They want baby teeth which are turned into happiness charms for grandparents.
When I had four adult teeth yanked for orthodontics, I felt horrified and sad and they gave me silver dollars (post 1976) for them.
I think they just felt sorry for me.
Here to add that this is my problem too, and I have a therapist… that I talk to by phone once every 2-3 weeks (Here in the states psychotherapy openings are impacted so anyone who doesn’t have super-good insurance is on the wayside) and she’s more of a CBT coach.
I’m trying to figure out why anyone is alarmed that I want to head to the check-out lane, given our society elected the party that regards us all as expendable, and very much wants there to be fewer Americans and more elbow room for the MAGAs.
As I’m likely to be elevated on the list of priority persons to get the CECOT treatment, I still need to arrange for a rapid exit strategy for when ICE stormtroopers blast down my apartment door. Kennedy Jr. has some serious beef with us ASD folk, and as someone who is on a fixed income (though I’ve had jobs and even have written poetry) am exactly the sort that he wants to purge.
For the moment, I am currently living for a cat and a dog. I regard them as persons and can’t trust anyone else to. And so am very reluctant to re-home them until I cannot support them any longer. I might be living so as to not traumatize my wife (we’re separated) but lately I seem to be more of an obligation and a burden. It didn’t help she went to a family Easter event to which I was uninvited. I spent the day alone.
What I don’t understand is why elected officials claim that people like me are a burden to the state are distressed by the notion that we might want to self-dispose (This is, or rather was, my only country, my only society) Indeed, the US suicide rate has soared since the Trump era began in 2016. We’re higher than Japan now, and gaining on Russia.
I don’t think it’s that anyone actually cares about me, I’m an abomination, like The Outsider in HP Lovecraft’s story of the same name. They just don’t want to process the cadaver and meager legacy I would leave.
Anyway, I go off and on suicide watch, but in these times, we’re all expendable, and sooner or later going to be removed from the new MAGA society to be stuffed into a megaprison gulag. I’ve been told by 77 million American voters they don’t want me around. I don’t understand the drama if I immolate myself in front of a state building. Is this not what they want?
PS: Wife and family are considering giving me ECT, the same stuff that Hemmingway and David Foster Wallace tried before they decided it didn’t work.
According to the Trump administration, the entire population within a specific range of millennials are gang members to the last.
OG Boomers and Silents are gang members, but they’re called lodges and esoteric societies, sometimes churches for tax reasons.
Remember that the primary efforts of Black Panthers and Hezbollah are community support (often cooperating with NGOs like Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders), we can expect that other terrorist organizations are similarly extremist.
In 2008 during the California Proposition 8 controversy, there were was a clever ad suggesting You want to stop gay sex? Let them get married. It showed a gay couple transitioning from honeymooning to blasé cohabitation and even bickering as old spouses are wont to do.
Young men who are capable of playing video games all day are likely depressed, and have a clinical problem. Our volition to be productive was demonstrated during the 2020 lockdown and the great resignation of 2021-22, in which young men (as with all other working demographics) learned:
The ones who resigned from old jobs were the ones who were able to monetize their hobby enough to quit. Many more got productive, but didn’t find something in their craft for which there was a ready market.
Speaker Johnson is a fierce MAGA and conforms to the common fascist trope of never speaking in good faith. See Sartre’s antisemite quote.
With several perspectives including that crunch remains a thing in AAA game development, our ownership class and CEOs are less concerned about maximizing profits than they are being lords with a feif and peons (compulsory servitude).
Oh and death to all monarchists. Disney deaths preferred.
I assume the prohibition the there so that lovers can feel naughty when they participate in its violation.
Crime is merely what the state doesn’t like, and when the state is being an asshole (say, serving the ownership class rather than the public) then ot shouldn’t mean much to be a criminal
We were supposed to learn this from Robin Hood, I thought. Maybe Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham are the heroes now.
That is a fair assessment, and in a world where life is expected to be stable and tolerable, it is stongly tempting to keep your head down.
China may be that kind of stable, though from what I hear, they disappear people for benign offenses, and people have to manage their social rating. Not easy to do when you’re, say, gay, or neurodivergent, or Uyghur. I can’t help but wonder if the acceptable norm is shrinking, and the list of undesirables is growing.
Here in the states, it already is growing. And unless you’re doing sexual favors for a billionaire or are indispensable to a billionaire, you’re on the purge list, just further down than homeless folk and Latins.
Granted you might rather just be summarily executed than tortured. I personally am terrified by the marks on the interior walls of the Auschwitz death camp genocide chambers where the victims were clawing as they died. In the current path of least resistance, I’ll be making those marks one day, or rather will perish from malnutrition in CECOT.
