well to be fair it’s not unusual to get away scot free after murdering people with your car, that shit happens all the time

This is funnier retrospectively because apparently this fucking dumbass wasn’t even using an optic. insanity

This is the case with many countries where toilet paper is cheap and shitty and will clog the hundred years old shared plumbing systems which probably drains into the same system as the rainwater drainage. They still have plumbing systems, though, so some form of bidet is still viable. So, wash with your left, eat with your right, as is common in india. Not too big of a problem, I’d say, so long as you have soap and water to wash your hand afterwards and you do a thorough job, and maybe also have a diet where you’re not shitting your brains out every time, and maybe also have a shaved asshole or something, but yeah.

I mean you could always just wipe your ass, leave the TP in the bowl for like 48 hours, and then flush it, but then that kinda seems unsustainable unless everyone has their own toilet and only needs to poop every 48nhours which isn’t gonna be the case in a poor country I bet.

Hayes is not a checkout aisle self-help book lol he pioneered multiple major branches of CBT

I mean, both can be true, right. It’s not uncommon for pretty popular scientists to get into kind of the grift economy after a little while. Jordan peterson has how many citations to his scientific papers or whatever? But then he still rolls around and spews a bunch of bullshit that’s sort of framed under the guise of his psychological background, and you can still tell is pretty easily influenced by his jungian type bullshit. I dunno, been a while since I actually looked into him, but it shook my ability to trust psychology more as a field, after that one.

I admire the skepticism but you haven’t read it and clearly haven’t taken time to fully understand it. he isn’t making prescriptive claims. he’s speaking on behavioral science. “A happens, then B tends to happen. C happens, then D tends to happen. do what you will with this info.”

No yeah for sure I haven’t read it, don’t claim to have read it, I’m just extremely skeptical of that kind of book, which presents science to the public at large, because most of the experiences I’ve had with that sort of thing have been damaging psuedoscientific bullshit that I slowly have to talk my friends out of. Which becomes much harder when they think they know things on a topic because they’ve read like one book about it. I don’t even try to talk them into a different stance, I just try to talk them out of the kind of, oversimplified takes which they tend to get from these types of books. Steven pinker type books, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” type books, “The Bell Curve” type books, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, “Poor Dad, Rich Dad”, shit like that. Admittedly not all of those are science guys, and some of that shit’s kind of old, but, you see what I’m getting at, it all blends together for the public. Pop psychology, that’s probably the term for that specific type of book, and uhh, yeah, that book gave me that kind of vibe.

If I’m really being skeptical, than, not evaluating anything else, because I just got up and still haven’t finished my coffee, the first study at the end of your post has two experiments. The first has a sample size of 34, the second has a sample size of 44. I dunno if I would say that you can really extrapolate anything from such an incredibly small sample size, to be honest. Especially one that’s like, taken from standard college campus volunteers. I know there are lots of scientific studies that rely on sample sizes which are pretty small, and I would throw that criticism at those studies, too. Shit happens in nutrition and exercise science too, I know for sure, which is why you see shitty fad diets circulate so much. I dunno, maybe I’ll read the rest of the paper, but that’s just like my general, me throwing shit at psychology as a field, right? But, maybe more, like, maybe more to, I think, some sort of point, if I have it, right:

and we humans clearly need treatment.

Like what do you mean by this? Because you’re looking at this through “treatments”, right, and I dunno if that’s the correct lens with which to view most people’s problems that they have in life. I mean it’s not a fuckin, incredibly new take, right, but like, you have a society where you’re expected to work 9-5, probably more, hours, five days a week, probably go in on a rental with your significant other, or increasingly, with your significant others, for like, 60 something years of your life? It’s not a shocker when we’re experiencing increasing amounts of depression at large, then, to me. That people have problems with that. I mean like, does changing society at large, qualify as a kind of patient treatment? I suppose my problem, if I’m really trying to have one, is just kind of that like, there’s not really any amount of psychological help which makes it better that your fingers are getting crushed in industrial machinery. Psychological help, in that case, just looks like copium. I don’t think psychology can help a lot of those problems, I think the best it can do is put a band-aid over a crippling tumor, which is nothing.

If you were to ask me what we were to do with the mentality I have, I’d probably want to incredibly balloon sample sizes and drastically increase the amount of evidence that we’re collecting, compared to just like, some guy’s written observations on like 50 people in some random experiment. Probably though, this is impossible, because school funding does not look to be going up anytime soon and google isn’t gonna share their massive amounts of data they’re collecting on people, and even if we had a glut of data to go through then we’d probably still be having to come up with and apply some sort of framework to it. At which point we just end up with a bunch of hacky bullshit, where you just take the noise and draw something in it and then say that this was somehow a natural occurrence, so you’d also need more rigorous standards for what conclusions we’re actually able to draw from the noise.

