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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?

    Losing the Cold War. America wasn’t beaten militarily, but brought down via foreign propaganda. (It also hit the UK, with Brexit, and other countries with similar harmful things going on domestically to them.)

    Livejournal was one of the earliest “modern” social media sites (for those who didn’t experience it, it was like a longer-form tumblr–longer text posts, fewer images), and it was sold to a company in Russia in the early 00s. I remember scratching my head as a 20-something about why the servers kept going down, then I learned that intellectuals in Russia had taken it up as THEIR social media and due to politics “on the Russian” side it was getting DDoS’d.

    I was still too young to connect the dots then, or understand what all that really meant (hindsight is always much better, isn’t it?) but basically they perfected control via social media first on their own people, probably trawled through all the content of the original LiveJournal users posting in English, then perfected using what they learned there on later social media sites.

    And because Americans A) thought the Cold War was over, and B) have a bit of a head-scratcher conundrum when it comes to free speech because it’s valued so highly and nobody likes censorshiop, nobody did anything or even realized anything was happening until the harm was already done.

    Personally, again with hindsight, I think company-designed social media algorithms that just suggest content to you as “trending” or whatever should be illegal (and block buttons should be mandatory). Users should have to be forced to follow, one by one, the content they want to subscribe to.

    Having “trending” algorithms that have no transparency in what they show or boost allows malignant actors to game the algorithm.

    If you force people to follow others based on word of mouth or reblogs from their actual friends, and give people a way to solidly block someone that’s easy to find and instant to use, it will cut a lot of the bullshit down. People will be somewhat less inclined to fall down wells of stupidity. It won’t completely stop it, but people are lazy and if you don’t dangle shit in front of their nose many will go off and do something else instead of putting in the effort to find something horrible.




  • This is definitely one of those truths. In situations like this, it’s both right that someone should be their best happiest self…but it’s also true the other partner had their own expectations for a relationship, which might not be one where she’s partnered to someone taking their life in a wildly different direction than what was expected early in the relationship.

    It’s a case where neither party is necessarily wrong, but things can end up hurting on both sides. Kind of like if other things were thought to be communicated early on, and is changed…like someone saying they’re child free then trying to have a baby, or someone saying they intend to focus on career then doing something to wildly impact finances of the couple. Changing one’s mind isn’t wrong, nor is growing and learning about yourself, it’s natural, but it can cause an incompatibly to pop up in a relationship that hurts or ends it, esp if it’s not talked about, and esp if it’s on a topic that greatly changes the nature of a relationship from the original agreement or assumptions and beliefs.



  • 2.The Power of Generosity: Generosity stands out as a potent ingredient for happiness, especially in wealthier countries. Once basic economic needs are covered, the act of giving seems to play a more vital role in elevating life satisfaction.

    This surprised me, but then I thought back to the anthropology class I had that covered societies that had a “big man” structure.

    Basically, the social status of the ones on top depended on how able they were to give generously to people in their community and redistribute wealth. So high social status came from not having a lot but being able to GIVE a lot.

    My memory is foggy, but if I recall some Native American cultures from the pacific northwest operated this way or had elements of it, as well as some pacific islander communities.

    Edit:

    The Moka is a highly ritualized system of exchange in the Mount Hagen area, Papua New Guinea, that has become emblematic of the anthropological concepts of “gift economy” and of “Big man” political system. Moka are reciprocal gifts of pigs through which social status is achieved. Moka refers specifically to the increment in the size of the gift; giving more brings greater prestige to the giver.