I’d say that 20-50 years is generous. Maybe if they’d won every election, but that’s now how US politics goes. When one side stages a coup, and history shows they’re going to win an election again within the next cycle or two, not throwing the leaders of the coup in Gitmo by January 21, 2021, at the latest, sure seems like enabling fascism.

Honestly, this argument comes across to me as a horrible mangling of different pop-sci concepts to construct a victimology. There’s good evidence of the mechanism by which stress and trauma induce epigenetic changes in organisms. (Selective methylization regulating expression of genes.) There’s some evidence of epigenetic changes due to physiological trauma passed down through germ cells. But it’s a huge leap to ascribe mtDNA damage to psychological experiences.

The mitochondria have a degenerate genome, a tiny amount of DNA with (looking it up) 37 genes to support the processing of energy into ATP to power the cell. It is susceptible to epigenetic changes, which leads pretty directly to a number of metabolic disorders, but I can’t find any evidence that those changes result from life experiences of an animal. The idea that mtDNA has accumulated generations of damage from sexist trauma beggars logic, too, because there’s just not a lot of room to collect damage, and that damage leads to health problems fairly directly. If one got every cell of life from one’s mother, in turn, she got it from her mother, and so on all the way back to the first eukaryotic life. All of those generations of trauma, how are we even still living?

Furthermore, the assertion that “men created the patriarchy” ignores actual history and context. One simply cannot ascribe a singular intent to a class comprising billions of individuals across time and space. At best, one could describe patriarchy as an emergent phenomena of societies and cultures. About half of the individuals in those societies and cultures were women, so you’d have to conclude that women helped create patriarchy, unless you deny their agency or intelligence.

There’s a whole range of procedures that fall under the umbrella term of circumcision, depending on how much they cut off. It goes from snipping off a little ring at the tip (the traditional bris), to outright removal of the entire mobile skin system. I figure I’ve lost at least 15 square inches (an index card size) of adult tissue.

Just that I read them so quickly, I’m ready for the show it movie to move on to the next scene, and have to wait for the dialog to catch up.

Grab the one of the middle knuckles of one of your fingers firmly with your other hand. Now slide the skin to your fingertip, then down to the base knuckle.

What’s that? You can’t do that, because the skin is fixed in place? Well, imagine my surprise when I learned penises aren’t supposed to be like that.

TIL that my nose is my dominant eye! (I think I’m not doing something correctly.)

In both cases, the words just… go straight from words to comprehension? It’s kind of hard to answer that question, because introspection of the process isn’t possible. I mean, I just look at words and know what they mean. From experience, I think I read about 3 times faster than most other people, what with not having to wait to hear them spoken by an internal voice. (Subtitles in the same language as the audio are maddening, because I can’t not read them, and then have to wait so long for the speech to catch up.)

Should we also show “empathy” to Klansmen who joined up because they claim to feel disenfranchised by society?

Well, yes. No qualifiers. Full stop. Ask anybody who’s successfully done it. Arno Michaelis is particularly good at turning white supremacists back to the light because he was one, and knows the mindset.

Changing somebody’s mind and world-view always starts with listening empathetically. What you don’t offer is sympathy for abhorrent beliefs. It’s hard to make the distinction, but that old saw about education granting the ability to hold a notion in one’s mind without accepting it is relevant. I would argue that maturity means learning to offer kindness while maintaining strong personal and moral boundaries. Self-righteous fury might feel good, but it’ll never get through to a Klansman, or an incel.

So, yes, you have to show empathy, but certainly not a pat on the back. Those are two different things. It’s hard to hold the line between them at times, but it’s the only way to effectively reach people with backwards belief systems. Frankly, I feel like a lot of people would rather be self-righteous than effective, because it’s easier and feels good, and that’s what I see in the too-common conflation of understanding with approval.

For what it’s worth, about that age is when it started to go away for me.

I don’t actually know if this is unusual, but I can smell when people have a respiratory illness, like a cold. It smells vaguely like the rooting hormone that you can get from a garden center.

“Don’t worry about blank. Let me worry about blank!”

Would it even get that far? Gathering that many people in one spot, at the same time, with a coherent plan would take… a lot of communication. And we know for a fact that the spooks are listening in.

But, hell, @veniasilente@lemm.ee, start organizing people. I’m interested in seeing how far it gets.

I love how people seem to think that “the economy” or “politics” is the same type of thing as sports— a recreational activity with no actual bearing on anything that other people pay attention to as a diversion. It explains so much about how we ended up here.

What’s insane is expecting every individual to be person to know enough about financial asset classes to know how to balance risks in their portfolio, when we used to have pension plans with subject-matter experts whose job it was to do that. Getting rid of them was like throwing everybody overboard from the cruise ship (pension), but giving them a life jacket (401k).

I mean, it makes sense when you know that the decision was made by the sharks.

Where is the left complaining about shrinking 401k accounts? Do you mean Democrats? They’re a center-right party.

No, that’s exactly what I don’t want in a President. Sitting there, doing their job and not trying to get onto the TV news every day is perfect for, say, an EPA grant administrator. But the drafters of the Constitution fucked up by making the President both the head of government, and the head of state. The former should be an administrator, and the latter needs to be a leader. It’s not the framers’ fault, the world just didn’t have a lot of experience with huge democracies back then. The trouble is that “huge” is too much for the human mind, and abstract thinking doesn’t come naturally to us. A worrying proportion of the population can’t do it at all. Instead, we conceptualize our nation through a parasocial relationship with the leader. In that role, the President should be on TV, and in the news every day, influencing the citizens.

The UK has its own problems, but at least their system splits the job. They have a head of state, King Charles, whom everybody can relate to as the embodiment of the nation, more or less aside from political disagreements. (This role was far more effective when Queen Elizabeth was on the throne, to be sure.) They also have a head of government, the Prime Minister, who attends to making things run. Each can focus on their particular role. But we don’t have that luxury in the US, and Obama needed to continue the energy of the campaign even after taking office.

It wouldn’t be wild, it’d be accurate. The man has dementia. I’m on mobile and not inclined to tap out all of the indicators, but remember when he abruptly stopped speaking at a campaign rally, and just kind of swayed to his music playlist for 39 minutes, or when he described in detail the literal, giant faucet in British Columbia that he seemed to think that Canada uses to control water to the West Coast? (Or the literal dome over Israel?) Both losing track of time and losing the ability to process metaphorical speech are symptoms of dementia. Why else would his doctors have administered that cognitive test that he bragged that he aced?

Fun fact: The mass of all humans on Earth is about 10 times greater than the mass of all wild mammals.

Maybe. There’s clearly hidden power behind the throne. The orange face at the Resolute Desk has never been this disciplined about following an agenda in his life, and that change is not one of the known side-effects of dementia. Those people in the shadows might be able to replace him with a different useful idiot like, say, Joe Rogan.

I’m not versed in modern military strategy, but I’ve heard others say that the U.S. carrier fleet has been a dominant force because the U.S. has only taken on adversaries that didn’t have submarines, and anti-torpedo systems aren’t foolproof. Also, it seems to me that they’re for force projection, and not so great for defensive action, to since there are only 11 of them. That is, the U.S. has a lot of assets that enemies could strike while the carrier groups are elsewhere.

I guess I’m not convinced that the carriers would be decisive in a conflict with a modern military, instead of the usual U.S. MO of picking on the weak.