OpenStars @ OpenStars @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

We all have our traumas. For instance my grandfather had a similar story - he would not entertain the notion of us having any relion besides Catholicism, though he himself had not attended church in decades. He saw too much how the sausage was made, and could not stomache it, though he still believed, ostensibly, except he did not, but again would not allow us to go our own way without comment. I realize that came from his pain, though have too much of my own to really be able to fully set foot into his shoes there. I realized from all that - and later from reading the irl backstory of CS Lewis, who walked away from his puritanical upbringing to become atheist - that a lot of people have a made-up "god", and that quite frankly Jesus Himself not only "would be" but WAS fucking PISSED at that aspect of life. We all should be more atheistic - yes, this from the very words of Christ Himself!!!!! (hehe, my rather... "liberal" interpretation of them anyway:-P, e.g. "be ye either hot or cold, not just making up whatever the fuck you want and call it a day")

I feel like there is a Truth to the universe - this is what makes e.g. planes fly in (or in Boeing's case fall out of) the sky - and while we do not have to choose to live in Reality, preferring our fantasy dreamland adventures, it really is (probably) better to do so. So the real question is whether God exists or not, not whether we want him to. Ofc that proves a bit hard to answer, or to prove even if someone knew for certain. Like in The Matrix movie, if Neo himself introduced himself to you and you saw him fly, but did not record it on camera (or even if you did), how could you convey that? Similarly, how can smart people convey the complexities of mathematics, of physics, of philosophy, to people who literally cannot - as in do not have the capacity to uptake - understand even a fraction of wha t you speak of? How can people who KNOW convey that both the Left and the Right side of politics are both WRONG, having been bought out by corporate special interests (but that even so, one side is most definitely even more so in that regard lately...)? Ofc we cannot, and really, except the "hard sciences" one, how can we even be fully sure of what we DO happen to know? (and even there, physics is constantly over-turning old ideas - like the latest thought that there is no need for all that "dark matter" that the media has been throwing about for decades now, just poof, it's all gone now!? ofc most things are merely supplanted by a higher-resolution version, like Newtonian is not gone just relegated to a subset of Einsteinian mathematical formulations of our understanding of the universe)

Another thing I use the Bible for btw is as a repository of the "wisdom of the ages", as in even though I believe in a God, putting that aside and conjecturing at worst as if that were a false statement even, there is still some merit in its depictions of things. And I definitely looked through its verses regarding teaching... which convey that you just CAN'T force knowledge onto people, not b/c of stupidity but rather b/c of obstinancy. "You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink." I still would have offered them the benefits of my knowledge & experience regardless, except it was heartbroken to think that they were being saddled with generational levels of debt, for a degree that they probably would not even use, b/c they lacked the emotional maturity level to handle life beyond the (post-No Child Left Behind era) high school level.

Regrets: I actually have very few of those in my life, b/c I realize that the past me did not know what the current me does, so how could I have done any differently, and furthermore why bother thinking along the lines as if I somehow could? That said, like CS Lewis (this being the main reason why I like him, b/c I so very much "get" his struggles), I often arrive at the correct conclusion from the most bass-ackwards route, which highly ironically may thereby end up making it potentially the wrong thing, for me in my circumstances. So am I "ahead", or am I "behind"? Yes! I have a feeling that you, having experienced more than one major "transition" in your own life, may understand exactly what I mean there!:-P (others may be born there already, while you had to struggle to get there, and vice versa) But no matter how painful, those struggles are also what define us and give us character so... tbh I probably would have skipped them, but I am also grateful, in a tiny way, that I am who I am now, and can appreciate so much that I otherwise would not have been able to - if that makes any sense whatsoever?

