I’ll deliver this reply in Choose Your Own Adventure Format:

If you want to make a reference to Donald Trump being at his birthday parade and thus exposed, vulnerable and in the open and presently not looking up, turn to page 89.

If you rather make a reference to how we should leave the Devil be because the Devil himself is more respectable and honorable than any of these monstrous despots who murder out of spite and wrap themselves in scripture, turn to page 322.

I would wager that a lot more do.

My mother got drunk one night and sat me on her bed and described in detail when she got raped as a teenager, and the resulting abortion and the details of how that went. I was eleven.

Of course, being a male I can’t go around talking about the lasting effects of many such incidents that happened to me, and I’m not really expected to even connect those things to any feelings about sexual shame. So instead what it does, and what it does to many men who had any kind of sexual trauma, is we just block out the incidents and internalize the feelings and associations inward and it just wrecks our self-esteem, our standards for ourselves and our perceptions of attractiveness in ourselves.

A lot of guys process this in different ways, and trauma like this can take many forms. But it’s often expressed as later over-compensation and bravado and an image of being “in control” sexually and performative masculinity and hyper-objectifying notions of sexuality, or for more people I suspect, just an internal, festering self-esteem that doesn’t want them to be happy or feel good about themselves. For every loud, angry incel, I suspect there are thousands of men who have the same background or traumas and they just sit quietly on it forever and it robs them of joy.

Yeah, maybe my people just messed me up.

I’m pretty sure we’re now in a situation where most of our society’s contention is driven by childhood-induced shame over sexuality in some form or another.

And there’s not shit we can do about it because every time someone tries to make a campaign to encourage better sex-education, or even scarier, sex positivity among children, those people or groups get attacked for being pedos and predators.

This is going to be a social dividing line that gets sharper as time goes. There will be people who have a shred of intellectual capacity and haven’t been hollowed out be capitalism, who raise their kids to be free from shame and shackles of toxic social norms and let them just live and discover on their own what sexuality means to them.

And the orcs, who want literal dark-ages levels of shame, hate and fear and of course power-imbalances as deeply rooted foundations to anything and everything related to sex, and they will only want children associated with sex when it involves controlling them or worse.

Hey now, he didn’t say he was working close with Trump, he said he was working closing with Trump.

I’m sure there’s a distinct difference.

To stop insisting upon itself for like, five fucking minutes.

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer”.

Bruh, it’s not game of thrones. People just need to work.

TPM cup

I googled this and now I’m enrolled in a yacht race… thanks.

I really feel like the linux thing is far more cultural than practical, and if you don’t actually enjoy fiddling around with settings and software, you’re probably not going to enjoy the community either.

I have no idea what I’m going to do, I can’t afford a new PC nor do I have the desire to buy a new PC just because Microsoft says jump through this new hoop. I’ll probably just do a bypass and ask around the docks for a security key “workaround” from the friendly, local, sailors with eyepatches and peg legs.

There are brands moving there, that’s how a place starts generating value or the perception of value. I saw the same shit happen with twitter and reddit back in the day, this is just the same cycle repeating.

We need to store the waste for thousands of years. This is bad.

I feel like you didn’t read my comment and just wanted to talk about thorium. Which is fine, yes I know it generates less waste and creates its own fuel and all that, I am speaking about nuclear waste as we know it right now, from our hundreds of traditional power plants, the things that MOST people associate with dangers of nuclear waste. Which I explained is not even remotely the problem people think it is, because the actual amount is so small and those thousands of years pass in a blink of an eye deep under earth’s crust.

Thorium is good. Traditional nuclear power is also good.

I love how almost none of this discussion is about nuclear power or thorium and just about people wanting to feel morally correct about something and snarling back and forth at each other accusing the other of supporting genocide.

Our species is so cooked. We must be the first species to evolve with our heads up our own asses.

For the amount of actual nuclear waste, it kind of is. Earth is so huge and the amount of waste so small, that you could bury literally ALL of it under a mountain somewhere and chances are high that it would never see daylight again nor would never be found by anyone in the future.

Even despite this, extraordinary measures are taken to make sure nothing escapes the containment until such time that Earth’s crust has completely rolled down into the mantle or the mountain erodes, which by then it wouldn’t be nuclear waste anymore.

Lemmy is barely a thing. Lets not get ahead of ourselves.

People do prefer centralized platforms with shiny front-faces and easy-to-navigate corporate bullshit. The reason why that stuff is so successful is because it works.

People fled to Bluesky because advertisers moved to Bluesky.

But maybe some kind of resilience to the forces of destruction plaguing commercial social media.

This isn’t going to be the effective slogan that turns the masses who are finally just barely starting to fill Bluesky.

As soon as any platform sees a measure of success, it becomes a product and thus vulnerable. If we want social media that isn’t just a massive propaganda and advertising machine, I feel like we need to change something else.

Like physically storming corporate offices and returning the means of production to the people?

Maybe.

