I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
Did you do psychedelics, by chance?
I’ve done almost everything (even opiates now, I thought I’d never touch them but the hospital begged to differ, and they were right… at least for a week) and the biggest change to my life was actually a random k-hole I put myself in maybe 18 years ago. I didn’t intend to hole, but oops! I laid there with my eyes closed and all of the stresses and problems in my life were laid out visually in front of me as… tiles? Spinning tiles? And a whole bunch of things and thoughts and whatnot happened, and I realized fully that I had some toxic people in my life, and I could just… don’t! I could just don’t, whenever I want, and for no reason at all! So after that night, if there was someone toxic at a thing i was going to attend or someone I didn’t wanna be around hanging out with a mate, I just… didn’t. I just said “nah I’m good” and my life got insanely better only seeing people ever who were good for me.
Despite many DMT breakthroughs (soooo cool) and heroic amounts of acid (man it’s been half a year now, it’s about time to trip again!) I never got anything spiritual out of substances.
I loved tripping in college and as a young adult. I grew up, friends changed…and now I find myself a few decades down the line thinking I just want to drop a little and I have no contacts anymore. So frustrating.
Haha, I had the same experience with my anxiety and shrooms. Realized I could just don’t.
But my conclusion is different, because I view realizations like that as spiritual in nature.
But my conclusion is different, because I view realizations like that as spiritual in nature.
Maybe you should give yourself some more credit, the human brain is pretty insane. You ingested a chemical, and it did weird things to your brain, but whatever realizations that you had are yours alone.
Well then I DID have some spiritual stuff going on if that counts! I suppose I have also experienced… entities? on n,n-DMT breakthroughs. All extremely positive, but incredibly intense.
It’s definitely time to try that again. I haven’t broken through in maybe eight years.
It just counts to me lol, you get to define your own experiences! Thanks for sharing your trip stories! I always love to hear them.
Oh the craziest one was my second breakthrough ever. I was siting in a room with my closest friends, and everyone had a crazy face suddenly (they still looked like the people I loved, but with crazy faces!) Two parts stuck out to me so hard, I can still see them to this day. One was the strings. I could visually see strings connecting things from where they currently were, to where they were going to be in the future. I’m convinced that my brain was just working really slow, and what I was seeing were trails from where things WERE, but it looked sooooo different from the trails I’d see see on LSD or MDMA/MDA or RCs. Plus, they didn’t sync right with the words I’d hear from people, making it reeeeally seem like I was seeing strings connecting into the future.
The second and most intense thing I saw was a new color, that I had never seen before. It was like a scintillating vibrant color, a mashup of blue, pink, silver, gold, maybe? But kinda, cycling through them at the same time? I can still see it in my mind, and I wish I could show it to other people. I cried.
Sounds slightly like a similar experience to how people describe seeing the new color olo
https://www.science.org/content/article/superprecise-lasers-show-people-whole-new-color
I’ve still not broken through.
That last experience sounds like it was really moving. Like the good version of The Colour Out of Space.
I used to say not all men are abusers. Now I say all men are responsible for stopping abuse.
Used to make fun of small cars and “ricers”. Now I have like 3 of them and hate large vehicles.
The irony there being you now have more car than just a single large vehicle. Although you won’t be driving more than one at once.
1 person who buys a new car (especially anything large) is wasting far far more than I am with my 15 year old cars. I don’t believe in throwaway culture. Plus I hate new cars so there’s that.
I’ll also add that I’m not a menace on the road like Karen road raging in her 8000 lb suv
15 year old cars. I don’t believe in throwaway culture. Plus I hate new cars so there’s that.
When you put it like that, I can actually get behind that. New cars are absurd with all their electronics and non-fixability.
I mean I know I am justifying my hobby. I’m probably just as wasteful as the next person.
To be fair half the cars are the so’s, they have a problem with saving unloved cars too ha
… why do you have 3 of them?
I have more than 3 but people get mad here if I talk about that. I enjoy fixing up stuff and driving different ones.
