Politics
balerion
1 year ago
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0%
you are saying that discrimination is a reason to arm yourself. people are being discriminated against. therefore, you are saying people should arm themselves. what about this is so hard to understand?
I've read a decent amount of theory and the like, but I'm ashamed to say most of it has been written by straight white guys. However, I did very much enjoy *Racism without Racists* by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
sigh
Alright, what WAS I supposed to take from your post if not "minorities should arm themselves"?
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
You heavily implied that people of color, at least, should purchase firearms.
What? When the government tells you what your rights are that's good and normal, but when a random person tells you what your rights are that's fascism? Nothing about that makes any sense at all.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
God. If you're this deliberately dense, there's no point in arguing with you. Enjoy whatever this shit is rattling around in your brain. Blocked.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
Before I block you, I am simply going to drop this image from this article. I was mobile earlier, so my sources may not have been the best.
Oh, and this one is just for funsies: You have more success in not losing your property if you use literally any object other than a gun to defend yourself.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
My recommendation for people to arm themselves isn’t going to encourage to or dissuade anyone from doing so.
Then literally why say it?
they have a right to own them
Yeah, and maybe they shouldn't. There's lots of dangerous shit you have no right to possess. Guns should be in that category. And for the record, I don't believe the government should be sending armed people to enforce shit either.
You sound like my mother.
Smart woman.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
You sure did imply it. And nobody said you weren't in that group, merely that you did not speak for us.
balerion
1 year ago
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0%
Yeah, if I'd literally said, "I speak for us." All I said was, "You don't speak for us." Which is true. I never claimed to be speaking for anyone but myself.
balerion
1 year ago
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0%
Did I say I spoke for the entire class of people?
balerion
1 year ago
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0%
Because when you recommend that people arm themselves, you are talking to us too. Mental illness is much more common than you think, and becoming even more common as late capitalism exacerbates the conditions which produce some forms of mental illness. Moreover, mental illness can hit at any time. Someone who showed no symptoms of mental illness before can snap one day and commit suicide or murder their family. When you recklessly recommend that people buy guns, you are increasing the likelihood that someone will commit suicide or homicide, due to mental illness or otherwise.
balerion
1 year ago
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0%
I didn't say they weren't a vulnerable person, merely that even if they were they did not speak for us.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
To be clear, it wasn't "you have to do literally any paperwork" that stopped me. It was the sheer amount of paperwork and hoops you have to jump through in my state to get a gun.
If anyone is lying here, it's you. Literally just google it.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2763812
balerion
1 year ago
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0%
This is not about terminal illnesses. I too support euthanasia. This is about mental illness. The fact is that if more guns are purchased, more mentally ill people will die.
As someone who has attempted suicide many times, I have no idea what you're talking about. The fact is that if you want to end your life reliably and quickly, guns are your best bet by far. As part of being suicidal, I did intensive research into what the best way to kill myself was. The universal conclusion was guns. My other attempts did not work, obviously, and not for lack of trying. It is much, much harder to kill yourself than most people realize. Besides, statistics show that having a gun in the home significantly increases the likelihood of suicide.
Gas stoves used to be a popular method of suicide. Do you know what happened when they stopped being made? Suicides went down. So yes, the method of suicide IS responsible for suicides. It's not true that people will just find another method of killing themselves. Suicide is often undertaken on a whim and people who survive attempts often never wind up killing themselves.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
As the kind of person who is targeted by rising fascism, I would prefer you did not speak for us. I am firmly against gun ownership. The statistics show that having a gun on you makes you less safe, not more.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
People are numbers. Thinking you will be the exception to statistical realities is a fool's errand. And it would be all well and good if the only people who suffered from the myriad gun deaths in this country were the people who bought the guns, but that's not the case. They are also endangering their families and neighbors. It is just objectively true that you and the people around you become less safe, not more, the moment you buy a gun.
