If you don’t have a lot of money, you could try masturbating every hour until midnight. Conversely, if you do have a lot of money, you could also try doing that.
I’ve spend many holidays alone at this point. Even last Christmas.
For New Years I usually try to get to the city, and walk around for a couple of hours enjoying the chaos around. You might bump into some random people, which could lead to who knows what?
What about grilled sausage on a pier looking out to the horizon in a country that starts with a C? I just am super curious about that specific case, you know?
I think it’s because people see capitalism as one thing, while in reality they are implemented very differently.
The nordics are not successful only on their capitalism. It’s because it is regulated, and because the money is distributed more fair than in other countries.
The Nordic countries are also on Earth, which we are destroying. Some of their wealth comes directly from that destruction. Norway is the 5th and 3rd largest oil and natural gas exporter, respectively, making their happiness the result of good social policy that makes up for capitalist inequality which is directly funded by destroying the Earth and fueling capitalism elsewhere.
Even setting the climate aside (a ridiculous thing to do, really), the Nordic model isn’t possible to sustainably replicate elsewhere on Earth on capitalism’s own term, because we can’t make every country a net exporter of the most desired commodities for obvious reasons, or the beneficiary of complex historical circumstances, like neutrality during ww2 (Sweden), or a long-time colonial power (Denmark).
Put another way, there is no Nordic model available for Bangladesh, whose workers work six days a week in factories to make the cheap clothing that happy Norwegians wear. Norways needs Bangladeshes to keep their standard of living.
In a previous job, I spent a good amount of time in a Bangladeshi garment factory. That specific factory in which I worked had been on strike a few years prior, requesting a raise to dozens of dollars per month. That’s not a typo – per month!. The police fired into their picket line, killing and wounding hundreds. This fall, Bangladeshi garment workers went on strike again, demanding a tripling of the minimum wage from its current ~75USD per month.
The urban poverty that makes my life possible, so far away, out of sight and out of mind, is an absolute fucking disgrace. We should talk about it daily. When they go on strike, as those garment workers are now, every single westerner ought to strike in solidarity, even if motivated by nothing but shame. Instead, we don’t even know that it’s happening, at least in the anglosphere.
I’ve since become convinced that there’'s only one path to a just and verdant world – international solidarity. Communists and anarchists have filled libraries with ideas for what that might look like. I’ve read some tiny sliver of that corpus. If you actually want to know why some of us want capitalism defeated (beyond the anecdote that I just relayed), or if you’re curious how much better some of us think the world could be, I’d be happy to point you towards books that spoke to me.
Going to give a wide range of answers based on topic, so you can pick up what interests you. Happy to give more if none of these appeal to you.
If you work in tech, Stafford Beer’s Designing Freedom. It’s very short, accessible, and full of so many big ideas about what computers are for that it exposes the tech industry’s absolute fucking poverty of vision.
If you’re interested in deep dives on more technical topics, David Graeber’s Debt. It’s a fucking tome, but it’s also amazing. So much of what we take for granted in our world is completely arbitrary and made up, but no less powerful, and there’s nothing quite as arbitrary and powerful as the concept of debt.
If reading a cinder block based on an internet stranger’s recommendation is too much for you, maybe try Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, or his The Utopia of Rules instead, depending on which topic interests you more. Graeber is a great place to start because he’s accessible but also his mind isn’t limited by the confines of capitalist realism in a very special way. He was truly one of our best.
If you want something that’s extremely light and fiction, I recommend William Morris’s News from Nowhere. It’s extremely cringe in a way that only 100-year-old socialist utopian fiction could be. It’s excessively sincere, even naive, in a way that rings hollow to our cynical modern selves, but it’s such a short read, and it’s so adorable. I like the way that he challenges the concept of work. I think that the modern left should revive that line of criticism. I also enjoyed that you can see early versions of things that we associate with more modern movements in his utopian vision, especially degrowth and reforestation/environmentalism, not just for “the environment,” but with nature as a part of and inseparable from the human experience.
Finally, if you like philosophy, and you want in depth analyses of capitalism, and don’t mind something that’s maybe less accessible, I recommend Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay The Culture Industry. It was written in the 1940s, and it reads prescient today. They saw the rise of capitalist mass media as more than just a threat to independent thought, but a pacifying, homogenizing, almost all-consuming force. If you want something longer than The Culture Industry, and probably slightly less accessible, I recommend their Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. He basically argues that capitalism, and more specifically what he calls “technical rationality,” has conquered our culture and our very ability to reason, at scales big and small.
