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At their very best, third places allow people of differing backgrounds to cross paths — to develop what are known as bridging ties. As opposed to our closest connections, bridging social networks encompass people who have varying identities, social and economic resources, and knowledge. “Studies have shown that just having a diversity of folks in your life … more informal and infrequent and unplanned, can be really protective for health and well-being,” Finlay says.

What is intrinsically valuable then: third spaces, diversity, or individual health? It feels like the first has the most value in service of the second, which is really just a supplement for the third. Almost like we stopped believing we can convince people to get on the same page about anything that looks like a shared value...

Also much respect to the persistence of patronizing Vox-speak in 2024: "to develop what are known as bridging ties" Known to who? "Studies have shown that" Studies where?

i'm not alt-right but this comment just makes me want to read alan watts more

A great essay (also check out "The Left is Not a Church" by Benjamin Studebaker) but by 2013, feminist bloggers online had made all these same sort of urgent, crucial observations about female solidarity. Eventually, I'm sure they will be seen as the original canaries in the coal mine of the post-Bush internet-enabled progressive-political holding pattern.

If you think your law enforcement should decide which political speech is terrorism, you have many home countries to choose from -- from the U.K. to Saudi Arabia -- but the U.S. is not one of them. Best of luck!

"The social benefits of adopting it outweigh the theoretical unfairness" of war and torture. Would you agree?

speech doesn’t have unlimited degrees of freedom in the United States.

Thanks -- Nobody said it does or should. I asked the person above me for the source of their statement.

As in many other areas, the younger generation raised on Web 2.0 are far beyond the Web 1.0 crowd in regards to industriousness and psyche. Nobody writes or reads stuff like this anymore. They just install Shinigami Eyes and move on with their day

Is the BDS movement an example of stochastic terrorism? Someone told me they exist to inspire hate crimes against Jewish and Israeli citizens.

Are hasbara organizations stochastic terrorist in nature? Someone told me they exist to distract from settler-colonial violence against Palestinians.

Who should get to decide which warrants investigation?

Are you ok with BDS and all other Palestinian human-rights advocacy being nuked off the face of the internet for "anti-Semitism" within moments of handing the anti-"stochastic terrorism" powers to the government ? What about any video of IDF doing anything wrong? Even the recent articles about the killed Palestinian journalist could be used for Nefarious Purposes

Source in U.S law?

Yes, they say all this about war and torture as well (curious your thoughts on those?)

The solutions are to convince the center, succeed at reform through protest and politics, and maybe, as necessary, go further through grassroots action. Just like the women who won the ability to vote, for example. Actual activism still works, although it requires doing a little more than sitting on your couch crying to the government to make the bad ideas go away

My point was that framing the problem as an individual pathology that afflicts at random rather than a cultural, communal sickness inevitable under capitalism is absolutely absurd

Most people suffer from what is commonly known as “plant blindness”, a term coined by US botanists Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee. They described it as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment”. Unless taught, people don’t tend to see plants – despite the fact that at any given moment, there is likely to be a plant – or something made by plants – nearby.

But there are also proteins nearby -- isn't it worrying how people don't notice those too? With COVID and monkeypox raging around the world, isn't "protein blindness" an even more dire issue? I think the author might be suffering from "protein-blindness blindness," a term coined by US biochemists Elisabeth Simoneer and James Widdershins. In our recent study...

What a comment. A feast for the inner reply guy:

The traditional way is to seek a guru

"The" way? According to whom? Did you do it?

Some even leave everything and go to forest or mountains to practice for years.

Except the Buddha and his stories explicitly advised against asceticism...

they should practice "Raja Yoga" which is also a spiritual path where one raises their spiritual plane

Again, according to who? Why not Jesus? Or Scientology? What's your personal experience?

However simple breathing exercises still work for the body and can be easily incorporated into every day lives.

Well this is out of nowhere. It doesn't connect to anything that's been said. Do you do this?

