Psyxe - Space Whale Aesop

Yes, SO MANY contexts, possibly all of them

“This thing can be hard for some people and I get that, but unfortunately it’s still necessary, so here’s a few tips you can try that might help you deal with it” - You, dear friend, are a good egg and I’m listening intently.

“Urgh, it’s not that hard. You’re just weak and whiney. Just do the thing.” - OP, you’re being an asshole and I’m already three posts down my dash after having made very sure my eyes never alight on your bullshit again, and that’s true even if I personally find the thing simple.

(It’s probably rather obvious what this is about right now, but it’s actually a general point that comes up in multiple contexts. If someone says something is hard for them THAT’S PROBABLY BECAUSE IT’S FUCKING HARD FOR THEM! Maybe drop the “This is ideologically inconvenient for me, so it can’t be true” for two goddamn seconds and acknowledge that you have knowledge of only your own physical and mental sensations and can’t actually derive a full picture of other people’s minds by projecting those sensations onto everybody else. “It’s easy for me” =/= “It’s easy”)

Question for the day: how many people in history of civilization have been as bad or worse at sex as Stalin?  I don’t mean in the “physical sex life was bad” sense, i.e. he’s a notorious P&V kind of guy.  I mean in the “hardcore statism sex is bad and this is why people did horrible things” sense.  Stalin had the best sex life of anyone in history.  (I mean, last I checked, anyway.)

(He also invented the kaleidoscope, for some reason.  I dunno.)

babies need more than one error message

rn it’s just like “you are clearly upset about SOMETHING, I am VERY MOTIVATED to fix it, and I have NO IDEA WHAT IT IS”

Another thing to remember for these next four to eight years of Biden: While the capitol rioters were a bunch of youtubers and lawyers and people cozy enough to afford spontaneous plane tickets, a much larger proportion of Trump’s base were radicalized so easily because they were poor and are still poor. Republicans spent years lying to them about the sources of and solutions to their suffering, scamming them with trickle-down policies and scapegoating “illegals” as more and more jobs just get automated or sent overseas, while a lot of Democrats just kind of focused on the coastal cities and let the rest keep deteriorating. Remember Hillary not even fucking CAMPAIGNING in some entire states??! Just completely snubbing the poorest parts of the entire country??????? Yeah??????????????? Even if you believe that huge swathes of America are populated by nothing but dumb, slovenly racists, which isn’t true and makes you kind of a fucker actually, their poverty and lack of education are symptomatic of problems that affect you too, there are minorities there too, there are little kids who didn’t ask for any of this shit and deserve to eat three full meals a day no matter how they’re being brainwashed by their KKK stereotype dad. That could have been you too. You have to want things to be better for everybody.

impostor syndrome is a common problem in academia. For example my colleagues keep putting me in the airlock and ejecting me into space

The Atlantic

Scolding Beachgoers Isn’t Helping

People complain that going to the shore is a careless act during a pandemic, but the science so far suggests otherwise.

I strongly recommend the entire article.

dataandphilosophy replied to your post “I just wanted to get on and read some rationalist posts on tumblr and…”

But Kelsey, how can I solve my problem of not having read the Silmarillion by converting to Orthodox Judaism?

Now that you’re observant of Shabbat and don’t use technology from sundown Friday-Saturday, you have a lot of free time, which like any sensible person you spend catching up on all the books you want to read. Thrilled at the prospect of ensnaring someone in two of my interests at once, I send you a pocket Siddur and a pocket Silmarillion, and you end up reading them at the same time, having strange dreams, and writing a long, revolutionary essay on the compatibility of Beresheit with Middle-earth’s revised cosmology. The Christians get mad at us for cultural appropriation. 

OK but there’s another “critical” here, and it’s also getting confused with the others. Critical as in critical theory, critical consciousness, actually does mean “being able to see and point out all the ways in which a thing is Problematic”, and when that gets (combined/confused?) with literary criticism/critical thinking, you end up with “analyse(critical thinking) a fictional work(literary criticism) by looking for all the bad things(critical consciousness)” and interestingly enough that ends up being very similar to what would happen if you just went at it with a hammer

Why did “be critical of your media” turn into “find all its flaws and hate it” why did people become allergic to FUN

I’d really like structural critiques to move away from using words like “scum” in general. Individualist moralizing doesn’t belong in discussion of systemic forces; in fact, the two are directly at odds. And it’s a mindfuck of a double-bind for people who are prone to taking ideas seriously: “this issue is very large and touches many aspects of society, and you personally are directly responsible for it.” Structural problems will not be solved by obsessively purifying your own heart. 

#if you’re a us citizen of course 

Do this now.

Do this now.

Take a pause from President Trump’s latest outrage (sending federal police to foment violence in U.S. cities in hopes that it will help his flagging campaign) or inanity (“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”) — and do the only thing guaranteed to end the nightmare.

Go to Vote.org, or, if you are reading this in the dead-tree edition, type vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote into your browser, spend 30 seconds entering your name, address and date of birth, and you’ll find out instantly if your voter registration is current. If not, follow the instructions to register.

Next, click this link or type vote.org/absentee-ballot into your browser, and sign yourself up to receive an absentee ballot for the November election. That takes about two minutes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/24/stop-fretting-about-trump-do-something-about-it-right-now/