I didn’t know how messed up it was at the time, but with the hindsight of what I know now: Hebrew school telling me I could go on a free trip to Israel after my Bar mitzvah. I didn’t go mostly because I didn’t like religion or having to go to boring temple all the time, but now that I know about the genocide and the Birthright trip being this super messed up propaganda tool for impressionable teenagers I’m really glad I didn’t go.

Semi recently. I’ve got a group of college friends who hang out on discord most nights to game and chat. Most of the time it’s shooting the shit, but we occasionally mix in life talk. We all have some bundle of mental health issues, so stuff related to that comes up a lot. One of my friends has been trying to find a romantic partner and we’ve been giving our fairly limited advice to him on his search.

It’s kind of a shame that we’re not geographically close enough to see each other in person to be more directly supportive, but it is what it is and we’ve had a few visits over the years. ATM I’m with 2 of them on a trip and we got to spend a lot of time chatting.

Yeah, but why did it turn out differently like that? Europe surely had its own class of capitalists and other entrenched interests. They could have pushed for similar suppression measures.

Maybe it had something to do with the difference in fallout from WWII? Idk. I’m not super well read on this subject in particular, so I don’t know enough to do anything but speculate.

Like most of these kinds of problems, the answer can be boiled down to a simple commonality: The people who stand to lose the most from things changing for the better are the same people who have the most power to influence the outcomes. The only thing that can counter that is a strong labor movement.

Now, there is a more complicated question to be asked about why US labor movements have been less successful than their European counterparts, but that I don’t have an easy answer for.

Do you think they’d actually bring back the draft? I feel like after Vietnam they realized that it’s too hard to send the general population to do terrible shit without getting a lot of pushback. A professional military that’s already filtered out anyone with a conscience is half of why they can just do shit like this while most of the country doesn’t want it. Plus technology has improved a lot, allowing a smaller force to do the same thing.

As for me. I’m already out of that age range, but I’ve already been wanting to move for a while. Maybe that would be the last kick in the pants necessary to get me to actually do it. But with the depression it’s still kind of a coin flip so….

The thing that bothers me about the whole discussion around the Epstein files is why do people think THIS will be any different? The rich and powerful have been getting away with heinous and illegal things in public for a long time. Wars which aren’t just immoral, but illegal by both international law and the laws of our own country. Gross violations of civil liberties and human rights. Police just straight up kill people and get away with it. Illegal torture facilities. Companies have killed tons of people through either negligence or outright malicious greed. Etc.

We KNOW about all of these thing already. Some were just straight up done in public, some done in private but eventually got leaked or declassified, but either way, we’ve had plenty of evidence of these people doing things that should have put them away for the rest of their lives and the worst consequences they’ve ever suffered were slap on the wrist fines if they even got those.

To me, the Epstein files are a perfect crystallization of the broader reality that the rich and powerful can use their money and influence to commit crimes with impunity. The idea that they are distracting from these crimes by committing even bigger crimes is just sheer absurdity. Not in the sense that it may be wrong, but rather how it shows how fucking insanely broken our system is. If you can get out of one crime by going out and murdering a bunch of people… what the hell are we even doing? Why do we think any of these people will ever pay for their crimes? The very system that would do that has been corrupted by those same criminals. They’re not going to put themselves, their buddies, or their benefactors in jail.

Something needs to change. Something needs to be done. But the idea that all that we need is for people to see the complete evidence of this particular set of crimes and the legal system will finally work properly is beyond delusional.

Other people have good real answers, so here’s my joke answer:

Clothes and fire. Humans evolved to live in the climate of Africa, then one day some genius had to invent stuff that let them move to everywhere else in the world, and now thousands of years later, I’m freezing my ass off and my skin is dry for like a third of the year.

Yeah I shower right after. Shower temp is a bit inconsistent but I try to get it to be warm but not hot. I use body wash in the shower then I do moisturize and then I’ve been using clyndamycin that I was prescribed for this issue.

When you say do sets and groups, do you mean to do each of the exercises one time a day or only one part of the body rotating each day?

Also should I still pair this with the running? How much could I reduce my running if I started doing these? I’m currently doing an hour. I start seriously sweating after like 15 mins maybe and by around 40 mins I’m usually out of towels.

Also perhaps this is a silly question: But do you know a good set of workouts that I could do while watching anime? That’s what I do while running to keep my brain occupied and part of the reason I stopped going to the gym a while ago was because I couldn’t really do more than listen to podcasts, which isn’t really enough of a distraction. In other words, exercises I could do while facing towards a stationary screen like a tablet or maybe I could do some in front of the TV.

huh. I actually did start one somewhat recently (a few months now) and that somewhat coincided with when I increased my run from 30->60 mins. I do end up sweating a lot on my head, although also on the chest, back, and armpits. Probably not a reason to swap off the meds, but good to know I guess.