Oh absolutely 100% this has had foreign involvement, the KGB handbook (literally) describes how to plant chaotic agents into a democratic nation’s population to boost both sides of every social debate or argument. The digital age made this the easiest tactic in the world and every nation that’s been “annexed” by Russia experienced this sowing of absolute weaponized bullshit and hate.

edit: several tankies follow me around downvoting my every comment and throwing tankie memes at me because they seeth when someone says that Russia did a bad thing. It’s quite charming, they can’t do much else because they’re blocked.

They want us to all tune out. This is all by design so we don’t know what’s real or not anymore, then they can get away with even more and nobody will care.

This is what they’ve been doing for years and years, this is just more of the same.

I am not a woman but I have many female friends and family members and a partner who talk about the things they deal with, so let me give a few examples of things you may deal with as a woman online or off, in increasing levels of severity and threat level:

• Being condescended to and ignored, talked over and interrupted constantly.
• Being excluded from things and patronized for wanting to talk about certain topics or activities.
• Guys who cannot stop making sexual advances and sexual comments and have to try to steer every conversation towards sex. Always cracking sexual jokes towards women and looking for a response.
• Getting sent dick pics and other pornographic imagery without prompt or reason.
• Guys in gaming groups or discord servers who act friendly and slowly become more and more obsessive and threatening and feel entitled to your attention.
• Men who fully act normal and decent and integrate into a social group but have secret obsessive impulses and they try to spread rumors and lies about the woman or women in their circle, creating stories to try to isolate the girl they’re interested in, or attempts to get the female members of the group ejected because they feel insecure around them.
• Men who can’t distinguish between being friends and being intimate, and suddenly feel like they’re your boyfriend and entitled to know everything you do and everywhere you go, making threats to harm themselves or you if you don’t reciprocate the “relationship.”
• Stalkers who find your personal information online and send you pictures from your social media or other personal items to show that they know where you live.
• Being followed home or stalked by actual people who find out who you are.

There are a lot of social “rules” that women have to deal with, and a lot of men aren’t even aware of them. Like how they never leave drinks unattended when out with friends. When being dropped off at their house, they ask the driver to wait until they get all the way inside with the door closed before the driver leaves.

I often hesitate to give these kinds of examples because invariably there will be someone who claims it’s all lies or exaggerated, or they dismiss it and say “I wish I got that kind of attention online!” and other mind-meltingly dense, stupid or aggressive takes. This is why I asked if you have talked to real women you know about their experiences, because they don’t talk about this stuff, particularly online to people they aren’t close to. As soon as you get close to any women you learn exactly how much sexual predation they endure their whole lives and yeah, they do “get used it” in that they don’t go around telling everyone about every interaction. 1 out of 5 women are raped or have been assaulted/attempted rape. Of these victims, 1 out of 3 had it happen between ages of 11 and 17.

Most women who are murdered are murdered by a spouse, boyfriend, acquaintance or someone who met them once or twice.

Women have very good reason to feel afraid of strangers, online or off, if you’re actually interested in learning more and reading actual examples there is a WEALTH of information online and plenty of women’s stories on major forums, from Lemmy to Reddit to twitter threads.

There are a lot of things you probably aren’t even aware of that are normal for women, I would really encourage you to broaden your social sphere and make friends of other genders and backgrounds and listen to what other people deal with.

You probably don’t even know how much harassment and threats you would face just being a woman online, it’s not exaggerated, there are a LOT of people who really enjoy making women feel unsafe, it’s a game to them. Most girls I know hide their identities online and pretend to be men. Imagine not being able to express yourself freely even on the internet because you don’t want to feel unsafe or hated.

I love how GMO foods pose one of the greatest dangers to our species’ continued well-being and survival, but not in way because of the genetic modification, but because of the ability for corporations to patent life itself and control who gets to grow it or not.

Meanwhile, you ask most average grocery shoppers if they would eat GMO vegetables and they will shriek in horror like it’s going to make them grow dicks out of their elbows.

We’re in free-fall right now, but kind of like the market when a recession begins, we don’t see it until it’s in hindsight. But right now it’s already in full swing, whatever people meant about the “singularity” it’s already happening, because we have no idea what’s going to happen next, predictive models are toast. We used to be able to predict the future out to the decade with ideas about politics, technology and society being extrapolated with fairly good accuracy.

We can’t predict what’s going to happen next month now. Even our so-called leadership has just abandoned all semblance of control and appearances of normalcy and are just trying to get as much as they can as fast as they can before it all collapses.

I don’t think we’re going to lose everything. We’re going to have some hardships and a LOT of people are going to suffer. And likely there will be deaths at a scale that grows so steadily and so long-term that we’re all going to collectively tune out the news. Again. I just don’t know what’s going to be built on the other side. It will either be solar panels and servers and robot factories, or it will be death machines and tools of darkness. (And server farms and robot factories, but meant for like… mulching brown people who still have oil and water.)