Ask Lemmy

the pendulum swings this way and that way

I can do things to nudge towards better. Those little wins and survival is what thrivinging is built on.

I cannot remember a night so dark as to have hindered the coming day. -John Brown

The global south is developing and rising, and imperialism is crumbling. The birth of a more equal world will not be clean or even, but it is happening, a world where all nations are soveriegn.

In France, high-schoolers are launching a revolution, new generation rocks!!

Organising stuff! I'm pulling together a couple friends to a bar and holding a privacy workshop For anyone who feels like practicing privacy is boring and wants do it over a drink.

In general the last few centuries of history have been two steps back, three forward. Slavery (as a legal concept, not wage slavery) gone, or at least mostly unacceptable in many places. Automation meaning everyone has to work less (but you need a job to survive, the dream of an ever lessening work week has been squashed).

Hell, there's actually a chance this upcoming generation might do more than just react violently against the absurdly Orwellian culture emerging (that's OK, guillotines are appropriate) and perhaps have some coherent future trajectory.

OK, this was fairly pessimistic, but overall I believe humanity can overcome the capitalistic bullshit. Climate change will likely require it, cause for optimism, yay!

We're getting to see how bad things get before people change their minds. And people are, it's slow and there are holdouts as well as people that just do not want good things for anyone besides themselves/their tribe.

I think the global right is pulling all the cards they have to try and pull the world into war and chaos and even as bad as it is it's not going their way. The more authoritarianism is pushed the more people wake up to their delusions.

In the states you have DSA members actually getting seats, you have people caring about flock and privacy that would have a few years ago brought the story that it's for their own protection. You have Generals and officials resigning in droves because they refuse to be apart of another forever war. You have a whole generation being aware the the US/Israel colonialism and even things like police violence.

If we as a species are going to build a world that's built for peaceful coexistence we have to wake up to what is not working. All of the bad things that are happening are cycles and patterns that have been going on for longer than any of us have been alive and I think there's a good chance we will see old cycles finally break in our life time

I know that there are good people everywhere who will keep trying. It will take some time, but the pendulum will swing back the other way. People will always keep trying.

Every day I learn a little more about the world and that generally fills me with optimism, depending on what I learn. If I learn about history, it helps make sense of the current situation. If I learn about psychology it helps me understand myself and others. If I learn about science it helps with my job and all of the above. If I spend a lot of time in news stories and politics it seems to have the opposite effect and I become pessimistic and negative. I'm limiting my exposure to those things. I stopped using mainstream social media 10+ years ago. I go out in nature, do exercise, sleep, eat vegetables and cook food with my daughter. We make fun of each other and share jokes. If I can do all of those things consistently, I can be optimistic. It's not always possible and that's also to be expected.

There's a quote from HBO's Chernobyl series:

To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for the truth we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants, it doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?

All these fucking guys who've made monsters of themselves to pretend they're our masters - they'll all fail. Their lies are a patchwork of tapestries meant to hide from reality. The bigger it gets, the more it wants to fall. Pull a thread, watch it unravel.

Someday I'll be dead, and therefore not suffering.

People were talking about games going off (saleable, owned) discs and saying it's coz discs degrade and I got to post this

Eh, that’s just the shitty organic medium they cheap out with. Metal dyes (M-Disc Blurays are 100GB good for 100 years, fine even for modern games) are great, shame they’re artificially expensive.

Newer glass or quartz optical discs with femtosecond lasers are good for 360TB for 100K years (claimed) in a similar footprint. See also M$ sitting on ‘Project Silica’ for most of a decade.

Shame corpos don’t want the CD burning revolution to happen again, just imagine what sneakernet would be like if you could fit all of Netflix in the palm of your hand burned on a USB peripheral.

I really like the utopian possibilities currently available, just needs a bit of capitalist kicking to flower.

Got invited to do Halloween with some folks, excited for that.

The idea that the people wrecking the world are playing 5d chess and only pretending to be delusional idiots becomes less believable by the day. Things may get worse, but their plans are going to blow up in their faces, because they don't contend with reality and that makes for bad plans.

An optimist and pessimist are in a horrible situation. The pessimist says, “this can’t possibly get any worse”. And the optimist replies, “oh yes it can!”

two things

1. one day he'll die
2. one day I'll die

that's about it.

Global warming cannot cause humanity to go extinct. Nuclear war cannot cause humanity to go extinct. Population decline cannot cause humanity to go extinct.

