Chit-ChatSunday Social - open chat!

submitted by NutterButterFlutterStill waving into the void[M] from self.LGBDropTheT

In-between moments of righteous activism, we all have lives we attend to. What did you do last week, or what are your plans this week? Watching any good movies or shows? Go on any dates? Struggling with, or achieved, any major life goals? Survive any alien invasions?

Do you want to promote a new sub, or discuss topics that otherwise get removed? Do you want to introduce yourself, but are feeling too shy to make your own post?

Feel free to share here!

NOTE: our Rules are relaxed, but not gone entirely. Be excellent to each other!

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[–][deleted] 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Found a YouTube channel, SaveAFox, where this woman has a menagerie of animals in some rescue operation up in Minnesota. So far, I've seen a bunch of really fluffy foxes with winter coats, mink, a squirrel, a coyote... and they're all super friendly and love pets. The coyote really surprised me. Foxes apparently can also climb trees, they like dog toys (I mean, they are canids after all,) jumping on trampolines, and chicken. I want one! So effing adorable.

[–]julesburm1891 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (8 children)

What are y’all reading?

[–]ArthnoldManacatsaman🇬🇧🌳🟦 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

My book club are reading Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi. Since International Women's Day was last week we decided to go for a book written by a woman. I haven't started reading it yet but I've heard good things about her being a good voice for Arab or Muslim women.

I'm currently reading The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. I think it's kind of a polarising book, with people on one hand arguing that

Well this should basically be called HoW To Be An AsShOle why would anyone read this omg psychos thats who

and fanboys on the other arguing that

This is the perfect Machiavellian manual for your malefic machinations. I've absorbed the knowledge herein and am ready to take over the world!

True to form, I come down somewhere in the middle. Yes, if you follow this book to the letter, you will make a lot of enemies and you won't be a nice person, but the book never promised that. In the introduction the author himself acknowledges that these are not things that nice people do. But we all know that glory, success and power don't always go to the nicest people, and even if you don't want to play the game yourself (and Greene tells us to beware of people who make too much of a show of not being interested in these games) you can at least learn some of the tactics that others might use against you.

[–]IridescentAnacondastrictly dickly 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

48 Laws is a great book. At the very least:

you can at least learn some of the tactics that others might use against you.

But more fundamentally, consider how the idea of "niceness" is often weaponized against the person trying to be nice. The best example for this sub is how our desire to protect vulnerable people is weaponized by TRAs ultimately to attack us. I no longer strive to be a nice person because of this.

Also, more basically, what is your goal in being "nice"? Social approbation? Brownie points to get into heaven? Consider that the material world is fundamentally based on predation (everything eats), so that survival is the first law. But also consider the sphere of your identity is larger than your own body and encompasses your family, close friends, tribe, etc., so that what constitutes altruistic behavior is really "selfish" (in a good sense) in that you are facilitating the functioning of the wider sphere of identity.

In short: I am unapologetically selfish, but my sphere of what I consider "self" can be quite large.

[–]julesburm1891 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Hmm. I’ve never read The 48 Laws of Power, but I know it’s controversial (and always stolen from libraries). Maybe I should give it a read!

[–]IridescentAnacondastrictly dickly 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (Volume 1). Also John Michael Greer's translation of the Picatrix which I admit is not everybody's cup of tea.

[–]julesburm1891 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Ohh, I’ve never heard of Spengler but he sounds interesting!

[–]IridescentAnacondastrictly dickly 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Spengler is a difficult read but really interesting. Picatrix requires some foundational knowledge that not everybody has or wants, but the perspective/worldview is also really interesting.

[–]CaptainMooseEx-Bathhouse Employee 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

La Peste par Albert Camus

I'm going through a phase of buying up some classic Francophone literature to read in this phase of the pandemic.

[–]julesburm1891 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Such a 2021 appropriate read lol

[–]reluctant_commenter 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (11 children)

What do you guys like to eat for dinner?

[–]Three_oneFourWanted for thought crimes in countless ideologies 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

I honestly don't know. I've been in college with a meal plan I didn't want for so long that I've forgotten how to cook and just eat whatever crap they have at the buffet.

I usually get either a sandwich or a slice of pizza and a bag of chickpea puffs because there's nothing that is both healthy and appetizing here. They do have salads, though. Because apparently the only way to eat healthy is with rabbit food.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (7 children)

They do have salads, though.

Ah yes, the food my food eats.

