Most people who aspire to being "rugged individuals" have been told in tons of ways that it is not cool to be vulnerable. Ever. In any way.
Unfortunately avoidance of vulnerability ALSO keeps tons of people in really stunted levels of emotional awareness.
Why? Because allowing a little bit of vulnerability is necessary for us to truly experience all kinds of good emotions: compassion, trust, love, generosity, etc.
This has been known in different ways and in probably almost all cultures for thousands of years.
AND ALSO throughout history: the -MOST unaware folks in those cultures (the people pushing for wars and domination and CREATING needless suffering) don't -ever- listen this.
People socialized to be compassionate just do not do as many shitty things. They don't knowingly oppress, or harm for power or profits. They just don't. This has been the real struggle for centuries.
honestly, I think there's a huge and under recognized difference between people reactively reeling from and then acting out fear/insecurity (and creating rationalizations from it)
and people having enough emotional sensitivity to accurately identify and use their emotions (capacities for compassion, ability to identify suffering, etc) sensibly.
There are a bunch of reasons why patriarchy sneers at people (especially men) developing emotional sensitivity.
@StillIRise1963 yeah, that's one I got wrong. I really thought Twitter would totally collapse within a half a year of when Elon began actively poisoning it.
It's kind of like Kissinger though- so unfair it is still living on.
if I were biden, I’d whip every single willing rep and senator into a full action plan to bring integrity to the supreme court, starting with the demand that judges whose households have documented partisan or ethics issues involving politicians must be recused from all decisions involving those leaders
What I find most disgusting is all the people who knew Diddy was abusing Cassie and others and kept their mouths shut because of money. I have no respect for that shit. It’s INDEFENSIBLE.
earlier boosted news of a R congress guy with 7 kids, filing for divorce after cheating on his wife with another R congress gal
now we have new details about the moms for liberty exec…who obviously needs -decades- of therapy in addition to being held accountable for harms done to LGBTQ community….the source is the local NPR station. Details are …sad (and gross) due to the obvious level of self hatred seen soooo often in authoritarians.
authoritarians are cowards. every damned last one of them.
When you have folks who are so emotionally out of touch with themselves they can't handle their own desires due to fear of being rejected…you end up with self loathing people who don't have any tools for dealing with real emotions..
They hate themselves but they can't face it, so they (say it with me) PROJECT their self loathing outwards.
if they just harmed themselves, it would only be sad. But they HARM OTHERS
I'm going to ramble a bit, but it will hopefully come around to something. When I was growing up, I read a lot of older historical book series, a big one would be the Little House On The Prairie series. While I really enjoyed it, there are some very obviously negative portrayals of Native Americans and African Americans. I remember being angry about it as a kid, and my Dad telling me, that part of learning about history is that we have to acknowledge the people we were, and still are. But because Little House on the Prairie is only semi-autobiographical, I still have mixed feelings about this. I do think they are well written books by a female author, an interesting perspective on early American life, and as an adult I can see and acknowledge the issues with the text. If we try to get rid of every author with racist ideas there wouldn't be much left to read from the 20th Century, and it also feels like being dishonest about who we are. So, I'm very mixed, how do you all feel about it? Do you think children can handle books with racial issues like this if it's explained to them? What is our responsibility here?
@RickiTarr Kids (like the young of many species) are designed to be -mostly- sponges, they learn from what they are exposed to. If animals learn the wrong stuff, they don't survive.
The saying "garbage in, garbage out" while overly simplified, applies.
Far too many of us are already not spending enough time unlearning the garbage we were fed about racism, sexism, assumptions about how to live with others, peace, economics, how to treat the environment, etc. around us.
might be worth it to reevaluate who you follow for "good analysis" if your list of people has included folks who have repeatedly told you the justice system is working just fine
Same goes for those defending the FBI, (and for that matter, the the entire "intelligence" community)... who were apparently unable to see any criminality or any security threat in Trump in 2015- when millions of normal people did see it.
Seriously- look behind the curtain at some of these larger accounts.
@Eka_FOOF_A I was referring to decades of pretty blatantly criminal conduct in several areas (including financial crimes as well as physical and sexual assaults) -before- he announced his presidential run in 2015.
Hate to point this out, but when you post things like this you make so much extra work for the punditutes STILL swearing justice is right around the corner...
Groups who already have consolidated power...like their reach and power. So large corporately owned groups like the NYT WaPo, MSNBC or any number of other groups are simply NOT going to mention this often enough. Universities "leaders" like their statuses as well, so they aren't gonna be eager to deconstruct their own authoritarian assumptions.
Same with demographics with certain privileges due to social hierarchies created by colonizing cultures.
Who do people think of when they think about people who study power? (interested in names, not whether you agree with them)
I learned informally about power via those "top of the food chain" posters from late grade school or middle school, you know the ones with a man at the top of a pyramid?
In college, Foucault was the only person I recall being specifically -called- a "power theorist"
@Eka_FOOF_A morning! thanks, that's where I think most people learn, from general social interactions...but probably not from directly being around reigning monarchs!!!
It's been so increasingly interesting to me how power dynamics do permeate culture, as you say, they are everywhere and yet we really don't have formal science that studies them on their own…
In contrast, language is everywhere, air is everywhere, economic systems are everywhere, and so on, they all have robust sciences that study them.
@Eka_FOOF_A yeah I suppose I overstated the issue in that comment. I was more trying to say that for the amount of influence it has on the quality of life, the amount of study isn't terribly robust.
And the -general- popular understanding of power isn't very sophisticated either. Some people -even some activists- will still say straight faced: Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, that's all you really need to know about power"
"The state House majority leader, Maureen Terry, said in a statement on Friday that the Democratic-controlled Legislature would “be compelled to act in order to restore fairness,” should Nebraska’s Republican governor sign legislation that made the state a winner-take-all election in 2024.”
Double oops for me since I actually had been boosting the effort, and urging people to bug their state legislators if their state hasn't signed on to the effort.
I'm glad Maine is ready to change up their counts if necessary, and I'm sure Nebraska won't pass the Interstate Compact right now, but people in Nebraska (and other states) can still read about the efforts in their states and bug their legislators!