I forget where I read that revolutions tend to occur in the spring/summer because that is when state policy reveals failures at the time of harvest, there’s not enough food, and people lash out at the their rulers.
I have been wondering a lot about my career path, lately.
Started as a biologist, then a lab techie, then a biostatistician, and eventually an IT person. I recently left (was pressured out, essentially) a soul sucking job at a mediocre healthcare IT shop and I have zero desire to go back to that field.
We have a plethora of high quality data available to make important decisions... But as we've seen with at least COVID, the bottleneck seems to be more cultural than technical 😒
Just thinking about how wrong the phrase is, "You have to earn respect".
No, you have to earn disrespect. As a human being, I'm naturally going to respect you if I don't know you. It's when you earn my disrespect, that I'll stop showing respect.
I give people respect freely, until they prove to me that they don't deserve it.
I miss when packages took like a week to arrive and there was no overnight postage nonsense (unless you paid a lot for it). Now it is industry standard and I need to be ready to get my package the next day, like...I need at least few buffer days to prepare emotionally.
Also the tracking system is not great and telling me it can come between 8-16 is NOT HELPFUL.
I an up at 8 only in case it arrives now.
Madness, I tell ya.
I really do have a soft spot for 80s heavy metal like Iron Maiden and Dio. I don’t listen to it very often, but occasionally the mood strikes.
There is something about it that feels grandiose, almost naive, and a bit playful compared to the dark assault that much of the genre seems to be these days (though tbh I don’t really have a wide knowledge of contemporary metal).
It’s also partly nostalgia and a connection to my teen years.
I love a lot of RPGs but I think honestly only one has made me actually want to visit the world it is set in: Assassins Creed Odyssey (and yes, it is a proper RPG, one of the reasons it is shunned in the r/AssassinsCreed subreddit).
Admittedly I have always been very fascinated by Classical and Ancient Greek history and the whole Mediterranean area pre-Rome, but also that game is still in 2024 gorgeous as heck.
So, I've been working on hatching a theoretical structure to address the quandary of MAGA for a long time. I think it is almost impossible to combat it unless one can identify grasp the causal factors of the eruption of a mass psychosis. This is going to be a really long thread and I'm developing it slowly. Please feel free to mute me if this irritates you - I'm thinking aloud here. And most of my ideas aren't original, I'm just sometimes gathering them together in novel ways. #musings
And with the rise of leaders like Trump or Johnson or Putin, that rationale of ideology really fails. These men have no ideology, unless one can conceive of greed as an ideology (which is a concept I'm prepared to entertain). I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler or Mao in terms of historic catastrophe, but in terms of the effects he has on his followers. I simply don't believe ideology accounts for this. #musings
Moreover, ideology - the compromise of morality in the service of a greater good - provided a coherent (if entirely unacceptable) excuse for obedience in many cases.
My sense is that something has changed in a fairly profound way. When it comes to Trump, while those outside the MAGA movement might perceive him as an obscene transgressor, those within it don't. For them, he isn't a leader with flaws, he is a leader beyond where flaws are measured. He is an authority beyond law. #musings
Sometimes it's hard to live out here, and winter is especially isolating. As we all retreat and focus on inner work and reprieve from the often constant movement of other seasons, we tend to reach out less, travel less. This is true for both us and our friends we see often, usually, and so since the Solstice it's been quiet here at the Ranch. We've really not gone anywhere, and no one has really come to visit.
However, I'm reading "The Independent Farmstead" by Shawn & Beth Dougherty, and feeling renewed and inspired. Sometimes this path feels too difficult, and I reminisce on the period of my life where I was ignorant of the depth and multitude of the issues that plague our species and where I just lived in the way that society dictated. In a way, ignorance really is bliss. In a way, it was just easier.
But I think back on the suffering I experienced then: the suffering I experienced at jobs, at the hands of others abused by our society, the suffering I experienced feeling like I was drifting along without a purpose, and the suffering that came from seeking purpose in careers that I could never attain because of my chronic inability to engage in personal politics. In a way it was easier to work many hours a week, eat out, go to parties, and move through life unthinkingly chasing the next thing that made me feel alive, connected, loved, despite that those experiences never lived up to my memories of them and despite that they were always so fleeting.
So it's not that we don't suffer now, of loneliness or of hardship or of our own interpersonal shortcomings. But we feel guided by purpose and by duty, and in so many ways that eliminates suffering. Though we don't always have other humans here to feel connected to, we do often, and in their absence we are connected to place, and to other living things that help sustain us and which we sustain in return.