This is why I try to endure the fever side effects of vaccines as much as I can without taking a tylenol, so my immune system gets some proper “training” to recognize and fight the real thing.
Seriously I kind of miss the “Internet playground” era of 10 years ago. It felt like you could easily find not just one but multiple close knit groups for ANYTHING you might enjoy. It was easy to engage with people without huge effort.
Nowadays it’s monolithic corporate groups. Soulless without the close interactions. Content is at an all time high yet simultaneously true interactions are dead. Forget about trying to find multiple groups, they all have been cannibalised into a singular Uber corpo group if it exists at all.
Where the internet was a curiousity, not yet exploited by companies and advertising, where to find new websites you had to click next on ring networks or find a website directory cause search engines werent even a thing yet, but every website you found was someones passion project and rife with the interesting and bizarre
For me it’s the early 2010 internet. Where technological advances made navigating it easy and you could with no effort find several groups chatting about topics you liked. Information was easily available yet it felt extremely personal too.
That was before everything became ultra monolithic and corporate. You’ll be lucky if you find even just one active forum for something you like and more often then not it’s been cannibalised by one of the megacorp pages like YouTube or reddit where interactions are all dull and dead, soulless posting only for menial engagement instead of making friends
You can still be subconsciously judged or ignored, though. It’s easy to get left out because you aren’t thought about because you aren’t in a particular group chat, for example.
Not in the trash, but I regifted something a friend sent me the week before Christmas. Wrapped it in fresh paper and gave it to another friend on Christmas Eve. No-one need know…
As a woman who was single and dating, saying you don't have a social media is a red flag. Best case scenario, you truly don't and it's probably from having some sort of arrogant judgement value about people who do, worst case, you have a spouce you are hiding from me.
Either way, not worth the risk. Like all the women I know feel the same. Sure it's a historically newer redflag that didn't exist 10-50 years ago, but neither was worrying about crypto gambling and manospehre BS. Modern problems require modern precautions.
saying people who don‘t have social media are arrogant (or worse, suspicious) is the most red flag you can get. there was literally a greentext about this recently and I remember thinking there‘s no way someone could be that ignorant and yet here we are
If I don’t have social media I am either arrogant or I am hiding something? Sounds very ignorant and arrogant to me.
The women I know are people I can talk to, discuss social media, discuss decisions regarding social media, no red flag bullshit. Maybe it’s different in different countries.
Not every gun is always loaded, but you should always treat a gun as if it's loaded.
You can think whatever you want about my post, unfair/arrogant idc, I'm just sharing a very common view from among the women I know and the discussions I've read. Not every one out there in the dating world is a creep, but I'd rather be careful since I only had a limited time to go out.
It's not that every single person falls in to those two camps, but social media is super duper common, so why would I risk wasting my time on someone I can't vet?
Please don’t put words in my mouth, I didn’t say your post was ‘unfair’. You do you, date whatever you want. But you don’t see how it could be problematic to call all people without social media accounts arrogant or liars? And then trying to establish that view as normal by citing your social media bubble-friends and ‘discussions you have read’ is just messed up.
Not gonna lie, if I knew someone was about to try dig through all my life and history before first date, I’d tell them to fuck off. That’s like the A in ABC of not dating shitty creeps.
It’s worse than “very ignorant”. It stinks malice and stupidity at the same time - because the person is rushing conclusions (aka assuming, aka making shit up) about another person, based on little to no information.
I never saw this in real life, but if some acquaintance told me that they avoid dating people without social media presence “because it’s a red flag”, I’d look for further signs that the person is unjust and/or assumptive and consider avoiding them altogether.
I love that your post gave a probabilistic binning of someone who doesn't have a traditional social media account, which was unironically confirmed by people replying with rustled jimmies.
Come on folks, it should be clear from context that she is saying that a single woman setting up dates is going to use what limited info they have to avoid stalkers, cheaters, red pillers, and anti social people. That this might filter out perfectly normal people along with the creeps is the cost of maintaining safety and not wasting time, which is pretty much par for the course in dating. There's also a difference between exchanging info after a brief meeting, and actually knowing a person for an extended time and then dating. I doubt OP is saying that someone they studied with for three semesters would be excluded for lack of social media, because they have real life context and don't need the proxy filters.