What do you mean by being spiritual? I’m an idealist so I think consciousness/subjective perception is the fundamental substrate of reality, and matter/the physical world is just an illusion, but I wouldn’t consider myself spiritual…
Cool, do you think the belief in physical reality can be harmful?
I think you have to operate in the framework of the sensory world when acting within the sensory world, and like using science and stuff to work out what’s likely to happen if you do certain things as opposed to other things. But that’s not the same as saying that you believe the physical world is real
I think we should use science to manipulate our senses for good, regardless of alignment with reality. But the realists say we should only use science to get closer to reality. I think they’re stifling scientific progress.
That’s actually the basis for Mahayana, which then transformed into multiple kinds of Buddhism. I’d consider it a pretty spiritual stance, if not only because it means that you’ve spent time thinking about what is “reality” and our role within it.
Not at all to imply that this is your case, but there’s a difference between having an intellectual understanding of idealism and actually having the lived experience of it.
And most people need to do some kind of practices to get there, which are typically found in spiritual contexts (meditation etc.). But there definitely are people who just kinda click into it.
Though… yes. It’s a philosophical stance but it kinda gets tossed under the umbrella of spirituality. Maybe that’s actually a problem come to think of it. Since spirituality is easier to dismiss as “woo” (as in, everything that goes against the almighty scientism is woo…)
Though you do say:
subjective perception
What do you mean? Because as an idealist, I was specifically taught to see the difference between a subjective perception and general consciousness. It’s very possible this is just semantics of course.
Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot. Being religious doesn’t make you a bigot and being atheist doesn’t mean you aren’t one either.
I had a similar 180 though, I used to be an atheist but in the last year or so I pivoted into druidism. Turns out following a religion that focuses on spending time in nature helps to get you out of the house when you’re going though a depressive episode.
Yeah, I had a world-shaking 180 for spirituality after I read about Zen Buddhism.
I was a really proud atheist and thought all religions were just believing in something supernatural. Until I actually gave an intellectually honest try at understanding them. Most theistic religions I couldn’t get on board with but after I read Three Pillars of Zen, something just clicked and I joined my local sangha. Also begun to understand a bit more about religiosity in general after, though I’m still not a fan of Abrahamic religions in particular.
You say you were “intellectually honest” so I’m curious what it was about Zen that appealed to that kind of approach?
The way I was introduce to it framed it specifically as not believing in anything you can’t verify in your own direct experience. The book I read ( https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89766/the-three-pillars-of-zen-by-roshi-philip-kapleau/ ) was actually pretty mercilessly pointing out how much of what I thought to be obviously true was actually just a belief. Meaning what I think is the average westerner experience of the world as explained by science. It didn’t offer me a set of ideas to believe in, it offered me a way of disbelieving anything I couldn’t know for myself to be true.
Like I said it was pretty world shattering. I realized there is a world BEFORE any thought and that is definitely more real than anything I can think about. I joined the local sangha because things got a little weird for me for a time and my friends kinda thought I was going crazy haha but in my perspective they were the ones alarmingly missing something incredibly important. And I still kinda think they are but it’s not my place to try to “convert” them. Since there’s no point. You need to have the active desire to actually understand.
But aren’t there things that you can objectively know to be true? Wouldn’t this just lead to believing whatever you want to believe?
I feel a little timid about trying to answer this because at this point, I know that people can talk about these things intellectually forever and it just won’t… click. It’s so hard to write about too because if I tried to write in a way that very perfectly reflects my experience, the text becomes weird and cumbersome ( and then when I don’t, people try some gotchas like “ahaa but you refer yourself as “I”, doesn’t that mean you still believe in an individual self”, no but writing more precisely gets in the way of the message ).
First, believing whatever I want to believe is definitely a danger and actually you see this a lot in spiritual discourse that leans towards Buddhism, especially via New Age stuff and “McMindfulness”. Many people happily discard the mainstream beliefs but then they get hooked on their idea of what is true. But the merciless approach that Zen Buddhism has is that nothing you think about is totally true. It’s more like a reflection in a mirror ( Interestingly Plato was also alluding to this in his Allegory of The Cave, so this realization isn’t unique to Zen ).