When one goes to discover/amplify their inner core

Inner core is new. What's that and who asked? Is it the same as a True Self?

I'd say let's just focus on this: "Meditation is a part of ones spiritual journey." That's correct and all this issue needs. MBSR and the other sanitized, faith-cleansed scientifically quantifiable practices are not synonymous with mindfulness, meditation, or Buddhism. They're tangential, and for some they are nice greeters at the door to a path of spirituality.

This is what meditation is about, but replace "phones" with "everything"!

$1.41 parking ticket

For work, Vimflowy has been great as a todo list scratchpad. I have Markdown New Tab in the browser as a general scratchpad, but Vimflowy as a pinned tab for todo lists.

I forgot about Amber Heard, responsible for a nontrivial amount of world-wide violence that we have statistics for

Anyway, this women arent violent stuff is actually extremely harmful to society

I don't think I said "women aren't violent" or any form of that claim?

Emotional abuse in relationships being a world-wide issue is kind of a separate thing to what I said

In a century or two it will be wild that doctors could just get up in the morning and do these things. How far does this stuff have to go for anyone to reckon with this? If I have a psychological need, with a fancy name, for people to eat me, can a surgeon just cut off my arm and feed it to people? Why not?

I am highly sensitive to not bother anyone but I agree with this. This reeks of the tech mentality of trying to overcome nature and separate everyone into neat little pods.

Eventually we are going to have to face and accept our natural human bodies as a species. For hundreds of years the market has offered us escape from them, with new technologies to plaster over our "faults" every decade. If only we had listened to the hairy armpit feminists when they were shouting this at us in the 60s and 70s...

because the headline can never be "90% of nurses' employers fail their employees this year"

I wasn't aware those were documented world-wide issues. Please fill us in!

Male violence. Most novels and other fictional media will immediately feel antiquated afterwards, unfortunately

Many detransitioners are raising the concerns about the psychological effects of more and more surgery on young people to actualize their true selves. This is counter to the prevailing narrative that every surgery that a young person might have is reversible down the line through more surgery.

The problem is that once you expose any surface area for censorship decisions, some of the loudest voices point to it and apply "inaction is violence" (an appropriate concept in some contexts, I should say.) Because the Euphemism Treadmill is a real thing [1], there's always grounds to pressure companies to ban or steer people away from newly incorrect language.

I can see many asking: Why steer writers away from slurs but not "biological male"? Is everyone at Google just... unaware of what's happening right now? I find it hard to believe that there's no one there who can explain what's wrong with this term or how badly we need to raise awareness about it.

[1] https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2020/08/ableist-language-and-t...

I guess I was reading between the lines:

p174 : "There is no such thing as a 'public charter.' 'Public' does not just denote public money but also public accountability; most charter schools are not under the control of the parents and local citizens at all and thus cannot be called public."

p177: "[T]he very competitive landscape that charters are meant to foster creates a structural bias toward dishonest practices."

All public guarantees in this modern time are going to end up with a lot of shitty conditions and outcomes, when people in power don't care about them. Maybe that's a poor reply but it's my reply. The book indeed mixes "just overthrow the culture and machines of capitalism" and "here's some reforms I like, each of which may or may not be precluded by the overthrowy bit, at least a little." I think an unstated and reasonable assumption of FDB's is that if we enact these reforms, it will be because we've convinced the public that public schools and teachers are important. The ideas aren't just to put legal language on paper, they are cultural reforms advanced through appeals to compassion ("As a socialist, my interest lies in expanding the degree to which the community takes responsibility each all of its members, in deepening our societal commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of everyone.") Did the gay and lesbian community get marriage legalized by just crafting the most perfect bill texts?

It's hard to deny that leftism is in a confused way right now. They (generally, not deBoer afaik) think prostitution is liberating!

Funny, I was just talking with someone about The Cult of Smart by Freddie deBoer on another comments thread here. Every American should read it. I read Scott Alexander's critical review and I'd recommend it as a nice response overall but I have a lot of problems with it.