Tootfinder

How popular media gets love wrong
Had some thoughts in response to a post about loneliness on here. As the author emphasized, reassurances from people who got lucky are not terribly comforting to those who didn't, especially when the person who was lucky had structural factors in their favor that made their chances of success much higher than those is their audience. So: these are just my thoughts, and may not have any bearing on your life. I share them because my experience challenged a lot of the things I was taught to believe about love, and I think my current beliefs are both truer and would benefit others seeing companionship.
We're taught in many modern societies from an absurdly young age that love is not something under our control, and that dating should be a process of trying to kindle love with different people until we meet "the one" with whom it takes off. In the slightly-less-fairytale corners of modern popular media, we might fund an admission that it's possible to influence love, feeding & tending the fire in better or worse ways. But it's still modeled as an uncontrollable force of nature, to be occasionally influenced but never tamed. I'll call this the "fire" model of love.
We're also taught (and non-boys are taught more stringently) a second contradictory model of love: that in a relationship, we need to both do things and be things in order to make our partner love us, and that if we don't, our partner's love for us will wither, and (especially if you're not a boy) it will be our fault. I'll call this the "appeal" model of love.
Now obviously both of these cannot be totally true at once, and plenty of popular media centers this contradiction, but there are really very few competing models on offer.
In my experience, however, it's possible to have "pre-meditated" love. In other words, to decide you want to love someone (or at least, try loving them), commit to that idea, and then actually wind up in love with them (and them with you, although obviously this second part is not directly under your control). I'll call this the "engineered" model of love.
Now, I don't think that the "fire" and "appeal" models of love are totally wrong, but I do feel their shortcomings often suggest poor & self-destructive relationship strategies. I do think the "fire" model is a decent model for *infatuation*, which is something a lot of popular media blur into love, and which drives many (but not all) of the feelings we normally associate with love (even as those feelings have other possible drivers too). I definitely experienced strong infatuation early on in my engineered relationship (ugh that sounds terrible but I'll stick with it; I promise no deception was involved). I continue to experience mild infatuation years later that waxes and wanes. It's not a stable foundation for a relationship but it can be a useful component of one (this at least popular media depicts often).
I'll continue these thoughts in a reply, by it might take a bit to get to it.
#relationships

When Nixon adopted Goldwater’s Southern Strategy and won, that was a party realignment. The new foundation of the Republican coalition was “throw anti-Black racism lots of ethnonationalist red meat so they support the concentration of wealth.”
I’d venture that ethnonationalism captured to concentrate power is (or inexorably becomes) fascism. Nixon’s realignment made the Republican Party the fascist party.
@…’s post below on this topic touched off my train of thought here:
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https://jorts.horse/@AnarchoNinaWrites/114926186431482846

Sources: Applied Compute, a pre-launch reinforcement learning startup founded by three former OpenAI staffers, raised $20M at a $100M valuation led by Benchmark (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/ex-openai-applied-compute-raises-20m…

Ex-OpenAI Staffers Raise $20M For New Startup Applied Compute
The reinforcement learning startup founded by Rhythm Garg, Linden Li and Yash Patil was valued by VCs at Benchmark, Sequoia and others at $100 million pre-launch.

Notice scientists aren't exactly beating down Canada's door either.
Perhaps if we funded post-secondary and research. 🧐
or maybe even provded tuition some or all free education like most of those in this list
#braindrain #education https://mas.to/@mikegalsworthy/114584609202908831

Réfutation des affirmations de Soteria International sur la "communauté bouddhiste persécutée OKC" et son fondateur Robert Spatz
https://blog.rmendes.net/2024/12/15/rfutation-des-affirmations.html

Réfutation des affirmations de Soteria International sur la "communauté bouddhiste persécutée OKC" et son fondateur Robert Spatz - rMdes - a place to write and think freely
En tant que victime, survivant de la dérive sectaire Ogyen Kunzang Chöling (OKC) et défenseur de la justice, des droits des enfants, des droits humains et de la …

McCarthyism was rate limited by the number of people engaged,
the amount of money available,
the legal frameworks in place,
and the media environment,
in a way that is very different from what universities will face
not just in the next three years
but until we find a way to contain these people

TL;DR: Before the US bullied the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor its office was about to submit international arrest warrants against racist Israeli government members Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
"ICC reportedly weighed arrest warrants for Ben-Gvir, Smotrich before prosecutor's leave"

At its core, #CCSignals is an attempt by Creative Commons, a Silicon Valley-based organisation, to legitimise the AI grifts of its donors – Google, Microsoft, and Meta (Zuckerberg).
Creative Commons was always a thinly-veiled attempt at enabling Big Tech data farmers to get more data (that’s why the whole “open data” realm is so well funded/popular – open as in “open for business” not fre…

Right now, there is a •preposterous• amount of money devoted to propping up an AI industry that is causing massive environmental damage, sits on unethical foundations, is enriching some of the worst people on earth, nurses a whole mountain of fascist fantasies (https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/114559604028049328), and isn’t even profitable.
For all those reasons, I’m really, really careful about what kind of hype I share. And — this is important! — I’m careful about what kind of hype I allow to get inside my own head.
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Right now, there is a •preposterous• amount of money devoted to propping up an AI industry that is causing massive environmental damage, sits on unethical foundations, is enriching some of the worst people on earth, nurses a whole mountain of fascist fantasies (https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/114559604028049328), and isn’t even profitable.
For all those reasons, I’m really, really careful about what kind of hype I share. And — this is important! — I’m careful about what kind of hype I allow to get inside my own head.
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