Reposting my thread from yesterday with an update. Thanks to a generous comrade donor, I only need 45 more dollars to go fill my Buprenorphine prescription. I got fucked over by my last employer several months ago and have been since stuck in no job or income or savings land. Surviving out there is brutal. That, on top of the never ending, dehumanizing limbo of job hunting, is burning me from the inside out. If any other comrades would like to pitch in as well, my cashapp and venmo accounts are both under the handle cosecantphi Once again thanks so much to the bumpers and donors here on c/mutual_aid. I've been saved by this place, and I deeply appreciate it. I really can't wait to finally get out of this mess so I can pay it forward here 
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I wonder what it'll be like when the nukes launch. How many new comments per hour in the news mega before the internet infrastructure fails and we all get vaporized?
I'd very much hate for us to be caught off guard during another one of those quiet "sometimes there are decades where weeks happen" moments, resulting in only getting to see 100 new comments about how the ongoing end of human civilization is not-based
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They love calling things genocide because they have this idea in their head that word means you can't disagree with them. They see how holocaust deniers are rightfully reviled, and their lib brains come to the conclusion that all accusations using the word genocide are somehow indisputable by nature
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After this, I will never again fail to mercilessly dunk on any liberal who blathers on about how DPRK, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela are rogue, irrational states. Not while Israel continues to exist in any capacity other than as a terrible memory. This apex reactionary state is the perfect definition of everything liberals complain about in US state enemies, yet Israel's inalienable right to commit war crimes and genocide galore with US weapons and funding is forever unquestioned.
At what point does it become comical even to the unobservant libs who think Russia invaded Ukraine out of nowhere in 2022? How can one think that is a moral black hole beyond the point of no return, yet also apparently that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is complex and nuanced?
I'm sorry, I hardly use non-Hexbear social media anymore, and day by day I get more incredulous that the garden variety western libs continue to exist like this with no sign of slowing down.
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Lmao, he's rolling over this soon? He must've gone into this with the mindset that Brazil was just totally bluffing when they said they'd outright block Twitter
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My friends whataboutism, Amber, and the volcel police would like to productively engage in conversation within this thread if you don't mind
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Yeah I think that's exactly what it is. These numbers on casualties probably won't be final, but it seems like only a handful of people actually died, and only a few hundred were actually severely injured.
Israel would have known they were using on average a sub-lethal amount of explosives in each pager, so it wasn't even about taking potential Hezbollah members off the board. Their goal was to cause Lebanese people pain and suffering and that's it. They wanted that so badly they've hurt their standing in this war once again.
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Another extremely evil move by Israel, but they can only really pull this trick once. Now Hezbollah is going to be thoroughly inspecting every vaguely electronic item that goes through their hands. For injuring a couple thousand random people, Israel has thoroughly burned their ability to infiltrate resistance organizations this deeply ever again. They could have injured the same number of people with conventional weapons easily, but they wanted their terrorism to be theatrical above all else.
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Pan seared large portabello mushrooms are great on sandwiches as the central ingredient, highly recommend.
This shit sucks. It'd be almost funny at this point if it weren't wearing away at my soul bit by bit. Still unemployed without having qualified for unemployment. I think I've already applied to pretty much everything I can reasonably get to by bus. Currently looking into temp agencies. Anyway, not only am I now 25 dollars in the red, I needed to go grocery shopping and now I definitely can't. I'd very much appreciate it if any comrades with some cash to spare could help out. I need 25 dollars to get my account out of the negative, and then another ~30 so I can run down to the store later today or tomorrow, but any amount is of great help! My cashapp and venmo accounts are both under the handle cosecantphi EDIT: Goal reached! As always, thanks so much to our comrade donors and comrade bumpers here on c/mutual_aid. I hope my situation stabilizes soon so I can pay it forward. 
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The Republican was there
Choosing to interpret this as 
being present when this happened instead of Trump.
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In order to stay pure, our hatred requires only for us to continuously bear witness to the capitalist class brutalizing nature and destroying endless lives in pursuit of greed.
