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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The money from energy companies dripping from both sides of this interview is disturbingly clear. My only hope is that where CNN is clearly grilling Harris for the interests of their investors (energy companies), Harris’ evasive responses are there to assuage the concerns of those investors long enough to get into office. She’s talking out of the side of her mouth for someone and probably needs to to get in office. I just hope that at the end of the day she sides with Earth and humanity over evil incarnate. I think she will, but she has to walk a tightrope to get there.

    If I’m wrong I’ll probably be part of a literal chorus of leftists looking to make it extremely clear that she can be a one-term president if she doesn’t find her way to doing the right thing.




  • Sure. Something like a poorly configured sprite sheet could be an appropriate metaphor too. Personally, I have PTSD. For me it tends to manifest as getting wrapped up in memories and in grappling with thought patterns that make it hard for me to process them or that leave me struggling with how I feel as a result. A lot of my own stuff is very internal, and often comes in response to my trying to process trauma. I feel less like I’m tinting the world than struggling with buggy internal processes. Not to say that interpretation of outside stimuli (social stimuli in particular) isn’t also a factor, but it’s not the main thing for me.

    Where you put the error, whether in interpretation or in execution, is largely beside the point, though, to my thinking. The main thing is that you’re looking at an error versus a choice.

    I do think that a lot of these destructive and malicious behaviors could certainly be seen as being the result of toxic thought patterns and compartmentalization, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing as a buggy, error-prone brain.

    Like, somebody who drives around in a massive pickup truck ignoring traffic laws and bullying their way around knowing that people will fear being hurt by their vehicle and will avoid them is just an abusive, dangerous asshole. There may be some underlying insecurity or discomfort that leads them to react that way, but it’s the reaction they’ve chosen and habituated to. We can discuss free will all day, but there’s a big difference between the guy who runs stop signs in a 2 ton vehicle and someone whose depression keeps them stuck in bed. One of those things is a pattern of choice-related behavior, while the other is someone struggling to have the energy to exist.

    The fact that many of us seem to have a hard time conceiving of anyone making these kinds of choices on purpose, to me, is simply illustrative of it being related to volition. They make different choices because they’re a different person, who sees things very differently. When the behaviors are taken to their extreme and other people are hurt, it can be harder to see the volitional difference, but at a simpler level I think it’s a little more obvious.

    Does knowingly blasting everyone with your high-beams indicate mental illness? Does being rude to service workers? Littering?

    The volition aspect here is pretty obviously different in someone who, for example, dumps their trash in a river rather than paying to have it removed. We may not know exactly what’s going on in their heads, but we can at least sort out that they probably don’t really care about nature or pollution or the people swimming down-river. I think it becomes a little harder to see in those more extreme behaviors because it’s so extreme, but I don’t think the fundamental nature is all that different.

    Someone carrying out a murder is not, in type, fundamentally different from someone who merely doesn’t care if anyone gets killed by their 8ft tall truck. They’re different in degree.


  • While I think this is a reasonable sort of surface-level interpretation, I think it misses a bit of what typifies mental illness versus just being destructive, malicious, desperate, or extremely entitled.

    Mental illness is something your brain is doing to you. It’s not just a thought that you have and roll with, it’s a persistent pattern that you struggle against. Just deciding that the thoughts and feelings being produced are inaccurate or unhelpful doesn’t make it go away. It’s not just extreme emotion, it’s emotion that’s being switched on in a way that isn’t tied into the continuity of your more volitional patterns of thought and feeling. It’s not just that the thoughts and behaviors playing out are unhealthy.

    To put it into metaphor, think of your life and your interactions with the world like a video game, with your brain being essentially your character controller, interpreting your actions and bringing them into the world. You can decide to do healthy or unhealthy things with your character, but those things are under your own volition. Mental illness, then, is like a poorly coded character controller throwing errors and causing unforeseen bugs. Like, for example, if I push the down button there’s a 30% chance that I randomly move to the left first, rather than moving in the appropriate direction.

    That 30% chance might send me careening into a pit, but chances are that once I’m used to having this bug, I’ll be aware enough of it to try to compensate. It might not always work, and I might drift a little left occasionally, but if I give myself a bit wider berth for any obstacles on my left, I’ll probably be okay. This is distinct from someone who uses their volition to throw themselves into a pit on purpose.

    Are both potentially bad for the character’s health? Yes. But only one is caused by a character controller error, and because my goal isn’t ‘throw myself into pit’, I’ll probably do a much better job avoiding pits than someone who’s jumping into them intentionally. These two problems are fundamentally different in that one is a product of a person’s volition, while the other is a problem with the means by which they interact with the rest of the world.

    That’s not to say that people with mental illness are going to accidentally assassinate someone because they pressed down and went a bit left, but it illustrates the fundamental difference in making a bad decision versus struggling with errors in your brain.

    That someone jumps into a pit on purpose does not imply that their character controller is bugged, especially if they smoothly beeline it while showing all signs of acting with intention.



  • Too much thinking.

    The right doesn’t care about accuracy, but they will pretend to to keep us busy. To counteract it, we can’t spend our time engaged in good faith arguments of carefully considered wording. We need to beat them on that flippant energy that shows we won’t take their bait and we know we’re right, so we don’t have to prove it.

    Weird is perfect for that. They don’t want to be weird.

    Now when they turn it around and try to call us weird? Then is the time to say ‘hey, that’s cool! I’m happy to be weird!’ and literally not worry about the contradiction at all.

    They picked an arena where they can’t beat us. Let’s meet them there.



  • That’s cool! I only really do thumb-ball mice, though, and I haven’t really seen alternatives to Logitech in the same form-factor. I imagine they might even have a patent on it.

    Buuuut I’m betting I can do stuff like repair the couple of MX Ergos I have lying around if I need to if I get motivated about it. Or like, maybe there’s a way I can have replacement parts fabricated or use the shell of a Logitech mouse as the basis for something similar.

    You hear that Logitech? Charge me a subscription fee and I will absolutely figure this out and distribute blueprints and repair guides to the whole ass internet. I appreciate your ergonomics, your unifying dongles, your precision mode, and all your hotkeys, but $90 is plenty for a mouse. Don’t get greedy or I will personally bite you in the ass.