I can’t believe Saudi Arabia are nationalising Pokemon Go when the UK won’t even nationalise regional water monopolies. Honestly these things were never great for privacy and given the state of things I’m not sure I’m more concerned about a Saudi entity tracking me than a US one.

Not good news for gay Pokemon fans in that country though.

Of course we’ve all got mental health problems. Our economy is entirely oriented around paying us to service bullshit and then going “what I don’t understand” when we have economic problems. Maybe if we get a few thousand more engineers to spend their entire careers pushing numbers with no intrinsic value around that’ll fix the problem.

Nobody needed a crystal ball to know Starmer would be this shit.

Definitely just poking a stick inside a printer

I guess fundamentally I see the mind as arising out of physicality and emergent constructs within that physical system rather than being fundamental. The reason the Gaia hypothesis appeals to me then is because it is just an extension of that emergence idea but across the whole world

Maybe like a limited Gaia hypothesis. The whole planet is a conscious thing, we are its braincells and its hands.

What dem supporters need to understand is that support for Trump for many is people sticking two fingers up at the neoliberal order. All this talk of “woke” or whatever would all evaporate if people thought they were getting a fair shake. Of course it’s a bloody stupid way of protesting this like so as it’s basically asking the foxes to fix the hen house.

The key point is the neoliberal order hasn’t been successful by capitalist standards. GDP growth in western countries from 1985-2015 was slower than the 1955-1984 period which preceded neoliberal policies taking hold.

So what you ended up with was a system which actually slowed growth, removed welfare in a lot of cases, made housing unaffordable and really only seems to have succeeded in funnelling money into the hands of the 0.1%.

People have been convinced all kinds of scapegoats and whatever are to blame, but it’s pretty clear that they see mainstream politicians, as most embodied by the Dems, as the face of their issues.

The lack of self-reflection on the part of mainstream Dems is a huge, serious issue which has basically given Trump and Musk a blank cheque to implement fascism or at least very authoritarian capitalism.

if there’s any medical conspiracy going on, it’s that the effort to destroy trust in the medical establishment is a ploy to promote eugenics and survival of the fittest by modern day Nazis.

Imagine doing this during a massive bird flu outbreak, in a country that was essentially founded on biological weapons based genocide.

Any time there’s a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham suggested at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend that Trump’s demand was a clever ploy to bolster declining popular support for the Ukrainian cause. “He can go to the American people and say, ‘Ukraine is not a burden, it is a benefit,’” he said.

I continue to be amazed by how frequently the entire spectrum from mainstream liberal regular conservative to Trumpist conservative fascist fall back on a line which is tantamount to “they’re not tricking you, they’re tricking someone else! Totally trustworthy!”

We’re just smelly sacks of biology like a rat or a lizard who happen to have developed higher reasoning capacity for whatever reason.

not only do these people want to do fascism, they want you to rawdog it

Edit: having read this back to myself, I realise that the alternative of non-rawdogged fascism would be much more unlikely

As an exercise, try to be conscious about your thought process, write stuff down. When your thought process leads to an action with a consequence or verifiable prediction, consider: did it pan out? Was that because of your thought process or a fluke? If something went wrong then what about your thought process didn’t help you?

This can help you to narrow down stuff like: did a possibility not arise to you, were you biased/overly dogmatic in some way, did you just not know some relevant information or a particular technique that could have helped you? Have you gotten out of practice with something? Was the situation even in your control?

And like wise if it’s good, what can you repeat? Did you apply some good critical thinking rule or something you learned? Are there situations where this wouldn’t have happened this way?

I find it’s impractical to do this for everything but worthwhile doing every so often and sometimes this can call out patterns in your cognitive processes.

Another one on mental clarity: do the apple test. Try to visualise an apple. At some point I struggled with this and got mediocre results but I was able to improve it by doing some visualisation based “meditation”/exercises and employing some techniques like verbally saying or thinking the word “apple” or a description of one and/or focusing on parts of it before attempting to call the whole apple into view. This had some carry over benefits like being able to visualise things in blender in my head better.

It’s still March… 2020

Too real. Not just holidays, weeks and months go by and it’s like “shit when did it get to 2025??”

I no longer feel a sense of unrealised potential for myself I guess. That’s it, I’ve got what I’ve got.

This from the same people who told you to inject disinfectant and are actively distancing themselves from international medical consensus.

Bill Burr’s project to turn every mansion into Luigi’s Mansion

Without knowing the finer details, my assumption would be that it’s some kind of risk/reward tradeoff.

Ok the nuclear risk is higher, but causing chaos in nuclear security could create opportunities like giving Trump or Musk more direct access to the nukes or removing people who might have prevented them from using them, thereby granting them more personal leverage. This would be in keeping with the Project 2025 aligned executive orders and such.

There might even be commercial opportunities for Musk: “oh well the state management of nuclear security was super inefficient, ApocalypseX will do it”

Remember disaster capitalism is a thing.