I am very pleased with the DU Mail Archive!

It was fun to see some correspondence I had from years ago with posters who may not even be around-Saphire Blue(she used to post on homelessness) and some other posters who have either changed their userids or drifted away..hopefully they have not been tombstoned ;-/...(Is that still a thing? The tombstones even are gone..I was in my late twenties when I joined DU..I feel old...).

That sounds intriguing at any rate

And it is in PNAS so it cannot be too out there. Never heard of the Carnegie Institute of Science.

Along those lines, I admire Lina Khan a lot

That was a great pick by the Biden admin-really signalled they were serious about regulation:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/owentedford/2023/09/29/winning-isnt-everything-for-bidens-antitrust-regulators/

If anyone can regulate these messes it would be she.

Ed Zitron's pieces are generally pretty good.

No they are not.nt

Dark ages thinking

Child-bearing is a woman's primary if not sole function I guess.

That last line makes complete sense

"No social media account from the actual BLM organization will be issuing support or any press release in regards to Israel/Palestine at all."

Not every lefty group has to comment on every single issue. It distracts from their own mission and strands them in a lose-lose situation either way.

For instance I was sorry to see there was a rift in TST-I kinda like those guys. I hope they stay together:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/social-justice-rebellion-satanic-temple/675481/

I generally think Lucien Greaves of TST sounds fairly reasonable* and I agreed with him on a lot. What can seem like an insistence that all groups should always formally state positions on all issues is a losing proposition for most serious activist groups. It derails them from their actual goals and missions.

Many progressive causes generally are in alignment but there is no need for them to be one homogeneous group-it can even be detrimental. That is kind of the whole point of being a "snowflake". That you have complicated unique viewpoints not one consolidated view whatever your general allyships etc.

It is okay to have a focus and to stick to it..I think it is great that TST is helping women get abortions. One of TST's focuses is bodily autonomy and I respect groups sticking to their missions. They all have different distinct important roles on the left-from animal rights people to deep greens to lighter greens to labor rights and blue collar issues, women's/LGBTQ and civil rights groups to feminists to anti war groups/anti hate groups to abortion rights activists to atheists/satanists/pro science groups/good ai safety groups like DAIR or even left leaning people of mild faith who support choice. They don't all have to be one monolith.

BLM does important work and this was an attempt to troll them. Good for them for not taking the bait..their mission is too important for them to get mired in needless controversies like these.

* Silvermann though does sound like a creep, but as Greaves points out he has all but disappeared so whatever. As an atheist/satanist in spirit , I am glad they booted Silvermann out.

Edit: Also whether it is MeToo/BLM or any lefty group of the Twitter era that has accomplished stuff, they can expect to be thoroughly trolled under an ass like Musk.

Yeah it is tragic

It is tearing a lot of lefty communities apart..I am ignorant really when it comes to anything outside green issues (If you have ever seen "I heart Huckabees" I sometimes feel like Mark Wahlberg's character who connects everything to petroleum-I am like that with planetary stresses).

Beyond an insipid and annoying to all sides "I hope it all turns out okay for everyone somehow", I have nothing usually, which is why I read it but stay away. Lousy to be a child in any war-torn part of the world. You will inherit all your parents' conflicts and wars if nothing else...

I hate conflict.... Russian-Ukraine is still ongoing and now this..I think there is also a conflict ongoing in Armenia..

Scary times...These times when we seem to be careening closer to global instability in an increasingly connected world are always scary.

I highly doubt Trump has any opinions on anything..

Except his own amazing coolness.

In a way I get how Trump thinks sadly. If you have ever had an injury or a loss where you become incapable of being externally focused and can only endlessly ruminate on your own problems, you will know how you lose the adult capacity to have your own self be at the fringes of your consciousness in your interactions with the world.

I am not talking btw about being introspective or inward looking for reflection and so on. That is you using your internal resources as an introvert might be inclined to. But this is more like a completely self centred person who cannot really register that other people, events and things exist at all..

It happens in any diseased state. Obviously very ill people can only mechanically be at all interested in the world outside them. Their own pain and illness preoccupies them. I like the bit in Rosemary's Baby (the book) where she talks about how she vaguely notices the Vietnam War, students turning in draft cards and external things but nothing is real to her except her own misery.

But with someone like Trump I think it is a permanent state to only dimly be aware that other people exist as anything but something that exists in relation only to himself. It must be a very unpleasant headspace to have as your normal state..

And it seems to be the common state of a lot of our leadership from tech leadership to the gop and so on..It certainly explains the human condition.

It is interestingly a bit different from the more Machiavellian type that notices other people so as to make them pawns in their manoeuvres.

Just like old times tbh

Sorry I am not being flippant -it is a serious topic etc. But well it is just having read posts here since 2005 or something, I would be worried the forum was dying if it was any other way..
Dysfunctional human online communities.

The other day I read about this rift in TST-I was sorry to see that..I like those guys. But otoh from afar it is pretty much every lefty or human group ever.
Passions cool down and things carry on..

The toll in the real world is a different matter :-/...No easy fixes for those outside or often even in the realm of politics...

Yup

I view pretty much everything as a resource war on an overburdened planet with a shrinking resource pool. It doesn't surprise me that the world over and (largely due to ideologies driven by religious extremism or general belligerence), keeping women from having a say in limiting the number of children they have (it is usually always in that direction though there are far less common examples of coercive sterilization etc) is the wtg.

In general if you want to keep populations at each others throats and miserable there is no more efficient way than forcing or coaxing women to have more children or never letting women get emancipated to the point where they end up doing what most women end up choosing (to significantly reduce the number of children they have or have then for sane reasons-not to win some ideological war..or gasp even making connections that are not narrowly tied to certain specific forms of self interest..such as that the more of the planet that humans across the board complete transform into human habitation or malls and factory farms, the less room there is for any type of nonhuman life-and I don't mean ai) or its err "evolved" counterpart keeping women obsessed with that topic. Sadly, even a significant chunk of humanists don't seem to get that planetary health is needed for humans to thrive. And overcrowding as well as overburdening with consumerism both take a toll on planetary health and that resulting sort of war torn slummification comes back to bite us in the ass in more ways than can be as clearly shown with just one or two metrics like co2.
We are fucking up the planet in far too many ways and destabilizing everything but because the blowback comes in forms that are not always that clear the root issue is often not recognized.


Too damn many people and too much general belligerence and consumption in people. The planet gets the short end either way...

I see a fairly obvious connection between human overcrowding and rising fascism/rising terrorism and warfare. Resources get strained more and more whether we discuss it or not.

Economists have been trying to bamboozle people into buying that infinite growth is not next door to magical thinking.

It is all a mess..in every part of the planet..If there were only around 3 billion of us, almost every problem we have would be manageable and democratically. Instead we have chaos and instability in every part of the world and bread and circuses...
It is really difficult to produce a civilized, healthy human adult and when humans are churned out to be pawns in the lives or wars their parents are involved in..

I definitely feel bad for all the kids involved...