That includes the concept of “objectivity”. Objectivity relies on the idea that there is some external third party to human experience. But once I looked, or more like was forced to face it, I realized that there is no such thing. I can exchange ideas with what appear to be other people and have an agreement. Like we can probably both agree that we’re looking at a screen now. I anticipate an objection here on the “other people”. I don’t know if “other people” exist outside of me but I know that I don’t have control over anything that appears in my mind. Something that I can call “other people” appears, and they have their likes and dislikes and it can be painful if I’m not respectful of that. This is where compassion teachings come in.
Oh and I’m not anti-science at all. Science is great at revealing patterns in the way things appear. Happy to go get my vaccinations and all that.
Tell me you had a certain experience without telling me you had a certain experience.
Were you specifically taught to not talk in certain terms about how your world “shattered”? Because I was.
I was, yes. I think even if I wasn’t I probably wouldn’t use those terms anyway since in online discourse it never looks good.
Okay, thank you for explaining.
I admit I don’t get it, but maybe I’ll consider reading that book. It seems I had a mistaken idea about Buddhism. Or at least Zen Buddhism.
What they describe is similar to the discourse in western philosophy about the mind and the objective reality. There is no way to prove or disprove that the reality exists outside of the mind of the observer, i.e. that solipsism is true or false. But it also follows that solipsism is practically useless. So we must agree that we probably have a shared experience with other people, which we’ll call ‘reality’. Then the question is, how close the experience of one observer is to that of other people. This is where stuff like qualia comes in, which posits that it’s impossible to qualify immediate perceptual experiences, because each person only refers to what they themselves have experienced. It could easily be that one person’s sensory experience and perception of the world is wholly different from that of another person. It seems, though, that in practice we have a shared vocabulary for our perceptions and use that to build our knowledge of the world.
@[email protected] does this sound like an accurate interpretation of your concept?
an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot
Being religious doesn’t make you a bigot
Looking at the entire history of (a) faith-based religion, versus (b) evidence-based science
I have to say:
- learn history
- fuck you, you ignorant evil-enabling asshat
There’s no denying that most of the major religions are rooted in racism, and many still promote hate against certain people.
That being said, “fuck you, you ignorant evil enabling asshat” sure sounds like you are making assumptions and vilifying someone you’ve never met based on one trait that you do not agree with.
Sorry, bro, but you’ve become the monster you’re trying to fight.
Certain units of the Japanese Army conducted a lot of inhumane scientific experiments on human subjects they racially discriminated against during WWII, and the evidence collected was retained by the USA.
I want to note that none of this was valid science, the results were worthless because they prioritized torture and didn’t document their “experiments” and their results properly. Same for medical Nazi “research”.
Though it’s true that you don’t need religion to do evil acts.
Maybe the Japanese Empire didn’t, but the Nazis were explicitly Christian.
the Nazis were explicitly Christian.
Eh, publicly Christian 100%, but there were plenty of anti-Christian views from Goebbels, and then there’s the Occultism in Nazism as well.
That being said, Positive Christianity was 100% a tool to manipulate the people into doing the State’s will, trying to eject Catholicism from Germany.
Not really. They were certainly white supremacists and hated Jews, but Christianity didn’t really play a big role in their ideology. They spent a lot more time supressing local churches than going on about how christian they are, and many of them were very interested in pagan religions.
This is revisionist bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_Nazi_Germany#Accommodation_to_Nazism
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-role-of-clergy-and-church-leaders
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state
the us thought they were getting a deal from the japanese when they conducting biological experiments on chinese people, but they were getting all fluff results
evidence based science conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Let’s infect black people with syphilis and see what happens! They aren’t really people, so are like monkeys so if they die from untreated diseases it’s not a big deal!
scientific practice both past and present is often rife with racism.
but don’t let the facts of the world get in the way of your worship of science as a religion.
