OpenStars

Third time's the charm? :-P

Thank you for reminding me: I am the center of the universe, believe it!

you can’t teach something that is fake.

Uh... I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you can though. Here's a little example:

Africa is a shithole country. White people were kind to accept the slaves that Africans themselves provided, and civilized them. They even gave them sammiches sometimes!

There problem solved: now little Timmy doesn't have to feel guilty about being the oppressor anymore! :-P Next week we'll cover how chaining native Americans to (active) hot stoves in >100 degree temps in the desert will help teach them the true meaning of Christianity...

As Global Warming slowly kills us all, try to enjoy it!:-) 😭

Next up, sipping on orphan tears.

Eventually you will also come to the question often expressed in the popular phrase: is it better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all? i.e., even as you retreat from hostile forces, what are you advancing towards, that is worthwhile? I am not very knowledgeable about this - most of my own advances irl have failed, though I do not really regret any of them, as each decision was made only with the knowledge that I had at the time, even if I have learned & changed & grown since.

The reason I bring it up is to help illuminate how boundaries need to be set even upon the very setting of boundaries (how meta!:-P). In the limit (I mean in the mathematical sense), the ultimate safety is achieved by walling off everyone and everything so that it cannot affect you in any way - I have heard that concept expressed as an analogy where someone builds a castle, and thereafter basically suffocates inside, walled off entirely from the world, both the bad but also the good from it.

At some point you (& me, and each of us, possibly uniquely for each situation even) will need to find the appropriate balance point b/t avoiding toxic people, vs. allowing contact with imperfect humans. If we cannot forgive them, at some level we cannot forgive the faults within ourselves, and that would be the ultimate tragedy - if we could not even stand to be around our very own selves! That said, it is an advanced concept, b/c for instance it does not mean that we should re-establish contact, or to not break away contact, from a toxic person. If anything rather, it is the ultimate severing of their "hold" over us, where we know that we will be okay regardless of what they do, even if we remain in contact with them (which would need to be decided on a case-by-case basis ofc, b/c the more contact we have with them, the more they influence us even if we fight tooth & nail against that).

Doesn't that sound nice, in theory? Sigh... I have literally no idea what it means though, in practice:-P. We, like them, are all just bumbling around in the dark, trying in our own way to do the best we know how. The difference is that at least you are making the attempt to illuminate the situation - and that will make a HUGE difference in the outcome!

Then this might help: remember that even as you try to set boundaries between yourself and others, you can set boundaries within yourself as well. e.g., you could watch a movie depicting a fictional narrative of a not-good-faith event, and decide to at least attempt to not be triggered, or at least quite as much. You cannot control the world, but you control your response to it, and you deserve to be happy:-). Though you need to find the route to get to it - even in spite of others attempting to ruin it for everyone around them, to become as unhappy as they are.:-(

I guess you already said this, sorta, in that when people act that way, you respond to increase your happiness by getting away from that source of toxicity. But I mean something deeper, which you may also already be doing, in terms of setting the boundaries within yourself, to not feel unhappiness about their actions.

What people "call" capitalism, vs. what capitalism actually is are two different things. According to wikipedia:

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.

Communism is... a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need.

Socialism is... social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.

So if you went to a public school in the USA, that's socialism, even though it's a primarily "capitalist" society in which private schools also can exist. Similarly the post office is heavily subsidized, so sending via Fed-Ex would be capitalism, vs. using the USPS is socialism, but both exist side-by-side in the USA, which is called "capitalist", even though much of what was considered "great" about it derived from the socialism components within it. The line between the two is a bit blurry.

Plus when you bail out a large corporation, it's one-way socialism where society accepts the burdens to pay the company when times are bad, yet also one-way capitalism where society does not directly reap any of the profits when times are good. That's a bastardization of all systems, and the only way I can think of to describe it is not capitalism, nor socialism, but "corruption". And it blurs the line still further, b/c it too exists in supposedly "capitalist" countries, but is not a defining feature of capitalism. Though it does create a lot of the hardships within capitalist nations.

A small mom-&-pop shop like a family restaurant is an example of capitalism, but I don't think that's evil to allow such a thing?

Suffering is produced by corruption, greed, large corporations that are indifferent to its workers, etc. A lot of that tracks along with capitalism - e.g. when you allow money to substitute for votes - but those things are not the defining features of capitalism, nor are all instances of capitalism evil, like those small mom-&-pop shops that just want to make food and through that, a life for themselves.

To me, the key is always good-faith.

Abso-frigging-lutely. Even the dumbest person, or maybe someone with a bad memory, but who is trying can eventually be trained, or else constrained, whereas a malicious actor can do everything "right", until they get what they wanted all along and then cause the highest magnitude of harm.

I like how you are approaching it intentionally, which demonstrates awareness and intent to make things better for yourself, and also others as you plan ahead for what is most important.

We ALL are that way. :-D

I thought some of the older ones, like 2000, were more secure, with ability to access on-chip security features. So ofc they threw all that out in favor of 10, the final OS that would come as a subscription service, meaning that you'd never need to buy one again. And then they threw that out too, in favor of the next one... and on and on it goes:-P.

I absolutely hate Windows:-(.