Belligerent Optimist

All the coolest people were in Cairo

Zapp brannigan standing in front of an Earthican flag - Futurama

Picards standing by Kirk’s grave in Star Trek generations.

I fully support a Kirk Remembrance Day.

Wait I’m just being told… I’m sorry what’s that?

Who?

I would, however, add a note of hope. We're all familiar with the butterfly effect. How small, seemingly insignificant things can ripple outwards to create large-scale change. Well, that applies to everything we do. It might help to keep in mind. Every little thing matters.

A facebook post with the following text: "Looking at the world and understanding people and processes, what poses a threat and what doesn't, the success or failure of movements, the expansion and collapse of ideas and organisations, how massive things can be disrupted by small things and how small things can become massive things as well as how people can be at once subject to enormous forces and a force unto themselves...all of that...requires - more than a passing knowledge of politics, economics and philosophy - a knowledge of physics and of cosmological processes. Society is a universe with as many dimensions as there are conceptual paradigms, all folded into one another. A mass of multidimensional interconnected universes. So when someone says a leader will never amass power, or a person can never make a difference. Just imagine how a cloud of gas turns into stars and planets, orbiting each other, feeding off of each other, ripping each other apart and reforming ad infinitum. Instead of thinking about how many people are on side with Donald Trump right now. Think about Gravity."

I'm not over the moon that I turned out right about all this 8 months before the orange dickhead won his first election. But I stand by the analogy.

Hope is punk now.

And being the eternal belligerent optimist I am, I guess that makes me cool.

It took a while, but you were right all along Mum.

Age turns music from a parade of dreams to a procession of memories.

The 'Do Nothing' Democracy (and what to do about it) Democracy has stalled. It lacks vision. It's consumed by feckless conflict. And it's starting to believe the bullshit authoritarians say about it. But we can fix it. We have the technology.

This (what the emperor said), but unironically.

I’m sick of folks buying into the images authoritarians have painted on the inside of our eyelids. Democracy is the engine of human freedom and one of the best damn ideas we’ve ever come up with. It just needs fixing.

Exactly. It would be good. IDGAF about celebrities. And I don’t buy that it’s supposed to be feel good either. If I wanted feel good I’d start a youtube called “Something You Love” that just spent an hour with someone as they show&tell their passion. Could be a hobby, idea, place or even person.

So here’s my pitch. A late night show, with all the trimmings, but they just pull randoms off the street and introduce/treat them like they’re ‘important’ celebrities.

We got a great show for you tonight. Josh is here! He waited tables for 3 years and now he’s starting an animal shelter!

I’m convinced that history will judge Millennials even more harshly than their boomer parents. We grew up so consumed with expectation and self righteousness and believing we deserved what our parents had, that we gave up the last chance to properly change things before it all turned to shit.

The Great War for Peace continues.

Just read that @nature.com is adopting transparent peer review across the board.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

You folks should really look at using Stone - the free tool built explicitly for that purpose. Produces embedable records of review.

www.writeinstone.com

Captain Jean Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise smiling in front of a “Captain Picard Day” banner made by children about the ship.

Happy Captain Picard Day!

Mass protests > Military parades

Ok cool. Now take a page from the Arab Spring and do the same thing every week.

Every. Week.

“…from a kingdom of gold, to one of rust and iron…”

- Cassius Dio

League of Nations ❌
United Nations ❌
________________ ❔
United Federation of Planets ✅

After gen Alpha and Beta get the ball rolling, gen Stable Release will bring it home and save us all.

Functional brain network correlates of cardiorespiratory fitness and moderation by depression symptoms Cardiorespiratory fitness may protect against or alleviate depression through neuroplastic mechanisms within disrupted brain networks underlying cognitive and affective symptoms. There is a scarcity o...

Good news everyone!

Depressed about the erosion of civil rights, the collapse of democratic institutions, the rise of authoritarianism and the fecklessness of liberal society in the face of unspeakable human suffering?

Apparently the cure is cardio.

Convenient.

Easy to be right without a timescale, but it does feel more likely all the time. Trying my best to see other routes out of this sort of deep polarisation, inequity and failure but it’s tough. I hope someone can. As unfortunately it’s our inability to imagine other ways that makes it self fulfilling.

I’ve been saying from the beginning that the one silver lining to this shit show was going to be watching the Elon and Trump relationship implode. It was always inevitable and it’s going to be glorious watching them try and leverage their largely overlapping cults against each other.

Really appreciate you sharing it!

Thanks! It’s a little short I’ve been waiting years for a good moment to share.

Brb. Running a highly uncoordinated psyop on myself to do better.

More equitable in one sense anyway. It would be wrong to describe the modern economic reality as more equitable across the board. In any case I tend to see it as kind of a reflex - a reckoning with the product of past inequities. I had hoped they would eat their veges and move on but apparently not.

Yeah that framing is extremely problematic. And ironically it’s many of those same white men doing the framing that also claim to be all about strength, independence and self reliance. They’re not being denied. They’re being compelled to adapt to a more equitable reality and aren’t taking it well.

You’re absolutely right. I imagine however that it’s not entirely dissimilar to the phenomena that sees higher suicide rates in relatively affluent countries.