Then, even if you were able to do that, you’d still have no real way of distinguishing, say, one set of noise from another set of noise, to compare the two and draw a conclusion, because we’re just playing with like, one set of data, in a vacuum, compared to another set of data drawn from a vacuum, and there’s too many variables which might effect one outcome compared to another. So you’d probably need to be gathering pretty rigorous data over the course of many years before you’d be able to draw a real conclusion. Even then, the data might not be good enough, I dunno if you’d have enough information.

I’d maybe lean more into neuroscience to try and cut out some of the external noise, some of the factors that might fuck your shit up, but then that’s also not quite a good method because it doesn’t really cut out the external noise so much as ignore it, and you can still end up finding FMRI signals in a dead fish.

So, I dunno, probably I’d just use science for maths and astronomy and physics, stuff like that, and then otherwise I’d dismiss it, in looking for philosophies and methods with which to live my life or shape my being around. Or, you know, try to take it as it comes, and not really accept claims at face value. I’ve tried mindfulness, and I’ve found it wanting, because it just caused me to dissociate whenever I encountered an outcome I didn’t really like, and then instead of responding to things naturally, and flying by instinct, it causes me to kind of be like, the guy who smokes weed and then becomes hyper-aware of everything they’re doing but then their actual behavior devolves into nonsense.

Then, when I got farther than that, and I started to observe that behavior in the abstract, then it just sort of struck me as like, none of this realistically gives you a particular value judgement, right. It’s fine enough to just say, like, ah, well, think about it more, evaluate your life more, think about the long term consequences a little more. But, that train of thought doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to be making the correct judgements, and even over a lifetime, it might very well be that I could try everything and still come to the wrong conclusions, wrong judgements, or the right conclusions and right judgements, or whatever. I could be a hyper-conscious CEO evaluating my own life totally inaccurately and still be getting by fine and dandy, and I could be a homeless guy with accurate takes but still have a shit life. It’s basically nonsense, to just be like, oh, well, think about it a little bit harder, just be a little bit more conscious, because that isn’t nailed down to anything in particular.

I mean that’s definitely just a checkout aisle self-help book, though. Psychology, along with nutritional science and some other softer, more survey-based fields, has been suffering a pretty massive replication crisis, where something like 50% of papers are totally incapable of being replicated, depending on the journal and subject.

So I dunno, I’d generally be pretty skeptical of anything a book like that says about how you have to live your life or what you should be doing or how you should be doing it. Even if it’s something like “mindfulness”, right, generally thought to be a therapeutic practice, which we’re extracting from zen buddhism or whatever, just like carl jung travels around and extracts a bunch of “archetypes” from other cultures and then supposes that they’re universal when really it’s all just kinda some schizo bullshit canon he’s coming up with on the fly.

I uhh, I don’t like the scientific paint that is painted onto psychology and psychotherapy, is I guess what I’m saying. The attempt at formalization. What is just as good for one person, to be mindful, is probably something that someone else should rather not think about at all. Maybe even as a functional adaptation, a functional delusion that they can go on believing, and still end up having a fulfilling and uplifting life for everyone around them.

damn that actually sounds like a great read, never heard of that one before

Yeah, I think this problem is mostly solved if people were more willing to take their obviously highly produced and edited scripts and just make those publicly accessible with sources and whatnot, which they presumably need to basically do anyways in order to have good captioning on their video. The main problem isn’t so much that they use videos, to me, but that we have no way to sort through leagues of text documents and blogs now. Harder for me to subscribe to and read a blog in a dedicated fashion, I guess. I dunno, I guess ultimately I’m just saying that the two mediums need more connection, which would be mutually beneficial, I think.

Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores, eaten alongside things like bananas, which sucks, because bananas are some plant grown like a thousand miles away and I can go outside and go gather my own huckleberries if I wanted. It should be really easy, I live in an area where they grow.

So, that, but also just more broadly I kind of think that after learning enough about different regional botany, we’ve both crippled basically every ecosystem with a bunch of invasive species, we’ve crushed the human experience into a very narrow square set of experiences which includes the biodiversity that you can see around wherever you are, and we’ve made food worse. Because we’re not using local plants for our food, you see, we’re just using a bunch of generic ingredients that are sort of unnaturally made out to be universal across entire hemispheres, maybe even across the globe. No regional variation outside of specialty goods, only Mcdonald’s.

