Dragons don’t care about tourism or the economy. They only care about gold and being feared.

Hey family, who wants to go to Alligator Alcatraz this year?

Don’t get me wrong I would love to see her run for office. I think it would need to be something with authority though to do as much good as she is now.

Like Prime Minister or whatever they call the top position in her country.

Even if she didn’t win, she could move the needle a lot.

But that’s just one country, what she’s doing now moves the hearts and minds of folks globally.

Move your attention from your thoughts about what you could be doing, to your breath and your body.

I find my feet can be quite grounding, as our feet have a lot of nerve endings in them, they’re pretty sensitive like the hands. And usually our thoughts you know, we experience those in our head, because we associate it with our hearing.

By moving my attention down to a different part of my body, it helps to make the thoughts feel less intrusive. You don’t have to push the thinking away or get rid of it, just put most of your attention someplace else.

A lot of mindfulness meditation is this practice. And body scans and walking meditation are a couple of nice alternatives to sitting that can work well even when restless.

There’s politics and establishment politics.

What Greta is doing is a political act, it raises global awareness, which puts pressure on politicians to act or risk losing their offices to folks who will.

And if needed the tech fascists will pull a Weekend at Bernie’s using AI and body doubles. Assuming they don’t believe JD is up for the job.

Fascism isn’t ending with him dieing.

Bet your life on it.

National Guard in major cities.

Make obvious jokes that a computer will think is real.

I saw an AI quote what was obviously a joke somebody dropped on Facebook about bees getting drunk.

So basically just have a sense of humor.

I’m not making an argument. I’m learning to identify with a bigger picture for my sanity.

My heart weeps greatly for all of the species that are going extinct on this planet.

And I find some hope that life itself will continue here, even if it’s not complex life. Life has survived extinction events before. Life is adaptable.

I’m trying to be less attached to the form life takes, because I can’t stop climate change.

So it’s something that gives me peace. It’s not an argument that what is happening is right. Because it’s not.

Anarcho-communism is the way.

There is one source.

I recommend reading nurturing our humanity. Primates have two observable social systems. And they both exist in all societies along a spectrum.

Domination and partnership.

The more domination based a society, the more everybody suffers. Including those higher in the social hierarchy.

Working class men, they are in a strange place because they have hierarchical status based on gender but not based on economic class. This makes it difficult for them to find solidarity with women. And thus more lonely in a system of loneliness.

Communists would blame capitalism of course, and they’re not exactly wrong because capitalism is a domination-based system. Marx called this phenomena alienation.

Feminists would blame patriarchy, and again they are not wrong it is a domination-based system.

So on and so forth, but we can take a step back and look at ourselves as apes and see domination is the problem. The will to power.

Buddhism calls this energy Mara, and would call the partnership energy Buddha nature.

It’s all the same thing, it’s a strategy apes use to relate to each other and survive. Partnership is a better strategy. Assuming your goal is the health of society and the planet rather than personal gain.

Yeah I also disagreed, I’ve read some very compassionate takes on men’s situation written by academic feminists.

Bell hooks the will to change for example. Women can be experts on gender, and how systems of domination effect everyone. Men included.

On the other hand, belle hooks’, The Will to Change, is one of the most compassionate and understanding takes on the subject.

So she has an opinion on the validity of the experience, and it is that capitalism and patriarchy is alienating for men, just like it is for others. Especially working class men.

Nurturing Our Humanity, co-written by a female author, uses system science and primatology to validate what men experience in domination based societies.

I know your point was more long the lines of critics shouldn’t criticize things that they don’t understand, but there are a lot of feminists that do understand and have an informed opinion, because they study how these systems of domination affect everyone, not just women.

I was also uncomfortable being in there. And I agree with you that the article doesn’t give us enough background of what was going on, because obviously there’s a lot more to the story if the school board did find that these kids were bullying.

And I agree that filming wasn’t appropriate, presumably there would have been a lot of boys in there that weren’t bullies.

Anyway, I think there is a lot more to this story than what is in the article. So us from the outside, it’s just conjecture. The scoreboard made a decision on what they thought was going to keep kids safe. And their decision was to suspend kids they perceived as being bullies.

I have a kid too, and it eats at me.

But I find comfort in the fact that life will carry on, even if my kid can never have the future I hoped for him when he was born.

It’s what gives me some comfort. Taking a larger perspective than just worrying about how humanity will fair.

If there was a girl in my locker room in school, I would have been uncomfortable too.

I was referencing specifically this part of your post.

But I agree with your take overall. And see that in the quoted text you were referencing the boys perceptions. But it also sounds like this harassment was ongoing, hence the trans boy feeling the need to record it. Calling him a girl was likely part of that harassment. They likely know he’s trans. But are learning a lot of exclusionary rhetoric from their peers and likely adults too. Which they used to harass and exclude the trans boy.

We need education, inclusion. And yeah, safe gender neutral spaces too.

Civilization doesn’t equal the world. Life will carry on and heal from the damage us ‘smart apes’ have done in our hubris.

It sounds like there wasn’t a girl in the locker room, but a trans boy.

I’m not saying that isn’t awkward, but your perception of events aren’t exactly accurate either.

I’m trans personally, and I think the solution to this is more gender-neutral spaces. If I use the men’s room, I make men uncomfortable because I’m a woman. If I didn’t pass, I might make folks uncomfortable in the women’s room instead.

The issue is the gender binary and our cultures discomfort of anything outside it. Not that a trans boy was more comfortable in the boys locker room.

That said, I don’t think the trans boy should have been filming. I get the he wanted to catch the harassment on video, but an audio recording would have served the same purpose.

Because they are taking the entire cost of the operation, and dividing it by the number of folks deployed.

So that includes logistics, housing, food, equipment maintenance. Including those big expensive fucking trucks, etc etc. And of course, the MIC gets a big cut too.

Payroll is probably a small portion of that $530.

I hear you. And honestly we need to be better about using the hate crime enhancer for violent crimes generally.

But, I’d prefer to live in a society that doesn’t tolerate hateful criminal behavior. If someone wants to call me a trans slur that sucks, but if someone spray painted hateful slurs on my property, I’d like that to be prosecuted with a more serious consequence than simple vandalism.

And, I have no idea how to frame it so that more violent offenses aren’t watered down. But, as I mentioned at the outset, we don’t use the enhancer often enough as it is. And maybe if we used it for less violent offenses, with smaller enhancers, we’d normalize using it more generally.