As someone who nearly killed myself with a gun and was only stopped because I was too depressed to fill out the paperwork to buy one, my life was directly saved by gun control. If I had lived in a state where buying a gun was easier, I would be dead. If I had still been living with my dad who owns guns, I would be dead. And I am part of a hated minority, just like the people you seek to protect. The statisical reality is that people like me are still more likely to kill ourselves with guns than to be killed by bigots, and moreover, that having a gun on you does not protect you from bigots. It only gives them something to take from you and use against you. Adding a gun to a situation only ever benefits the most violent and unhinged person in that situation.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
You are statistically much more likely to--accidentally or intentionally--kill yourself with a gun than successfully defend yourself against an attacker. Arming minorities will just result in more dead minorities.
LGBTQ+
A majority of Republicans now say same-sex relations are immoral after a year of 'groomer' attacks on the LGBTQ community
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
I wish the left (the real left, not corporate Democrats) were half as good at strategy as conservatives are. It's a shame such brilliance is wasted on the worst people on the planet.
TTRPGs count as gaming, right? So tell me a little about what you have going on! I'm currently in two DND 5e campaigns. The first one is a homebrew setting, but still pretty standard as far as DND settings go. All the usual races. My character is Velena Zausek, a level 3 half-drow draconic sorcerer. Her backstory is that her drow father escaped the Underdark when he was young, then he and her human mother went on to start a successful weaving business. One day a badly wounded man stumbled into their town and they gave him shelter, fully expecting him to die. But he miraculously recovered, and then he claimed to be a dragon in disguise. As thanks, he offered them a boon: He would ask his dragon god to bless their bloodline. Thinking he was just nuts, they accepted and thought nothing more of it... until Velena hit puberty and started growing scales and setting things on fire. When she reached adulthood, Velena inherited the weaving business but was bored to tears by it, so she decided to set out to be an adventurer. She and her buddies just finished fighting some drow who were about to sacrifice people to perform a ritual, and I suspect we'll try to figure out what their whole deal was as our next move. Oh, and one of the party members is a draegloth (drow monster thingy) who took one look at Velena and decided she must be in charge lmao. Velena didn't initially realize this, but upon figuring it out she is *so uncomfortable* with it. I'm loving roleplaying it. The second campaign is set in the [Old Margreve](https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/tales-of-the-old-margreve-for-5th-edition/), though I believe the DM just borrowed the setting and isn't planning on using any of the premade stuff otherwise. This campaign is newer, so I have less to say about it, but it seems really fun so far. Amusingly enough, we're following what seem to be drow through the forest, so drow are possibly the bad guys in both my campaigns. My character is a Tabaxi swashbuckler rogue named Wind on Water. He just hit 4th level, and if anyone has any suggestions for feats, that would be appreciated. (I already have Alert.) He doesn't have as much of a backstory as Velena, but he grew up dirt poor in a big city and is adventuring to make money for himself and his brother. He and one of the other PCs are con men who were hiding out from their last heist when they got roped into this adventure. Their game was that his companion would steal from nobles, then Wind would "catch" him and turn him in for a price before freeing him. Kind of like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, if you've seen that. Both Velena and Wind are a blast to play, but for very different reasons. Velena is my first DND character, so she's a lot like me because I figured that would be easier to roleplay. With Wind, I wanted to try something harder, so he's not much like me at all. But enough about my bullshit. Tell me about *your* bullshit!
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
I mean, look up "mindfulness" on Amazon. There are a million books for sale out there. And people like John Kabat-Zinn have made plenty of money selling mindfulness to everyone from mental health clinics to the military.
Mindfulness in this context is generally just defined as paying attention to the present moment. But that's ethically neutral and can be used to, for example, make the horrors of late-stage capitalism more bearable for its subjects, or to help soldiers focus on the act of killing rather than the horror of it.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
I'm not saying mindfulness can't have serious benefits. However, I would caution anyone who's into it to read the book McMindfulness. A lot of the "science" behind it doesn't stand up to scrutiny, there can be genuine drawbacks to it, and it's often used in unethical ways--like to make CEOs of ruthless companies more able to shove aside their feelings of guilt, or to sharpen the minds of soldiers for killing.
