The hypocrisy is unreal. I have been successfully holding onto my final shred of hope in the goodness of humankind, but this tips the scale. I give up. Now I only have despair in the badness of humunkind. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to drown my sorrow by bingeing on Napster, Scour, BitTorrent, newsgroups, and Gnutella.

Now that right there is some Buddahriffic wisdom. As someone who has destroyed a keyboard in frustrated anguish, I can say the satisfaction was dismally ephemeral and every time I found a loose key for months afterward, I felt ashamed of my impulsive and violent behavior.

Although, in the exact moment in which the keyboard exploded into shrapnel, the satisfaction was intense, although I think the novelty of the situation and the personal distraction it caused were the real source of the delight. When I turned back to my sorely inadequate and poorly behaved workstation, the feelings of frustration quickly flooded back, only worse now that I needed to find a new keyboard…and waste time cleaning up the old one.

Ripley discusses trauma early in the book and there appears to be some correlation between the size of a person’s hippocampus and their capacity to absorb and rebound from traumatic events.

I got caught up on the term ‘empathy for self.’ I haven’t read the book, but I visited the link and couldn’t get past what I felt was a tragically flawed oxymoron. But maybe that’s a flaw with the Wikipedia article and not the source material, so I’ll endeavor to seek out the book at some point to learn more.

That’s the irony of it. I’m by no means a scholar of Thich Nhat Hanh, but I remember reading an account from his early life as a Vietnamese monk during the conflict with imperial France in which he had basically nothing and was himself barely surviving, but still found a way to feel peace and express compassion for a young French soldier suffering from malaria who desperately raided the monastery at gunpoint.

Aversion of pain is a pretty powerful deterrent. I guess there may need to be a critical mass of empathic individuals in a community to tip the scale in favor of everyone being more empathic and feeling generally better for it. Misery shared and understood amongst peers seems to always feel better than misery in solitude.

What kinds of things did you consciousnessly and intentionally do to train yourself into a healthier and more empathic frame of mind? Did you naturally gravitate toward a vocation requiring calm decisiveness under pressure in dynamic and unpredictable situations?

Sorry. I’ve never in my life ever been accused of being based, but my personal memories consistently paint me as a paragon of cringe, so you might be on to something. You’re welcome to transcribe any part(s) you think might be relevant to improve its accessibility, searchability, and generally superior functionality.

That’s pretty wild and really cool to ponder. Battery placement and balancing its weight safely seems like a steep hurdle for bolt-on EV conversions.

There very well could be something innate. Later in the chapter, Ripley writes about heroes who did what they did because they felt they wouldn’t have been able to live with the sense of cowardice for not acting. The fear of future self loathing overpowered their fear of present peril.

As for nurture vs. nature origins of empathy, I’m looking forward to watching Boarding On Insanity.

I like the way you think. When Tesla tanks and gets sold off for pennies, could you please start a Tesla Conversion business? I’d like to have a useful EV pickup that can carry a slide-in truck camper. I don’t need any of that self-driving shit or connections to the Cloud or giant touch screens. Just pedals, gauges, levers, buttons, and a steering wheel.

I have duly upvoted your obvious sarcasm.

That’s the thing I can’t fully understand. What sticky secret sauce does Twitter have that keeps people on it? I never saw its appeal and never created an account. I tried Bluesky and was underwhelmed. Instagram had some stickiness, but then it got stale after the initial novelty wore off. Maybe my brain just isn’t wired for those types of social media.

Perhaps you should feel concern for that person, because they’re resorting to violence to cope with their feelings of frustration. We’ve all done it and in my own experience, I don’t think I’ve ever come back to my senses feeling satisfaction that I had lost control. I usually feel some shame for the destruction I caused.

Here is the problem: When you spend time thumping an inanimate object, like a pillow, or beating nonliving things in a rage room, you are conditioning yourself to quickly become aggressive next time your anxiety levels rise. So instead of opening up the escape valve on a pot of steam, you are rewarding your distressed feelings with the instant and ephemeral pleasure that comes from throwing dishes against a wall.

Hey, whatever heuristic works for helping people show and feel respect for their environment and the things in it is good in my book. If you’re capable of respecting others in your space without needing to be polite to your inanimate tools, then good on you. Not everyone is like that and if it helps someone feel peace with their surroundings to imagine everything around them has some kind of soul or feelings worthy of consideration, then I’ll take that, too.

Of course, there are limits to everything and if a tool irreparably breaks, hopefully someone is able to discard it accordingly. Pathological hoarding of useless objects is a thing, too, after all.

I prefer to see things go by the way of The Last Question

Perhaps pokable is a more apt description.

Glad to see you’re all-in on this rebellion, Han. I hope your Isu-Sim SSP05 is in full working order for the actions ahead.

Those were amerigrams

I’m having trouble thinking of an example where a tyrant dictator was assassinated and displaced by a democratic leader and not just another dictator. I don’t think Hitler is a great example. Maybe Hussein? I’m apologetically ignorant on the current state of Iraq’s political system.

Democratic norms seem to be more successfully implemented when a ruler is facing bankruptcy and has no easy source of funds (e.g. natural resource extraction, sponsorship from foreign sources), and therefore has no other option but to expand freedoms and public goods to empower citizens to be more educated to work more profitably (and be reliable tax payers). A fairly recent example is the shift Jerry John Rawlings performed in Ghana in the 90s, which is explained succinctly in The Dictator’s Handbook (Bueno de Mesquita and Smith).

A general strike could be an effective means to force the hand of a ruler dependent on national productivity to keep his coalition’s insiders/influentials happy enough to retain their support.