I found my cat as a maybe 4wk old kitten, wet and flea infested on the side of the road. He grew up with Australian Shepherds as his siblings, and his favorite play move with them is to flip upside down and let the nibble his belly while he gently bats their muzzle. I may have reprogrammed a cat.

I read that in belch.

Make sure the jail will accept the donation before you stock up. Different institutions might have different approved supplier lists because there have been issues with contraband as well as administrators who just like to make having even the simplest of comforts as difficult as possible. Having been a volunteer with the incarcerated, don’t forget that depending on where you live you might have a lot of folks who don’t read English and would appreciate books in their language, and middle school/high school reading level books might be appropriate for some of the folk’s current reading level. I’ve generally found that public, school, and college library discards can be arranged if there’s no middle man handling the books. Even slightly outdated textbooks are useful for people studying for GED or learning ESL.

You guys get vacations?

Elaborate. I’d like to hear your opinions on why.

Sugar, unbleached enriched flour, palm oil, soy lechtin, Selena Gomez, cocoa processed with alkali, high fructose corn syrup

It will worm it’s way into more and more everyday interactions and the bulk of society will accept it like they did cameras everywhere, smart appliances, the digital tracking device in their pocket, and screens in their cars instead of physical controls. Avoiding it will become a lifestyle choice that takes effort, and the secondary market for decades old digital/analog technology will continue to grow.

Day training and rescue. You could probably get AI and a robot to teach Pavlovian conditioning in a controlled environment (screen shows symbol, dog gives appropriate response, machine dispenses treat), but behavior modification, leash training in different environments, manners, social conditioning around other dogs/people/animals? A substantial number of humans can’t even train their own dogs to sit, much less behave in public. That’s why I have a job.

Quit Meta a few years back, never had Amazon, and haven’t had a computer in… fuck, almost 20yrs now! My phone is a compromise because it’s a work phone, personal phone is a landline (it’s fantastic, you can ignore it and people can’t assume you have it on you and are ignoring them). Still rocking cassettes, cds, dvds, and vhs, some old, some thrifted. When I do drive (which is infrequent) I drive a 40yo dumb car with a manual and windows you still have to crank down. I still use a typewriter. Some of this is deliberate anti-tech, some is just a fondness for vintage tech.

Eh, I offered my personal experience as an abuse victim and my adult struggles because of that as well as my insight gained through working with people who have committed heinous crimes and what they told me about their lives. If you don’t want to believe it that’s your choice, because as I said earlier, the only universal truth is that people will continue to choose what they want to believe even if every fact, logic, reason, and experience says “you’re wrong”. People believe what they want to believe and will find any excuse to avoid a conversation that challenges their belief. By all means, block me, but this is not a message, it’s a reply in a public forum.

So, you don’t know many rapists, murderers, or child molesters personally?

Do you know many rapists, murderers, and child molesters in real life? Their backstories, the lives they lived before they became rapists, murderers, and child molesters? I do. I’ve been volunteering at the prison for over a decade and as a re-entry aide for dudes who get paroled. I’ve met dudes who had every opportunity to be good, successful people but chose to indulge their worst impulses and I’ve met people who perpetuated the cycle of violence. I’ve known some that continue to get love and support from their families despite the heinousness of their crimes and have seen misguided love turn into enabling. I’ve seen people rejected by both loving families and their abusers who taught them such behavior was acceptable. I’ve seen people break the cycle, struggle to break the cycle, and many fall back into it. I also have friends, like myself, who were beaten, molested, raped, pimped out, and otherwise abused who became decent enough members of society. Granted, many are substance abusers, have a higher acceptance of interpersonal violence, and have been married and divorced a half a dozen times, but they are at least aware of their faults and coping mechanisms and put in the effort to grow.

How about a non-military coup while the military is otherwise occupied? I have yet to see how ICE performs when faced with anything other than clergy, frogs, nurses, and high schoolers, but I have seen a lot of them eject their clip, drop their guns, and cram themselves into Temu tactical vests with all the breathing room of a corset.

40s. Pretty much the same as a lot of folks, grew tired of the Reddit bot-verse as well as kept getting banned for encouraging Shermination and posting pictures of Mussolini’s hanging corpse. Not incredibly tech savvy, but yeah, closing in on 30yrs of being on the internet. I still remember the first time I ever logged on. It was at a friend’s house, he went into a chatroom, someone sent us incest themed porn and asked if we want to roleplay a dirty Peter Pan and Wendy chat. Welcome to the internet!

The world is full of people raised in loving, kind, caring homes that go on to become rapists, murderers, child molesters, and regular old assholes. There are also people raised in abusive, neglectful, violent, bigoted homes that go on to become decent, kind, generous people (albeit probably carrying some trauma).

Very, very few people are raised in such isolation they don’t have some exposure to society. Even the Amish know and understand there’s a whole diverse world out there. We grant teenagers the benefit of inexperience as they develop and explore their personal identities, sometimes guided with love but still rebellious, sometimes an effort to escape abuse but still labeled rebellious. But eventually we expect individuals to be accountable for their own choices, actions, and beliefs.

Bigots might have networked on social media, and those platform’s owners might have seen an opportunity for profit and power, but they remain angry because their digital bubble gets popped everytime they go out in public and are reminded that real society is not reflective of that. “Woke” is just a by-word for everything outside their worldview. The world’s always been woke because no two people share exactly the same beliefs, some of us just know how to navigate life among others. Propaganda only works if you want to believe it despite a lived experience that says otherwise every single day.

