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If we cannot enter into productive dialogue, we cannot build towards large scale social change. When invested in being right, we cannot engage in productive dialogue that requires us to get our hands dirty, considering other ways of being that might complicate binary distinctions of right and wrong.

Demanding that people not use AI because it is morally wrong, is not a very nuanced argument, and obviously will not convince anybody who is not already on side. This is the same behaviour that has conservatives critiquing the left for being annoying.

These often seem ill equipped to enter into a discussion with anyone who doesn’t hold the exact same prescriptive views on this emerging technology. I wonder if we are alienating those very people we might influence by being closed minded and morally righteous.

I was recently involved in mediating an argument about AI and found the same talking points that I’ve encountered in nearly every discussion, which paint AI with broad strokes as a malevolent evil.

I have been thinking lately, how the moral imperative to mark certain things as right and wrong, can deprive us of the ability to maintain contact with those things we disagree with and so we cannot understand what it is about them we disagree with so strongly.

From the InternetIsBeautiful community on Reddit: Someone made a Gmail clone with all the epstein Media Explore this post and more from the InternetIsBeautiful community

someone made a gmail clone with the epstein documents that you can look through like an email inbox

In the middle of a web, a fly may not feel the spider weaving, until it moves to escape.

Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows Brown Swiss in Austria has been discovered using tools in multiple ways – something only ever seen in humans and chimpanzees

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

This is the same monstrous distortion that enabled endless social rejects to be lobotomized. This process never stopped, it just became pharmacological.

That is not to say that the drugs don’t “help” people, but have we ever stopped to ask why people need to be anethsetized to survive their lives?

This will surprise exactly no-one suffering from shit life syndrome.

Someday we will look back on the psychopharmacological gang who gaslight people into thinking they have a chemical imbalance as somehow separate from interpersonal and environmental factors as supremely fucked up.

The Inflammatory Signals Associated with Psychosis: Impact of Comorbid Drug Abuse Psychosis and substance use disorders are two diagnostic categories whose association has been studied for decades. In addition, both psychosis spectrum disorders and drug abuse have recently been linked to multiple pro-inflammatory changes in the ...

There is an increasing mountain of evidence linking inflammation with going crazy or becoming an addict.

Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water New ideas about chronic illness could revolutionize treatment, if we take the research seriously.

It turns out the environmental pollution might be making people sick.

For those who don’t believe that the deregulation of environmental protections affects them, and who celebrate delusions of perpetual industrial growth and chemical saturation, try surviving without water.

When the rules become increasingly exclusionary, people might not be paying their rent for reasons other than malfeasance.

If we’re okay with “rules” that allow people falling on hard times during a global recession to be put out onto the street, maybe it’s the rules that are wrong.

In Ontario, the government just passed Bill 60, which is meant to speed up evictions. I am hearing politicians saying that it won’t hurt anyone obeying the law and playing by the rules but I wonder why we aren’t talking about why someone wouldn’t follow the rules.

What we sometimes fail to remember is that conservatives with wealth have an absolute eugenicist disdain for the poor.

These systems will effectively sort rich from poor, enabling the rich to survive and the poor to be filtered out. M*rder through neglect is how neo-g*nocide works.

She is investigating and providing receipts for the massive upscaling of Neuralink facilities outside of official approvals with some concerning links with immigration detention pipelines and manufacturing and testing facilities registered under shell corporations.

Ya’ll should be checking out the Drey Dossier investigations if you are at all concerned with what is going on in the US, where the crumbing of the rule of law and the rise of unaccountable billionaires in opening up the room for mass abuses.

I’ve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since I learned that it’s so purpose is to make friendly noises. As long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. It’s just a show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. So we do our little human dance to each other to say, “ I’m not here to hurt you. There’s something we have in common, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, in this proves we can get along. I’m being lighthearted and non-threatening right now.” small talk isn’t to get to know a person. It’s just a greeting to affirm your buddies in the universe. I am motivated by wanting the other person to know I am friendly, so I have gone pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.

in Uzbek we have this concept of the divine dark, the darkness from which all things came. So there’s this idea that shows up in a lot of our literature that when the world was first made it was like a gentle night, peaceful and pitch-black. The night is when creation started and the night is when you’re closest to glimpsing what it was like at the very start of the world.

I think a lot about how whiteness needs to develop a deeper and more appreciative relationship with blackness.

We can’t develop care and cultural exchange without a deep sense of love for difference itself.

Blackness is a source of creation. It is the sign of healthy soil, and so wealth.

okay, yes.

You are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you. (- Marcus Aurelius)

As someone who does not live in NYC, I am grateful this week for this teaching from Marcus Aurelius.

Building things consistently shittier has a ceiling. We’re making things like dishwashers to break in under 5 years. Where do they think they all go?

Say goodbye to rent control, indefinite leases if Ontario passes housing proposal: advocates | CBC News Ontario's planned new housing legislation could open the door to ending rent control and indefinite leases across the province, advocates warn after a recent proposal by Premier Doug Ford's government...

This will be devastating, and during a housing crisis. Contact your MPP.

I don’t know how many graduate students have told me in private that they need to keep their head down and repeat information they know is not only wrong, but unethical, in the hopes of someday getting a job.

If I critique the system so effectively that I become un-hireable, do I at least get brownie points?

We often equate mutual aid to finances, but what if, especially in these cash strapped times, we saw opportunities as “mutual aid”? Offering professional services pro-bono Teaching a skill you know well for free Hair care/barber services Preparing meals Delivering food Running other folk’s errands Offering translation/interpretation Few child care Elder care Shoveling snow Raking leaves Home repairs Community cleanups Vehicle maintenance Laundry Service Whatever you can do.

How many people’s mental health diagnoses are really just them struggling to function in a capitalist system that is amoral, destructive, overwhelming, overbearing, unsatisfying, and bereft of meaning? It’s surely one of the most unexamined questions in the field of modern psychology. People in general and researchers in particular all too rarely think to take a step back from the data they are looking at and consider the large-scale framework within which that data is materializing, and to consider whether there’s anything about the particular framework which is giving rise to the particular data sets they are seeing.

While more than half of Canadians report living paycheque to paycheque, 47% of workers surveyed reported their pay was late, creating financial difficulties.

Over 1 in 4 workers report having to borrow money to pay the bills due to wage theft

Over 60% of people working overtime report never receiving OT premium pay or time off in lieu of ot pay

46% of workers reported that they did not get public holidays off with pay.

20% faced wage theft of over $5,000, while 50% of workers lost wages between $500 and $5,000.

This is a resource from the Worker’s Action Centre, containing data on corporate wage theft.