Thanks. I think I’ll at least try the running shirts. At the moment I just use whatever t-shirt I happen to be wearing that day. I guess if the sweat evaporates faster that is sort of a solution.

At least for now I mostly just want to exercise in the house. I have some mental health issues and I find that unless I have something to watch to distract me, I can’t really exercise for long without getting bored/stressed/mentally tired.

Perhaps when that issue is better I’ll do a wider variety of activities like swimming, but of course weight can contribute to those problems, so it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation.

That’s not really my concern. The issue is comfort and I end up getting a lot of pimples, which excessive sweat can contribute to.

I started doing this when I went away to college. I think it was some mix of not having parents to tell me to go to sleep, feeling like I needed to reclaim some time for myself when the rest of my day was so busy, and maybe being a bit lonely far away from home.

I almost exclusively watch HS BG. It’s the right level of enough stuff happening that it occupies my mind while I’m conscious but it’s not something I care about missing any of it and they’re generally chill enough to not overexcite me or shock me awake. Plus they usually have on some generic chill music in the background.

I set a timer to shut off my tablet after an hour and with only a few exceptions I don’t ever stay awake long enough to see it shut off.

I haven’t done enough research to know how well it does in every category, but I was recently thinking of moving to Vietnam for similar reasons. I’ve learned a decent amount about it and while it’s definitely still a developing country, it seems like it’s oriented in the direction I want. It’s been making huge strides towards poverty reduction and while it’s not entirely there, it’s getting close. Similar to modern China, while it has markets, the government does a lot to make sure important things are adequately addressed including stuff like infrastructure and apparently they’re getting close to implementing universal healthcare. They have an unaligned foreign policy. From what I’ve seen, the government seems reasonably responsive to the people. And lastly it sounds like they’re reasonably friendly towards foreigners. I’m kind of shocked they’re not more pissed at Americans, but apparently there are US expats living there who have said they have good experiences with the people.

The problem with me moving anywhere right now though is I’m super depressed, so doing all the things I’d need to do to move, including learning a foreign language, would be really difficult for me and I’m not sure I’m ready to live without my current support network. It’s kind of stressful though because it really does feel like it might be urgent to leave now. Even before Trump I hated it here, but now it looks like the fascism train is rapidly accelerating and I’m an autistic Jewish communist. I might not be immediately in the crosshairs thanks to me being white, but I doubt I’m that far down the list.

We like to think we have rule of law, but in practice that is a fairly flimsy concept that ultimately depends on how many people in power are willing to adhere to it. Something could be against the law, the Supreme Court could rule that it’s against the law, (although with all the right wingers they stacked the court with, even that’s not gonna happen often.) the legislature could object, but at the end of the day, if the executive instructs the government workers to do something and they’re willing to do it, well… they can do it. So the politics of those government workers ultimately determines what can and can’t be done. And since those workers are downstream of appointments made by the executive… they’re likely to agree with them. And we see that bear out especially in the military and law enforcement agencies. The culture of these institutions is fairly right wing and the people in them have demonstrated a willingness to follow illegal orders and commit some truly heinous acts, even if they rationalize it as “just following orders.”

It’s not just under Trump either. The government has been acting in ways that violate our own laws for a long time. Every war we’ve been in since WWII has been an illegal act since they were never formally declared as wars and many of the things done in them have violated various international humanitarian laws. Police have straight up killed people without trial and were protected by their fellow officers and the government. And of course now we see ICE agents be more than willing to commit crimes to pursue this anti-immigrant agenda, whether they are just following along or they’re also ideologically committed to this.

So yeah. The answer can be anything as long as he find enough amoral right wingers or pushovers to staff the administration.

Thanks. I never thought of that. /s

Depression. Lots of depression. And anxiety. And probably some other stuff.

Tried tons of different treatments and nothing has really worked. Going to try therapy again on recommendation of my psychiatrist, but I’ve only had negative experiences with therapy and I still really don’t see how it’s going to fix anything.

Unfortunately this is the movie. So it’s longer and we have to pay for it.

During high school I did a summer study program in France and also briefly went to Amsterdam for a weekend.

In college I took a vacation with some college friends in Japan, going to several cities across the country. It’s kind of funny, we’re all weebs, but one of my friends learned Japanese in college and he’s pretty much fluent. He actually speaks better Japanese than Chinese despite being from a family that immigrated over here from China this generation lol.

It was definitely nice seeing the different kind of things they had in those countries as well as a lot of the similarities. That said, I don’t know that I know enough about them to talk intelligently about their modern politics.