I guess i don’t really see the point. Is there a strong use case out there, or is this a marge’s potato? (“I just think they’re neat”)

I was careful to say perminant heirarchies for that reason. Bao Jingyan said that power originates in the contrast between the weak and the strong, and the cunning and the naive. I’m inclined to agree.

But we can have social institutions that break up and flush out these natural channels of inequality, rather than institutions that metastize them into heirarchies.

Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen. We could tax all inheritance above say 500k at 100%. Eliminate all personal debt every 7 years.

There’s a lot we can do to make heirarchies more temporary.

There are lots of ways to organize people that aren’t heirarchical, or that dilute or limit power rather than concentrating it.

Directly voting for laws, appointing officials by sortition - like being picked for jury duty, pushing decisions down to neighbourhood councils, consensus decision making, a culture that always permits insulting the successful and plenty else has been suggested.

It all comes with drawbacks of it’s own, of course. And having grown up in a heirarchical society, it can be very hard to imagine anything else, until you read about all the times and places where people have organized themselves differently.

There’s a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.

Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.

Or that’s how i see the problem.

While i too yearn for the downfall of capitalism, pre-capitalist societies were still responsible for environmental distruction, slavery and genocide.

As long as individuals or a small elite have enough power to enforce their needs over the needs of everyone else, we’ll always have capital-b Badnesses.

We have to usher in the collapse of perminant heirarchies, whatever form they take.

The rich don’t want equality. They need people to be suffering and in dire want, so they have exploitable people to profit from.

Edit: i didn’t realize the watermark completely obscured the word conundrum 😭

Love is the ultimate painkiller?

Oxytosin? Not sure on the spelling

A large community of child predators is a great opportunity - to expand roblox into a prestige networking site for the republican party.

loudly talking about the anal sex with a trans person they had over the weekend.

Oh that sounds lovely.

If you say it was problematic in context i have to believe you, but i would happily take that over the advice a psychic gave them, obviously made up trauma dumps, or how the eastern orthodox church is the one true faith - all real examples from my current coworkers.

She doesn’t really go on about it though.

There’s a kind of terminally online identity-yelling that’s easy to spot and definitely a red flag, but she rarely talks about her personal life at work, other than mentioning samhain and yule.

I found out who she claims to be from coworkers who use mainstream socials and stalked her.

I work in residential mental health and my boss is a progressive queer wiccan. I thought we’d get on great.

But then she started using an HR mistake i told her about to falsely bill medicare, and lied about not knowing in official emails. She tried to force me to pay for a company parking ticket and acted shocked when i wouldn’t.

When a staff was punched in the head by a resident in the evening she took hours to arrive on site, told the staff they had to finish their shift before going to the hospital, then let them drive themself after a possible concussion, and tried to get staff to reclassify it as a non critical incident.

Not truly evil, but sociopathetically dishonest in her dealings, and about who she is.

Thats getting away with raping children money.

What kind of head leaves you thinking afterwards, “i would pay for that to have not happened. But i’d only pay $4”?

What kind of head leaves you thinking afterwards, “i would pay $4 for that to have not happened”?

That house looks sweet! Cool tree right there, plenty of nature, even a ramp. My appartment is less ada compliant than that.

Also this post is some middle class bullshit.

Always was.

Wu Tang means “sugar free” in chinese so there are a lot of products labelled as wu tang.

Empathy is a trait that almost all individuals of many mammal species possess. Lethal intra-species violence is also a behaviour observed in many (all, i’d guess) of those same species.

Individuals, their peers, their social networks, their identities, institutions and the specific situation all influence behaviour. When those line up one way, we do a murder. A different configuration and we do a cuddle.

It makes no sense to suggest that humans are either inherently good or bad - those are artificial concepts that don’t even have a fixed meaning within a single human identity group. At the end of the day we’re just organisms exhibit behaviours to meet needs.