Chuds aren't principled, they are very frivolous in their hatred. If they didn't constantly doomscroll 4chan and twitter while sinking progressively deeper into reactionary black holes within the youtube algorithm, they'd very quickly forget who they're even supposed to hate and why.
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This goes hard as fuck and I wish it were real.
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I can sort of understand being pro-Ukraine in this war given you probably don't know the context from before 2022 and have been thoroughly propagandized by western media portraying these fascists as freedom fighters.
But calling this war a genocide? I genuinely don't understand how anyone could come to that conclusion while we're watching an actual genocide unfold in Palestine. Russia could have immediately and relentlessly terror bombed Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure back into the stone age like the US and NATO typically do. But they didn't. Clearly they intend for Ukrainians to still exist at the end of this. In order to call this a genocide, you'd need to say essentially every war ever fought was also a genocide.
There is no racial prejudice or settler designs in Russia's motivation here. They've made themselves very clear since the fall of the Soviet Union that Ukraine joining NATO is their red line. But even after the US orchestrated the 2014 Maidan coup to install a fascist, rabidly anti-Russian government, even after Ukraine violated the Minsk agreements by continuing to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, Russia still attempted diplomacy until there were no other options left when NATO had Ukraine shut down all talk of peace.
You can't goad someone into a war for literal decades and then start crying when, on their own terms rather than yours, they join the existing civil war on the side of the people you are trying to erase.
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The reason you need to slow down is because you're starting on Earth, which means you're moving fast enough parallel to the sun's surface that for every foot you fall downwards toward the sun, the sun's surface curves away by 1 foot. This results in the nearly circular orbit around the sun we exist in.
If you start speeding up, the orbit becomes more elliptical, except your aphelion starts raising away from the sun because now you're moving fast enough that you've moved more than 1 foot sideways in the time you've fallen 1 foot downwards.
Slowing down has the opposite effect. If you get your speed down to 0, you'll fall straight down toward the sun as normal with gravity. But you don't need to go all the way down to 0 velocity to enter the sun, you just need to slow down until your elliptical orbit brushes up against the sun's surface. If you then want to speed back up to avoid falling into the sun, you need to do it parallel to the sun's surface. At this point, speeding up toward the sun will actually make you fall into the sun faster.
So basically the problem isn't that you're moving too fast to fall into the sun. By virtue of Earth's orbit, you're moving too fast in a direction away from hitting the sun's surface.
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I agree the show, especially toward the end, is definitely no kind of masterpiece, and many of the plot points are definitely really dumb, just in a very entertaining way. You're correct that the fact that Lelouch almost died because his cadres didn't have a real shared ideology that would allow for them to have any kind of faith or respect in his leadership doesn't quite work as a criticism of exactly that kind of organization when Lelouch uses his geass to win anyway by mind controlling the remainder of the Britannian Empire's armed forces.
My being impressed at this show mainly comes from the mere fact that it's very explicitly and wholeheartedly endorsing violent resistance against US coded imperialism. I feel as if that's rare from popular media, especially back when it released. It neglects to take a specific political stance, but it's absolutely anti-imperialist, even if just being that is a low bar to clear. The rest is mostly very fun but harmless anime slop apart from the parts I criticized in the OP.
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I think that kinda reflect the core message of the show, which is pretty libby, though. "society is bad because of bad people, and you can totally just simply wish them away".
See, I disagree because the events I described in my comment are not actually the conclusion of the show. Nothing is inherently solved by the death of King Charles. What killing King Charles actually accomplishes is that merely Lelouch has one less enemy so he can focus on stopping his brother Schneizel, who represents a much more competent threat than his father did, one with the connections to build the Sword of Damocles. Lelouch does ultimately use his geass to neutralize Schneizel, but he is only in a position to do so because a war is fought that spills an unfathomable sea of blood, and that is where the big shift in power structure comes from that allows for the effective revolution we see toward the end.
