No Stupid Questions

I think others see this but not enough: the slow collapse of Liberal democracy.

A rot has set in and people in politics and government no longer believe in liberal democracy. If you read history you find impassioned fighting for liberty, freedom and equality.

Now we have quasi democracies, with erosions of freedoms, rights and even dumbing down of access to news coverage and knowledge. Countries like the USA and UK that were leading lights in liberal democracy have fallen back into more authoritarian regimes. Countries in continental Europe that were bastions of liberal democracy also seem to losing their way. Big corporations and a wealthy elite are working against the interests of Liberal democracy and we're letting them do it.

Authoritarianism is the scourge of our age - being pushed by China and Russia and taking hold in India, the middle east, Africa and increasingly in the west.

It's depressing to see the rot.

When I was young I saw the night sky with the milky way clearly visible. I never got the chance to see it again.

I travelled to the top of a remote mountain free of any light pollution or air pollution. It was a dark night with new moon. The sky was completely clear. I still had good eyesight at that time.

The starry night sky was magnificent and mesmerizing.

The way fear, anger, hatred, and the resulting division is being used to control populations.

We have more in common with one another than we think. We all do. But our media highlights the things about each other that we fear or hate.

I know plenty of people across the political spectrum. There is a distinct lack of empathy for anyone who doesn’t share specific views or experiences.

Note, I am not trying to “both sides” here, I’m really not. Modern conservatism is dangerous. But it remains in place not only because conservatives are fed fear and hatred about progressives, but also because progressives are fed fear and anger towards conservatives.

I don’t think the original goal here was to control people, I think fear sells. We seek out warnings, they impact our mental state more. News organizations originally realized they could make more money by making their audience afraid.

But there have always been those who capitalize on those fears. And today it means that those who control the channels simply need to keep us afraid of and angry at one another over some wedge issues and they don’t then need to fear anyone coming together to make actual meaningful societal change happen.

I wish we’d all spend a bit more time talking to other people. But that’s becoming more and more rare.

Following a reaction to being put under for surgery, I see way more colors than I used to. When I look at a rainbow, I can see more bands of color than normal.

Down side? Bright light is physically painful. When I woke up from surgery I had to beg to be put in a dark room.

Having spent too much time in OS security, I wish people building today's products could realize and internalize just how their project is a house of cards built on top of a house of cards, security-speaking. We've normalized a seriously insane amount if sketchy shit that the critique of a modern product core to many linux OS distributions was seen as just old people ranting ... and the shady shit continued.

One day we're going to run into a series of deep-seated security exploits that will blow our mind and cause a chernobyl of damage, and we may not even link it to a particular weak link among SO MANY weak links; but that's what we're looking at. And the fact that we're ignoring common-sense, best-practice rules to develop core apps is leaving a hole in the proverbial fence that we're ignoring as well.

God help us.

I work in the field of mental health, specifically mostly in the area of recovery mentorship.

This is an area that is effectively dominated by women.

I wish women could see how that within the realm of healing, they have constructed their own systems of power where men are oppressed, abused, belittled, and prevented from accessing those services without standing up to / enduring that level of hatred.

In short, once the oppressed have the guns, they become the oppressors.

The (for lack of a better phrase) flicker from led lights. For those that don't know what I mean.. Stand near a strobe light and move your hand in front of your face. You get basically a shutter effect.

That's what I see when I'm near led lights and there is movement . It's hard as hell on the eyes.

I wished every one saw it so it would get fixed.

I should have bought a pallet of incandescent bulbs when I had the chance.

The world's population is getting significantly sicker and we're blaming the victims for "lifestyle diseases" as a way of dismissing the problem. But research needs money and time, so there will always be better and stronger evidence for money-making remedies instead of the slow and complex research into why people are increasingly experiencing disease.

We're hurting ourselves, and each other, and because disabled people are excluded from huge parts of society, we're also covering up the evidence. It's only when we're wounded that the reality is clear, but by then it's too late - you're just written off as someone who made bad choices.

Capitalism has eroded society to the edge of what is tolerable. The push for infinite growth has pushed the world to the extreme, with 0.001% of human holding 99.999% of the riches.

We are now at a point where growth cannot continue because the customers are too poor and the thumbscrews are all the way in. And yet, corpos want more. It will break - very soon. Then what happens?

The value of good frontend engineering.

I recently stumbled upon this blog post that describes it better than I could

How gamer culture is heavily based around the ability to have an accessible and more real-feeling power fantasy in your imagination to fill in for a lack of power in real life, and the damage this is doing to our societies.

Games allow you to feel like you're very good at something. You used to have to earn that feeling in some way, but no longer. Now it's purchasable for $40.

That the solutions that benefit all beings are always the best. Even if they require more effort. Also, that there are never just two solutions to any problem. The human experience is not binary, there are infinitely many solutions to all problems.

Ghosts

Does anyone else hear every electronic device and feel a wave of comfort when the power goes out?

The hidden walls and the dwarfs in them

How much damage suburbs strodes and massive footprint drive up box stores actually do. The amount of materials and ecological flattening needed so that everyone can have their own yard with a patch of shit grass. All the concrete reflecting heat into the atmosphere and causing temperature instability, the damage to the water and carbon locking systems we all need to survive because so many people can't stand being around people outside their own isolated family units or need to find a place to park their car. We need affordable city and high density village housing and flip the script on housing costs heavily incentivizing moving out of suburban areas.

We need more trains and buses but more than that we need design where our land use is treated as an actual resource that requires harm reduction policies instead of just "unused" land because "unused" land is what is keeping the planet alive and if we don't start reclaiming it we are gunna be in massive trouble.

The ISS. Woke up around 4-5 am just to see it a couple of years ago. I was afraid of missing it, but then saw a fast dot on the sky. First a dot, that split into 5 and a line, after that back to a small dot before disappearing.

Seeing the human technology in space with naked eyes is beautiful.

There was helpful site on Nasa to know when to look for it, but looks like theres an app for it now. Give it a try if you like space stuff, it cost nothing, well maybe a sleepy morning.

Which dynamics (political, economical, privacy-wise) will lead to a less enjoyable future for all of us.