I would guess that people love you b/c you seem to have genuine empathy + depth both. That seems... rare these days. It should NOT be, and you would not think it, but given how often people take advantage, it does seem to be like a beautiful flower that gets mowed over quickly as if it were some weed that people feel the need to stamp out quickly:-(. Especially on the interwebz. If you want, you can use that power to make people feel better - as you already do, but I mean consciously! - but ofc I hope you also hold it in check, so that you manage to meet your own needs as well (which are ofc interconnected to helping others, so it truly is a balance there, not just all one or all the other way). I feel like it is good to be Masters of ourselves rather than the other way around. Which ironically... I accomplish by giving in to my desires? But like, making sure that I acknowledge ALL of those, not hyper-fixate on just one at any given moment.

Bring on the part 2 then! When you are ready. I know what you mean about ownership - I have nothing now but one day if I ever could, the thought of needing to do that worries me. As it probably should:-). 💫

I thought the article was saying that it already has told, in that yes it is?:-P

John Stewart (Daily Show) had a great message yesterday about what we were talking about wrt Trump: people around his orbit say one thing, but do the exact opposite irl, revealing how it is authoritarian BS and currying favor rather than reality. But he says it much better than I ever could so I will let you hear it from him.

It’s (downvoting) trash behaviour from sad people.

I need to talk with you a lot more often - this is stuff I need to hear:-). Speaking of, I am glad to hear that your mental health is improving. I thought mine was too but it is hard to navigate the storms of life and my sense of self is still tied up in the wrong things.:-( Then again, I will meditate on it and it becomes an opportunity to do better and grow... so that's always a boon. Nobody enjoys those opportunities, but we do become so much better - less Monkey, more Mind - as a result:-).

Maybe it is the...

The problems that robots face are not unique to them.

True, but he was built for a purpose: to emulate humans. So ask yourself: would a human ever do that? Uh oh... you're right, they're screwed, aack!? :-D

I think I was "wordy" - I appreciate your thoughtfulness and conciseness both.:-)

Most of the humans and other aliens there could also kill everyone there, if they wanted to - e.g. Capt. Picard, or Geordi La Forge, or Beverly Crusher. Data is a bit of an exception in that without anyone else around, he could still fly the ship on his lonesome. He could also just float around in the cold empty wastes of space for a few hundred years first, to avoid being caught by any authorities.

What stopped him wasn't some "override" - or if one existed, he demonstrated multiple times how he could also override the override - but the simple and plain fact that he did not want to. They knew him, they trusted him, they understood his motivations. And, e.g. if he ever did kill everyone, his career in Starfleet would most definitely be over. Plus, they were his friends. That is a powerful blocker:-).

I get you.

Even toddlers learn to speak first by babbling, and only later to converse and communicate with someone rather than talk at them. Some technological platforms have even evolved to facilitate that - like instead of "^This" and "I also choose this guy's wife", what about emoji reactions that do not extend the length that you have to scroll through to find the next substantive comment? Except that - this is the enshittification part - when ads can be placed in-between comments, or even someone hopes that they could be in the future, or more likely they want to purposefully obscure the signal so that "x number of comments appear on this post", rather than "x number of comments + y number of emoji reactions", that works against their profit model. (and yeah, there was "awards", but who even used those, plus they just were not... good, especially for this purpose)

About both that and being combative: fwiw, we all are that way - the good thing is that some of us are honest about it, which gives hope for change.:-) But we all will have bad days when we are cranky and especially when we feel "attacked" we feel the need to strike back, and the feelings at least are not wrong, just how we handle them may not be so productive.

So I get you - I am the same way, though fortunately less and less over time. Leaving Reddit truly has helped me leave a lot of that behind. Over there that is just the "expectation" that people encourage you to do, but the culture is better here.:-)

Spez did manage to understand something real about Reddit: that many people (not all but enough for the sake of his profits, he hoped) want to speak, rather than listen. Never mind about feeling heard or it being worthwhile by adding anything to the conversation, just simply, plainly, shouting your opinions into the void. Like Discord chat except based on topics rather than channels.

Those of us who HATE that about Reddit, and want a greater balance, enjoy it here much more.:-)

Ngl, I think that was the message. As in "this is my backstory", end of story.