Also, getting real close in these replies to "but I'm a nice guy" and "I'm not like other girls."
I just think it’s quite funny that in their justification, they project their own arrogant judgemental attitude towards those they justify their own behavior against.
[it’s justified because] best case scenario, [the reason why] you don’t [have social media] is probably from having some sort of arrogant judgement value about people who do
seriously? I think that’s where people disagree.
it’d be different if they said:
a single woman setting up dates is going to use what limited info they have to avoid stalkers, cheaters, red pillers, and anti social people. That this might filter out perfectly normal people along with the creeps is the cost of maintaining safety and not wasting time, which is pretty much par for the course in dating
but that’s not what they said, and that’s not what people are responding to.
Imagine if some guy said:
“honestly, dating women who have social media is a red flag, at best they’re probably attention whores, but there’s also a good chance they’re a cheating slut.”
now imagine if someone responded to the “rustled jimmies” with
I don't disagree that comment OP could have phrased it better and come across as less judgey. And I think that of someone like you left a well worded reply to the effect that it would be very fair feedback.
At the same time I feel like some of the comments she has gotten are living down to the less generous version of her statements. If that makes sense. It also sort of feels like people wallpapering over the underlying reason that many women look for social media participation, which is as a way to vet for safety reasons.
But I agree, it's not good to typecast and overgeneralize, and a better suggestion to the post OP might be that some women look for social media accounts for safety reasons, if that is part of your social issues mentioned.
Aye. My mother met dates through church and barn dances; friend of a friend vouching for a dude was enough. I am exposed to easily 50x the number of people that she was and at the same time “third places” are dwindling; mechanisms for social vetting have to evolve too.
If I can’t find any record of a person, I’m going to be really cautious about spending time IRL, same as not walking off alone with the stranger who crashed the dance who no one has ever seen before.
If people are dating through mutual contacts, sure, social media plays minimal part if any. Online dating? Hell no I’m not meeting a rando until I know they are a real person with base level social skills.
I read Montaigne’s essays (written in the 1500’s) and while his views are remarkably modern in many ways, one thing that stuck out to me was how unabashedly elitist he is. The translation I had used the phrase “common herd” to refer to the large majority of people who failed to impress him due to their lack of education or strength of character. I hesitate to speak for him since I think he was a wiser man than I am, but I expect that our modern notions about democracy would have seemed ridiculous to him. He might accept that universal suffrage is in practice the least-bad option currently available to us, but he would argue that at least in principle it would be better to exclude people who don’t actually know how to run a country from the process of deciding how the country is to be run.
(He would also be unashamed to say that the life of an exceptional person is worth more than the life of someone ordinary, but we think that in the modern day too. We just consider it rude to be so explicit about it.)
Without knowing his works, I’d argue for him that he’s right to some extent towards an uneducated population, BUT the reason we have universal suffrage is that our founding fathers assumed that:
Everyone would be well-educated and make rational if not reasonable assumptions about politicians (eg, not elect morons who immediately try and sabotage the government, citizenry, and friends)
Politicians would serve as public servants and would be even better educated and would work hard to brush up on things so that the common man wouldn’t have to learn the ins and outs of complicated decisions in terms of complex trade agreements, city planning and zoning law, and universal medical systems that work across state lines.
Obviously, it didn’t quite go that way. But it’s why I’m such an advocate for good public schools and free education, because it pays itself back in spades when it comes to R&D/innovation and an informed populace who make the country and world a better place to live.
The founding fathers did not believe in universal suffrage; at the time only people who owned land could vote–to say nothing of even less privileged groups than that–and they were fine with that policy, in part because these were considered to be the people with the most skin in the game.
To be fair, our modern concept of democracy really is quite shitty and the only reason we use it is because it is better than anything else we came up with so far.
But generally the notion that the common person cannot be entrusted with politics holds true even if we find it distasteful. The average person is a fucking idiot and objectively not qualified to decide on political matters.
Compounding the problem, this environment rewards charlatans and sociopaths. There will always be some that will exploit a weak spot in the system, in bad faith, no matter what the system is.