Now, the very existence of geass magic fundamentally divorces the world of Code Geass from ours, but I thought the Black Knight reaction to Zero's identity and the power of Geass made a lot of sense. Learning about the very existence of geass is such a mind fuck because being put under the command of Lelouch's geass is an extremely gross violation of bodily autonomy. It's a serious crime to use it in such a way that isn't directly advancing the goal of the proletariat in class war. Lelouch's identity as a Britannian prince isn't what necessarily loses him the support of his comrades, it's his ability to violate people in such a way with absolutely zero accountability or oversight. They also learn that Euphemia's massacre of the Japanese people was orchestrated entirely by geass, Lelouch never tells anyone but CC that it was an accident.
They all start to question whether their very involvement in the resistance is their own will or not. Kallen is the only member of the Black Knights to give Lelouch a chance because she is the only one who knows him personally enough to continue trusting him. Which is ironic because Lelouch did in fact use his geass on her previously, as minor an order it was.
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An ironic recommendation given my post, but I actually suggest giving Code Geass a second chance if that's what put you off about it. I got the exact same vibe during the peak of Attack on Titan hype and was eventually vindicated, but I feel Code Geass successfully escapes the same pitfalls. Japan under Brtiannian occupation and colonization far more closely resembles modern Palestine than it does post war Japan.
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Comrades, are pinned posts authoritarian?
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I thought the supernatural EoE-esque human instrumentality project ass shit King Charles was working on with his brother and wife came to a great conclusion and served the story pretty well in that regard.
Like Lelouch spends most of the anime with one of his leading motivations being finding his mother's killer and taking revenge. But in what was meant to be his climactic showdown with his father, he finds his mother is actually still alive, her soul in some trippy subspace connected to the thought elevator by her geass ability. She reveals she's totally into this "slaying god" shit King Charles (who is now immortal btw) and his brother were doing. Lelouch's parents then drone on and on about how actually we had to exile you and Nunnally while ruling Britannia as a racist, genocidal empire built on the backs of subjugated colonies, those we're just the conditions we needed to wield the Sword of Akasha! (the helical structure seen stabbing into the planet Jupiter). They claim this will kill the capability for deceit in human nature (???) thereby allowing the collective dead to all commune with the living (???) in an unchanging, perfect world frozen around the current status quo in terms of social structure (???)
Lelouch correctly rejects all of this out of hand for the nonsense it is. The supposedly good intentions of his parents buried this deep in metaphysical fascist nonsense are meaningless. In rejection of everything his parents believed and worked toward, Lelouch uses his Geass to request god not halt the march of time. God responds by erasing the immortal King Charles and his wife Marianne. Everything falls apart for them in an almost comical way, starting with the sword toppling over and falling away from Jupiter, and the subspace itself becomes unstable. King Charles dies, evaporating away in shocked disbelief, having previously demonstrated himself immortal. Marianne calls Lelouch an ungrateful child before she too disappears into a puff of smoke. I thought this was such a great twist to take the mystery of Lelouch's mother, and it was a great way to tie up a lot of the lore threads before moving onto Lelouch's confrontation with his older brother.
The terrorists are entirely justified in their violent resistance against the obviously evil and genocidal Britannian empire, which is something of a stand in for both the British Empire and the US. The annoying liberal deuteragonist bumbles around for 2/3 of the show being a supersoldier for the Britannian Empire while constantly making these bizarre self righteous arguments that Lelouch's rebellion is just too darn mean and violent, we have to support the Britannian Empire's rule of law just a while longer guys! The longer this goes on, the more and more his world view crumbles around him as basically nothing goes to plan for this liberal who is just incapable of grappling with material reality. He ends up following his sense of liberal morality all the way to accidentally killing millions with a Britannian wunderwaffe nuke. This leads him on his jokerification arc wherein he realizes the error of his ways and actually supports Lelouch through the batshit last few episodes of this show. Anyway, I can't recommend this show to anyone in year of our lord 2024 because it's obnoxiously, embarrassingly horny in a very mid 2000s anime way, because that's exactly what it is. But I'm imagining what could have been.
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Oh god, at first glance it appears he's so close to realizing that yes, with every cent of increased funding it gets, the DEA directly makes drug addiction both more prevalent and deadly by artificially driving unregulated black market demand for insanely potent, synthetic mu-opioid agonist. Some of the newer RC opioids aren't even based on the structure of fentanyl anymore. When this happens, the drug grey market literally outpaces legislation until the DEA catches wind of things and schedules a defining member of the class.