Guaranteed that was run by Christian White Racists
Arguing for faith is literally saying “I will believe anything on no evidence, and I think the following…”
Sorry, I stopped listening when you told me you don’t know how to think as an adult
right, anyone who says anything that disproves you is wrong and bad.
clearly throwing tantrums and calling people names is a thing only very mature adults too. toddlers don’t do that… ever
I had something similar. I grew up catholic and was very devout until I learned some stuff about myself that made me step away for a while. I expected to come back like a year later and join the episcopalians or something, but I wound up an atheist for several years. During that time I was kinda insufferable about it for a while. Then I started exploring pantheism, earth worship, and ancestor devotion because I’d felt I was missing something without religion and lighting candles to talk to my mom helped me cope with how much of my life she doesn’t get to be there for. Later an acid trip and some exploration would help me delve deeper and find the goddess I primarily pray to these days. Somewhere later I started using the Wiccan holidays because they’re really convenient for solar and seasonal observance and meditation. They also help make it so I don’t wonder where the hell the year went.
So yeah, catholic to atheist to pagan. There are many paths up the mountain, find the path that is best for you and makes you better.
Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot
Most “spiritual” people adhere to one of the big organized religions, and those kinda suck in general and are rarely content to leave nonbelievers in peace.
The biggest organised religion is realism.
The biggest organized religion is breathing
We don’t live in a society that persecutes people for not breathing, but we do live in a society that persecutes people for not believing in reality. Genocides have been committed in the name of reality.
A genocide for not believing in reality?
Yep. Aboriginal folks don’t tend to teach their kids the white idea of reality. I’ve heard from some Indigenous people that their culture (keep in mind, there are many Aboriginal cultures) doesn’t believe in reality at all.
So the white people took Aboriginal kids away from their families and put them in white institutions and with white parents. Took away their language, their culture, their land, and gave them white patriarchal realism instead. And there was a hell of a lot of abuse. Beatings and rape. They called it “civilising” the children.
It was an attempt to exterminate Aboriginal cultures. I call that genocide.
How can you not believe in reality? Do they think we live in the Matrix?
idea of reality
Let me stop you right there bud. Reality is or isn’t. There is no idea about it.
What you’re talking about is racism.
If we’re free to redefine “religion” as we see fit, I declare breathing a religion.
I think some people can be overly smug about their lack of belief, but I don’t think that means it’s akin to a religion
Realism isn’t about lack of belief. Solipsism is about lack of belief. Realism is about an unshakeable faith in the existence of an external world beyond the senses. Soulism is about making the best of the world within one’s senses. Out of the three main approaches to reality, the realists have the most belief, and are most easily cut down by Occam’s razor. That a world beyond our senses exists is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. It is nothing to base one’s life around. It is better to work to improve the malleable world within our senses, than to strive for Plato’s world of forms.
The biggest organized religion is breathing
Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot
The main issue is that the cohort of people with megaphones broadcasting their spirituality is virtually entirely comprised of profiteers.
Like all such parasites they follow the pattern of establishing out groups for you to despise, simply because it drives engagement better. Same reason all major social media now attempts to shape you into a being of hatred and impulse. It keeps you stressed and activated so you jump at the opportunity when they offer to let you spend money to blow off some of the steam.
Bigotry as a phenomenon has many origins, but wherever it springs from it ultimately doubles as an inherently appealing strategy for those who wish wring dry their community.
At any rate, as we all sit here dying around the same poisoned watering hole, we see these profiteers dressing just like us while actively dumping the poison in. Ashamed, we feel compelled to proclaim, “I am not them! They only wear my clothes!”
Spirituality is an incredibly comfortable and practical “clothing” for many people. You’re absolutely correct in drawing attention to how bad it sucks that the people who embrace that comfort now feel pained to differentiate themselves from the abusers who pervert their fashion
There are LGBT friendly churches run by LGBT Christians. Are they conveniently ignoring certain parts of the Bible? Sure but all Christians do that
In high school, I was pro-death penalty. As part of a class on politics, I was randomly assigned the anti-death penalty position to research and debate on. I very quickly changed my opinion when I learned about the systemic racism involved. Now I’m an anarchist
Don’t worry, when you graduate high school you’ll drop the anarchist bit, too.
