Gentle nerd freak of the pacific northwest. All nation states are vermin.
Almost word for word what i was going to say.
I’m in a committed, 9year relationship, we’re in our 40s and married in all but name.
The state can fuck right off.
We know what we have and no piece of paper steeped in millenia of patriarchal property ownership could ever affect or authorize that.
Can’t wait!!
🤤🤤🤤 I just ate dinner and this is making me hungry again 😂
I’d love to go back, i really want to visit like a million historical sites and food places. I’ve heard such good things about Hunan food. I always make sure to say “要大辣” when i order chinese here in the US, hoping they will make it proper spicy.
好啊！Where in China are you from?
I studied for a semester in 云南. 好想吃米线啊！
I miss so much food from China. Stumbling home drunk and getting fried rice cooked over one of those intense burners that sound like a jet engine. All the 烧烤 was incredible. And in 云南 the 傣菜 was always so special. 🤤
Because the fediverse is small, niche communities tend to have little content and it’s quite likely that most popular content will end up in your feed. I found it was helpful to subscribe to communities after i saw a post i liked from that community.
Welcome, hope you like it!
My dad was a linguist, so he’d met chomsky at conferences when he was just a big name in linguistics, not politically. Despite being very left wing, my dad wouldn’t listen to anything chomsky later had to say on politics because dad hated chomsky. Arrogant pig-headed asshole, he’d say. And when my dad called someone an asshole he specifically meant a kind of false or unempathetic rudeness.
Before the epstein files came out i told my partner I bet chomsky is in there.
That said i want to believe specialists toiling in a field they love are less likely to fall prey to this, but academia politics are known to be brutal.
Yeah it depends on who your heroes are for sure, but unless we’re talking about like “my granma”, anyone who has significant accomplishments probably has enough social status within their group to count as powerful.
(Here. Are. Some. Sources). These are pop articles. Below are some quotes from papers. I go on about this topic a lot!😂
“Recent evidence has demonstrated that empathic responses are modulated by social power.” “high-power people show low empathic accuracy compared to low-power people” “numerous studies have shown that people with high power are less accurate in recognizing others’ emotional expressions”
“higher socioeconomic status is associated with reduced neural responses to the pain of others” “experiments using fMRI indicates that power promotes greed … displayed decreased response in the right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, indicating a weaker restrain of self-interest when processing receiving more than others” “Power decreases empathic concern” “powerholders may experience less distress and less compassion as well as exhibit greater autonomic emotion regulation when faced with the pain of others” “elevated power impedes accurate understanding of other people’s emotional expressions” “Elevated power is associated with heightened interest in rewards while low power is associated with increased attention to the interest of others”
“In face-to-face conversations, participants disclosed experiences that had caused them suffering. As predicted, participants with a higher sense of power experienced less distress and less compassion and exhibited greater autonomic emotion regulation when confronted with another participant’s suffering.”
Powerful people just can’t help but be vile.
As you gain social power, the empathy centers in your brain are suppressed. “Power corrupts” has a neurological basis.
Yeah for sure one child makes it a less clear example, but even post-one child, china shows the same trends as other rich nations.
As the average income of a country goes up, birthrate goes down. That’s just how humans are. We guess at reasons, but it’s just a universally observable fact.
All high income industrialized nations developed low birthrates. North america, europe, japan, korea and now china.
If rich nations allow room for anyone else to claw their way up out of the low end of the value chain, we’ll see the same thing happen there.
Action.
Get organised. Find a group to join, action to take, a specific cause you feel passionate about.
I won’t pretend it’s easy - social anxiety is real and really difficult - but we’re social mammals and we do better as part of a group. Helping others is always the best way to help yourself.
Cardamom rich coffee
Night blooming cereus
The smell of my best friend from back at uni - patchouli, henna and well-cared-for dreds.
Burning Xanthorrhea trunk - the australian grass tree that acts like a firelighter.
That whole bit is SO GOOD. Everything from bang the rocks together, worst dressed sentient being, best bang since the big one, culminating in Zaphod’s jist zis guy, you know? 😂
It’s right up there with the ‘space, it says, is big’ and might even be better than the bit about the marketing division of the sirius cybernetics corporation.
Nup! It’s the only thing that keeps me going. It helps me get out of bed and fills me with hope and purpose.
I do think it’s a bad idea, even as someone who saves sex for committed relationships.
But if it works for you, don’t let others talk you out of it.
Neurologically.
There are some great studies using brain scans that show when you give people extra privileges, even in limited contexts like games, the empathy centers of the brain are supressed and show weaker activity.
Higher status individuals regularly fail to read emotions as well as lower status people do. Brain scans also show that power makes your resource reward centers more active and makes you less able to regulate these kind of impulses.
Power makes humans cruel, selfish, greedy and impulsive. It’s how human brains work. Heirarchy and justice are mutually exclusive.