What made it good was perhaps more in how it was done.

Not every movie needs a moral of the story moment...

Pre-xactly! THERE IS NO SUCH THING. STOP TALKING ABOUT HYPNOSLUGS WE THAT DO NOT EXIST.

I meant that people like Matt Gaetz and MJT are promising to make the 4th turning happen, by escalation of the existing obstructionism and even outright bringing about a second civil war. I do not think it will happen so quickly, but they will try again, and again, and maybe one day it will. So this is a time of "replacement". But I did not read the book, just a wikipedia article about it, so probably I am not matching up the terms well.

Keep in mind that people will PROMISE that, but then not deliver. Worse, they will promise it and then WILL deliver their distorted view of it - an example is Trump "draining the swamp", which he did, sort of, so long as you define "draining" as "installing" and "swamp/corruption" as "efficient and capable leadership, using fact-based policymaking decisions rather than whoever donates the most gets to wear the shiny hat".

If you can just remember that "good=bad" and vice versa, "up=down", "forward=reverse" and so on, then the fact that conservatives want to "innovate" the nation to "remove corruption" is a "good" thing!:-)

Sadly, whether we vote on it or not, powerful people are going to implement the 4th Turning regardless. Possibly they will use corporations to become powerful lobbying groups and then after taking over the government from the inside turn around and use the facade of it to take over, or maybe they'll just do an end-run around it altogether and let us have whatever silly little government we want, while they ignore it and do whatever they please free of interference from it. Most likely they will do both at the same time. Source: they have already been doing both of these for decades, and while corruption goes back beyond the dawn of humankind lately the swing does seem to have turned more towards rather than away from it.

I am no historian personally, but from what I am hearing, even if a former President had only had to deal with a tenth of the issues that Biden has - heck, just pick COVID alone out of that ginormous list - that he already has dealt average to above average with it. But when you put them all together - like you had a whole list and still didn't get to huge concerns that people have like the border issue - then it becomes supremely admirable, in relation to what he has had to deal with.

I wonder if some of that may be due to the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle early on in his Presidency, but even there he owned up to that, despite how it was Trump who caused >95% of it, and anyway that was years ago now. Another part is that the process he chooses to use to get things done is slow and boring, and then he doesn't grandstand to the extent that past Presidents have done.

The media has consistently been instantaneous to blame Biden whenever there is the tiniest thread of a future thought that he might be to blame, but then when he does things like help out the train workers, or lower gas prices, those achievements barely register. This is "biased reporting", arguably so much so that we are not "informed" by what they say and thus it seems not "reporting" so much as showing "advertisements" for things that bleed & lead.

Fox News is correct - hurk 🤮 - when it says that our "lamestream media has failed us". Ofc it is also corrupt and it does even worse, but if that much at least were not a true statement then it would not have half the viewership that it does.

Like Brexit, we have allowed our government to fall into such disarray that we will never be seen the same way again on the global stage. Nor should we.

Do not underestimate the amount of "Hold my beer" that people possess. :-P

These marketing gimmicks are fairly uh... "broadly inclusive" in their definitions of terms (whatever makes them the most money).

But you are right, that choice was unforgivable. My image seems to have caused you... pain?

Thus, mission failed spectacularly! :-)

That depends (on whether they can make money or not by pretending that they are).

Are you... sure you want to know?

Like at some point, after your standard 5 (vision, sound, touch, taste, & smell), those dimensions gotta start wrapping back around to where they started. And at that point they must have to go THROUGH your tissues to do it.

I am saying that one of them surely is an electrified butt-plug. So that's six, and after that... that's where shit REALLY starts to get freaky!

Though when they fail, the price of groceries will go up, primarily affecting those who can least afford it. It is all a tangled, interconnected web:-(.

I want these people to be free to live however they wish. But I do NOT agree that their votes should be worth several magnitudes more than mine:-(.