Of course, this hypocritical piece of shit is actually talking about increased funding for aid directly to the homeless. 
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The libs just want someone who will quietly and politely do genocide without dropping the mask too hard. Trump won't do that, so in their eyes he's automatically worse on this issue to a level they believe justifies voting for Harris. If that's not mathematical proof liberals are racists who care far more about the idea the United States is a fundamentally good country than they care about this genocide, then I don't know what is.
They will not put the smallest effort into even trying to think about how absurd they'd sound to the Palestinians who now constantly occupy the space between living a life with dignity and dying badly, their entire culture and identity extinguished because settlers are too racist to share. The US being a country descendant from the same type, is ever gleeful to aid Israel in any manner they deem necessary. Both of the American capitalist parties are entirely subservient to the same existing military industrial complex, they are both accomplice to the Palestinian genocide equally.
Given these two parties are our only option because of the way our voting system works, would it not be fair to say we actually do not have a democracy? All semblance that the US is not a blatant dictatorship of the capitalist class dies once you understand our electoral candidates run entirely at the whim of each capitalist party. Neither have any obligation to actually conduct primaries if they choose not to, you can't vote your way into forcing them to do something they fundamentally don't want to do. No one fucking voted for Kamala Harris, yet she's half our total allowed candidate pool.
Expressing support for one or the other genocidal capitalist faction makes these libs accomplice. In doing so, libs admit they believe stopping this genocide isn't as important as conducting this genocide gracefully. Either that or they believe stopping this genocide isn't as important as whatever domestic issue they believe the democrats pay lip service to. That doesn't justify throwing the Palestinians under the bus, which is what they're doing when they loudly exclaim the democrats have their vote regardless of any material intention to stop being accomplice to a genocide.
Anyone who isn't a racist shithead sees right through it, this tendency of western libs will be a useful litmus test in the years to come.
Reposting my thread from yesterday about needing $65 to get my Buprenorphine prescription filled for the month. The goal is almost reached, I just need another $15, if any generous comrades want to help out with the last bit My cashapp and venmo accounts are both under the handles cosecantphi. EDIT: Goal reached! Big thanks to our very dedicated comrade bumpers and very generous comrade donors here on c/mutual_aid 
HBO tried to make the line go up by cutting two episodes off the second season in the midst of the writer's strike. Like no exaggeration, the season 2 finale ends in a way that makes it immediately obvious two more episodes were supposed to exist. They were simply truncated along with the all the payoff for many of this season's character arcs and plot lines. One of the writers even made a statement that an eight episode season wasn't their decision. Unfortunately the news of that must have hit them too late in production to fully accommodate that in the writing. Except on all the subreddits for this show, the prevailing opinion amongst dipshit redditors is that the writers are cutting book events to make time for LGBTQ asoiaf fanfiction. While that'd be based if true, it's not. Like wtf? Do these people live in a different universe? Are they watching a different dragon show? Redditors ain't alright, man. These people watch the enshittification of media in real time, and their lack of media literacy results in them going on queerphobic witch hunts and throwing wild assignment of blame at anything but HBO and capitalism.
The reason I ask is because I'm autistic, but I wasn't diagnosed until I was 18 so I never received any kind of assistance growing up. And every time I've used an NMDA antagonist drug, I've experienced amazing relief from all of my sensory issues. I've never tried Ketamine, but I have used DXM and Nitrous Oxide, both of which are also NMDA antagonists. It's like they partially sever the connection between the mind and the body. Nitrous Oxide isn't very useful for this because it only lasts a couple minutes before you need to redose, but even on lowish doses of DXM I feel totally unencumbered. My sensory issues tend to take up a lot of cognitive load when I'm out in public and interacting with strangers, resulting in social anxiety. My whole life I've been too focused on the feeling of wanting to crawl out of my own skin too much to put any effort into being social, making friends, or having fun. But on NMDA antagonists that all just goes away and I finally feel free and clear headed in a way I had never imagined possible. They literally just make me feel free to be me. Has anyone else here experienced something similar? Is there any existing research on this?
