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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Okay, here’s the thing about death. Everything about death is expressed in the negative.

    There’s no boredom
    There’s no excitement
    There’s no joy
    There’s no pain
    There’s no frustration
    There’s no elation
    There’s no disappointment
    There’s no surprise
    There’s no bewilderment
    There’s no love
    There’s no conflict
    There’s no violence
    There’s no resolution
    There’s no reconciliation
    There’s no forgiveness
    There’s no vengeance\

    There’s no you. Your story ends.

    As it is right now the world sucks. There’s a lot of misery and a lot of people are choosing to check out (Around 40K per year in the US succeed. We guess about 120K more try and end up in the ER.)

    If you cash in, everyone you know is going to be shaken. They’ll all have to deal with the sneaking suspicion they are personally at fault for you choosing to quit. A suicide note won’t help. It’s not a rational belief. Even little kids will wonder if they did something (or failed to do something) to change your fate.

    Anyone who depends on you, even if just for emotional support will go into crisis. Unless you’re a hermit in the Yukon, this is more people than you think.

    Family may try to deny it. They will make up stories about how you were coerced or secretly murdered or drugged to diminished capacity. If they cannot deny it, they’ll be ashamed and try to cover up your suicide, suggesting maybe you perished by accident.

    Police will resent the job of telling professionals who engage you (doctors, therapists, teachers, etc.)

    Alt-righters will revel in your expiration.

    Elected officials will feign concern. The ones attached to your district will wish you moved first. White Christian Nationalist officials and Freedom Caucas officials will presume you’re one of the degenerates who are on their target list, and your action affirms you knew they were right.

    Most Christians will assert you are damned to Hell.

    Mostly it’s a shit show, and a bunch of statistical counters will increment by one.

    Consider crisis counseling, maybe. If you’re in a developed country, your county probably has a hotline or chat.


  • Heh. During the Trump administration when all the Republican elected officials we’re shouting Free Speech In Social Media because Trump was getting factchecked on Twitter, we fantasized about a state-serves social media platform that would be as free-speechy as the state legally allowed.

    Not that it would be useful except to point at it and say if you don’t moderate your platform, it’ll turn into this!

    I expected some poor bureaucrat would have to clear all the CSAM but the furry-futa porn would remain, as would all the advertisements for penis pills and Nigerian princes. The hate speech would stay up but get tracked until someone got radicalized by it.






  • To answer your question, for the non-tech-savvy having to pick a server is, yes, too much of a leap. We are conditioned in the industrialized capitalist world against making decisions we don’t understand.

    If we want to market it, we could make a wizard that randomly designates a server from a set of cooperating servers. Include also reminders that a user can join multiple servers and each one has separate rules (say, regarding posting NSFW material even to appropriate communities.)

    I just talked to a Redditor who was entirely unfamiliar with the recent changes at Reddit.






  • I think the abortion and trans kids situations are putting into sharp relief the danger of large third parties knowing too much about us. Facebook is absolutely scanning its servers for signs of unwanted pregnancies and relaying that information to red state law enforcement. Other platforms may be doing the same thing.

    Women in the US are advised not to use period-tracker apps, given they do often sell the data they glean, and don’t discriminate against far-right interests. And anti-abortion organizations are shopping.



  • So this is related to a previous law (the CDA? Not sure) that requires special accommodations for users under 13 years of age in order to separate kids and porn (also kids and predators). For most social media platforms the response was to limit the age in the TOS to 13 years.

    Did you click a TOS confirmation when you joined facebook? Congrats, you asserted you’re at least 13 years old. Were you underage at the time? Congrats! You committed a felony violation of the CFAA (though this was fixed somewhere in the mid 2010s). It was never enforced, but the assumption was if you’re tweeting you’re old enough to read swearing.

    In time we established that kids who want to see porn will gladly pretend to be an old person to do it. If someone admits they’re underage, and you’re sexually explicit at them, then yes Chris Hanson wants you to have a seat.

    (Our rules regarding sex and underage people vary from county to county, and while a teen boy and a teen girl of like ages can get it on without violating the law in every US county, this is not always the case when it comes to two boys or two girls or enbies of any stripe, and very few counties have protections for teens doing anything else, like sexting their sweetheart. So be safe!)

    That said, currently all a porn site has to do is put an age-gate where you click to assure you’re over 18 and can witness the content of M-rated video games. If Louisana is going to require more (such as mandating a license check) they’ll have to specify, and in being specific the law will then interact with commonplace rights to privacy, which includes engaging with the internet while staying anonymous.

    So far we don’t have a way to prove one’s age without also compromising their specific identity, a consequence which has a chilling effect that most would-be moral guardians depend on. Since the porn industry depends on people obtaining porn anonymously, we can expect there will be some very serious first-amendment and fifth-amendment challenges to this law.



  • So a couple of notes from the clinical end regarding split-personality / MPD, etc.

    Firstly, the current (DSM V) diagnosis is Disassociative Identity Disorder based on the controversial notion that all the individuals within a single mind are part of a whole. As with prior interpretations, this remains controversial but is the bleeding edge of psychological theory so far.

    Secondly, modern medical-model psychology depends on the standard of dysfunction to decide if a mental illness necessitates treatment. I think (not sure) its related to a study of patients who hear voices compared to patients who hear God (whether it’s actually God is irrelevant.) The latter group was happy to have that voice, and found it comforting while most of the former group were happy for medications that quieted or silenced the voices.

    That said, the psychiatric sector in the US (and I think the developed world) is required by law to get a patient’s consent for treatment or assess they are a danger to themselves or others by a psychiatrist (in the case of involuntary committal) Yes, this is a power that is sometimes abused, say when billionaires want their gay son to be less gay.

    Kids in the US have fewer rights and protections, largely because a parental signature can bypass direct consent, which is a problem when parents are not fully interested in the child’s autonomy and well-being, or is just credulous of medical professionals.

    But it means for the rest of us grownups, if you like the demons that possess your mind (or at least have come to terms with them), you don’t have to accept treatment to get them exorcised. Also, there are plenty of treatment-resistant diagnoses (👋major depression over here) that cannot be cured by normal psycho therapy, and the best we can hope for is management, so coming to terms with our personal demons.