If I have to go out suffering, I’d rather I made a difference. If I lie low, I might as well commit suicide, which I’ve actually considered except that would cause harm to others connected to me.
It’ll also suck for them when ICE comes for me and my neighbors are silent.
Social Security Disability.
One of the things Musk is trying to kill because I am allegedly useless.
Musk is about to learn there are practical reasons to assure the wellbeing of non-workers, including NEETs.
We often sre useful, just in ways not recognized by pure transactionalists and capitalists. And those uses can and do turn renegade.
Trump and Musk have turned into Disney villains and deserve Disney villain deaths. For Musk, I have chosen to hope for eaten by hyenas (preferably ones he recently betrayed)
Though a proper Julius Caesar demise would be amazing for Trump. He’s more of a Nero than a Julius.
We’re still holding onto the belief that it might go back to normal, while in actually our lives as they once were are forfeit, and no one gets out of this without a fuckton of trauma.
Albert Camus, who was in the French Résistance before becoming an author and philosopher, was serious about confronting death and considering actual suicide, and had to invent a whole 20th century post-enlightenment philosophy to survive.
Our lives from now on are defined by the ongoing attack on society, and the sooner we push back and hard, the less will have to be repaired for Alphas and later dimensions generations. (I want to blame autocorrect. Badly. But I’m not sure.)
I go by susbribed top last 24 hours, which gives me a decent scroll experience.
Im ASD and diagnosed with major depression and on SSD.
That means I’m high up on the purge list anyway.
We’re all on that list. Even those of you who keep their head down. That’s the point of the Niemöller poem, especially since Trump’s shadowy masters are not trying to become dictator for life rather to bleed the federal general fund for a while before skedaddling to Switzerland or Liechtenstein.
You can’t lie low on this one as if it’s a protracted storm. At least I can’t.
He’s doing a suck job of it. The things he’s gutting are pennies towards his dark-souled oligarch masters. Cutting small government projects like the NEA, PBS or like FOSS grants is only used as an appeal to fiscal responsibility conservatives that aren’t willing to cut into old-people benefits like Social Security and military sacred cows. Not because gutting tiny projects does anything useful, rather it gives the vibe that representatives are doing something.
This is an appeal to the imbicile MAGA though the tech bros might have specific FOSS projects that compete with their own commercial offerings. Not enough to cut all FOSS grants, though.
Screaming from the far left, there are a lot of people in scarcity or precairity in our society, a society that would collapse if they all suddenly fell incapacitated from their want.
It is our fucking duty as fellow citizens to stabilize them.
Conservatism at its core is ignoring their need in the name of tradition. To the ninth charnel circle of Hell with that.
A) He’s doing this stuff to make the libs jump (or more accurately do something that MAGAs believe will make Libs jump.)
and
B) When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Also, Behind The Bastards has done a deep dive on the life of Musk. Find it. Listen to it.
Then check your local officials and see if they’re die-hard ownership class, or can at least sympathize with the proles.
It’s time to activate. Don’t make Molitovs yet, instead find out where to march or stand. But do look at where your molotov-making supplies are.
As Richard J. Murphy notes, when money goes into the hands of billionaires, it leaves the economy, getting tied up in bank reserves (or corporate reserves if invested) and into literal vaults. That money is no longer in motion, propelling trade, but gets trapped dormant.
This is why when wealth distribution graph is deeply bowed, the economy gets austere.
And as Leeja Miller notes, historically the only way such wealth ever gets redistributed to public interest (either directly to the public, or into a good-faith public-serving state) has been through violence.
Disclaimer: This is not a call for violence, only that corrections in history have involved piling aristocratic heads high after a takeover by force. The 20th century has seen a lot of progress in non-violent revolution.
Right now the ownership class has a powerful propaganda machine to dissuade protest, and mass suffering tends to lead to violent reprisal, especially when families see their own vulnerable suffering and dying, so if we don’t figure out some peaceful action that creates movement, we’ll end up with a lot of self-radicalized folk eager to die in action just to express themselves.
I pick up dog poop left by dogs other than mine. And I do it in the name of comnunism and the end of monarchy.
Yeah, my other ride is a broom and similar stickers also imply if you cross my path you better be firm in your beliefs curses don’t work, because mine will find your immortal soul and drag it, screaming and writhing into the very heart of Hell.
Also my coven depends on me for the sticky-icky and some amazing baked goods. And they don’t want me sad.
I might be reading a lot into it.
Also BMW was a major sponsor if NSDAP when the Communists were considering nationalizing private wealth.
All the hate and cynicism directed at Bavarian Motor Works can never be enough.