Okay? No. Normal? In the context of that person's life, yes it's normal, else they wouldn't do it.

Being hurt by perceived rejection is normal and valid. Making another person "wrong" for holding a boundary for whatever reason is not valid, though it might be understandable which is NOT the same as excusable.

People need to learn more non-violent communication, and general understanding of boundaries.

I already have a magical rectangle my dumb ass likes to look at already. I don't want another.

It's a misunderstanding of anarchy to equate it with either total chaos or total control. True anarchism is about opposing coercive authority, not creating a new, rigid authority that dictates what discourse is acceptable.

You can absolutely oppose bigotry and harm (which are coercive actions) without resorting to silencing anyone who doesn't conform to a specific ideological viewpoint. Genuine community defense is about voluntary association and preventing harassment, not about restricting the exchange of ideas.

Yes and I've been there. It took me a lot of conscious effort to get past that wall.

It'll sound weird and it's possible you might feel a bit inhibited but I strongly recommend trying. It's just getting your locked up nervous system to cooperate. Kinda like pushing a car to start it up.

Use music with any of these if you want. Find the safest place you can.

You can just go somewhere in nature and sit there until tears come. Sometimes you need to just create space for it.

Another is to actually just make noise. Moan. Shout. Or just hold a note. Whatever. Just keep doing it for a few minutes or so. For whatever reason I like to do this in the car. Not to cry anymore but it's just become a habit of letting out steam.

Then more involved is to move your body. Shake it. Jostle it. Make more noise and let it sound weird from all the moving. Dance without trying to be good at it. Don't think about it.

TRE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FeUioDuJjFI

If you feel a lot of inhibition because of the imagined cosmic judge, be gentle with yourself. Some people get this immediately, for me It took a bit of pushing. I had already tried everything else and sure, cried a tiny bit here and there but still felt like I had a fucking ocean on uncried tears in me. I had to learn to go to it via the body, not the mind.

People hate on Yoga and meditation but it does work for this. Problem generally is in finding competent teachers. But I've been on retreats where grown, burly men burst into tears because for the first time in their lives, they actually connect with their nervous system, they're allowed to be vulnerable and actually FEEL their feelings. Instead of "dealing" with them, "letting them go", intellectualizing them away, suppressing them or drowning them in substances or work/hobby. It's a hell of an aha moment.

https://youtu.be/VsNcjRSBhGA

old article but hate how they are intentionally fudging the difference between people who pay for a pirate streaming site vs. people who just torrent stuff. I too will bet my left testicle that downloading anime isn't going to put money into trafficking.

Great idea, let's get parents to raise their kids.

Now, how do we suddenly make them actually do that? Last I checked this idea has been around about as long as people have been around but it's still not happening.

Parenting matters, but it’s not the only layer of protection. We don’t rely solely on parents to keep kids from walking into bars or buying cigarettes, we have laws and systems to back them up. Why should the internet be different?

I haven’t degraded anyone. My focus is on the contradiction of using the language of liberation to justify the mechanics of control.

Lemmy has a lot of performative anarchy: putting on the badass sunglasses of a rebel only to act as a gatekeeper for a specific set of permitted thoughts. When someone claims to be an anarchist but their first instinct is to use centralized power to silence anyone who doesn't follow an ideological script, they haven't abolished authority, they've just claimed it for themselves.

True anarchy requires individual responsibility. It’s about the capacity for adults to navigate discourse through their own discernment, critical thinking and voluntary association rather than needing someone to pre-filter their reality. If a community can only exist by forcibly removing any voice that challenges the status quo, it isn't a functional anarchist space; it’s just a digital walled garden with a cool flag.

It’s a great connection. Beyond Descartes, the Wachowskis explicitly cited Buddhist philosophy as a primary influence, specifically the concepts of Maya (illusion) and Samsara (the cycle of suffering which people unfortunately tend to misunderstand a lot).