How one was raised and the values impressed on them at an early age might give some indicator of the kind of adult they will become, but time and again we see that it’s no guarantee. We’re more than lived experience, we’re also how we reacted and survived those experiences, how we organize our thoughts and feelings and choose to go forward (or not), whether we stick with the family we were born into or abandon them for peers, and sometimes our genetics and brain chemistry. It’s the double-edged sword of why liberalism can’t eradicate conservatism and conservatism can’t eradicate liberalism; people have free will. They choose what they want to believe and the only universal truth is that people will continue to choose what they want to believe even if every fact, logic, reason, and experience says “you’re wrong”.

We’re at a cultural tipping point because for the past 250yrs in America the white Christian patriarchy has been losing the status they enjoyed as a majority and they’re making a desperate last stand to reclaim it. Most of them know they’re not in the same class as the oligarchs, but money talks and the middle class patriarchy will accept being second rate if their leaders will force everyone else to recognize the hierarchy. They can make the world a miserable place but can’t ever lock it in perpetually. Look at how many Boomers tried to indoctrinate their Gen X and Millenial kids into their bigotry, and how many now have adult children who despise them and don’t allow them to spread their toxicity to their grandkids.

Hold individuals accountable for their own beliefs and actions, otherwise we’re treading dangerous waters pawning off responsibility on phantoms and boogeymen. Blaming social media is like blaming Goebbels for the complicity of the German populace even if they didn’t personally commit an atrocity. You really think they couldn’t see what was going on around them? Those who support it, those who endorse it, those who fail to do even the simplest act and speak out against it, they’re just as responsible as the ones they empowered to do it for them.

Musk bought Twitter after it became obvious social media was amplifying existing rage and the value of continuing to weaponize that anger for politics, social division, tribalism, and controlling the narrative. But again, this is nothing new. Rush was doing that in the 90s, newspapers were doing it before that. 4chan and Stormfront have been hotbeds for hate that predate Facebook, and there were hate forums and Angelfire/Geocities before that. Aryan Nations were having parades in the 90s, Rodney King was getting beaten by cops, Matthew Shepherd was beaten and left to die on a fence. If the term incel had been around the Columbine Murderers would have defined angsty, Nazi-obsessed, white male loserdom turned violent.

Modern social media normalized open bigotry that used to have to hide in the shadows. The people who own those sites definitely picked a side and choose to allow it (along with just enough dissent to keep the arguments rolling) because of revenue. Fighting with words online keeps both sides of the masses happy because they can get in their zings and hot takes and feel like they’ve won, when in reality there’s nothing gained, nothing lost, only words. Meanwhile the banter is filling Elon’s pockets and he’s looting the government while we bicker with some dude in Malaysia over Confederate Pride.

People are impressionable, but they still have agency. They pick narratives that they’re comfortable with. There’s also never been a shortage of white, straight, Christian male privledge in America that never died, just steadily declined in functional importance until “your rights are being stolen by everyone not like you having rights” became a bankable campaign slogan. Combine that with twisted nostalgia for a peak America that never existed outside Hollywood concepts like “Leave It to Beaver” and you end up with Boomers making a desperate last stand for themselves and a generation of youth who think they missed out on something grand even though it never existed. You don’t need a psyop when allowing people to shamelessly indulge in tribalistic, entitled narcissism, you just have to give them a target to punch down at. Get them onboard with that and they’ll let you rob them blind while fighting tooth and nail to keep their overlords from getting taxed on their billions they’re making platforming their hate while they wait in line for the foodbank.

The people like Zuck and Musk have a hand in what’s going on in this country, but they are not the source of it any more than Trump is. All of them are but the visible tumors of a cancer the left keeps trying to ignore. We share this country with a lot of people who choose to hate. Taking away their platforms and leaders is like cutting the tail off a rattlesnake. It’s still there, now you just don’t know where it is.

I’d argue the opposite. Meta caters to the kinds of people that want to believe in a specific worldview. It didn’t brainwash people into becoming bigots, racists, misogynists, fascists, and haters, it just gave them a platform where they could say things in a curated social circle and not suffer the consequences that might occur if they said it in public. Gradually they realized there were a lot like them in the world and networked. The worst of them banded together and became real world threats like Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, but the vast majority still won’t take the risk and don’t do anything other than vote for candidates who promise to make their online fantasy a real one. New medium, same bigotry that has always existed in America. If social media disappeared today it wouldn’t prevent haters from hating, it would at best simmer it until they found a new means of connecting because now they know their vitriol is shared by many.

Zines made on a typewriter, slaps, and old fashioned vandalism with wheatpaste or spray paint are still your best mediums for spreading the word. They might not get as much distribution as posting on the internet, but they’re also not competing with billions of other comments for attention, just the eyes of the people in your community. People who want the kind of world this canker envisions want social media and the government to sanitize it of dissent for them so they can be reassured and feel safe. The rest of us are already ditching those platforms and as long as you can scrawl a message in Sharpie on a street sign, you can let them know dissent always exists in their community.

“When you’re a warhawk, they let you do it. You can do anything. Shoot ‘em in the face.”