Anger is a tactic people use to prevent themselves from feeling vulnerable.

Anger is also a quick way to forge a group identity, joining people who don't want to feel vulnerable collectively.

But anger is a fragile bonding agent.

Anger is fickle, constantly seeking out new rationales and targets. And sometimes anger just ends.

The entire social experiment we commonly call #Twitter demonstrated very clearly to me that sarcasm is a hugely overrated way to dialogue.

Especially in a text-based medium void of other non-verbal cues, it misfired so spectacularly, and with such regularity (and still does), that its impulse should be generally resisted. Further, the failure was most often blamed on the reader and not the writer, only serving to widen the chasm.

Sincerity is a far likelier path to a meeting of the minds.

A great irony: everything I see with United/Unity in its name has stark, glaring divisions in it.

And my current my current go-to platform for building community is called Discord.

#weird

Elon Musk selling his $44bn website right now would be remarkably similar to Monty Python's parrot sketch.

"I'd like to complain about this bird you sold me."

"Oh? What's wrong with it?"

"It's dead."

"It's not dead. It's resting. A remarkable bird. Lovely plumage!"

"It's not resting. It's passed on. This is an X-Twitter."

Have they considered giving Star Peace a chance?

If you like to consume your climate change news with heaping side-dishes of humour, thorough research and satirical paranoia take-downs, let me introduce you to:

The Climate Denier's Playbook

This episode is where I started, and I laughed out loud several times, for whatever that's worth:

https://art19.com/shows/the-climate-deniers-playbook/episodes/88cadede-8af4-48ab-9a81-cb215c36d48a

Content warning: the vocabulary gets spicy at times.

#politics
#religion

Saying "there are extremists on both sides" is an easy way to dodge & minimise the blatant, totalising way conservatives are entrenching their prejudices into politics and law.

The imbalance between the desire for dignity on the left and the escalating clamour of antagonising supremacism which has reached mainstream on the right is simply staggering.

Never let people get away with both-sidesism. It's a horrid lie.

I follow a few different people on Substack, and I think we're at an interesting crossroads.

There are journalists and reporters who are finding their voice in a grassroots channel and allowing their presence, their sources and their material to shine. They're building their credibility and careers up from the foundations.

At the other end of the spectrum, corporations with no journalistic integrity whatsoever pay their people to spout inane, antisocial misinformation.

Strange days.

I keep looking at the antogonising politicking and the outrage factories and thinking about how this is beyond arranging deck chairs on the Titanic -- it's playing musical chairs on the Titanic.

Silly games to try to prevent certain people from having a place to sit, when the whole ship is on a steady course for the iceberg.

"Our global civilization is on an unsustainable course because the meaning we've derived from the world has historically been based on disconnection."

--Jeremy Lent, The Patterning Instinct

I've cobbled together a playlist of random scores from Ennio Morricone and Lalo Schifrin which I've been playing off and on all week.

These composers and the musicians around them made so much beautiful music -- it's staggering!

I will never see all of these movies, but the music stands on its own.

Has anyone here had any success asking a "think for yourself" reality-denier if they've ever allowed the possibility to dawn on them that people who think differently than they do *are* actually thinking for themselves?

I mean, it's such an unserious argumentative gambit, but it's still attempted with surprisingly regularity, with apparently unassailable levels of pomposity.

There is a tough problem that creative/artistic people face:

Insecurity.

One way it shows up is in the drive to do too much; anything to prove the worth of the creative person.

The person ends up over-extending, eventually burning out, and ultimately letting people down. The creative person internalises this as a failure of not doing enough, and vows to correct that the next time out, ensuring that the cycle repeats.

"Know your worth" is about much more than charging a sustainable rate.

I just saw that a metal computer monitor stand is offered in woodgrain colour.

That's weird, right?

Like: "Get the warm aesthetics of a natural material by adding another layer of plastic coating to steel!"

Yep. Weird.

It reminds me of the giant woodgrain stickers they put on the sides of station wagons in the US all the way into the 90s. Or the wood-coloured plastic pieces cars have in their interiors. Or leather texture applied to plastic and vinyl.

[cue Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees]

If you support World Vision, you should know that part of your donation goes to paying Google to feature them in search results for other charitable organisations.

"Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up." -- this throwaway line from the Princess Bride is actually a profound reflection on the best we can ever hope for.

I just went looking for it again. It's from John Mayer:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CwdOVWPswm8/