I've been catching up with season 2 and honestly it's not half bad. It has cut out the worst shitty (often gross and misogynistic in nature) excesses of the original show while still retaining most if not all of the great character writing and great dialogue that the first four seasons of GoT had. There's all this great early GoT style political intrigue retained to it as well. All of these lords and ladies and queens and kings are just terrible, awful people for most of the runtime while we've been getting increasing focus on how badly the very concept of monarchy forces the dirty laundry of one inbred family with pet nukes to take shape and brutalize not only the slowly starving smallfolk of King's Landing, but also the smallfolk throughout most of the surrounding empire. The Lords of the Seven Kingdoms all exist in this web of familial ties that ensures their ultimate class solidarity, eventually dragging most of the continent into dragon war the aftermath of which resembles that of atomic bombs. Now we find two desperate peasants given dragons because Queen in Exile Rhaenyra needs to find someone capable of vibing with Vermithor and Silverwing, the second and third largest war dragons in existence. She ends up burning to death dozens of claimed Targaryen bastards to do this by locking them all in the Dragonmont and letting the dragons sort the rest. She watches this happen with bored disinterest, in contrast to the horror on her face when her highborn Queensguard Steffon Darklyn dies in a previous attempt to claim the dragon Seasmoke. [Brief Spoilers for book events in this paragraph] ::: spoiler spoiler In the book, after Hugh Hammer and Ulf White risk their lives to be her attack dog dragon riders, they never receive the kind of social elevation you'd expect for the people with the largest dragons on the continent. Rhaenyra does not want to deal with the political fallout of there being legitimized Targaryen bastards with bigger dragons than those of her sons, whom are also legitimized Targaryen bastards. Thus Hugh and Ulf plausibly retain some amount of class solidarity to the average smallfolk's plight and betray Rhaenyra to declare themselves Kings. I'm hoping the show has them join some Riverlander anti-Targaryen guerilla movements once they see the kind of atrocities they are expected to commit. :::
I took three years of Spanish and got an A every semester. Even when it was still fresh in my mind, I was nowhere near able to hold even a very simple conversation. And now just a few years later it's all totally gone from my brain. My mother's native language is Spanish and she never taught me, which I resent her for. But I still find it incredible how shitty my public school education in Spanish was. We really should be teaching kids a second language from kindergarten up.
I swear to god, my mental health, self esteem, and confidence are flying to heights not seen since I graduated high school. That may be a low bar to clear, but I cleared it! I still want to lose another 30 pounds to reach my goal weight, but already I no longer feel ashamed when I look at myself naked in the mirror.
She regularly uses cannabis vape pods. I had no idea she would explode on me about this because I had already previously told her I was using cannabis, that I was paying for it, and that it greatly helped me with my social anxiety and depression. It also was greatly aiding me in my weight loss, and I'm currently the healthiest I've ever felt in my life. So yesterday I started making my edibles like it was no big deal because I thought the heart to heart I had with her about it patched things up. I legitimately thought she'd be happy for me. Well the moment she smelled it in the oven, she stormed into the kitchen, suddenly she threatened to kick me out, threatened to stop paying for all medical care I'm currently receiving, and when I didn't give in, she started begging my elderly father to intervene, nearly gave my dad a heart attack the way she reacted to me consuming this plant like it was bloody murder. I had been open about this with him for months and he doesn't have a problem with it. I was making edibles with preground weed because it's so much cheaper to buy, I picked up a couple eighths for $10. Apparently though my mom had never heard of the concept of baking weed in the oven to decarb it, and started screaming at me like I was insane. I'm thinking she thought that maybe smelling it might mean she's also smoking it, that's my speculation on why she reacted like this, anyway. I currently don't use any other drugs on a daily basis not prescribed to me by a doctor. Though seven years ago I had a problem with opiates that I've since solved with Buprenorphine maintenance, for context. Once I realized this might be about the smell I turned off the oven and put away the foil pouch of weed, but that wasn't enough. She gave my dad an ultimatum to kick me out or she'd be calling the cops. I refused to stop using weed, I told her I'll avoid using cannabis when she's home like I had been doing previously, but I would not be sacrificing my mental health at her arbitrary whim. My dad started having a panic attack, got in his car, and drove away. The cops arrived, explained this wasn't their responsibility, and they left. I am very glad my dogs and I are still alive. I have autism and thought this might be the end of me. My dad returned a few hours later. It is now the next day and no one has breathed a word of this since my little brother returned from work.
