OpenStars

Learning about the philosophy of the Stoics (which frankly was not enough for me), plus this quote (which also was not, but the two together… that did help!:-D), something to the effect of: “Strong societies beget weak children, who then grow up to create weak societies, which then beget strong children, who then grow up to create strong societies” - and the cycle continues. i.e., Boomers mainly did not fight in the wars, just grew up hearing how Great America was, without having to experience first-hand the blood, sweat, and tears that made it that way (to the extent that it ever was that way ofc). Well, now things are changing in the direction that they were ALWAYS going to have to changed in - b/c evil people gonna evil it up, no doubts about that - and eventually, sheeple will get sick & tired of being sick & tired and rise up, to change things. Until then, we suffer, but not needlessly.

In other words, we’ve gone through the stages of denial (climate change / economic downturn / wage slavery / cultural insensitivity / whatever is NOT happening), anger (okay so it’s happening but what are you going to do about it), bargaining (he tells it like it is and big daddy will fix everything & make it all great again! ironically this holds true for both Obama and Trump, loathe as I am to have ever uttered such a sentence), and now we are into the depression era.

Next comes acceptance, and that’s when the healing - and the beginning of lasting change - can truly start.

Nobody “never gets mad”, they just deal. But your issue speaks to something bubbling underneath the surface, it sounds like (obligatory caveat: I am nowhere near a professional). Figure that shit out bc it’s not going away.:-(

Maybe you are worried about your job or partner or something, and this little stupid stuff is just how it comes out, bc you won’t allow yourself to be mad about the REAL reason you are currently unhappy. It definitely sounds like it is yourself that you are mad about… but even that could be a smokescreen or like projection or some such, if it were not okay to be mad at someone/something else.

Therapy could help if you could afford it - even just the time bc there are like volunteer orgs that lower the cost - but you can also do a lot on your own, like try to create a safe space where it is okay to be mad about whatever, even if it seems “wrong”. Stupid dog tracking stupid dirt on the stupid carpet… why can’t I ever do anything right? (Like: I could not even marry someone who I don’t highly suspect is cheating on me… WTF!? Or maybe not that, maybe it’s a midlife crisis with career, or children, or who knows what else). Eventually your brain will allow you to know what is REALLY bothering you, when telling you that fact will cause a lesser amount of pain than doing so right now would.

IMHO, start with: you are not okay, this is not normal, and things can get much better (REALLY!), but it will take effort and possibly time (depending on how deeply ingrained whatever it is turns out to be).

There is no possibility of this ever causing negative effects of any kind, certainly it will not ever be misused (like one pilot being pressured into flying 5 planes at once bc… profit).

• Elon Musk, probably

Regexps are awesome! And also not at the same time:-P. 🎉 Congrats👏!:-)

Eventually you will also come to the question often expressed in the popular phrase: is it better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all? i.e., even as you retreat from hostile forces, what are you advancing towards, that is worthwhile? I am not very knowledgeable about this - most of my own advances irl have failed, though I do not really regret any of them, as each decision was made only with the knowledge that I had at the time, even if I have learned & changed & grown since.

The reason I bring it up is to help illuminate how boundaries need to be set even upon the very setting of boundaries (how meta!:-P). In the limit (I mean in the mathematical sense), the ultimate safety is achieved by walling off everyone and everything so that it cannot affect you in any way - I have heard that concept expressed as an analogy where someone builds a castle, and thereafter basically suffocates inside, walled off entirely from the world, both the bad but also the good from it.

At some point you (& me, and each of us, possibly uniquely for each situation even) will need to find the appropriate balance point b/t avoiding toxic people, vs. allowing contact with imperfect humans. If we cannot forgive them, at some level we cannot forgive the faults within ourselves, and that would be the ultimate tragedy - if we could not even stand to be around our very own selves! That said, it is an advanced concept, b/c for instance it does not mean that we should re-establish contact, or to not break away contact, from a toxic person. If anything rather, it is the ultimate severing of their “hold” over us, where we know that we will be okay regardless of what they do, even if we remain in contact with them (which would need to be decided on a case-by-case basis ofc, b/c the more contact we have with them, the more they influence us even if we fight tooth & nail against that).

