MonkeMischief

I appreciate your gratitude and I really do hope it does some good for others... Especially because I really hate needles but I have it done anyway for this reason. Lol 😬

Yeah! I'm glad! :D

If the world's gotta be dark, I'd much rather it be "nobledark" than "grimdark"!

We are the stories we read and tell. Don't lose heart. :)

No hard feelings. :) I understand it's an emotionally charged topic.

Believing in afterlife punishment or reward causes people to ignore the reality of life.

That's a fair perspective, but I think like many things it can shift wildly based on the individual's existing tendencies.

For example, I believe in an afterlife and the persistence of the human soul, but that spurs me to do the very best I can in this life and be accountable for it, rather than waste it.

While, as you said, others inclined to apathy might use that perspective as an excuse to loaf or not hold bad people accountable.

Could not the same be said of not believing in an afterlife? This belief could cause one to value every waking second of consciousness they have... ...or they could use it to justify inaction, because "In the long run, what matters anyway?"

Just a thought I had is all.

In either case, perhaps apathy and indifference are our biggest foes.

But hey I appreciate your reply and thanks for not taking my response the wrong way either. I hope you're doing well today. :)

Switching to Linux without prior experience will challenge even the most tech-savvy, but it's an investment worth making many times over.

I would normally agree with this but for reals, I've switched over "I just need a computer and don't care what's on it if it does what I need" types to Linux Mint, usually because they keep a perfectly good old laptop around that is getting Windows-crusted and nagged to updating to an even slower bloatier version...

...and I get very few help requests, and I hear "I'm getting used to it and I like it!" Especially now with how their Steam games will just work 98% of the time. I also hear that it's faster and more responsive.

It's truly awesome, and I think a lot of the fears come from past horror stories and turbo-nerd elitism haha.

There's still holdout issues, like VR or Adobe stuff, yeah, but it's going in such a lovely trajectory. :D

I teach martial arts and often get asked (mainly by children haha) if I've won any fights, or been in any fights, etc. (No to either lol)

I always emphasize that martial arts is awesome, potentially great for protecting yourself, but isn't the same as "fighting people", and to get "good at fighting", real fighting, in civilized society, requires an exposure to giving and receiving violence that is really unhealthy on your soul, and you likely want no part in it.

I was gonna say, my heart really hurts for a lot of Iranians. Their youth especially are living such a tough cyberpunk-esque underground reality just to communicate freely and spread knowledge and survive.

It would be a net-positive to give them a means of escape to where they'd be appreciated for their spirit, I think.

Thanks for saying this.

I think these posts have a way of propagating doomer-think in a way that almost creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all collectively assume good will never win so we don't do anything, so good doesn't win, but then we collectively at least feel smug and perceptive.

For all of us, but I think especially for younger generations, it's hard to see any "wins" from the side of good, so it's tempting and almost comfortable to just make sardonic memes and embrace depressive nihilism. We've been conditioned to helplessness.

We laud cynical storytelling about selfish horrible people because it's "realistic". We meme about mass-extinction. We see boring-cyberpunk dystopias as our inevitable near future. We doomscroll about each and every terrible rotten thing that happens on every square inch of the planet that we can't do anything about and believe it's our fault.

But we gotta combat this with hope if there's any possibility for a brighter future.

I'm just gonna leave this here. It's profound and I think of it every day to keep going:

FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.

SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?

SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

--Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers (film version)

I don't get why they're still going at it over this. This lefty infighting is exactly why fascists that hate each other somehow manage to gain ground.

There's nothing wrong with using what little power one had in voting blue. It doesn't mean they're "pro-genocide". We're elbow-deep in a shitty system where we had two awful friggin choices, and the system is designed so that objection is simply removing your voice entirely.

I can understand that rationale on a moral level, to want to abstain from this nonsense entirely. I get it. But also there's no way we could've convinced the majority of a brainwashed country to say "none of these." (That's not even an option on many ballots btw). It'd be awesome! But not realistic.

But for the people actively bashing those who voted blue in last-ditch desperation, seriously can you not understand it? Believe me, we know the Dems bring nothing to the table besides "Not being those guys." I doubt there were so many "Kamala fans" compared to how many were "Not this Cheeto-Toddler shit again" fans.

It's not about "enabling genocide" or not, to those folks. We figured that a blue win would mean a government that could still be swayed by the people to act against violence, even if the chance was slim!

This compared to a tyrannical regime that will simply iron-fist any dissent to their single-minded aims, and actively make the world worse every day.

We had a razor-thin chance to give ourselves just a little more time to change things.

But here we are:

• It was a struggle to motivate people to vote at all.
• Apathetic squabbling over moral nuance didn't stand a chance against zealoutous fanaticism.
• What now? Can we finally demolish the Democratic party for failing us while replacing it with those who would speak for us?

It's time we learn to get along and focus on what is and claw for every inch of ground if we're going to fix anything. Because they aren't going to give us any breathing room while we keep dunking on each other for not being "pure enough for the cause."

such that the worst atrocities are "everyone's fault".

Ah yes what's that catchy quote about their modus operandi...

"Privatize the gains, socialize the losses"?

Oh you're religious. Nevermind.

Man, you were on a good logical counterpoint streak until you seemed to feel the burning desire to jab an ad-hominem in there.

Otherwise all good points.

Please remember the human being behind the post. <3

Bags of dog shit would be landing in the rigs left and right too.

Oh man it'd be so fun giving the local kids hands-on learning in constructing and operating trebuchets and catapults. :D

...By a country that largely claims to follow a belief system wherein it is explicitly and plainly laid out: "Don't swear oaths (Matthew 5:34). Don't make idols / worship images or objects." (The second commandment)

Anerican patriotism is a cult lifestyle brand.