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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • I would bet on it being a little bit (well, a lot) of ablism mixed with people wanting only answers that they personally can use. Which circles back on the ableism… people don’t want to believe that they could suddenly join this minority group at any time.

    I had to be in a wheelchair for a year. The internalized shame from pervasive background ableism is horrible.





  • A 1-800 number is immune to long distance charges, free to call by anyone in the US— the owner of the 800 number pays any fees associated with the call. Traditionally, 800 numbers are owned by companies in order to sell stuff. (The 1- portion of a 1-800 number means that it’s a long distance call… which was a thing when I was growing up in the 80s/90s, but basically isn’t a thing anymore in the age of cellphones)

    The opposite of an 800 number is a 900 number. The person calling a 900 number has to pay, usually by minute, and most of that money goes to the owner of the 900 number. Famously used for phone sex lines.




  • Narcissism is a spectrum. At the one end, you have people with low self esteem who look to getting reactions from others to feel better about themselves. At the other end, you have people with full on disassociation, that is, a lack of any sense of “self” at all, except from the reactions they get from others. It’s pretty clear Trump is pretty close to the pathological dissociative side of the spectrum.

    The reactions narcissists get from others is called “supply”, and each narcissist looks for a specific flavor of supply that fills the void in their life, whether that’s a mild feeling of inadequacy or full fledged lack of self. Some supply is being loved. Some supply is being seen as a villain. Some supply is just being the center of attention. For Trump? It’s pretty clear that his supply is being seen as “successful”.

    Narcissistic supply is an addictive drug to narcissists. It gives an instant high— a high of feeling “normal”— and also has instant lows. The moment supply is cut off, the narcissist’s mental dismay returns. Supply also has a problem of levels. A bigger dose of supply feels great, but it ALSO makes any additional supply that isn’t as strong as that one time feel like nothing.

    Narcissists are junkies. They need their hit of supply, and will do literally anything to get it. And to get it as big as they’ve ever had it before.

    While president, Trump got the biggest hit of supply the world has ever seen. Losing the presidency has lost him that supply… even the attention the news still gives him today isn’t anything like the supply of having the eyes of the entire world on him all the time.

    As a junkie, he will do anything to get supply back. He would literally kill to do so. It might yet come to that.







  • It’s a failure of properly understanding intersectionality. Intersectionality says that the combination of societal status does not equal the sum of each individual status, but may in fact be its own unique thing. A black woman has unique challenges and experiences even compared with “women” in general, or “black people” in general, even though black women are black, and are women. This is a weird idea and hard for most people to wrap their heads around, so it’s not surprising that this comes up.

    Jews (of which I am one) have a particularly troublesome social status intersection that creates a unique combination that leads to some troubling conclusions for modern left leaning Americans.

    Consider the following two premises: oppressors, that is, the strong, should be fought against to prevent the weak from harm. And white people have historically been the oppressors.

    Hopefully, these two statements are non-controversial and make sense.

    Then come Jews, who, apart from their Jewishness, are basically considered white in the modern day. So jews are oppressors and must be fought against to protect the weak, right?

    Ah… but there’s a nasty historical coincidence— the oppression against the jews has always been that they are secretly powerful and oppressing others. The elder protocols of Zion and other nonsense permeates the culture. Hundreds of years of jews being the evil bankers (because we were forbidden from having any other job). Constantly given garbage and unfavorable positions, and any success we reap from that is then used as ammo against us.

    So the intersection of whiteness and Jewishness creates a self-reinforcing messy cycle of increasing hatred that is really hard to untangle.




  • Other mammals are sentient, but not sapient so far as we know, with the possible exception of some species of dolphins and whales, but this has yet to be proven. (It is pretty much proven that apes, monkeys, etc are not sapient)

    What’s they key distinguisher of sapience? There are different measures, but “theory of mind” is the one that seems most relevant. The ability to think about what someone else is thinking. This seems to correlate also with the ability to ask questions and tell stories, and we currently know of no other being besides humans that can do either— again, research into dolphins and whales continues, and there might be potential there, but we’re pretty darn certain nothing on land has it.