If you think any of these are possible, you do not know enough about global warming, nuclear war, or population decline.

In short, things may get very, very, very bad. But hope springs eternal. And there are very, very few scenarios that won't leave many millions of people alive to pick up the pieces.

I am mortal.

Lula!

Long term statistics show that humanity is and will keep progressing. Remember this thing called the black plague or the fall of the largest empire in history leading to the dark ages? Did humanity go back to being apes in caves? The planet might be going through some scary changes, but humanity will survive this rough patch too.

Anthony Scaramoochi (or however he spells his name... yes, that guy) said it best. To paraphrase:

"Young people. The boomer generation (my generation), and all the losers associated with it wasted all their power and political capital in ruinous ways, and only emboldened the next generations in their political convictions and you already see a lot of them pointing correctly at where the faults lie, and how the geritocracy serves nobody"

Of all people to give an interesting interview lately, I really did not expect it to be him. You can find it pretty easily on youtube. It was called "38 minutes with..." or something like that. Maybe it was 28 minutes.

In other words, below a certain age, there is overwhelming support in working together for a better future for everyone. The current political class will die out with no heritage beyond everyone knowing how badly they fucked up.

EDIT: Found the interview. Also, it's Scaramucci.

This is a bit trite, but there are a lot of delicious foods to eat, and so many cats to give scritches to. Concerts to hear. Songs to sing.

I was at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix and they had a violin made out of literal trash. It's a testament to people's resilience and yearning to create. There are so many wonderfully creative people out there, I'll never have the time to consume the every good bit, especially when I feel well enough to create stuff of my own. I love seeing the things people, especially people I care about, create.

The bullshit with Putin and Ukraine as well as Trump and Iran is heavily incentivizing the adoption of EVs.

Getting some historical perspective is amazing. We live in one of the best times on earth, possibly the best ever. Most people just don't realise it because we don't have the lifespan to experience the difference ourselves.

Trump will die soon.

Kids are nicer now.

I am more listened to at work (as a woman) than in the past.

We did clean up Tampa Bay, and at least the clean energy tech is growing so fast.

So, so so much less violent here than when I was a kid

I believe AI will finally drive a good percentage of people back to true art and human expression.

The kids are burning down Paris again. I think we will be good.

History gives me hope. It's funny/not-funny seeing people on Western social media freak out like this is the end of all things. Human history is cyclic, and America in particular is on a monster downswing. Consider Europe in 1940 vs. 1960 vs. 1990 vs. 2020. Pretty radical changes for the better! China's up to bat to run the 21st century. Let's see how that plays.

Global warming is the only new thing in the room. But humans are the AR-15s of the animal world. Not the best at anything, but multi-purpose and wildly adaptable for whatever use case is required. Humans now live in places where even insects can't hang! We'll be fine. Eventually.

Everything nobody talks about because it usually does it's job perfectly.

I do believe that most things will get better in the end. Maybe not everything, and maybe not as quickly as you like. Maybe some things get worse before they get better. But for every one thing that gets worse, two things do get better.

Consider where humanity was 100, 200, 300, 400 years ago. Every generation ends up being better off than the last.

People have been prophesying the end of the world for about as long as we have written records.

Yet the world never ends. It changes.

Often suddenly, violently, and without warning - but it does not end.

What we are experiencing is the beginnings of a violent change, one in which most of our familiar world can be ripped away from us at any time.

But it is not an end. It's evolutionary pressure. And if you look at speed of human ingenuity and advancement within the course of just a century, we're on course to keep up and survive this change.

Not all of us, of course, but as a species, absolutely - although we'll likely look very different as a species once the change we're going through is complete.

Now I'm not talking out my ass here. I'm an early climate refugee - wildfire took my family home five years ago, and I've seen the forests I've walked through as a child burnt to ash. The entire neighborhood was erased.

It's now regrowing. Not the same, but the lilies my mother planted still bloom in the empty lot where the house used to be. There are young oaks sprouting that are now 7' tall, and along with the lilies, my mother's rosebush survived. People have started to rebuild, and in another 5 years the neighborhood and surrounding forest will be thriving again.

I don't believe in endings anymore. I believe in change. And this gives me hope for the future because I know that no matter how bad things get, they will eventually change for the better.

Of course, this also means that no matter how good things get, they'll eventually change for the worse - so you may as well savor and appreciate the good things in your life while they're here.

Or as the Buddhists like to say:

"This too shall pass"

Or as I like to sing:

"Wabababa!"