Because grown ups are capitalists ?
Obviously, it varies, but a thing often happens where as you’re exposed to the details of how the world works you start to realise the generations who came before and made it weren’t total idiots.
Thinking it all makes sense isn’t where that goes, but “a monopoly on the use of force is probably necessary” or “markets are more airtight than people think” can be.
Speak for yourself. All kinds of groups from conservatives to liberals to fascists to communists (although let’s be honest, it’s mostly the conservatives and liberals and ‘enlightened centrists’) love to arrogantly imply that their current worldview is the mature, rational conclusion that any intelligent person should reach in adulthood, and any other is just childish, naive, and poorly conceived. The people who do this aren’t speaking to anything concrete about the world, they’re just high on their own farts and confident in their ignorance.
And it’s the anarchists who catch the bulk of the sneering insults from these types, who will often demonstrate their own ignorance as they dismiss them as naive and uninformed. You did this yourself by extolling the virtues of markets as a defense of capitalism, apparently not knowing that markets are not exclusive to capitalism.
Oh? Which ideology on that list the push for, then? I’m in the picture, I used to agree with OP on a lot and now I agree on less, but can you even guess how?
Nothing is being sold here, I literally just listed a couple anarchist things OP believes. Learning as you get older is a real phenomenon, at least for most people. And, there’s no shortage of older people who have more complex, less absolute ideas about any number of things than they did when they were younger.
You did this yourself by extolling the virtues of markets as a defense of capitalism, apparently not knowing that markets are not exclusive to capitalism.
I used a different word on purpose, because capitalism doesn’t really have a consistent definition. According to Hexbear, China isn’t capitalist despite having all the associated features, for example.
Alright, I’ll have a go at guessing your ideology since you asked. Given your status quo preference (“the generations before us aren’t stupid and things are the way they are for a good reason”), you’re not a radical so that leaves conservative, liberal, or centrist. Given you’ve implied that you used to have some anarchist beliefs it’s unlikely you went from that to conservative, so most likely you’re some flavor of liberal, like a social democrat. You’re vaguely sympathetic to some socialist and anarchist ideas but think you’re too smart to commit to them because the world is “just more complicated than that.” Capitalist realism has pulled you back from becoming a radical as you’ve gotten older.
Actually, you pretty much nailed it, nice. TBF that makes it kind of a trick question, since it’s not neatly in any of the categories.
Do you think the world isn’t complicated? Even anarchists usually do. If anything, you see the argument that the world is too complicated to be reduced to numbers and laws.
Nah, it’s just that eventually you realize there is more to life that questioning your parents and wearing black.
oh look, it’s someone who doesn’t know what anarchism is
Let me guess, you use Linux?
what gave it away, the website I’m on or the posts I made?
I didn’t even look at your post history. It’s just that Linux users and defenders of Anarchism as a true system of power have a very narrow Venn diagram.
whatever. I’m not interested in discussing anything with someone this caustic. I didn’t say “humanity must become anarchists” I said “you don’t know what anarchy is”
And I’m not interested in having a conversation with someone who can’t even pick a side of the fence to argue from. I hear the Libertarians are recruiting, maybe they are more your flavor.
You’re in wrong neighborhood pal lol
I know what anarchism is and I think it a utopian thought experiment.
Like every single political ideology you rube
I mean, other ideologies, support them or hate them, have at least existed in the real world at a mass scale.
So you’re saying human civilization always operated under a hierarchical body politic without decentralized decision making?
Serious ahistorical claim.
By the way “anarchy” in the sense of childish movie plot stuff is not what any adherent of the ideology is about. Anarchy is a spectrum and set of guiding principles (like any political belief system), and one can argue that forms of what I might identify as anarchistic political structures have and do exist in many political systems. Just like socialism exists in neoconservative governments, and fascism in democracy ect…
Anarchism can run a small commune but not modern societies like China or the USA. Let real leftists build movements that actually succeed in reality and not at the scale of like a couple hundred people.