I see this discussion come up a lot and it always results in arguments that I think maybe come about as a result of a lack of agreed upon definitions for certain terms, so I'll start there. Here are some definitions that make sense to me surrounding the hard problem of consciousness, would love to hear if anyone else has had the same thoughts: ***Subjective experience:*** Essentially the range of qualia that I can say exists because I experience them. It's the information you receive from your senses that is not quantifiable. For example, a description of the color red, no matter how detailed and scientifically accurate, will ever allow a person who has never experienced sight to understand what the color red looks like. ***The mind and body:*** The physical apparatus through which animals like us interact with the world. From the body we receive the necessary sensory information and nourishment to exert our will on the world. With the mind we interpret all sensory information gathered from the world. Vast neural networks read, interpret, alter and conduct data received from the body's various sensory organs. Our brains begin this process with inherited patterns of basic cognition. Certain neural pathways calcify from repeated activity, forming memories: a catalogue of previous experiences we attribute importance to. Memories, guided by our upbringing, form a scaffold with which personality forms around, totally unique to the circumstances of any individual. But at no point in this fundamentally material process do we see the necessity for qualia, subjective experience. Theoretically, would a fully accurate computer simulated brain not also experience qualia if we know for a fact that we do? The ongoing process described above is how most people would describe consciousness. We find that messing with certain parts of the brain can interrupt consciousness, and therefore memory formation, but how can we be sure that some fundamental sensation never ends, totally divorced from the body and mind? People who get too drunk may not remember it later, but they were certainly conscious at the time. If there exists some feeling before conception and after death, no one can know because the dead can't speak and the living don't remember it.
RIP to my old Minecraft world from 2019 on this 2.5 inch HDD I now use as a mirror for shaving
(Initially posted in c/drugs but thought it would get more engagement here) I was thinking about the way cannabis is increasingly legal in the US, and I'm starting to see it as a symptom of balkanization in this country that might start to become the model for the legalization of other drugs. To explain: In most places in the US it is either legal or de facto legal despite the fact that until this year it was federally considered a schedule I controlled substance alongside Heroin, LSD, and many other widely known recreational drugs. For decades the federal government considered cannabis to be wholly unsuitable for all medical use and too dangerous for scientists to even research. They dedicated vast resources into destroying cannabis farms and putting cannabis users, dealers, and growers into prison. It was in a legal category more severe than fentanyl and many of its analogues. Without even changing those laws, we got to a place where most states decided to just hand out licenses to businesses to grow and sell it, and allow anyone over the age of 21 to buy it. I think the research chemical scene has by now made it clear that recreational drugs are not a finite group. New drugs are invented all the time. In the same way, new plants containing psychoactive compounds are either discovered or popularized all the time. They do not necessarily start their lives in the public consciousness with stigma, and they can be just as benign or deadly, euphoric or dysphoric, sedating or stimulating, psychedelic or inebriating as any classic, widely known drug. The way the federal government categorized drugs and the way the DEA enforced drug law was never rational when you approach it from the goal of reducing the harm drugs cause socially. In actuality it was always about maintaining a legal and socially acceptable avenue for continuing this country's legacy of racism and slavery. What this means is that which new drugs are to be banned, which are to be ignored, and which are to be accepted is an entirely local matter determined by which marginalized communities can be connected to each drug for purpose of stigmatization. With increasing social disunity across the states, we might begin to see certain drugs became wide spread and tolerated in certain states but treated with extreme hostility elsewhere. A situation like this would paralyze the ability of the DEA to gain enough cooperation from local law enforcement to curtail production and distribution, leading to decrease in stigmatization and eventually the relaxation in attitudes even in places where the stigmatization began.