The "There is no spoon" scene is a direct nod to Sunyata, or emptiness. It suggests that "reality" isn’t just subjective; it lacks inherent existence. In this view, it’s not just the world that is a construct, but the "self" perceiving it as well. Lana Wachowski has also stated that the trilogy was designed as a "meditation" on the nature of choice and the self, influenced by their interest in Eastern philosophy.

There's also an Upanishadic mantra in the third movie soundtrack, appropriately:

Asato mā sad gamaya (from the unreal, lead me to the real)

Tamaso mā jyotir gamaya (from darkness, lead me to the light)

Mṛtyor mā'mṛtaṃ gamaya (from death, lead me to immortality)

Unpacked here (a bit, but it'll correct the likely, immediate misconceptions people unfamiliar with eastern philosophy would get)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoEcSc064YY

My sentiments exactly. Americans always find a way to make eeeverything about themselves. And then they're surprised to find Trump as their president. And then, instead of actually doing something about their miserable country, they will dominate every online space with their political shitshow. Most ironically it's usually accompanied with a significant amount of self-flagellation about what evil imperialists they are. A lot of it. They REALLY need you to see how badly THEY feel about being shitty (not that they'll take any real action about it). 0 self-awareness. Trump is just the pus-filled cap of an inflamed zit.

Did you intentionally skip over the parts that you don't like in Anarchist thought?

Degrading, disrespecting, or insulting another person or group of people, because of their :

Gender or Gender Identity,
Ethnicity,
Immigrant status,
Religion,
Sexuality,
Language,
Physical appearance or body size,
Substance or medicinal use,
Disability,
Age,
Acceptance of any unfavorable or disfavorable group, whether this group is political, economic, social, or cultural.

People like to refer to the paradox of tolerance but always skip out on the inconvenient bit:

""Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

— In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.""

If you are not able to rationally argue why we shouldn't be bigoted, I don't know what to tell you.

I actually did scroll past that.

You are the problem, and so are the people who upvoted you without at looking for themselves at all.

Calling names doesn't change the structural reality I'm pointing out: that there are a lot of people using 'anarchy' as a mask for top-down, centralized authority.

I'm not attacking anarchism. I AM an anarchist who is tired of seeing it appropriated by authoritarians.

There are no universal rules about this... like pretty much everything, depends on who you're talking to and who you want to make a positive impression on.

Excessive amount of Emojis does seem to read as kinda juvenile, tone-deaf and Instagram-marketey to me at least.

You’re right, predators exist, and ignoring that is dangerous. But coercive systems don’t solve the root problem; they just move it around. Prisons don’t stop abuse, they concentrate it. Cops don’t end corruption, they institutionalize it. The illusion is that punishment equals justice, when really, it just perpetuates the cycle of suffering: hurt people hurt people, and systems that rely on domination will always produce more of both.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be consequences. It’s consequences without hate and domination. A world where harm is met with accountability and prevention at the root level, not exile and fear of punishment. The question shouldn't be "How do we punish?" but "How did we fail this person, and how do we stop failing each other?" That’s not softness. That’s seeing through the delusion of separation, the idea that "monsters" are a different species, not products of the same broken systems we all inherit. It's the admission that IF NOT FOR THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF YOUR GENETIC MAKEUP AND YOUR ENVIRONMENT, you would be exactly as dangerous and harmful. True safety doesn’t come from bigger cages. It comes from communities that refuse to abandon their own, even the difficult ones.

And yes there are cases where the only answer is to keep someone harmful separate from the rest but it's possible to do that out of love and care towards those that they would harm, NOT out of hate towards them as a demonized "other". I'm talking about being pre-emptive, which requires ability for people to have open discourse. It requires the ability to rationally look at horrible behavior and address the causes.