LGBTQ+
A majority of Republicans now say same-sex relations are immoral after a year of 'groomer' attacks on the LGBTQ community
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
yup. we have to raise hell ourselves, because even the non-queers who nominally support us won't always fight for us.
World News
Christian nationalism and biblical literalism independently predict conspiracy thinking, study finds
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
one kind of dumbass will also be another kind of dumbass. worth knowing, but not especially surprising
Antiwork
balerion
1 year ago
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69%
I can't back this up, but I've heard the mods there are literally feds.
People of Color
A non exhaustive list of studies showing racism continues to be an obstacle to success for black people in the USA.
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
Thanks for this. Arguing with racists is probably futile, but I continue to do it, and maybe this will help convince--if not the most virulent racists--the casual racists who just need to pull their heads out of their asses.
freecharity.carrd.co
I know a lot charities are terrible, and I can't guarantee that all of these *aren't* terrible, but I thought it might do more good than harm to compile this list. Feel free to let me know if you have any to add. Or if this would be better suited for a different community, as I didn't know where to put this.
Neurodivergence
ADHD/autism/etc. and justice sensitivity
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
Probably due to my own childhood experiences, it makes me very upset to see an individual or group persecuted because they are doing something or are something that is not harmful in any way whatsoever but have been arbitrarily categorized as unacceptable.
Holy shit, MOOD. I cannot stand people insisting that harmless things are bad just because they're weird/they're gross/they make them feel bad somehow. Especially from leftists like myself. They should know that that feeling is exactly the same feeling that drives conservatives to hate queer and kinky people.
When I see banal evil, or wrongdoing committed out of apathy and selfishness, I want to shake them and explain to them that they are deteriorating the social fabric and ultimately creating problems for themselves through sheer stupidity.
Right? Even if you don't care about anyone but yourself, YOU ALSO BENEFIT FROM THE WORLD BEING A BETTER PLACE. And you can actively contribute to that!
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
tfw you have to strike for the right to strike. what a world
I don't see how politely suggesting what a racist should do with their time is "threatening violence," but even if it were, we should *at least* both have received warnings.
ADHD and autism are both strongly correlated with justice sensitivity. If you need an explanation for what that is, here's a quote from [this article](https://edgefoundation.org/the-fairness-imperative-adhd-and-justice-sensitivity/): >Justice sensitivity is the tendency to notice and identify wrong-doing and injustice and have intense cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions to that injustice. People who are justice sensitive tend to notice injustice more often than others, they tend to ruminate longer and more intensely on that injustice, and they feel a stronger need to restore justice. Do y'all experience this? If so, how does it manifest? For me, I can't see injustice and do nothing. Failing to stand up for my beliefs makes me hate myself, and I'll usually do it even if I know it's a bad idea or I'm surrounded by people who disagree--if anything, I feel *more* compelled to do it then. Since some of my beliefs are wildly unpopular, this often winds up in me feeling ostracized, rejected, and depressed. I don't know what to do about this. I can't just not stand up for what I believe in--it's clearly the right thing to do. But it's a deeply unpleasant experience I keep repeating. I'll choose standing up for my beliefs over not being hurt if I have to, but that doesn't make it fun.
Memes
balerion
1 year ago
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66%
yes i have, and his argument is fucking stupid. marx is all right, but i straight-up hate engels.
Neurodivergence
Venting about medication shortages
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
I haven't been affected by the shortages myself, as apparently Vyvanse is unaffected, but I'm with you on this one. Fuck the DEA. They made it harder for my mom with chronic pain to get her meds during the crackdown on opiates.
The way to reduce medication abuse isn't by punishing people with legitimate need for the medication. It's by a) making society suck less so that people feel less compelled to abuse drugs, and b) providing support for addicts. Granted, I suppose the DEA doesn't have much power to do either of those things, but still. They could at least leave us alone.