Doesn’t that sound nice, in theory? Sigh… I have literally no idea what it means though, in practice:-P. We, like them, are all just bumbling around in the dark, trying in our own way to do the best we know how. The difference is that at least you are making the attempt to illuminate the situation - and that will make a HUGE difference in the outcome!

Then this might help: remember that even as you try to set boundaries between yourself and others, you can set boundaries within yourself as well. e.g., you could watch a movie depicting a fictional narrative of a not-good-faith event, and decide to at least attempt to not be triggered, or at least quite as much. You cannot control the world, but you control your response to it, and you deserve to be happy:-). Though you need to find the route to get to it - even in spite of others attempting to ruin it for everyone around them, to become as unhappy as they are.:-(

I guess you already said this, sorta, in that when people act that way, you respond to increase your happiness by getting away from that source of toxicity. But I mean something deeper, which you may also already be doing, in terms of setting the boundaries within yourself, to not feel unhappiness about their actions.

To me, the key is always good-faith.

Abso-frigging-lutely. Even the dumbest person, or maybe someone with a bad memory, but who is trying can eventually be trained, or else constrained, whereas a malicious actor can do everything “right”, until they get what they wanted all along and then cause the highest magnitude of harm.

I like how you are approaching it intentionally, which demonstrates awareness and intent to make things better for yourself, and also others as you plan ahead for what is most important.

We ALL are that way. :-D

You can do whatever you want.

So too can they.

The balance point lies somewhere in the middle.

sudo make behave

I’m just going to leave this here, in case anyone needs it… :-D

I won’t tell if you don’t…

Every single time the FCC tries to do absolutely anything (no matter how modest), the telecom industry works with the GOP to first demonize the proposal (or regulatory nominee as we saw with Gigi Sohn) as extreme, and then set about working to dismantle it. Usually successfully. And often with the help of Democrats.

30 seconds costs a minute

I… but… it… wha… my brain just broke a little :-P

No biggie! :-)

Okay, a fair point, but… we were talking about abortion:-D. (also, can we stop, or is it a stipulation somewhere in the contract that we must send? perhaps any time they are “attacked” we must automatically send a certain amount? there may be more there than the for-profit news media is willing to tell us, thinking that we are too dumbp to undermastand so they instead just focus on emotional one-liners that generate more clicks…)

I should have admitted in my previous response that I might be biased, trying to find a shred of hope where none exists. But also I aim not to be either an optimist nor a pessimist, but a realist. I do not claim to actually know what that means here though:-).

That said, what I said earlier still seems true to me: if you live in a state that allows - maybe even enshrines? - abortion as a right, then its being banned in other states affects you none to little (unless you actively visit those states, perhaps even traveling through them on the way to other states?), while if you live in a state that bans abortions, you have MANY problems, of which that is merely one of them (a big one to be sure). So it is one issue - perhaps the biggest of our time - and yet all of that said… what are we going to ACTUALLY DO about it? Congress needs to pass a law to make a decision one way or the other. Or else individual states need to do that. So far, Congress is more divided than it has ever been (during the Civil War, the South did not send their representatives anymore, so bills actually got passed!:-P), and we are looking towards another constitutional crisis happening as soon as the very next election, possibly spilling out into actual bloodshed. I don’t, but listen to the rhetoric on the side most likely to fire the first shot, and tell me that has no chance of happening, sometime in the next ten years? So yeah, I believe Biden when he says that it would be a difficult ask to get such a thing through Congress right now… that’s not about what’s right or what’s wrong, it’s about what’s possible at the current time.

