southsamurai

No lie, I love yeast.

Sourdough, other baking, nutritional/flake yeast, vegemite and marmite, it’s amazing how one teeny tiny little thing can start reproducing and burping and feed us so well, while being incredibly yummy.

Then there’s every ethanol containing beverage, which isn’t exactly my favorite yeast product, but look at all it can do! And it can be used as fuel, so there’s that.

They’re everywhere, and that’s so damn cool. Plus, have you seen the sexy little buggers in a microscope? Just wiggling around all naked, getting it on with sugars and reproducing for our pleasure. I mean, who can blame humans for being aroused by yeast sex!

My wife can confirm this is a universal truth.

However, there is usually another clean spot ;)

Look people. This is life now. We could rise up and put all these motherfuckers out of our misery, but nobody is willing to handle business

Dude, bugger off with this shit

I never said that, and you know I never said it

Since that was what I said, just phrased differently, maybe you can see how it looks like you’re trolling.

Maybe also notice that you’re the only one that took it that way.

Are you fucking joking?

If that’s really where you thought I was going with that, you’re the racist.

If you’re trying to troll, good job because now I think you’re either a troll, a racist, or an idiot. I prefer to think you’re a troll.

It’s artificial boosting of the same bigotry that’s been ongoing for generations. The new part switching the target.

See, there’s been a very concerted effort to radicalize the right wing of the American populace by media oligarchs. It’s part of an overall strategy going back to at least the post-nixon era.

Want to crush black people? Find a way to villainize them indirectly. “Inner city” crime. Step up arrests for things that are disproportionately a part of black people’s lives. Spread drugs into the chaos brought about by destabilizing black communities to engender greater violence between gangs. And it worked. Look at how many black people are in jail compared to pretty much any other group.

Go back to Stonewall, when the biggest movements for gay rights got going hard, and remember that trans people were involved from the beginning, but didn’t have a convenient label, they didn’t have a way to be a distinct group. Gay rights efforts worked to some degree. Enough that the far right plans to use gay people as the enemy had to find another target the same way that they had to change targets from black people to Hispanic people in the form of “illegal aliens”.

When your plan rests on fomenting anger, hate, and fear to stir up the lowest common denominator of a populace you have to have a target, ideally more than one since there’s always going to be gaps where your desired audience will fall prey to the manipulation for one hate focus, but not another, like when you run into conservatives that aren’t actually racist, but hate anyone in the LGBTQ+ umbrella because of religion, or sheer stupidity.

So, when gays weren’t a useful target for hate any more because enough people knew gay people, and there were enough gay people of prominence to make it harder, why not switch to the next best thing? Trans people!

See, we had a major shift in awareness of trans issues back in the late nineties and early naughties. That’s was followed by a large shift in trans people now having a serious chance at transitioning as medicine advanced, funding shifted, and there was just enough support that more people could transition and not be alone.

This meant that the assholes pushing their agenda to gain and maintain both wealth and power had a gift given to them. A new label to attack, using the exact same rhetoric they’d been using against gay people. “It’s unnatural”, “but what about the children?”, along with the ability to use lingering misogyny via to attack trans women in specific since they are now women, but used to be men (in the rhetoric), so they must be groomers sneaking into bathrooms.

It’s the exact same bullshit over again.

People have forgotten that the same methodology has been in place every time people in power needed to scare the populace enough to achieve a goal. Remember reefer madness? Before my time, but the entire thing was built in order to continue the oppression of black people, to keep them firmly under the boot.

Go back further, and it was the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, whatever group was “other” at the time.

But the modern version is so directly a rehash of the anti gay rhetoric that’s not even fifty years in the past that I’m amazed it isn’t glaringly obvious even to the people that have jumped on the bandwagon of both.

I’ve said it before, but people are stupid. They’re easy to manipulate, easy to fool, and that’s the majority. Even the ones that aren’t easy to manipulate can still fall prey to it if they aren’t paying attention. People are also lazy, and have little long term thinking ability, or attention spans. That’s why we got zero lasting changes after George Floyd was murdered. Anyone that’s made it this far, think for a second. How long did it take you to remember that name and what it means? Now, ask yourself how many people didn’t remember at all.

That’s why trans hate is working. People suck. The vast majority are easy to control, and will believe anything fed to them with the right language behind it. It just so happens that while all of the distractions being used to build up the hate also created a smoke screen to hide gerrymandering, which ends up with more and more control over what language is being used everywhere.

So, here we are with a manufactured, strawman enemy being propped up as the target and then painted with the word “trans”. None of the bullshit used to build up the hate is true, it isn’t accurate, and most of the people behind the hate actually know it’s bullshit, but they aren’t allowed to hate the blacks and the gays out loud any more. They can’t just scream the n word or call people faggots at whim the way they used to.

So, now they’ve got trans people to hate. And they want that hate because it means they don’t have to look at themselves, their own lives and choices. They don’t have to stop and think that maybe everything they’ve built their identity around is empty, so they scream about “wokeness” and “transgenderism” as code words.

There’s no serious, legitimate arguments against trans people being allowed to have the full protection of the law, to have full medical access, to have whatever gender they want on their driver’s license. There’s just the bullshit excuses to have someone to hate. There’s not even a good argument about bathrooms, they’re all built on bullshit too, and that’s the one that’s the low hanging fruit because it seems reasonable to people that aren’t buying all the bullshit immediately, but aren’t quite bright enough to think it through all the way on their own. Which, again, that’s the majority, stupid people too drowned in lies and manipulation to bother thinking.