Technology
Reddit CEO slams protesters as "landed gentry," says he'll change site rules
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
if MODERATORS are landed gentry, what the fuck does that make rich bastards like him?
World News
Republicans Declare Banning Universal Free School Meals a 2024 Priority
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
there are things you can do to start building a better world today, but it never feels like enough
World News
Republicans Declare Banning Universal Free School Meals a 2024 Priority
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
yeah, but if all the kids starve to death at least the drag queens can't groom them (by existing and sometimes reading stories aloud)
balerion
1 year ago
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55%
as a woke leftist, i hate tankies because y'all aren't leftists in any meaningful sense. the only difference between you and libs is which countries whose atrocities you justify.
balerion
1 year ago
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53%
i've read marx. at precisely no point does he say anything justifying the various atrocities state capitalist countries have committed. i think he's wrong about some stuff, but even if you accept that his word is gospel, tankies are still just people who took leftist principles as an excuse for the imposing the kind of brutal authoritarianism that leftists are supposed to be against.
Beehaw Support
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
It's too heavily stylized to resemble human children in any real way. Look at an anime child and tell me you wouldn't be horrified if that came to life. Being attracted to cartoons at all is a paraphilia.
Explain to me who is being hurt. If no real children are involved, I don't see what the harm is.
Beehaw Support
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
Ahhh, the ole "You defend weirdos? Seems pretty sus. Sure you aren't one of them?" response. To which I say: Of course I'm a weirdo! I'm a queer kinkster! Obviously I'm weird. Am I that specific kind of weirdo? No, but so what if I were? That wouldn't undermine my argument. My point is this: Is it weird and fucked up and creepy? Yeah, arguably. So? It's still not hurting anyone, and if you start moralizing based on your own personal feelings of disgust, that quickly leads you down a dark path of "anybody who does something that grosses me out is a bad person who must be stopped." That's exactly the same rhetoric conservatives use to go after anybody who fucks wrong in the privacy of their own bedroom, and I'm not about to become the thing I hate. Taking your side would make me a hypocrite as someone who cares about the freedom of adults to get off however they please.
Beehaw Support
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
You first.
Perhaps that content is more legally dubious than I realized, but claiming it's outright illegal is nonsense, and it's still true that almost nobody in the US is ever prosecuted for it.
Beehaw Support
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
I'm perfectly happy to die on the hill of freedom of expression because, as a queer person, I know that when people start coming for the harmless weirdos, I'm next. I've walked out of communities over this before, and I'm willing to do it again. Again, I have principles.
Absolutely no one is saying you should have to federate with instances like that if you so choose. I'm merely pointing out that it's not illegal, and perpetuating the stigma against being into weird but harmless shit will eventually come back to bite not just you, but anyone who likes anything that's not vanilla sex between a married man and woman under the covers with the lights off for the sole purpose of procreation. Puritans always go for the weirdos that even other weirdos don't like first. Then when they move onto something less weird, everyone is shocked and all "leopards ate my face." I've seen a disturbing trend of people equating what you enjoy in fiction to what you enjoy in reality over the past few years, and I feel a moral compulsion to fight back against it because I know that shit never ends well.
Beehaw Support
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
balerion
1 year ago
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100%
I'm not saying that this community should welcome it here. Like, not remotely saying that. Even leaving aside any other issues, this community disallows porn. I'm literally just saying that claiming it's illegal is nonsense. Hell, I wasn't even going to get into the moral side of things until alyaza took the tone they did.
I'm a huge fan of David Graeber. *Bullshit Jobs* was part of what radicalized me, and I read it whenever I'm feeling isolated and misunderstood by an unjust world. He gets it, man. His other works are amazing too, and I'd highly recommend them all to anyone interested in socialism. I'm still heartbroken that he died so young. Peter Kropotkin is another beloved author of mine. I'm not an ancom, but *A Conquest of Bread* is a great introduction to anarcho-communism, not to mention being beautiful and inspiring. Who do y'all like to read?
www.iheart.com
It's common among anti-tankie leftists to claim that China is a state capitalist economy, but as Mia Wong explains, the "state" part of that phrase is debatable. China is arguably just another neoliberal country with a more complicated chain of ownership for its corporations.
