Lefty Therapist

Trying to speedrun martial law before the economy collapses

i love the domino effect of trans people asking the moderation team to take harassment of trans people seriously and instead decided to perma ban a black guy who was one of the earliest users here

This is my new personal motto:

been struggling with how to articulate this for a while now, but it's a big part of what's going on now. i don't want to marinate in my own resentments, and certainly not in theirs. i don't want to work through someone else's daddy or mommy issues. it stinks!

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. How corrosive it is that public figures are--more and more shamelessly--ripping the copper wiring out of the walls. Integrity is for suckers. Abusing power is fun. Caring about anything bigger than yourself is lame. An elite class of evil toddlers

I can count on this account to make me literally LOL multiple times a week. 😂🥰

Feel like I’m going insane with the revisionist history that Charlie Kirk fostered open debate. He chilled speech and his targeting of professors for wrongthink led to threats, harassment, and being forced out of their jobs. His legacy is chilling speech right now, about him

Watching all these centrist pundits stress the “civility” of Charlie Kirk’s style without addressing the ugliness of his substance is giving me a renewed appreciation of how the civil, polite White Citizens’ Councils conned the same crowd into thinking they were distinct from the cruder Klan.

The fact that Matthew Dowd lost his job for pointing out Charlie Kirk’s hate speech, while Brian Kilmeade openly suggests we should euthanize the homeless and there is zero outrage, shows exactly what is terribly wrong with today’s political mainstream media.

I have written and deleted a lot of posts but I keep thinking about how the brutal assassination of Minnesota State senator Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark, and their beloved dog Gilbert in June did not prompt this same level of calls for empathy, sympathy, and flags at half-mast.

It's wonderful to see people refusing to mourn the death of a rabid bigot. Kirk dedicated his life to evil. He said gun deaths were "worth it," volunteering himself for a shooting death (oh wait, were only children supposed to die?) He was racist, queer-phobic, misogynistic, fascist garbage.

surely we can come up with something better for 7 billion people than being lorded over by a bunch of plundering elderly murder and torture enthusiasts who whisper to each other about printing spare organs so they can immiserate others in perpetuity

Maybe someone can help?

No matter what I do, certain functions are not available to me on this account, the most important of which is including Alt text. Alt text is activated in my settings. I thought I might be a temporary glitch but it's persisted for months. IDGI.

It seems that the answer may be "yes": bsky.app/profile/hero...

This is how you do it. Uncompromising courage.

My question also. Totally inexcusable.

Good mental health/reality-testing note:

things were better when the computer lived in its own specific room and you only went in there sometimes

Slavery: the original US PedoCon.

Nothing made slavery’s toxicity more obvious to Union troops than its effect on the fundamental unit of society, the family. For one thing, slave sales separated families. In the Upper South, where many Union soldiers were stationed in 1861, about one in three first marriages was broken by sale, and about half of all slave children were separated from at least one parent. 129 With their own eyes, soldiers saw slavery snap bonds between parents and children. The men of the Seventh Wisconsin were awakened by gunshots one November night. The following day, soldiers “learned, and saw the cause of the alarm in the form of two negro women—a mother and a daughter.” The pair had fled to Union lines to avoid the proposed sale of the “goodlooking” daughter into the so-called fancy trade, which soldiers viewed as a form of concubinage. Outraged by the plight and moved by the vulnerability of the mother and daughter, “every private in the ranks” cursed “that system which tramples on the honor of man, and makes merchandise of the virtue of women,” according to one member of the regiment. 130 When an Iowan encountered a young child about to be sold by her own father, who was also her master, he vowed, “By G–d I’ll fight till hell freezes over and then I’ll cut the ice and fight on.” 131

from chandra manning's wonderful book "what this cruel war was over"

building a Dyson sphere around the sun is an incomprehensible undertaking. building one around the solar system is simply impossible in even the wildest sci fi projections of the future

every statement Altman and his fellow tech oligarchs make is just as preposterous

anyway the choice america faces going forward is live in the confederacy or do reconstruction for real and purge those motherfuckers from all of public life. and there isn’t really an in-between.

Like, that's the first question you're gonna get. Have a fucking answer! Why anyone knows this dummy's name is beyond me...

I knew Barro casually 15 years ago (he dated a friend who had a kink for terrible rightwing men). At a party, Josh told me he was a libertarian. I asked his thoughts on the Civil Rights Act. There was absolute terror in his eyes. He walked away without saying anything. Total fucking idiot.

Right. And therapy is about 1/4 - 1/3 of the way to a secular religion, so...

Whatever we may do to cultivate it, health is, ultimately, an act of god. People have way more agency regarding whether they are courageous, generous, a person of their word, ya know, virtue! IMO, the dogged pursuit of mere health is why a lot of manualized approaches often fail. 🤷‍♀️

I've mostly kept it to myself because it's seen as corny or, worse, unprofessional, "moralistic," but I am wary of the standard of "health" and more interested in the cultivation of virtue. Obvs, health feels good, but *idolizing* it is ableism, IMO.

Therapists don't talk about this a lot but I know that part of our job is seeking difficult truths rather than (often comforting, but destructive) lies. You can't have real mental health without integrity, or vice versa. We should need to say that way more often.

To no one's surprise, there's increasing evidence AI makes even bright people dimmer, quite quickly!

Apart from privacy concerns, I will not be using AI for my notes as a therapist. Writing out my thoughts can help me make connections I miss in the here-and-now of listening and talking.

Excellent thread.

"By unanimous consent, they fast tracked all of his cabinet nominees (with at most three extremely performative exceptions), making his cabinet one of the fastest to be confirmed in modern senate history." Un-fucking-real. Vichy Dems.