SeeingRed [he/him]

This is definitely good news. It’s too bad they didn’t go as far as Cuba on their most recent rewrite of family law, but I’m glad things are moving in the right direction.

I hope Didi gains custody of her son soon enough, that will also be a win when it happens.

Same concept could apply to lots of things. Even something like theory. We should understand the basics, and then read that which is relevant or interesting to us. Having a backlog creates anxiety if you feel obligated to complete it. Keeping track of what you have done and how you felt about it (or even more detailed notes as should be done with theory) sounds like a really good way to make something more engaging and a better way to have sustainable motivation.

Definitely doesn’t apply to other things like work or household chores. You need to complete all the items on the to-do list for those, though items can usually be post-poned or shared with others in the event of time and resource constraints.

I believe it could just be “awe” or “awestruck” with it’s roots in both awesome and awful. Though the context of the modern usage of “awe” is maybe not quite right.

The specific context here would be closer to breaking free of the simulacrum of the hyperreal (media, digital life, and our daily work) and seeing reality as it is. I’m not sure that there is a single word for this combined concept and feeling, though it would be a good one to know.

The hyperreal concept is interesting, though I admittedly don’t know much about it.

So often our whole world is just the things on the screen in front of us. Everything around us is filtered out and ignored.

However, every once in a while, that small piece of light ceases to be a world and becomes just a screen. The physical glass and electronics lose their status as a world and become just the physical objects. You now notice how they feel, how the borders of the device look, how it sounds to tap on it. The rest of the room comes into focus and your mind realizes that there is a world outside the room. The room, the screen, the whole world, shaped by other humans fills you with hope and sadness. You realize you live on just one spec of dust in a vast cosmos. But that spec is important and precious, because it is where you, and everyone else is. All these things are real, all have a story to tell. The people all have wants, fears, desires, but your interactions with them are superficial, mediated by tiny interactions, or just through the physical stuff they made which you interact with. You want to scream and cry from the sublime understanding of it all.

As quickly as it arrived, it is gone, the screen beckens you back and the world fades away into the background and you become immersed in the digital realm once again. Your eyes and brain filtering out everything but the screen, your fingers nothing more than a means of changing the screen, your body and mind, no longer important, is forgotten.

This article is a shotgun of bad faith arguments and easily debunked propaganda. Feels like it was written by a bot that was just fed on western news. No original thoughts in the article, it’s just a summary of every propaganda point I’ve heard in the last few years.

Honestly, it could be a good starting point for a list of common propaganda talking points and their counter arguments. I don’t think I’ve seen such high density before.

The whole article relies on the reader already accepting every point it makes as fundamentally true, kind of like a political speech in the west. Responding to this sort of piece requires significantly more effort than it took to make the article.

🫡

I genuinely recommend reading the book, it won’t take you that long.

Key points I got are:

1. Summary of the US policy toward Russia post USSR up to present

2. There is a history of NATO moving east, and also a history of US weapons testing near the border and backing out of nuclear and arms treaties.

3. Preliminary integration of Ukraine military and economy prior to any admittance into NATO, effectively making them an arm of NATO without formal admission

4. A bunch of other history which contextualizes things. Seriously good extra context if you are not familiar with the history.

5. Ultimately, the US and NATO are far more at fault for the tensions that led to the current crisis.

The only thing I could think of would be him trying to get Ben’s visa revoked. China has pretty strict non-criminal record requirements on their visas (at least on work visa, not sure about other types).

Goodbye Petrodollar, history will not miss you.

It’s a ways to go still, but this is a promising sign.