I only became an anarchist in my 30s. Before that I was authleft.
I think I’m starting to lean that way as well, I definitely understand society and norms are an illusion of structure, but I used to think it was good, productive, now I think that theater is hurting us.
When people stop working towards the structure and begin to exploit it instead…
yep exactly. I really am just wondering how much this is recent failures or has it just always been this fucked up and we were sold lies growing up.
That escalated randomly.
Death penalty carceral state - carceral state - state -
state
I used to be anti-death. Now I am in the pro-death camp. This is because if a 2nd American War is concluded, we will be left with many living MAGA in our prisons. Do we really want to house members of ICE in our prisons for life, or allow them to once again walk the streets they terrorized? Members of the Trump Regime willfully given up their humanity in all the ways.
I cannot help but feel that executing them all will allow us to allocate more resources towards the people who matter: children, immigrants, and others who still have their humanity.
I feel that but also recoginize the inherent dark irony.
It is called the tolerance paradox. If you want a truly tolerant society you can’t tolerate intolerance.
Yeah. It is problematic: On one paw, it is definitely evil to kill people. On the other, it is also evil to allow rapists, thieves, and murderers to have a high chance of doing so again.
It sucks. 😞
we will be left with many living MAGA in our prisons
Conveniently they’ve been building tons of prisons that could be put to use for this
I used to believe that owning a car was necessary.
Idk depends where you’re at. In the US some regions you’re basically not a participating part of society without one particularly out west. On the East coast there are several cities where having a car becomes more of a liability than anything. Public transit is good enough with some caveats.
Having had a car in the bay area I literally would not have survived without it. I’ve since moved east and had my car break down a few weeks ago. Honestly not as bad as I thought it would be. Definitely had to cut some things out of my schedule that were on the opposite side of the city and get used to the occasional crackhead/tweaker but I’m honestly saving more money than expected. The convince of a car only really shows up with dating and cutting 10-30 minutes from most of my travel.
All that to say I mostly agree with you.
Depends on where you live, sadly.
Yeah. I live in one of those places were everyone else thinks it’s necessary to own a car.
i had roommates in a city where you don’t need a car who would drive their car to work rather than walk a KM. If you asked them why it was ‘it’s too far to walk’.
I used to believe in a woman’s right to choose. Then I got married, and having my wife always pick what we do had gotten us into some really boring shit. I would like to choose from time to time.
I used to believe in a woman’s right to choose.
So eh, what did that entail? You have the right to choose, therefore you must choose?
I have the right to vote, while still having the option to not vote at all, if I so want. Forcing people to vote would just be tyranny.
could be worse. you could choose and she could enjoy it and then hate you for being right. I had an ex who broke up with me for this very reason.
I used to joke about eating two animals for every one a vegetarian didn’t eat. I’ve been vegan for over a decade now, pulled a bit of an uno reverse in my early twenties.
How do you get your protein? I’ve been doing the plants - and eating beans a lot - but this last week I ate some meatballs in my soups and boy - I really crave the meat.
edit - not sure why it quotes irrelevant text in these replies
I eat a lot of tofu, soy curls, and chickpeas,mostly. I haven’t had much issue.
Here’s sort of a strange question. Not too strange though ;-)
Let’s say you had a basic rice and beans meal - garlic … onions … root vegetables … blackbeans and redbeans … then kale roots and final kale leafs … salt pepper
What spices do you use? What are your favorites?
For that kind of a meal I usually season simply with salt and pepper, but then make up a dressing or sauce to go over it, something like a pesto or maybe a carrot ginger dressing.
Thanks. I’ll try that.
Oh great. Now I gotta eat four animals. I’m never gonna finish lunch.
You can switch to crickets, I think that’s your best murder per Kg ratio.
Go to Wendy’s and get a 4 for $4 add bacon. bacon cheeseburger, nuggets and fries. That counds as three.
From what animal are fries made?
IIRC some restaurants were flavoring their oil with horse tallow.
That’s a fair point.
Yeah we all go through a stage where we haven’t mentally matured yet and have this tween-like rebellion reaction to any idea about changing for the better. Some grow out of it at a younger age, some at a normal age, and some not at all. I remember a bunch of examples I’ve seen happen through the decades;
“You say i shouldn’t eat meat, well i say nuh uh! Now I’m gonna eat twice as much!”
“You say i shouldn’t smoke cigarettes, well i say nuh uh! Now I’m gonna smoke cigars too!”
“You say i shouldn’t be racist, well i say nuh uh! Now I’m gonna be even more outrageously racist!”
It’s just a non-thinking reactionary response to the idea that you aren’t perfect.
I think it’s funny that there have been a bunch of stories about how genZ is smoking again because it’s some kind of nihilist counterculture and I’m just like… Yeah I didn’t quit smoking because the priest gave me a very stern lecture. I quit because I got tired of hacking up half a lung every morning.
I quit smoking because I actually want to live beyond 55 - I still remember my neighbour-woman smoking a ciggy, while standing outside with her chemo-drip… Absolutely haunting.
Before using AI for the first time: “Holy shit this is gonna be dope!”
Aftwr using AI: “Yo wtf? This is bullshit.”
Shout out for “tech wont save us” podcast. It kinda crystalised my thoughts around this - tech indeed will not save us.
Itd be fine if it was just useless slop that sat there. But then it gets shoved I to every last possible device, burning up water, and taking up valuable land resources to enrich billionaires, oh and outright stealing the works of others while telling us plebs “it’s illegal to do that!” Thats the issues I have. If it was all locally ran, open source, trained in public data only, I’d maybe be OK with it being used for research or data purposes only (nothing to do with art or surveillance) but we will never have that.
Did you ever play with the pre-NN chatbots?
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This is a topic I’ve gotten disagreement on from my fellow lefties for a long time, and I’m glad they’re finally starting to understand. I’ve always believed in strong gun control laws, but not a ban.
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The issue with strong gun control laws is that they would definitely be leveraged by authoritarian governments against the interests of the common people. I’m not really a fan of complete gun ownership freedom, but even in the not-quite-as-overtly-fascist past of US politics, it’s been conspicuous how often state gun laws were tightened when minorities started arming themselves, while the ‘white men shooting up schools’-issue is pretty much being ignored.
But you can’t start your scenario from after there’s already a fully situated authoritarian government in place. If you’re starting from there then there’s no actual law about anything at all anyway, guns or otherwise.
And secondly, you’re arguing as if strong gun control laws means a gun ban, which aren’t at all the same thing.
But you can’t start your scenario from after there’s already a fully placed authoritarian government in place. If you’re starting from there then there’s no actual law about anything at all anyway, guns or otherwise.
Fair enough. I guess it depends on how authoritarian and anti-progressive you think most western governments were before they started to tune into the Trump bs; it’s a completely different conversation if you think that we need a revolution before enacting strong gun control laws.
And secondly, you’re arguing as if strong gun control laws means a gun ban, which aren’t at all the same thing.
It’s really easy to declare someone who belongs to a political movement or politicized minority as ‘not fit for gun ownership’, the further away from the current political center the easier.
Strong gun laws doesn’t mean a test of political views for gun ownership. Strong gun laws means things like for example to have access to a gun a person must not have a recent conviction of initiating physical violence. Calling these things “strong gun laws” is really a purposely misleading term, because what we’re actually talking about is truly dirt-basic levels of obviously warranted restrictions.
But imo if you meet these extremely reasonable precaution requirements then after that you should be able to own basically any type of weapon you want short of WMDs. As long as you can meet increasingly tighter training and ownership restrictions then imo you should even be able to own the top of lethality weapons like a tank, rpg, or jet fighter
When I was young and stupid I was more conservative, and I was pro gun. Then I became very anti gun. Now, as the world gets shittier and more dangerous, I am drifting more towards pro gun.
It’s a funny thing. It’s made me realize that being a pacifist or being anti gun is, in a way, almost a privileged position to take. It’s easy to say “I’m anti violence” when your existence isn’t being threatened, it’s a lot harder to stomach as the threats get more real.
It’s a funny thing. It’s made me realize that being a pacifist or being anti gun is, in a way, almost a privileged position to take. It’s easy to say “I’m anti violence” when your existence isn’t being threatened, it’s a lot harder to stomach as the threats get more real.
Your existence was being threatened but now that you have a gun you’re safe? Sounds like creative writing to me. What was the threat? How did you counter that threat with a gun? Was their a big confrontation? Did you have to put a motherfucker down?
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Damn, a lot of people wouldn’t have learned a reasonable lesson from that interaction …
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Pacifism is sometimes privilege and sometimes moral ideology taken to its noblest extreme. You have some who are safe no matter what and decry violence, but you also have folks like the victims of the Gnadenhutten massacre, who didn’t fight back because they were pacifists. You also have nonviolent people who do so strategically.
For clarity, when you say “anti-gun”, what is that position? Like, “average people should not have them, period”?
Not trying to knock on you - it’s that there’s so many positions which get lumped under “pro-” or “anti-”, it helps to actually understand where someone is coming from.
“Average people should not have them and I don’t want one either.”
My opinions on that have shifted.
Same. ICE invaded my neighborhood and I promptly got my permit to carry and now I bought my first gun and am practicing at the range and carrying regularly
Not OP, but my position has always been the constitutional position of “a well regulated militia”. Like imo you shouldn’t be able to have guns in your home, but it would be fine if there was a single gun locker on literally every block where you could store an entire personally-owned arsenal, as long as the locker met strict security rules and the gun users met strict and recurring training requirements.
When you have the gun, you’re the one bringing a gun to the party.
I took a really similar arc as you did, and now carry on a regular basis. I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head: it’s easy to be anti gun when there isn’t an imminent threat.
Forks with ice cream. Seemed stupid, tried it out, converted.
If the ice cream is very hard, then the tines of the fork break it apart more easily, than the dull edge of a spoon.
Some people melt their ice cream in the microwave before eating it, though.
Some people melt their ice cream in the microwave before eating it, though.
My dad used to put ice cream in a mug, and then place it on the metal plate of the biggest burner in the stove to melt it a little. This worked about a hundred times before the mug exploded in a lot of tiny pieces.
Everytime I tell someone I microwave my ice cream, they think I eat hot fully melted ice cream rather than just softening it lol
New concept for me. I’ve just left it out on the counter before for someone that prefers it softened.
Do you find the softening consistent all throughout? Might give this a go next time a softer serve is needed.
I’ll usually put a pint in for 10 seconds or so. It softens the ice cream pretty uniformly, just a bit more on the edges than the center.
“I’m making ice cream soup!”
How does that work with the melted part?
Can’t say it’s a problem I encounter, but I might opt for one of them double wall bowls that you can freeze to prevent the melting altogether.
I already have bowls. And spoons.
Right, well I wasn’t trying to convince you to switch only answering the question. Enjoy what you have as it please you.
To be fair, “buy more equipment” is not a great answer.
That’s how you interpreted my comment? Perhaps it was my use of ‘you’ whereas I may have written ‘a person’? It was meant more as a royal you than a specific you.
I didn’t suggest anyone ‘buy more equipment’. I answered that I would use a funny bowl.
Good luck on your future endeavors.
I used to believe that useful idiots were the exception, not the norm.
I had the opposite of you: I went from believing in mysticism and magic to being a materialist. All it took was talking to a friend and exploring our views.
Another one is believing in linear causality. I used to have hard stances on all kinds of subjects, but then I learned about Cynefin and functional contextualism. Now I am pragmatic.
I used to thing, every good meal needs meat. Now I’m convinced, you don’t need meat in a meal at all.