People back in the day had just as much terrible advice as we have today, it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
But to answer the question, anything related to the ingestion of mercury
Was listening to an American history podcast (the dollop) about the radium girls. They wore uranium infused lipstick because it glowed and they thought it was cute. They licked their fingers regularly to help apply uranium dust to things.
While their male supervisors were wearing full lead suits totally for no reason and let those girls do that.
Many of them lost their jaws. There was a suit filed that they won, but every single one of those girls died before they could collect the money.
The suit led to a law establishing workers’ safety rights, so it wasn’t all bad. But that law was definitely written in those girls’ blood.
At least accordingly to this link, the trend for dial-painters was to be teenagers. Some started as early as their fourteens. It makes sense considering the 1920s, when adult women were expected to stay at home and take care of children, not to be part of the workforce. So odds are that “radium girls” is accurate, because most of them were not adult women.
Wikipedia, and the sources that Wikipedia is relying on, are also rather consistently calling them “Radium girls”. This is clearly a fixed expression, that shouldn’t be decomposed like you’re doing.
And even if we disregard both things above (we should not), your “small correction” boils down to “I’ll vomit an «ackshyually» to boss the other user around on language usage, disregarding what they say to whine about how they say it”. This is simply not contributive.
A decent amount of safety law was written in the blood or sweat of women. The origins of fire code come from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire which manufactured garments in New York which was staffed almost entirely by women.
Not to say a lot of safety law wasn’t developed because of the deaths of men but a bunch of women dying all at once due to negligence does seem to be a decently galvanizing force for society which makes it easier to get a ball rolling and women, particularly widows and family members of victims , have always been important advocates and organizers in the fight for safety legislation.
I think you got the right idea but that description is missing the big points.
They were painting watches and their employers told them to use their lips to make fine points on the brushes, meaning they ingested a ton of the paint. The employers told them it was harmless despite evidence to the contrary. They chose not to use other options because wiping the brush on their lips increased productivity and they were paid per watch.
I don’t think you meant to imply that they were doing it for trivial reasons, but I do think mentioning that they were doing it for a job and that their employers were intentionally deceiving them is important context!
Anything related to health care in general, really. Keep in mind that germ theory was only invented in the late 16th century, and it was ridiculed for centuries in favour of Miasma theory. It wasn't until the mid 19th century that it started gaining legitimacy.
it’s just that the only one that survived long enough to survive to the present day is the really good advice
Okay but... I thought that was basically the point, in that if the advice survived for that long, then it is worth paying attention to at least, to consider if it might apply to a particular situation? e.g. chicken soup really is good for a cold, whether we knew the precise reasons why or not.
I killed myself. Or rather, I tried to kill myself. I mean, I did kill myself, but then I was still alive, in a new universe. My memories from the previous universe survived when I woke up here.
It made me realize that I literally cannot escape. Even through death.
That has given me a sort of “burned my ships” commitment to life that has made me truly alive. I also realized that all other humans are also trapped in a quantum immortality situation that will last for eternity as far as I can tell, so my level of caring and compassion for others has also increased.
I know it sounds totally fucked, but by realizing that I literally cannot die, it made me realize how important every moment is. Because every choice is a seed of eternity. The value of doing things right just went infinite for me, and I’ve never been happier, more productive, more generous, more committed to doing things right.
A series of experiences that I will not relate as I have zero evidence for has convinced me with visceral certainty that we are all immortal.
The thing I fear is the fact that death does exist, but only objectively. This means that for each of us who is going to live forever, that doesn’t mean everyone around us will.
I mean, it doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed to. Hopefully whatever narrative the universe produces that leads to the indefinite extension of our consciousness, will involve things that also make others around us able to extend their lives alongside us.
So we don’t have to be alone, for eternity.
Eventually, each of us will be alone. It’s just statistics. Infinite time, and eventually the improbable will happen. The narrative will continue to evolve into eventually being a narrative which produces the survival of one person, or one conscious entity of whatever kind it needs to be to survive for billions of years.
My guess is at that point, the narrative will have evolved into that entity being a god. Then that god will create a multitude of new people and try its best to let them be free.
Just thinking out loud here. This is all new to me.
So basically in order to not be alone, the eternally-surviving consciousness spawns new separate consciousnesses. And the cycle repeats. Crazy.
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