[–]Three_oneFourWanted for thought crimes in countless ideologies 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Yeah, I feel sorry for the vegans that have been forced to get meal plans who now don't have any cooked vegan dishes available to them.

I'd like to go vegan for reasons more akin thermodynamics than morality, but my college is making that very difficult right now since they won't let me eat anything other than fried chicken and cheeseburgers

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Yeah, the thermodynamic angle is important, but there's also the whole ecological angle that nobody is talking about--just exactly how we grow crops, especially how we make fertilizer, which wraps right back around to what you're referring to. Everything as usual, is more complicated then some activists would like to believe.

[–]Three_oneFourWanted for thought crimes in countless ideologies 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Well, we'd need a lot less fertilizer if we ate the crops rather than feeding thousands of calories to animals to get a few calories back out. Animals were amazing when they took useless stuff like grass and garbage and turned it into edible meat, but in the modern world, they're taking edible food and turning it into poop. We, as a culture, have moved beyond the point where cattle are a benefit to us.

Not to mention that GMO technology is advancing toward the point where we'd be able to make plants that can get their own stuff, like nitrogen, from the air instead of needing fertilizer. And if lab grown meat and dairy can become viable, then we'd have absolutely no legitimate reason to keep animals.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

GMO technology may be the way out of this. Just another Green Revolution to buy time. But to me, relying on future technologies to solve our issues contains some amount of hubris, insofar as we have the technological wherewithal to annihilate ourselves as a race as found in nuclear weapons.

[–]Three_oneFourWanted for thought crimes in countless ideologies 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

We are the only species in the world to have invented their own extinction event capable of being set off at the push of a few buttons, but GMOs aren't future technology, they're current technology that is being attacked for no good reason. GMOs can and have saved economies and plant species, yet people exist that refuse to eat them for similar reasons that people refuse to vaccinate: very poor ones.

We have a lot of technology that isn't even new that would allow us to do unimaginably amazing things, but we don't choose to spend the resources properly to do it. We could have had carbon neutral electricity, for example, a while ago if we spent the resources on development instead of subsidizing fossil fuels. Hell, we could have gone nuclear, the safest and most reliable form of electricity, if we didn't throw Chernobyl around as though it should represent every reactor out there. It didn't even represent reactors from the early 80s, it was cobbled together from ancient tech and trash

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

A lot of nuclear woes could probably be solved by not putting reactors in population centers. Assuming a country has geography that supports this. OFC there's the waste issue as well.

[–]Three_oneFourWanted for thought crimes in countless ideologies 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The waste is the biggest issue. Reactors are safer than ever and large countries could certainly put them in a place that, in the extraordinarily unlikely chance that something goes wrong, fewer people will be impacted directly. The waste, however, needs to be stored for centuries before it is safe to go around. Perhaps an island in a geographically stable place could be designated as the radiation zone and we could bury the waste deep underground there?

And of course, there's always the theoretical option of sending it into the sun eventually. Perhaps we could clean this island out and send the waste into the sun after using the place for temporary storage. A starship floating platform and automated system could be able to launch stuff into space and give it the right push that it'll crash somewhere we don't care about before returning to refill on nuclear waste.

[–]julesburm1891 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I made spaghetti carbonara tonight. Felt like it was a good treat after a day of yard work and hitting the gym pretty hard.

How about you?

[–]reluctant_commenter 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

That sounds really nice! I feel like I always appreciate food more after hard exercise :) I had grilled cheese and tomato soup. Wasn't in the mood to make anything more complicated.

[–]reluctant_commenter 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Sometime earlier this week, Saidit changed the way upvotes look when you press them, from black to gray. It's kind of driving me crazy, the first few days I had to squint and zoom in to check whether I had upvoted something. Anyone else bothered by this?

edit: typo

[–]wafflegaffWoman. SuperBi. 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Add your thoughts to my feedback thread from last week. :-) It was worse for about half a day—you could barely even tell if you'd clicked at all. So believe it or not, this is an improvement, although still worse than the previous buttons we were used to.

https://saidit.net/s/help/comments/7j7h/feedback_about_interface_change_voting_is_now/

[–]reluctant_commenter 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It was worse for about half a day—you could barely even tell if you'd clicked at all.

Yeah I noticed that!! And then they added the light-up on the light bulbs and color to the smiley faces later in the day/week.

Also, I'm close to 20 and I couldn't see a damn thing either, lol.

[–]wafflegaffWoman. SuperBi. 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah this isn't about eyesight, which is why I politely squashed that nonsense. :-)