FriendOfDeSoto

As a general vibe in life, I try not to punch down. Antivax kids through no fault of their own are at a disadvantage in life (and make life for immunocompromised folks harder). Wondering if they'd be okay with a cootie shot as a question seems snarky and punching down to me.

You could not answer this question categorically anyway. It would depend on the age, how much autonomy they already have over their body, and to how much RFK junioring they've been subjected. So the answer is care and individual attention for each kid, not a generalization.

I don't know where you get the idea I suggested we hunt them down from. But I think you've correctly picked up on my critical opinion on this question.

Were you dancing at the time?

I imagine it's not as easy in terms of producing the template video to match your body type (and maybe agility) and then to set up the projection just at the right distance. Conventional wisdom might also say that you learn dance moves better by copying others and that's why you get floor to ceiling mirrors in dance studios.

Bluesky is merely a stepping stone between Xwitter and Mastodon. Facebook can just die with them boomers.

Any other answer than professional therapy runs the risk of making it worse. But I know that it can be a luxury.

Out of sight hopefully leads to out of mind eventually. Actively avoiding these a-holes is one thing, having a good emergency plan when it can't be avoided is another. I don't know your life so you have to figure this one out yourself. In my experience, people that have a certain power over you in your mind immediately lose a lot of it if you imagine them naked, tickling the tip of their nose with a feather.

Are you reacting rationally when you're confronted with them? If you can control yourself enough to imagine the nose tickling, start there and see how it goes. If you can't get there and therapy is out of the question look for a fresh start somewhere else. Different part of the city, different city, different time zone. We are conditioned to think we mustn't run from our problems, which isn't bad advice but isn't universally true IMO. There are cases where you're allowed to just move away in the night, secretly flipping the old life off in the process. If after careful consideration going through all the pros and cons you arrive at this conclusion, don't deny yourself this option for dogmatic reasons.

A therapist, after disagreeing with me, would probably add that you should make sure you don't repeat past mistakes by creating new dependent relationships that could lead to new abuse. So keep that thought in the back of your head.

How does confidence factor into this? I've been confident in stuff before and it turned out that confidence was misplaced. Pride cometh before the fall shit. Confidence alone risks cockiness. Cockiness may lead to somebody testing your Golden Shield. Didn't work. You now don't have a country any more.

If the Golden Shield really worked it's a question of capacity. If you had enough juice in it to repel all nuclear weapons you could throw at this country in a worst-case scenario, you'd have a powerful defense against the most powerful weapon on Earth that's ready to deploy this minute. It may not save you from conventional attacks. It may not shield you from chemical or biological weapons so gruesome they aren't currently shelf-ready. But development of those would suddenly become a viable prospect. I fear it just turns the spiral of development of more destructive weaponry one more rotation. Extrapolating from the last 6000 years of history, we've gone from sticks and stones to vaporizing people into thin mist by harnessing the power of the atom. We're already in the narrow bit of the spiral. Paradoxically, developing a Golden Shield against nuclear attacks may lead to wiping our species out for good.

Why did she have to go and make things so ... complicated?

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

Thank you for your eloquence.

Glad to hear it! I thought I heard a sigh of relief so massive it circled the world twice.

My LLM says you're an enlightened one! May the builders of the universe bless your path.

This sounds to me (fixed typo) like the same percentage of people are susceptible to cult crap. It's just the availability of gurus is broader because you can have your own personal bs whisperer in your pocket. Kind of like how social media helped isolated village idiots to network and exchange views on DC pizza places. We wouldn't see them as a problem if the ability to scale hadn't become suddenly available.

Ironically, I think ChatGPT can help reverse some some of these troubled souls' convictions. It just needs to gently and repeatedly tell them they're not Jesus or a disciple of the builders of the universe.

My LLM always says I'm beautiful and always right. So no downvotes on this comment.

Ich sach ma so es wär mir lieber er wär der Chef von den Verein und nicht mehr dran an die Atombombenknöppe.