Also look at democracy globally - like UK with Boris Johnson, Brazil with Bolsonaro, uh… right now is not a good time for democracy it seems. I am not speaking out against it, just echoing your thoughts that we are already fucked, in so many more ways than one, since it seems that our particular brand of it (meaning: coupled with low levels of edumacashion), seems to be vulnerable to certain outside parties who may have interests in interfering with our electoral processes? :-(

And in the midst of ALL of that, what the Dems offer is… Biden. Yeah, I know, but it’s not about what’s ideal, it’s about what is possible.

That’s probably the gist of it right there in fairness - he could have tried harder. Then again, he knows what’s what, and like (a) the mess he inherited from the previous occupant of the job took an enormous amount of effort to deal with, like basically ALL of the efforts, really, that were to spare (and things like the border crisis, huge spike in homelessness, greedflation, etc. continue onwards even now), and so (b) to have fought the good fight would have come at the cost of enormous political capital that would have prevented other things from happening. Thought experiment: what would Dems be willing to give up, in order to have made a useless (I mean purely in the sense of doomed to failure in the short term, though ultimately such things may need a coordinated effort over many years) attempt to appear to try to codify Roe v. Wade? Would we have been willing to sacrifice funding for Ukraine? Passing a budget for the year at all? College loan remittance? Political capital has limits, so in order to work towards that goal, something else must be sacrificed, that’s just reality.

Also, unpopular opinion alert - or rather, adjacent to one, in the service of a deeper understanding - women are not prevented from having abortions, at least on the federal level. If a state such as Florida or Texas etc. prevents such a thing, then don’t live in those states? There are MANY things going on in those states - book burnings, teacher shortages, also libraries, also doctors/nurses, also basic infrastructure, the list just goes on forever - and Biden is merely one old man, so what is he being asked to do, replace Jesus in those states? There is only so much that he or any one person could do. e.g., when a Supreme Court seat opens up, that’s when he can do a lot to work towards his goal, but I cannot say this loudly enough, even as a President he cannot pass laws. He can be part of a solution but he cannot be the entirety of one. Nor should he be.

“Successful”? Ah, I see, you think they are making their choices strategically, rather than emotionally. Interesting. :-D

I kid, but there actually is strategy involved there - by saying that their votes cannot be “counted on”, they could be attempting to wrangle additional concessions.

Ofc there is a bunch of nonsense going on as well - e.g. blaming Biden for not managing to codify Roe v. Wade, in this Congress!? They would have a better chance of asking to go to the moon - that is expensive but at least possible in theory!:-P I mention Congress ofc bc that is the government body that passes laws - the Presidency enforces, maybe vetoes, but does not make laws, so having a President receptive to and even someone who heavily pushes for a certain thing is not sufficient. Contrary to popular opinion, the Presidency has many limitations, and you do not simply show up to vote and somehow life gets “all better”, as some seem to think. Young people can be quite inexperienced and naive sometimes.

Then again, it was not young people that gave us Trump, and if they choose not to bail this country out again a second time, especially if they vote their conscience as a result of Israel (right or wrong mind you, in fact especially the latter), I will not be blaming the least experienced among us as the scapegoat to all of life’s problems… It should not be the case that it is up to those least prepared to deal with a situation, to be the deciding factor that “saves” us all - and the fact that we continue to ignore this aspect every time the young people show up to do so, shows how perilous the situation truly is. Maybe next time they won’t? If so, then we never deserved saving in the first place… bc that’s not freedom, to continually lie in the shadow of destruction.

If you mean vote for him vs. not vote for him, then yes.

If you mean vote for him vs. the Republican nominee, then no, as there are other options. For starters the article seemed to suggest that some may just not vote at all. They also might vote for him but do so reluctantly, e.g. without discussing with their friends strongly promoting the voting for Biden as they did in the last election.

But it’s a long way to the actual election, and campaigning has not started in earnest yet.

“Welcome to the Hotel California…”