So, Don, if you’ve gotten this far, I know I went wide of what you asked, but it really is all related. It all comes down to the same thing in different faces over time.

For anyone else, I know this got a little ranty in parts. I know it is long enough to look a little crazed. IDGAF. This shit is patently obvious, it’s not even a secret. The people that have been running the right wing of things for my entire lifetime and before have outright and publicly talked about it. One part of it, the “southern strategy” they brag about. It’s infuriating, so I get ranty.

Did they make a choice though? As in a fully informed, conscious choice unaffected by internal and external pressures?

That’s the key to empathizing with addiction.

Most people don’t set out to be addicts. They don’t set out to OD as the goal of using. It’s fair to say that most addicts started out either partying, or self medicating.

The party addicts tend to not realize how damn fast and hard addiction can set in. They know it happens, but it isn’t real, it’s impersonal and distant, because they also know that people really can just use a few times and not do it again. But each time gets harder, and they start needing it to feel good at all. It isn’t done with intent, and they may not even be aware of what they’re actually taking. People are stupid. They’ll trust someone, and when they get handed a pill or a drink and the person they trust doesn’t explain, but they trust them.

And even when it’s someone arrogant that thinks they’re the exception, that’s still a very human thing.

For the ones chasing an escape from ugly reality, a way to feel good, no matter how temporary, sometimes the risk is irrelevant because to them, what they’re trying to escape is worse than any of the stories they’ve heard. Self medicating mental health issues, or physical health issues, or to numb the pain of a life situation they can’t escape otherwise, that’s as human as it gets.

Empathy. It’s also a human thing. We aren’t required to feel it for everyone everyone all the time. If you don’t feel it, you can’t make it magically happen. But we all want it to some degree or another. We all need some degree of human kindness to stay sane in a society that keeps staying ugly over millennia.

So, when we see someone that’s in a bad place, it’s part of that, that we at least try to find empathy for them, if only on a transactional level where we would wish someone make that effort for us.

It is, however, not equally easy for everyone. The human mind and brain is a diverse thing. Some people are born with brains that simply can’t empathize. Others can lose the ability. And there’s also people that have trouble doing it without some kind of “trigger” that gives them a connection to the other person in a way they can understand. Some of us over empathize.

But, at the core of it, the reason we are expected to try is that none of us are immune to the ugly parts of life. Every single one of us is one post surgical dose away from feeling withdrawals. Every single one of us is capable of feeling pain so deep we’ll do anything up escape it.

If you can’t empathize, that’s okay. Though going through the effort of rationalizing how others empathize would help you out a lot when dealing with others. If you make the effort to figure out how the same thing could happen to you, even if you don’t feel sorry for the person, you’ll have fulfilled your part of the social contract as regards the idea of “there but for the grace of the flying spaghetti monster go I”, or “judge not lest ye be judged”, or any other saying that boils down to recognizing that we’re all just flawed beings doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

I wish I could say I “got it” immediately and never got grumpy with people, but I’d be lying.

But I’ve noticed that what you said about trusting your goodness and letting it flow is fairly common. It’s pretty rare to run into someone that’s divergent that’s being mean or has ill intent by default. The more open folks are, the more direct, I find that they’re also more likely to be good as their intent. Which I think is pretty damn cool

Man, that’s super useful information, directly so, and it explains a lot of issues I’ve had communicating with the autism support group that uses the same space as my chronic pain support group.

Now, I’d never thought they didn’t have empathy, because plenty of them expressed it verbally, once something was verbally communicated to them. But it could be difficult to discuss things when emotions were high, and that’s pretty common when timing means they’re coming in as we’re going out, and we’ve got members visibly upset, but only to people that can read emotion visually.

Makes so much sense out of things.

Legit, even if this information only helps this one situation to bridge the gap between a single neurotypical/neurodivergent interaction case, that’s amazing.

Well, since I’m one is the people, and you can look up where a person has been banned, and any given reason given by the moderator, slander is bullshit. I don’t need to provide proof, it’s there, for anyone to see.

The context is that I expressed my personal difficulty in my belief in the necessity of police reform while knowing some police officers that are actively working for change. This was a comment on the weedtime C/. Weedtime had no rules against discussion of such things at the time.

Hamid responded with a single image, and threw in the ACAB thing. I responded with a relaxed and friendly comment about my personal difficulties, and Hamid responded with “bootlicker”.

I was then banned from weedtime.

I asked why via message, and got banned from other C/s on his instance where he and I had interacted previously. then I told him to fuck himself.

after that, rules got changed on weedtime.

This wasn’t some kind of rude joke, it wasn’t off topic, and there was no attempt to make me aware that there were unwritten rules.

Again, unless there’s some way an admin can remove the information, the bans and the reasons given are available publicly. When I looked last, it was something along the lines of cop lover or bootlicker given as the reason for the ban.

So there it is, the context.

Edit: and a partial screen shot of the actions taken. It was cop lover given as the reason. And then the bans from unrelated C/s. Which is plenty of evidence the guy isn’t a good mod by itself.

Yeah, but one of the admins there is the same way, and has directly used his admin position to ban people from the communities there based on unrelated matters on other instances. Hamid is worse than what this post is about.