Transcript: Shere Khan: Myar! Sansa: MEEOO Sansa: MWEEW Me: Sansa, are you hungry? Sansa: meww Sansa: MYOWOW Me: Myow! Sansa: moo Me: Mow! Sansa: Myowwooo Me: What about you, Shere Khan? Shere Khan: Myap! Me: Yep. Sansa! Shere Khan: Myarreearr! Me: Oh, goodness. Sansa! Sansa: myoo :( Me: Moo! Sansa: myew!
Apparently these days, the most popular dream job among children is influencer. I've seen articles about it, and both the articles and the comments are invariably full of judgy statements about how Kids These Days^TM^ are such narcissists/their brains are being rotted by social media/they don't want to do anything valuable with their lives. But like. I think the kids are onto something, tbh. The thing is, working a 9-5 (or 8-5, as the average job is nowadays) job is a pretty shit deal. You have no say in your work environment and have to do whatever you're told. The hours make a medieval peasant's workload look light, and that's not even counting the commute you'll likely have to make. What little free time you have left over is spent recovering, so you don't have time to do anything fun. And you get to do this for the rest of your life. At least if you're an influencer, you set your own hours and may wind up working much less than 40 hours a week. You get to work from home, and there's a small chance you'll hit it big and get rich. There's zero chance of that at your standard office job. If you can swing it, it's not a bad deal at all. And I don't think there's anything morally wrong with being an influencer. Are some of them shitty? Sure. But that's true of any job. You could argue that being an influencer contributes nothing to society, but really, how many jobs *do* contribute anything worthwhile to the world? Is it really more respectable to type numbers into spreadsheets all day just to make your boss richer? Or to write up reports no one reads? At least influencers entertain people. TL;DR: The kids know the grind is bullshit, and they see becoming an influencer as a way to escape that.
Wore it and immediately got a dude telling me I'd "pay for that on Judgment Day." 10/10, have worn again.
EDIT: WHY DOES LEMMY GIVE YOU A - WHEN YOU HIT THE BULLET POINT ICON THEN THO -do -they -work? -or -do -they -not? * what * about * like * this
Hi. I've subscribed to several communities outside my instance already, but I'm having a problem where I can't seem to repeat the process for certain communities. For example, I wanted to go to /c/test on lemmy.ml. But going to lemmy.ml/c/test takes me outside of Beehaw, my home instance, so I can't post or subscribe from there. So I checked how I could visit this community, and its URL is https://beehaw.org/c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml. I then tried going to https://beehaw.org/c/test@lemmy.ml, but that gives me an error page. What do? I can't find /c/test on the communities page, either. Apologies if I'm being dumb.
Reddit Enhancement allows you to tag users. I'd like a similar feature on Lemmy, or at least a way to make notes on their profile like Mastodon lets you. Sometimes you want to tag someone's pronouns, or that they're a cool person, or that you suspect they have a trait that would make you block them but you don't know for sure yet. It's pretty useful.