The thread’s gonna be against this opinion broadly, I think, but there’s not like, it’s not just the huckleberry, you understand, there’s a lot more out there that you don’t know about, both edible and not.

So, you know how in total recall he has this tracker inside of his head that he defeats with a wet towel and by just kinda pulling it out?

So, you know how it’s a pretty common thing in movies, like MI:3, suicide squad, I think agents of shield, unthinkable, the belko experiment, where guys just have like, bombs in their heads?

So, you know how scientists have used wifi to see through people’s walls?

So, you know how we currently have a bunch of wifi satellites spanning the earth?

So, you know how we’ve kind of automatically selected in our political system for a bunch of mercenary politicians that only ever act out of their own self-interest and are easily manipulated with like, free lunches, lobbying, and pamphlets?

That’s kind of my like, optimal ghost in the shell style conspiracy dealio. I dunno, I’m sure you’d need some way to get around people just getting CT scans and stuff like that, and a lead case would probably still just show up like a tumor or something, and any electronics you had would look pretty obvious too, so, who knows. You’d need to put like a water based gel around it or make it out of non-metal materials or something, which sounds a lot harder.

Other plans include maybe like a nuclear killdozer spidertank. Kind of like a metal gear, but instead of just having a nuke on it, the nuke serves the dual purpose of also being a mobile power source, either in the form of a nuclear reactor, which you could maybe use the heat of to drive hydraulics and like a heat pump or something, or a nuclear battery, and then you use it for political leverage. Maybe you could have nuclear satellites sent up from like an island or something. Just a bunch of satellites with nukes on them, and then they fall and nuke things and then you can use that for leverage maybe once you have enough of them. Maybe especially if you were like a private company or like you were sending them all up in disguise as a different kind of thing, because then nobody could really like strike back at you without risking getting nuked by a nuclear satellite, and then MAD doesn’t matter at all because they’d be nuking a bunch of random bystanders. Something along those lines.

Dunno, just thinking of some stuff that you could maybe do that’s like, more interesting or better than just like “oh I run around and kill all the politicians I don’t like, like I’m shooting puppies in a gravel pit”, you know? Because then those politicians just get replaced with other, shittier politicians as a result of our political system being kind of dogshit, and even beyond that, as a result of like, a majority of the population being kind of stupid, complacent, and perhaps even actively evil, if the behavior of white america broadly for the last 200 years is anything to go by. You know, burning the collective futures of your children basically just out of spite for racial minorities and to exclude them as much as is possible. Dunno, part of me says, don’t blame them, they’ve been tricked by the rich, and the population’s critical support for those causes was helpful to actually making progress, part of me says, the real progress was made by relatively small or extremist groups in the population, and that politicians and the majority white population will use every tactic in the playbook to keep things going as much as possible contrary to whatever political will you try to cook up, which is why you see sharecropping, segregation, redlining, denial of VA loans, increased police spending, the crack epidemic, and all that only comes about into the common cultural consciousness like a decade after the damage has been done.

I dunno, in any case, I don’t think you could solve all the problem in 24 hours alone, you’d have to set something up for a longer term set of solutions.

Also begs the question of, what are “consequences”? Where does an action begin or end, really? If I steal a million dollars from the bank, am I free from the consequence of having a million dollars? I dunno, I sit on the couch, and I’m free from the negative consequence of having not become god, which, in comparison to the infinite positive consequences of becoming god, is a negative consequence. Maybe something along those lines.

I support the phoenix wright roleplay, but I think you’d find more success in just saying something like “this is kind of a glib analogy when the outcome is still genocide, don’t you think?”, or something along those lines, rather than asking like, a series of questions asking whether or not they find genocide to be an acceptable outcome. One of those will come off as bad faith, and put the defendant on the back foot, the other will get them to open up and possibly admit fault, or potentially come off much poorer to a jury, were they still to choose to object.

yeah I dunno if I can though. I think probably if this is the best we can do then we’re headed down both a full-throated fascist reality of constant genocide, poverty, oppression, not only here but globally as america serves those ends globally, and basically a dystopian climate apocalypse on top of that.

