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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • For me, I look to the past to see what life could have been like were I born 100 - 200 -500 - 1,000 years ago and try to find the positives that being born now has.

    And the reality is that even as soon as 100 years ago life was much, much harder and worse in almost every metric. Brutal jobs, brutal hours, with safety of no concern, even if you were a child. Housing? You were lucky if you could heat your home in some way in the winter, and air conditioning didnt even exist yet. Physical labor jobs were a large amount of the work, so many people simple worked themselves into uselessness and then suffered the rest of their lives.

    It doesnt get much better going back further than that really. Plague anyone?

    Today we enjoy a massive, massive amount of comfort in our lives. Have amazing, tasty, and safe food at our fingertips almost without issue. Can travel the entire globe effortlessly when even a cross country trek could have been a multi-month brutal affair with a death sentence for half the travel party. Modern medicine eliminates so many of the issues of the past.

    In reality very few people “just” work for 40 years and then retire useless husks and then die. I suspect you spend some time with friends and loved ones, perhaps even travel and engage in leisure time kings and queens of 200 years ago couldnt dream of during those 40 years.




  • I would say pushing boundaries (and maybe to a lesser extent just pushing buttons) is categorically different than trolling.

    Trollings sole purpose is the reaction, to rile people up. You dont have any intention behind your words besides that. Or heck maybe you even lie to do it. “What if I post pictures of sad looking polar bears to Greta Thunbergs twitter account? Wouldnt that make her mad!? hahaha!” Thats a troll - Nothing is gained, nothing is learned, nothing is advanced.

    Pushing boundaries is something different. You can have intent, social movement, and a message with it. Star Trek pushed boundaries when they had an interracial kiss, it wasnt just for shock value or trolling white people. Ellen coming out on TV pushed boundaries without trolling people.

    Boundaries are generally placed by people for the purpose of holding certain groups back, and they deserved to be pushed and in fact broken. Trolling does none of that. Trolling is putting a flaming bag of shit on someones porch and ding-dong-ditching just to watch them get their shoe dirty. If they are old, fall over, and break their hip when they do it thats all the more fun to the troll.

    Pushing buttons… more on the trolling end of things, but probably done in a more playful way, maybe even to someone you know and hope to have a positive relationship with afterwards. But really its a more mild form of trolling


  • That doesnt really explain why Trump has such widespread magnetic appeal. That explains why they vote for republicans as a whole, or any individual republican running for president, but to me it doesnt speak to why Trump has become such a force of nature in the party to the point where he has basically taken it over and if those who do not grovel at his feet are cast aside. As he loses steam that is waning a bit, but man for a year or two he was king shit and no one could say anything bad about the guy, and even now people are obviously scared of him and his base

    I also dont think its entirely explained by the cruelty-loving post you replied to, but I do think its a much more emotional response than just the fact based information-silo explanation you’ve given.