Nonverbal learning disorder, that is. It's a rarely diagnosed visual/spatial reasoning disorder. I didn't know it even existed, let alone that I had it, until 4-5 years ago. NVLD's symptoms include poor visual memory, difficulty in social situations due to trouble reading body language, problems with disorganization, issues with math and/or reading comprehension, poor motor skills, etc. People with NVLD often develop strong auditory memories to compensate for these deficits. For example, I can easily repeat a phone number that was said aloud to me, but can't remember one I saw written. Children with NVLD often have big vocabularies and excellent verbal skills, which can lead to them "talking like adults" at a young age. This, among other things, can sometimes lead to NVLD being confused for autism. ADHD is also a common mixup, though of course there's no reason you can't have two or even all three. Here's an article about it: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/nonverbal-learning-disorder Examples of my NVLD-related traits: -I'm easily overstimulated by too much noise. Stick me in a loud crowded room without my ADHD meds, and I'll quickly need to put in earbuds to cope. Visual stimuli don't really have the same effect on me. -When I see a wall of text, my brain just shuts down and refuses to process it. Highlighting random bits of text to break it up helps. -I love podcasts and prefer audiobooks to regular books. -When I'm using Google Maps, I always have it on the directions view rather than the map view. I can't read a map nearly as well as I can follow written directions. -I can tell people's moods better from their voices than their faces. -I once drove around a gas pump at least twice trying to make my gas port (is that the term?) line up with the nozzle. (In my defense, my brain was fried that day. It's not usually that bad.) -No amount of playing first-person shooters has made my aim improve past mediocre, and that's being generous. -I suck at math lol
Disclaimer: I have no quarrel with the mods using the term in the creation of this community. I understand why they chose it, as even if they share my disagreement with the term when applied to ADHD, there's not really a better inclusive term. "Mental illness" is really the only other option, and naming a community that would probably invite darker discussions that the mods might not be prepared to handle. Another disclaimer: I think the term is perfectly valid when applied to autism, as autism is not, to the best of my knowledge, a mental illness so much as a difference in processing. Being autistic is only "bad" in the sense that our society discourages autistic traits. (Apologies if this is wrong; I'm neither autistic nor especially knowledgeable about autism.) The term "neurodivergent" implies that there's nothing wrong with you if you have ADHD--you're just special and different. But my ADHD is an illness that requires treatment. A lot of people will tell you that the only reason ADHDers struggle is because society is set up wrong, but I don't think that's true, at least for me. Being unable to remember anything, unable to self-start, and hypersensitive to rejection would be massive problems in any world. Sure, the world today is particularly brutal for ADHDers in a way we could probably mitigate if we reorganized society to be kinder, but that doesn't mean ADHD isn't ultimately a disorder that some people *need* to treat with medication and therapy.
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:/ This *removed* right here. My guess is that I'll need yet another one to determine if I have sleep apnea. This whole thing is such a massive pain in the ass, I just want to cry. I had a sleep study at home a couple years ago because I'm a pretty low-energy person and the doctors wanted to know if there was something wrong with my sleep. It showed sleep apnea. So I tried a CPAP, and I *could not* sleep with it on. I tried for like a year. I think I got maybe one night of sleep with it in that whole time. So I decided to ask if I could get a mouth guard or something else to treat it. But then they wanted me to do another at-home sleep study. I did, and it showed no sleep apnea. So they wanted me to get one done at a sleep center. After putting it off for like a year, I finally made the appointment a few days ago and got it done last night. But, as per the title, I didn't fucking sleep. I think it was at least partly because of the thing that connected to my nose--I have trouble tolerating things on my face while I sleep. I hate this so much. I know that living with untreated sleep apnea is really bad for you, and it makes me so anxious to know that that's probably going on with me. I won't even know the results of the "sleep" study for another 2-3 weeks, and then I'll probably have to make another appointment to try again. Fuck this. No wonder I put it off for so long.
Here are my two SIC gremlins, Sansa (skinny) and Shere Khan (chonk). Show me your pets! Edit: No idea why it's marked as potentially mature. Just looks like two tabbies to me.
See title. It would be nice to be able to see deeper into threads, but I don't think it's literally ever worked for me. I'm on Firefox, if that helps.
Just curious. I crochet a bunch, newly including Tunisian crochet. Tried knitting but that shit's hard, and slowwww. Might use my knitting skills for super small stuff like washcloths, but I doubt I'd have the patience to create anything bigger. Crochet, though. Crochet is dope. My favorite thing to make is scarves. They're nice and easy but useful and usually don't require you to count stitches like hats and other circular things do. I donate a lot of scarves and the occasional hat or blanket to local mutual aid organizations. I may post some pics of my crochet later on, but atm I'm at work and can't do so.