SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

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1,084

Joined

2 yr. ago

FWIW, I used to take my car to an auto shop located in the middle of a residential neighborhood, next door to an ice cream and bait shop. It did not affect the neighbors in any way that I could see, and didn't affect the property values.

The first time I had ever heard of the word "tankie" was on Lemmy. It's just not a thing that about anybody I know offline is, or has heard of. So I don't understand the obsession with them. Even if they're doing every evil thing claimed, it's a) the metaphorical tempest in a teapot, and b) not even working, based on the number of people here who seem to make hating on tankies part of their identity.

The court thing is not universally true. I worked in a family law firm for several years, and the practice in the courts here is to start from a baseline of equal custody and placement, and I've heard the same about other states. The men who lost out were the ones who wouldn't fight, because they were convinced that the courts were biased. But hell, in one case, we got full custody and placement for a guy whose son wasn't even biologically his! (His wife cheated, and he didn't find out until well after they'd emotionally bonded.)

I'd say that 20-50 years is generous. Maybe if they'd won every election, but that's now how US politics goes. When one side stages a coup, and history shows they're going to win an election again within the next cycle or two, not throwing the leaders of the coup in Gitmo by January 21, 2021, at the latest, sure seems like enabling fascism.

We talking about 19th century land grabs? There's a really interesting (to me) law called the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The United States needed fixed nitrogen, and therefore could just take it?

The history of the US—the real history—is wild.

fr

Honestly, this argument comes across to me as a horrible mangling of different pop-sci concepts to construct a victimology. There's good evidence of the mechanism by which stress and trauma induce epigenetic changes in organisms. (Selective methylization regulating expression of genes.) There's some evidence of epigenetic changes due to physiological trauma passed down through germ cells. But it's a huge leap to ascribe mtDNA damage to psychological experiences.

The mitochondria have a degenerate genome, a tiny amount of DNA with (looking it up) 37 genes to support the processing of energy into ATP to power the cell. It is susceptible to epigenetic changes, which leads pretty directly to a number of metabolic disorders, but I can't find any evidence that those changes result from life experiences of an animal. The idea that mtDNA has accumulated generations of damage from sexist trauma beggars logic, too, because there's just not a lot of room to collect damage, and that damage leads to health problems fairly directly. If one got every cell of life from one's mother, in turn, she got it from her mother, and so on all the way back to the first eukaryotic life. All of those generations of trauma, how are we even still living?

Furthermore, the assertion that "men created the patriarchy" ignores actual history and context. One simply cannot ascribe a singular intent to a class comprising billions of individuals across time and space. At best, one could describe patriarchy as an emergent phenomena of societies and cultures. About half of the individuals in those societies and cultures were women, so you'd have to conclude that women helped create patriarchy, unless you deny their agency or intelligence.

There's a whole range of procedures that fall under the umbrella term of circumcision, depending on how much they cut off. It goes from snipping off a little ring at the tip (the traditional bris), to outright removal of the entire mobile skin system. I figure I've lost at least 15 square inches (an index card size) of adult tissue.

Just that I read them so quickly, I'm ready for the show it movie to move on to the next scene, and have to wait for the dialog to catch up.

Grab the one of the middle knuckles of one of your fingers firmly with your other hand. Now slide the skin to your fingertip, then down to the base knuckle.

What's that? You can't do that, because the skin is fixed in place? Well, imagine my surprise when I learned penises aren't supposed to be like that.

TIL that my nose is my dominant eye! (I think I'm not doing something correctly.)

In both cases, the words just... go straight from words to comprehension? It's kind of hard to answer that question, because introspection of the process isn't possible. I mean, I just look at words and know what they mean. From experience, I think I read about 3 times faster than most other people, what with not having to wait to hear them spoken by an internal voice. (Subtitles in the same language as the audio are maddening, because I can't not read them, and then have to wait so long for the speech to catch up.)

Should we also show "empathy" to Klansmen who joined up because they claim to feel disenfranchised by society?

Well, yes. No qualifiers. Full stop. Ask anybody who's successfully done it. Arno Michaelis is particularly good at turning white supremacists back to the light because he was one, and knows the mindset.

Changing somebody's mind and world-view always starts with listening empathetically. What you don't offer is sympathy for abhorrent beliefs. It's hard to make the distinction, but that old saw about education granting the ability to hold a notion in one's mind without accepting it is relevant. I would argue that maturity means learning to offer kindness while maintaining strong personal and moral boundaries. Self-righteous fury might feel good, but it'll never get through to a Klansman, or an incel.

So, yes, you have to show empathy, but certainly not a pat on the back. Those are two different things. It's hard to hold the line between them at times, but it's the only way to effectively reach people with backwards belief systems. Frankly, I feel like a lot of people would rather be self-righteous than effective, because it's easier and feels good, and that's what I see in the too-common conflation of understanding with approval.

Knights fighting snails goes back even further.

For what it's worth, about that age is when it started to go away for me.

I don't actually know if this is unusual, but I can smell when people have a respiratory illness, like a cold. It smells vaguely like the rooting hormone that you can get from a garden center.

Willfully blind. Eastman Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975, but decided to focus on their existing, profitable product lines. Clayton Christensen describes the process in The Innovator's Dilemma.

You get thrown out of a farmer's market if you show up naked, though. Probably thrift stores, too.

Does that make the rest of the world Themians?

So get to it.