Ask Lemmy

Boltzmann brains are also neat

Important? No

Persecuted? Yes.

(See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung.)

To the state, I'm just another dissident for them to crush like a bug.

My existence was outlawed by the CCP for the fact that I was the second one born in my family. The world doesn't "revolve around me", but my existence definitely got on the the government's radar, they got so pissed at their "birth control" law being violated that they send people looking for my mother to terminate me. There are many like me, and most of them did not get a Hukou / have a legal identity (I fortunately did eventually got it and my family was able to leave the country) so they couldn't even get income or ride a train (since those needs IDs).

Sorry I'm having anxiety attacks, so my mind just thinks all the negative thoughts.

repeat the class

Noooo I hate it. I don't wanna do the "going to the dentist and have to get my bay teeth pulled" part again, fucking HELL. 😭

If I could just argue with your therapist for a moment - cairns (Cairns) are well researched and understood human creations, whereas we have exactly zero evidence the universe was made with intention, and definitely no evidence that there's any intent or any point to any of it.

All that said, I respect the perspective of gratitude and radical acceptance.

To be clear:

When you “make” a cairn, you’re reorganizing stuff that already exists. In fact, whenever we say “make”, we usually mean modifying something that already exists.

It’s reasonable to assume that a painting has a painter. We have experience with how paint behaves over time when left alone, and it doesn’t assemble itself into a painting by default.

We don’t have first-hand intuitive experience with how cosmic amounts of matter behave over time. But we do have measuring tools and mathematical models, which give us a pretty good view of how it does seem to assemble itself into Earth-like places and even the prerequisites for life itself.

And we also have a good enough understanding of Earth’s history to know why we’re missing the ability to measure some of the most interesting steps here on our planet.

Buuuut all of that is pointless to our question anyway. Because we’ve been talking about whether “makers” are necessary to reorganize matter over time. And you made a leap from that to “making” matter and time itself. That is something for which we do not have an analogous experience.

If “making” means taking raw materials in a “before” time and combining them into something else in an “after” time… how do you “make” the very concept of “making”, and “when” does that occur if it must be “before” the concept of a “before”?

The current US paroxysms of conservative conspiracy theories are IMO the product of failing to rein in such unproductive thought

Counterpoint: There are also people that completely disregard the potential of conspiracy theories being actually true. People keep saying "they can't do this, its illegal!" with no deeper thought as to what laws even mean. Its just another sheet of paper.

Like NSA global surveillance. If you told people that before the Snowden Leaks, you would've been labeled as a crazy person.

MKUltra seemed insane until it got declassified, just as with COINTELPRO.

There are two extremes:

One is the 100% law-abiding person with zero doubts and just eats anything they're told at face value.

The other end is the "government bad, therefore the opposite of what the government say must be true", which is also equally ridiculous. I mean, just because the government says the sky is blue, doesn't suddenly turn the sky red (yes I know its technically light reflections and all that lol)

Its very difficult to find the line of truth. There are government propaganda from every country, there are nutjobs and cultists spreading their propaganda, there are some dissidents actually telling the truth, but how do you even tell the difference between a legitimate dissident and a conspiracy theorist nutjob?

Even scientists/doctors can't be trusted. They used to say "smoking is healthy" but then we found out they just got paid. Its hard to know if the info you get, have a more sinister origin.

Idk man, I mean like not exactly a "Truman Show", but more like a target of Zersetzung, Stasi loved torturing dissidents by trying break their friendships, they would hide surveillance inside people's homes, even go as far as rearranging household items to gaslight them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

I'm a dissident both to the PRC and USA's current admin, its not unthinkable that I'm a victim of a new-modern day Zersetzung

As applied by the Stasi, Zersetzung is a technique to subvert and undermine an opponent. The aim was to disrupt the target's private or family life so they are unable to continue their "hostile-negative" activities towards the state. Typically, the Stasi would use collaborators to garner details from a victim's private life. They would then devise a strategy to "disintegrate" the target's personal circumstances—their career, their relationship with their spouse, their reputation in the community. They would even seek to alienate them from their children. [...] The security service's goal was to use Zersetzung to "switch off" regime opponents. After months and even years of Zersetzung a victim's domestic problems grew so large, so debilitating, and so psychologically burdensome that they would lose the will to struggle against the East German state. Best of all, the Stasi's role in the victim's personal misfortunes remained tantalisingly hidden. The Stasi operations were carried out in complete operational secrecy. The service acted like an unseen and malevolent god, manipulating the destinies of its victims.

It was in the mid-1970 that Honecker's secret police began to employ these perfidious methods. At that moment the GDR was finally achieving international respectability. [...] Honecker's predecessor, Walter Ulbricht, was an old-fashioned Stalinist thug. He used open terror methods to subdue his post-war population: show trials, mass arrests, camps, torture and the secret police.

But two decades after east Germany had become a communist paradise of workers and peasants, most citizens were acquiescent. When a new group of dissidents began to protest against the regime, Honecker came to the conclusion that different tactics were needed. Mass terror was no longer appropriate and might damage the GDR's international reputation. A cleverer strategy was called for. [...] The most insidious aspect of Zersetzung is that its victims are almost invariably not believed.

Also, the UK undercover police got in relationships with dissidents to spy on them

(Just a theory tho, not too deeply serious about it, but its still terrifying to even entertain the thought of being a potential victim.)

It's only freeing if you want it to be true. If you're like me you want things to matter inherently so knowing that isn't true is painful.

Sorry I didn't mean it like that, my brain isn't operating at 100% cpu right now, its hard to think clearly with depression.

About 2 decades ago I was a fetus and a government ruling over 1/7 of the world's population came after me before I was even born (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Enforcement). I was the second one born in my family, my existence was illegal. Then they tried denying me the legal documents like a birth certificate.

Then later my older brother started being abusive towards me and he tied me up at home using zipties and watched me suffer. He would've been the only child had my parents followed the government policy, but then I came into existence and he didn't like that my parents had to split their attention, so that's why he was torturing me. It got so bad that one day, I ran away from home once, then later my own mother told me she would not miss me if I was gone. Then the family (I'm saying "the" family instead of "my" family, because I don't feel like I was ever part of it) moved to the US, and I was promptly facing racism and xenophobia, my fellow Chinese American classmates didn't defend me either. People would exclude me, and I once overheard kids talking shit about me behind my back. Then when I defended myself against a bully, I was the one that got arrested. School admins decided to be a dick, I was a minor for fucks sake, and it was fucking SELF-DEFENCE.

Now my adopted country's government declared war on non-whites. My previous country is already a failed dictatorship. I have no where to go. Which is why I feel like this is a torture chamber designed to punish me.

Less of "attention" more like notoriety. Everyone hates me for some reason.