If I accept that, then I become a little bit suicidal, which is not allowed.

good acknowledgement of the point I was making there, very cool

yeah I post here quite a bit

I mean I dunno maybe they shouldn’t have ran a guy named hubert humphrey, sounds like the name you’d give to a fictional whale in a children’s novel hoo lee

I mean so lesser evil voting is generally a good strategy for damage control, but it’s not necessarily a great strategy in terms of like, blanket things you can just effect to the whole. If you take a voter in a non-swing state, say, california, a state that votes very consistently, them defecting their vote to a third party which represents them more accurately, is going to be of much lesser weight in totality than if someone in a swing state had done so. They are probably much safer in their estimation of walking up towards the line without crossing it. This is probably also true of states who get their votes tallied up later on, and also of states where projections are already in favor of certain candidates, since those projections affect elections.

This also kind of discounts “not voting” as an electoral strategy because that doesn’t send a super clear signal, but it’s probably not the worst thing in the world, since we could kind of file them away under like, either the average non-voter’s position in their state, or just the average non-voter’s position at large, which is probably going to be more radical of an average position than most would think.

But yeah, all of this still tracks with what you’re saying so far. I think the biggest determining factor for me, though, is that electoralism as a strategy at all hinges on the assumption that democrats would rather move left than lose to republicans. And I dunno, that’s kind of a tenuous assumption, and I think is the major disagreement on people who are willing to engage in electoralism vs those who aren’t, is that most people who aren’t, assume that the democrats would rather lose to republicans and ensure a status quo/backslide into fascism rather than move to the left.

The threat of making your candidate lose is the only power you have to shift them.

I mean this is also not really a threat, though. I think realistically biden and trump are both closer to each other than either of them are to this like, eclectic amalgamation of positions that is the “youth vote”. Him not winning isn’t like, still a victory, in that circumstance, but it’s not like, a loss to them in the same way that it would be if they actually had to do all the stuff the “youth vote” wanted. Basically I’m just saying that they, the DNC broadly I suppose, would rather give as little as they absolutely can, while still maintaining a delicate balance of power where they’re the only ones that can maintain the status quo rather than a backslide into total fascism. Going with all the “youth vote” positions, to them, would be as big if not a bigger loss than a slide into total fascism.

Which is to say, I think they’re willing to lose as long as it means they don’t have to really do anything major.

okay real question for the omega libs here: where do you see people that are like. worth taking seriously, right, that are worth engaging with (maybe that’s the major filter that I’m blocking out here since most people seem incapable of choosing who they actually want to engage with), who are the people that are worth engaging with that aren’t going to vote for the old zionist rapist guy? I mean, the democractic one? I’m pulling your chain there but like for real, where do you see the opposition that’s actually real?

Most of the shit that I’ve seen, still, is like, people rightfully saying “oh, biden sucks, here’s why”, and then people bringing up “trump’s worse”. Like okay, just because I hate pancakes doesn’t mean I suddenly love waffles, you know? Food analogy I know I know, but really, like, where’s the real opposition coming from? I’m discounting the super pro-biden turbolibs also, because they annoy me with their smugness. So far as I can tell, the people who are fervently anti-biden to the point of like, idiocy, right, weren’t going to vote for him basically in any context, regardless of you know like damage control strategies, or the fact that voting didn’t take that much effort in totality compared to other activism they might do, or like, oh, could they vote as a protest in a non-swing state that’s basically guaranteed commitment to biden already as a kind of protest vote with questionable utility, that sort of thing. Most of the “opposition” I’ve seen hasn’t been actually calculated about any of that, because none of that stuff is really very controversial, or, it shouldn’t be. Most of them have just been like, not worth bothering with. Probably not russian bots or trolls like everyone would constantly say, because that’s also fucking idiotic, but probably, they’re just stupid people who aren’t worth wasting your time on.

Basically why the fuck is everyone wasting their time on this like, stupid bullshit? How come every election, in equal measure, I see “vote blue no matter who” imbeciles trotted out in lock step, to shout down at “I will never vote for anyone because I’m a posadist accelerationist” terminally online idiots? There’s no nuance or real depth to the conversation, or strategy, it’s just like. Both sides can construct a strawman, and then basically get away with it because, on the vastness of the internet, said strawman is guaranteed to exist, especially if I make it kind of a vague ghost that I’m punching at. And then because of that, nobody ever has to actually like, work out any of their arguments in depth, because they’re too busy kind of churning forth the cycle of idiocy.

I dunno, maybe digg 3.0 is just not conducive to good political discourse.

alaska also has some kind of UBI because of their oil stuff, I’m not sure they slot as easily into political partisanship as most other states

There are other options aside from red and blue, and as a swing state voter, I’ll be taking them.

me when I decide to waste my vote as a swing state voter, instead of meaningfully pulling my support for a candidate that’s ultimately going to get elected anyways out of protest as a non-swing state voter: