Uriel238 [all pronouns]

He smacks you with a great shout. You feel glove slapped like a duel challenge. Then he offers a small tub as you feel the tooth slip from your jaw onto your tongue.

Absolutely everybody with maybe the exception of some well-sorted zen monks is crazy. It’s one of those things we learn in the wacky ward (or in my case, a partial-hospitalization program). Imagine a line going from healthy-brain to maximum-damaged brain (where ASD folk at the high end of the spectrum fall), they run:

• 0. Healthy
• 1. Neuroses (personal conflicts: I like ice cream but I also want to be lean). The best of us are here. But that’s few.
• 2. Personality disorders (APD, BPD, NPD, Being Donald Trump, probably). Note this is not too damaged, just in a way that makes psycho-killers
• 3. Psychosis, not to be confused with psychopathy which is not a psychology term but a forensic term. This is where BPD, Major Depression and so on go.
• 4. Schizophrenia, which literally means fragmented mind
• 5. Autism, according to the 1990s (pre-DSM-V) model, when it was called Autism and not ASD.

Since (according to my psychiatrists, ASD is a symptom of a high density of neurons that lead to crossed wires a lot, called kindling. When it takes place in the motor-function part of your brain, you end up with epilepsy.

ALSO: In since the industrial age and the end of extended family homesteads and the beginning of nuclear families, our resilience to domestic abuse has plummeted. (When there were aunts and uncles and grandmas around to run to when dad got drunk and handsy, it helped us manage our mental health as kids. Now we don’t have that support, and parenting has gotten worse as industrial and clerical jobs demand more of our time, so that by the 1970s, no one is actually around to parent (or to do research for civic duties). So we all are suffering from intergenerational insanity. At least it is my hypothesis.

There’s always the literary alternative:

“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving the right paw 'round, “lives a Hatter; and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like; they’re both mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat; “we’re all mad here. Do you play croquet with the Queen today?”

We all are crazy, and that’s okay. Hang with me and we’ll figure out how to manage it.

In the meantime, I love you and am with you.

(This may be a bit sappy but it applies to friends and lovers alike.)

I’d argue theocracy is serving the same cause as fascism, which is to manipulate the public to go along.

According to Karl Marx ( Das Kapital ) Capitalism bleeds money into the coffers of the ownership class until the system turns into oligarchy which turns into monarchy.

The US indoctrinates its people against communism and socialism (really, basic models from which we’d develop a community-focused economy): These words are regarded openly as derision one throws at people they want to disrespect. And yet the only alternative is monarchism, upheld by religious indoctrination (the same thing that propels dangerous cults) and fascist rhetoric ( such as the same enemy within notion that fueled the holocaust ).

Either we actively resist this, or most of us are going to get fed into the war machine and the genocide machine.

And yes, by turning away from communism – again not Soviet communism or even any given known model, but striving towards a community-based government and economic system – we ruled out all exceptions than feudal monarchy. Hence all the oligarchs paying literal tribute to Trump. He will be king.

BEHOLD THE POWER OF BAPHOMET!

ALL HAIL SATAN! 🤘

In the 1980s (when women just got to have their own bank accounts and credit cards, and we just invented no-fault divorce) there was still a lot of prejudice that women were too driven by emotions. My dad (a boomer) still believes this to this day.

The thing is, in the 1970s, we switched to two-income houses rather than the one-income houses of the 1950s. (Shit was evil then too, but that’s a different rant) and so women were required to do all this adulting that they allegedly couldn’t do. In the 1990s, women were regarded, at least by Gen-X and younger to be able to adult, and of which taking responsibility, being able to lead and / or follow without being a dick, and respecting others. If there was anything different, it was that men were expected to have higher incomes and be able to put more into rent, utilities, dating etc.

(I was dirt poor, but a solid friend so we went out less and ate in more. The VCR / DVD played the same role as Netflix in the Netflix-&-Chill paradigm.)

The way I put it came from the 1983 techno-thriller, Wargames, cut and pasted from a different thread, the man code was this:

🔸️ DON’T launch the LGM-30 Minuteman nuclear-tipped ICBM. Evar. Even if the President of the United States orders you to. (He’s bluffing.)

For most people it was allegory, but for some people, it’s a literal thing (also, I know of USAF missileers who admitted they would not launch even under orders, and they’ve been kept in the same post even during the cold war, so go figure.) Incidentally, women were assigned to missile posts, in 1977 in the USAF, so it seems that the US government trusted women with the decision to launch a nuclear weapon well before US culture got the memo.

Nowadays, we see masculinity as it’s expressed by politicians and pundits reminds me of Joffrey Baratheon insisting I am the king which I was specifically reminded of when Trump was strangling his own Secret Serviceman screaming I am the fucking president!

Any man who must say “I am the king” is no true king. – Tywin Lannister

I wouldn’t trust any of these bros not to abuse their lovers and kin, let alone with an LGM-30 Minuteman nuclear-tipped ICBM. But it seems seventy-seven million Americans trust that capacity to Trump.

My teachers were fierce about our capacity as fourth-graders to take responsibility seriously. Also to pronounce nuclear as NOO-klee-ur, so I had to cringe all the way through the George W. Bush era. It’s worse in the Trump era, watching my elders acting like overgrown toddlers.

I assume by more masculine energy, Zuckerberg means:

• More posturing by Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump, the US exemplars of manhood.
• Trolls, more trolls, trolls trolling trolls. People fucking with anyone else that makes them uncomfortable.
• People boasting about how rich they are, how fast their car goes, and how many women they bed. Comparisons. Leaderboards.
• Doxing. So much doxing.
• So much AI porn. So much futa AI porn.
• So much misogyny. All the misogygy. Al Misogyny. Misogyny leaderboards.
• Tons of hate speech against the targets of the week. Immigrants, trans folk, Jews Arab Muslims, libs (not liberals, neoliberals or left-wingers, libs )

Essentially Zuck wants Facebook to become 4chan/b… or 4chan/pol, only where everybody knows your name.

For inspiration for strong women, let me offer:

Spiders (actually most invertebrates) are the dominant sex. Yes, the females sometimes – not always – eat the males, but then spider children eat the mother. Protein is in very high demand at that scale.

Lionesses do all the hunting, and when they’re in heat, the Lion (who chased out all the other males) is jolly sorry, and welcome all the other boys to the yard.

Bonobos, in which the females run the matriarchy, and the males love it. Also sex for everybody!

My own street block is run by a queen feral cat and her gang. We keep trying to catch her for TNR but she’s too wily.

Human men, especially our leaders and pundits (Donald Trump, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro) have completely lost the plot. They don’t act like wolves, but ungulates: They fight each other to be the dominant who (allegedly) gets all the females. Even dominant chimps might have one or two partners, while others males woo the rest away with kindness (pets and food) to elope in secret (I’m simplifying. Chimp relationships are pretty complex.)

We human men should aspire to be like eagles, who share in the upbringing of the young (without the threat of the -40° – C or F? Does it matter) that penguins have to suffer.

The whole strong women in media question, as Lindsay Ellis observed with the Transformers movies, speaks ill of men that we can’t bear to let women hunt and war with the rest of us without feeling offended. We’re pathetic and can totally do better, as Governor Walz has shown us.

Smart enough to navigate the medical system enough to get an eye test and lenses and frames based on the results of that test.

More than I cam do. But my problem isn’t lacknof smarts its neurodivergence and being unable to human through the words come out.

I’m pretty sure Paul had the celibacy fetish and introduced the sex=bad element to the dogma. Some scholars even suggest that was his thing since the other gods were sex positive. (At least toward men getting laid.)

Post biblcal Christianity was informed, in part, by Hellenic philosophical traditions, which were apollonian in nature. Women’s sexuality was on the dionysian side.

More resigned to it. Has to close his eyes and think of England.

I feel called out.

Sadly, I have that John Nash thing where my brain notices connections and correlations (spurious relationships? dunno!) but without all the cool game-theory math skills.

WARNING: Fringe Hypotheses Ahead! 🕶🛸👽🧬

A recent one is the interaction between Trump’s state of being an insurrectionist (according to a commission and some legal entities and not denied by SCOTUS) and the insurrectionist clause of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

As things are SCOTUS has suggested (in dicta) it’s up to congress to legislate action to block Trump’s presidency if they want to, that the insurrectionist clause is not self-executing.

What this opinion doesn’t do is change Trump’s status as an insurrectionist. Nor does it rule the 14th amendment doesn’t apply, only that congress is required to pass legislation to make it happen.

This means members of the public and government workers might decide among themselves President Trump is not legitimate. After all, the January 6th Commission presented an ironclad case he committed treason against the US, and the 14th amendment is in effect.

And this could be useful when the Trump Administration gives orders that are contrary to the duties of the department, or are unethical. Say if the DOD is ordered to put down public protests against current policy, or the Department of Education is told to disband.

And Then if SCOTUS can neuter 14-3 (the insurrectionist clause) by insisting congress has to enforce it, they can also neuter 14-1 (the birthright citizenship clause) the same way, maybe even insisting each person born of foreigners on US soil has to be given citizenship by legislation. Trump is particularly interested in killing 14-1.

In fact, this suggests the US Supreme Court can reinterpret any part of the Constitution of the United States by adding further obligations to assure it is enforced. And this puts SCOTUS above the Constitution.

Will anything come of this? Dunno. Could be nothing. Could lead to civil war.

I mean I’m mad so take my ideas with that consideration. 🐰🎩🫖☕️

And by piles or hemorrhoids he means the epymonymous body part isn’t working right. They inflate (with blood) as a cushion during a bowel movement and then are supposed to deflate and retract shortly afterwards. If they fail to do either or bleed (usually profusely) that might be hemorrhoids, the condition.

I have a lot of not-uncommon butt troubles, and no one bothered to explain any of this to me. So here we are.

But then my experience with tech people and medical people alike (at least the ones I know) they’re use to friends and family coming to them with questions particular to their field, and are willing to help.

Myself included, and would suggest that yes, if the computer is portable, bring it, and we’ll sort it out.

But then I’m in California and a lot of non-californian Americans think we’re weird.

Also I’m a pinko communist and am motivated to help others just to spite imperialist capitalism.

Tom Bombadil is a spirit-divine-thing from from ages long before Middle Earth. And yes, the One Ring likely didn’t even recognize Tom as a person so much as some natural element. To Tom it was as useful as a common ring forged of tin.

Tom is the most special of the special cases, and I remember someone (Gandalf?) suggesting he could easily walk the ring to Mount Doom if he had a mind to, but would likely forget what he was doing a hundred paces later.

But for sake of this thread, the One Ring is a solid allegory for power, specifically money or political power. This trend of boomers staying in office until they are infirm and senile (and clearly no longer capable of actually serving) shows just how tightly and desperately we hold onto power.

This was a plot point in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country the factions in each empire who wanted to preserve the Federation-Klingon antagonism collaborated to subvert diplomacy efforts).

No one gives up the One Ring. Ever.

(Except Sam, because he’s special. And because spiders.)

My wife is the admin Spock. In her last job, she knew the bosses were unreasonable and was willing to cover for the employees more or less (some were jerks or incompetent. They didn’t last long.)

Though generally, if upper management does something outright scandalous or outright illegal, HR usually helps cover it up. I don’t think she’d be willing to cover sexual assault, but she did had to cover up grift by clients.

In the far future everyone will wear jumpsuits or togas (depending on role and preferences) and restroom facilities will be ungendered. Also, if you go in your pants, embeded enzymes / bacteria will clean it up completely inside ten minutes and the clothes will smell like chlorophyll due to esoteric science.

Don’t drink the battery warnings fall into the cover-your-ass listings of all the stupid things people have done that might lead to litigation.

But around a century or so ago, Boy Scouts learned to build a bungalow and a tool shed which were part of their bear badge.

When I was a cub scout I had the option of building a pinball machine. Of course it didn’t say how and a basic pachinko machine was easier if more tedious.

Note I didn’t do any of these things, being a latchkey kid and no internet, nor libraries in walking distance. I flunked out of boy scouts.

That all said, most appliances we buy have a lot of instructions we don’t remember, and the ones that are not obviously dangerous tend to require multiple infractions plus wear and tear before they’re actually hazardous. But the US is a litigious society.