It’s definitely to do with work conditions. I’ve been a paramedic for fifteen years, and suffice it to say, I’ve seen (and smelled and heard) some shit. I’ve always felt that I had a harder time processing the stuff from when I worked in a busy metro system and we had to go from coding a kid who drowned just fifteen feet from a party full of adults to holding grandma’s hand and making her warm and comfy on our five minute jaunt to dialysis to “hey, there’s a car on fire and bystanders report hearing screaming from the vehicle”. I would regularly get three hours of sleep over a 72 hour period and have almost no time to process the horrible shit we saw while still having to be a functioning, caring professional for every patient along the way. The also horrible shit we saw in the slower rural area I worked in has haunted me a lot less. There’s probably more to the whole picture than that, but I’m confident that work conditions are a huge factor.

You’d still have wealthy Christians being like “okay, but what did Jesus mean by this?”

Confidence fell sharply among Biden’s opponents, likely tied to Trump’s legal cases, while Biden supporters’ confidence dropped 18 points this year, reflecting dissatisfaction with court rulings favoring Trump.

This makes intuitive sense. It proved to both groups that the justice system is a sham, just for different reasons.

A guy running a local chapter reached out to me because of a comment I left on a YouTube video. We’re collaborating on how to organize more people and push the city council to take aggressive measures like zoning reform, repealing parking minimums, robust public transit, comfortable bike lanes, etc.

In EMS, there’s a saying: if you drop the baby, pick it up.

Dropping the baby is like the worst thing you can ever do, but for Christ’s sake, don’t just leave it on the ground, do something about it. I’ve gotten involved in local government. Local government is great because you can still affect change there, and you can affect change that can snowball into something bigger with other people in other local governments making those changes. I’m on the city’s bicycle commission, and I’m working with local organizations like the ‘Council for Leadership and Justice’ and ‘Strong Towns’ to try and make the world a better place than I found it. Is it futile? Sure feels like it sometimes, time will tell I guess, but the trying helps me feel better for a few reasons, not least of which because it puts me in contact with others who care enough to try too.

Well, anon has re-discovered the Buddha’s advice on dealing with lust. I don’t have the text handy, but basically, somebody asks the Buddha about dealing with lust, and the Buddha advises that you strip away your preconceived notions about sex and look at it neutrally. Consider that this same body undertakes all the boring and tedious things that bodies do, that the body will age and decay, that the grave beckons. The way he puts it is better than I do, ofc, but that’s the gist, and Anon’s converged on it. Not saying that it’s good or bad, but hopefully it helps Anon feel better and be a better person.

I logged in just to answer this:

Stellarium

When it comes to stargazing and learning more about the night sky, there is hands-down no better program. It’s available on PC (windows/Mac/Linux) as well as mobile platforms. I used it for months for free before I paid for the premium sub, and the premium sub actually feels additive rather than just gatekeeping essential features. Plus, it’s pretty cheap and you can choose to just buy a lifetime pass for $20 and skip the sub. It’s the only app I’ve ever been happy to subscribe to.

What’s funny to me is that the Dutch people I know complain about their trains as much as the Germans I know.

Anon, she likes you so much that she’s dating you twice.

We should make our rich and powerful worried about communism again.

My dad was a boomer, he insisted that Phillips heads didn’t used to strip out this bad and it’s just that everyone switched to making shit cheap screws out of shit cheap material. He also lived to see the enshittification of appliances from something you buy once in your life to something you buy every five years (at least, according to the warranty) with a nifty galifty payment plan. Walking into home Depot instantly radicalized him.

Maybe. I wonder if a failure in 2024 is going to cause one of those huge poltical realignment. Trump has raised a lot of money, but he’s also costing Republicans big time. He keeps getting tangled up in lawsuits that the GOP is paying for, him and the entourage of scammers that hover around him have been very steadily siphoning money out of their voter base, and Trump candidates now seem to do great in primaries and flounder in general elections. I know more traditional conservatives that probably never would have voted blue but have broken with the GOP and are now voting against MAGA wherever it pops up. It kind of feels like the whole republican party is getting ready to implode under the weight of this bozo.