This is actually a well known thing in Buddhism and other meditative practices. Most of the old beliefs about yourself fall away (losing that ego), and then you just replace them with new beliefs (develop a new spiritual ego that usually feels nicer). And you have no idea how insidious and subtle it can be. You of course hear about he most extreme examples but it can also be very inward turned spiritual ego that's mostly damaging to oneself. There's a whole new level of practice in dissolving that too (which is actually why having a teacher and being a member of a spiritual community is useful because if it's a healthy community, they will bring it to surface one way or another). There's a vicious cycle where the unhealthy communities (cults) led by people who are in this god realm delusion are the ones that get the press, so people start avoiding communities because they think that they're all cults anyway, and then they do practice by themselves and might gain some realization, and then develop a spiritual ego... and decide they should become teachers and then create an unhealthy community.

Despite our current parliament sucking ass, I still have some general trust in my country's government (and culture). So with that in mind:

Our government bodies already have my basic data. Healthcare, census etc. and we use our online banking services to verify identity when accessing the data. It's simple, and extremely widely used. I really don't see why it would be so hard to make a relatively simple service that just gives sites that need to know a yes or no answer on if I'm over 18. They don't need to know my birth date or any other information.

Not let a government or age verification authority know whenever a user is accessing 18+ content

This should be possible but of course the question is if one trusts the government to actually uphold this. Again, with my background, it's a bit easier for me to speak.

Make it difficult or impossible for a child to fake a proof of adulthood, eg. By downloading an already verified anonymous signing key shared by an adult, etc.

You'll never patch all the holes. In a perfect world, we wouldn't be having this conversation. In a perfect world, parents would actually parent their kids and monitor their internet use. Access to adult content doesn't even come close to being the biggest problem in many cases where some kids parents are fucking up their duties. Drugs, gangs, petty (and not so petty) crime comes to mind. Collective responsibility would be great but since we don't live in a perfect world where everyone can just agree to a good idea like "take responsibility of your kids", I'll settle for trusting a democratic government to have some capacity to pick up those that fall.

I happen to agree with age verification laws. This is a tangent but I would also go a step further in saying that MAINSTREAM internet should not be possible to use without verifying that the user is a real individual person. This would be another yes/no question via a service. Outwardly they don't have to reveal their identity but even JizzMcCumsocks needs to have a backend verification as a real person. Basically, if any government member uses some service with their own name and has a verification about that, that service must also have a way of verifying that any user is a real person. We have given Xitter way too much power and at the same time, allowed anonymity. Meta services too of course but I think Xitter is one of the worst due to easy and straight forward use. Humanity has shown that we are not equipped to handle the kind of (mis)information flow there is in these spaces. Spaces such as Lemmy can and should operate in full anonymity, as there are natural barriers to entry here, plus it's less appealing when it's not even really intended for the kind of use mainstream social media sites are. Here we have a collective and individual responsibility to account for the anonymity and the challenges it brings.

No, the imperialistic "I must dominate every space I find myself in" attitude is pretty ingrained in Americans, regardless of if they embrace it in themselves or not. Anything from "I must make everyone aware of how bad I feel about my terrible country" to "I must force every country and culture in the world to follow my value system" to just sucking the air out of any room they're in by making sure that they are the loudest and most visible person around. They come from a culture where everyone is trying to be the tallest poppy. Most of the world by varying degrees generally trims the tallest poppy. It's not without issues but I could write a hell of a rant on how the tall poppy thing has been painted in overly negative light thanks to American hyper-individualistic sensibilities worming their way into the general consciousness (and don't confuse me for a tankie, that's like cutting the whole field if one poppy grows too tall).

Maybe not all Americans go out with the intent to conquer. But very few Americans seem to actually ask themselves if maybe for FUCKING ONCE they could just shut the fuck up, sit quietly in the corner and give their attention to someone else. But no, even if magically all Americans took what I just said to heart, they'd FLOOD social media with posts about themselves sitting quietly in the corner. They'd make sure that everyone knows just how quiet and invisible they are. They would keep their mouth shut but paint a massive red circle and arrows on the wall behind them, and they'd definitely try to be better at it than the other guy. This is the American mentality.

Glad to see people are starting to figure it out.