AnarchistArtificer

This might just be non-vegan apologia, but I like to think that recognising the ethical merit in veganism is a step in the right direction, especially if you manage to not feel unhelpful levels of guilt about it (my ex's mom was annoying as hell, because she would cry if she ever thought about the fact that the meat she was eating used to be an animal. She felt so guilty about it that the cognitive dissonance caused her to reflexively avoid growth.)

I used to be irrationally somewhat anti-vegan, but now I am merely non-vegan. I'm not even vegetarian yet, but I am closer to that than I was a year ago. I'm not there yet, but I'm trying. It makes me uncomfortable to recognise the cognitive dissonance in me when I acknowledge that my current diet is not in line with my personal ethics. However, sitting with that discomfort is one of the ways in which I'm trying.

Along those same lines, give yourself space to grow. The fact that you recognise being non vegan as not saying good things about you is itself, a little good thing, in my opinion. It's not much, but that self awareness is definitely pointing you in the right direction.

I read a piece a while back that included a lot of comments from people close to him. They said that the federal case against him severely demoralised him, because even if his punishment ended up being minor, it would be enough to basically destroy his ability to lobby/campaign for the issues he was passionate about, effectively destroying his career. He was also apparently someone who was quite uncomfortable with the limelight, and the case against him made him into the kind of public figure who can get no respite from the public gaze. I can't imagine how overwhelming that must've felt.

I've seen no evidence to suggest that Aaron Schwartz didn't take his own life. However, morally, I would agree that he was murdered.

I conclude that Yorkshire should become an independent country

I think he is basically saying "I think that black people are bad. I also think that some billionaires are bad, but it's #notallbillionaires . The innate badness that black people have and the bad billionaires have are the same, so I am going to call the bad billionaires black". In other words, racist bullshit

That was a delightful video; thanks for sharing

I give out live usbs like they're candy (to friends who are Linux curious)

I have always struggled with sleep onset insomnia. In an ideal world, I'd probably sleep from around 5 am until noon, and my best working hours are from 7pm until 11pm, without fail. Even when I am exhausted from forcing myself to get up early for an extended period, I'll still perk up in the late evening, and struggle to sleep before 3am. This combined awfully with school.

I remember once that I was so exhausted, I literally fell asleep while walking, and I didn't wake up when I hit the floor. What's striking in hindsight is how little sympathy there was. I wasn't accused of being a drug user, but there were plenty of comments about laziness, which is absurd given that I was obviously severely exhausted.

A friend was the primary carer for a disabled relative, and this required her to get up at 5am each day, and to get up during the night to administer medication. She would often fall asleep in class, and she frequently got detention for this (which she would then often need to skip, to ensure she could get home in time to pick up siblings from school). Speaking with her years later, she lamented that if teachers had been more sympathetic and actually tried to understand what was going on here, it might've led to there being formal support to care for her relative. The amount of work she was doing was absurd for anyone, let alone a 13 year old, but she didn't know this, let alone that there were support channels to help young carers like her.

In many ways, we're already at that point. Crises often don't come out of nowhere, and if we think of crisis as a sliding scale rather than a binary, I would argue we're already in a time of crisis, and have been for a while.

That's why I agree with you. I am often miserable and demoralised, and I often feel suicidal because of my personal hopelessness. The goodness you describe is a huge part of why I'm still here. It gives me a wider sense of hope, because many of the best people I know are just as aware of the harms caused by the unchecked power of assholes, but the worse that the world gets, the more steadfastly good they are. Most of them are as depressed as me, but they seem to draw strength from the defiance of giving a fuck about morality in a world on fire.

It invokes a sense of duty in me that helps bolster my own resilience. When I was a suicidal teen, I felt like I was staying alive solely for other people, and this wasn't a productive or healthy way to live. This sense of duty feels different, because it's not framed as if I am a living martyr, sacrificing my own happiness for other people. Instead, it's grounded in the recognition that we're all struggling, and I actively want to stand alongside the defiant good people. Given the shakiness of my resolve, I don't feel like I have much concrete to add to their efforts, but perhaps I can show them that even when it feels like you're losing the big fight, the very act of resistance can galvanise the hearts of people who had already given up. After all, I'm still here.

"shan't" is a great word

Trans masc friends tell me that one of the things they miss most about presenting as women is drunk girl solidarity in nightclub bathrooms. Until I was a part of that conversation, I didn't realise how much I cherish these moments. Hearing this helped me to understand the loneliness of being a man far more than I did before.

I think that there are men on the left who leverage their platforms to reach out to men as you describe, but the problem is that their reach is far more limited because compassion doesn't sell as effectively as outrage bait; Manosphere content is incredibly skilled at creating a vicious cycle in which they incite anger in viewers, and, having nowhere to channel this anger effectively, it threatens to turn to despair, leading emotionally vulnerable viewers to return to the Manosphere, to "re-up" their rage. In the short term, it seems to offer some catharsis, but it fosters an odd dependence. The compassionate men on the left are more likely to resist this kind of dependence cycle (such as through taking steps to avoid unhealthy parasocial relationships with viewers, even if said relationships would make sponsorships more lucrative.

I don't think that sounds crazy at all. I wish that this sentiment were discussed more freely in society, because I hate the stereotype that men only care about pure physicality in sex (and the corresponding stereotype that women only care about emotional connection).

You're not wrong here about how a dummy designed to "the average male" proportions" is going to exclude men whose proportions exist in the statistical extremes (and likewise for women), but a phrase that comes to mind is "All models are wrong, some are useful". Whenever we are making a model for gathering and analysing data, it's because the real phenomena we're studying is too complex to be able to effectively analyse without a model. Even if we had a wide array of anatomically correct crash test dummies for many different body types, it would still be a huge simplification of reality. A huge part of research is about trying to always be mindful of this tension, and to be constantly evaluating whether our model is a good enough for reality.

The stats for injury rates in women indicated that no, our model was failing pretty significantly in this area, so we designed different dummies, effectively updating our model. There will be more research that looks at other kinds of variation between people, and that will mean trying to account for extremes while not overcomplicating our model.