About a month ago I got ghosted by my first real job just a couple months in, and it happened at a real inconvenient stage in my life. I didn't qualify for unemployment, so I was just kinda fucked and had to deal with it entirely on my own. I did manage to save some money during those two months, but now I'm running out and finding another job has been more challenging than I thought it would be. My mother works at a grocery store, and she told me she'd talk to her manager about getting me hired there too. Couple dollars more than local min wage, night stocking shelves, which I actually enjoy doing so long as I'm not pushed into working at a ridiculous pace. So she set me up with an interview with her manager, and here's where I find out it's a temporary position opening up because her union is about to go on strike. The manager is telling me I might have to cross a picket line. My own mother set me up to scab at her workplace, and she didn't tell me. Needless to say, I felt betrayed. She also feels betrayed at me for not taking the job. Lots of feelings of betrayal going around. So I'm back at square one, running out of money. I need help paying for my Buprenorphine prescription this month and the next, and have no where to turn right now but Hexbear. It's 60 dollars with GoodRX, so I need to raise $120. I saw some other comrades in bad situations have actually been receiving judgement free aid here, and that's honestly fucking amazing. If any comrade in a better position can help, here's my cashapp details: (removed payment link as per new rules) EDIT: I now have a Venmo account set up. (removed payment link as per new rules) EDIT2: So far you've all raised $70! That's very helpful, I appreciate it so much. Just need another $50. EDIT3: Total donations at $90, only 30 more to go! EDIT4: Thanks to all of you I've now hit my goal of $120. It'll be so nice for my mental health to not have to worry about this stuff for a little while. I want you all to know I appreciate this so much, and I hope to pay it forward when my situation becomes stable. EDIT5: Removed payment links as per new rules.
For purpose of discussion, assume that due to bad luck, this asteroid has evaded the detection of all amateur and professional astronomers until about six months from impact. The asteroid is too large to deflect with humanity's current spacefaring capabilities, and the general scientific consensus is that the impact will end all multicellular life on Earth. What do those six months look like?
I started a new job at a whole new grocery store a couple months ago. Got hired as a cashier a little while before the grand opening, but my first weeks consisted entirely of stocking all the empty shelves. Then when we opened, it was a nightmare suddenly dealing with customers for the first time but I thought I adapted fairly quickly. Next two weeks my hours dropped from 30 per week to just 15, but my boss went out of their way to let me know I'd be getting more hours next week, so I wasn't worried and considered it a fluke. Of course the next schedule came out, and surprise: 0 hours for the entire week. Then my manager and boss both blatantly ignored all my attempts to talk about this on the stupid ass app we use for communication. This happened to about 10 other coworkers too, and it clicked for me. It was just a fucking bait and switch to get some extra manual labor to get the store open sooner. Lure us in with promise of a long term job, and then throw us out like trash two months later when they're done with us. Please, we need some more excuses for the lack of terror.
I can't get paid for shitting on company time since I never really need to shit at work, but I'll be damned if I don't kill the same amount of time while on the clock. Thank god restroom breaks are mandated by OSHA and they don't count toward our normal 10 minute paid breaks. Over the course of an 8 hour shift, I try to spend at least 30 minutes total in the restroom.
Four light years may seem like an unfathomably long distance, but in comparison to the size of our galaxy, it's practically right next door. In fact, it's close enough that the Alpha Centauri system has nearly the same constellations as we do, just subtly warped due to the relatively small parallax factor. The only caveat is that they're missing the brightest star in Centaurus, having traded it for an additional bright star in Cassiopeia on the opposite side of the sky. The Sun's stellar magnitude is 0.5 from that distance, that's about as bright as Betelgeuse in Orion. I don't think we'll ever be so lucky that our closest star system just happens to contain a planet with alien life on it. That said, it's so surreal to think about even just the possibility of a life harboring planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. I'm imagining those creatures looking at the Sun in their night sky and wondering themselves about the existence of neighboring aliens. (To clarify, Alpha Centauri is actually a triple star system close enough together to look like a single star to the naked eye. Alpha Centauri A and B are both sun-like stars with a roughly similar mass and brightness. Proxima Centauri is the nearest of the three, and it's a red dwarf with confirmed planets.)
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