Rectal Death Adept posted:

what did a dodo bird taste like?

Shima Honnou posted:

they turn the throat into shoes and the penis into twine to sew the shoes, truly magnificent

Wakko posted:

gonna be real i will never understand ya'lls obsession with the forum for liberalism. is the idea that if you beat the liberals here it will make up for neoliberalism killing the planet. is it something with your dads. like what kind of damage makes someone subject themself to d&d

Wakko posted:

gonna be real i will never understand ya'lls obsession with the forum for liberalism. is the idea that if you beat the liberals here it will make up for neoliberalism killing the planet. is it something with your dads. like what kind of damage makes someone subject themself to d&d

Rectal Death Adept posted:

if you are marooned on a desert island with someone and spend long enough watching them pretend they are at home, complete with hours long commutes in fake cars and sitting at a coconut desk to type on a wooden plank, you are eventually going to get annoyed enough to kick over their sand Chipotle

Wakko posted:

nice

Rectal Death Adept posted:

what did a dodo bird taste like?

Decades posted:

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/0...vGLb6U9U6Aovc3f

So this is a This American Life episode about a father who grows estranged from his family because of their irreconcilably different perspectives on climate change. Yes, I know the succ zone is that way, but give it a listen and I think you'll find that it is relevant to our interests and actually owns.

You see, the story starts out with a father in Washington state who learns about climate change, has an awakening, and quickly grows deeply concerned. He gets his family involved, and he and his wife raise his two kids to be mini American Greta's. They go on tour spreading the good word about the need to aggressively transition to renewable energy. He pushes them hard, optimizing their performances to maximize their effect (the younger the cute disarming one, the older one the doomer), to an extent that quickly grows harsh and abusive.

The activism becomes too intense and all-consuming. There becomes no way left to maintain a healthy relationship with the father, so mom pulls the kids out. While dad keeps pushing climate change activism as a life and death matter,  the rest of the family takes a step back and tries to go back to normal life. The father can't go back and continues to pressure the kids, so they try therapy, and the kids admit they were only interested in activism in order to access their father's love. The father apologizes for not doing MORE to get them more deeply involved in climate work. One of the kids attempts suicide. Eventually the family gives the father an ultimatum and makes him agree to drop the climate activism and go back to being a normal loving dad.

Instead he goes full direct action and gets thrown in jail for helping shut off a tar sands pipeline, accumulating multiple felonies. His family is horrified that he would do something so selfish and destructive to their way of life. Doesn't he care about them at all? They scoff as elements of the media make Dad out to be some kind of hero. Other climate activists reach out to the family to try and explain the father's motivations and the importance of his work, but they maintain he was annoying, harmful, and has accomplished nothing, having postured as a family man while wasting his life on a frivolous personal pursuit. 

The interviewer reaches out to the father again to talk about his family, but he is still hung up on the climate change thing and only wants to discuss the science of the looming catastrophe. He gets talked down for the harsh way he treated his young children. He accepts that he's been left aimless and broken, stranded farthest from the thing he loves most.

The family cuts all ties, just barely wishing him well. The family feels much better having freed themselves of the irrationally intense pressure of their alarmist father. They can finally escape from a constant feeling of looming catastrophe, and they can finally get back to their own lives and take a deep breath. The kids go off to college, their climate nightmares now reduced to once every few weeks. 

Then the PNW heat dome comes (crack). Now the still-estranged father's voice haunts them, scolding them for not doing enough to help. They can no longer block it out, and accept that Dad was right about the climate after all (ping! lol).

Stereotype posted:

Rime posted:

So like, absolutely every thread regular should listen to this podcast, for reasons I will elucidate below:

A. Michael is very obviously mentally unstable. They bury the lede on this early on when they mention he was an evangelical christian in college, but the signs are there throughout the tale. Obsessive focus on a (back then) non-tangible issue, relentless proselytizing on it, bursts of unnatural rage, hero complex etc. As Herbert wrote "Woe to the society which finds itself in the grip of a Messiah." A family unit is just a tiny society, as is our thread here.
While most of the seriously unstable goons have been weeded out of SA by this point, recent events demonstrate that there are still posters in CSPAM who fit this mental niche. We should be aware of this and looking out for one another. Despite my one-track posting around here, I don't talk about this poo poo much IRL and try to remain self aware enough to avoid falling into this kind of vicious psychological cycle. Regularly questioning if you are going a bit too hard on the confirmation bias kool-aid is important, and I hope most posters here do so.

B. As his daughters point out, his actions have achieved nothing. They were worthless. Years of speeches and presentations, jail time for turning off a pipeline, torpedoed career, and for what? He destroyed his daughters childhoods and his family now refuses all contact - and the world is still burning down at a furious pace. This dude really is a poster child that even if you go to Direct Action, it is meaningless against the inertia of 8 Billion people who just want to consume and a system built to facilitate that consumption at any cost. This is why very early in my climate posting career I pivoted to heavily denouncing both direct action and personal token gestures. The former, because at best you are just going to ruin your life and those of your loved ones to achieve nothing, the latter because it is almost always aggressively preached as a solution and rarely as just a perfectly acceptable way to assuage personal anxiety in the face of an insurmountable crisis.

C. As the ex-wife saliently notes, if it hadn't been Climate Change the dad would have attached himself to something else eventually. Be it Q-Anon, Pizzagate, or CoVid conspiracies. The family just had the misfortune that he picked the one thing which is demonstrably real and happening but not at a rate fast enough to vindicate him immediately, which complicates them coming to grips with his mental issues but also allows them to escape from the toxic relationship. Particularly obsessive posters over in the Succ thread should take note, lol.

Taken as a whole, this is strongly a warning tale for anyone too deep down the biosphere rabbit hole. Indeed, any rabbit hole. There is little to be gained other than suffering by pivoting your entire life around trying to save the planet, or any single issue, the trite old parables of "a single raindrop raises the sea" do not apply in the context of a global consumer-capitalist hyper surveillance regime. There are more important things in what little time we have left than acts of empty heroism to feed the ego. Cherish your family and friends and unless they are unrepentant chuds don't make their last years worse than they need to be by never shutting the gently caress up. Work hard to cultivate self awareness, as it is the first and best defense against a religiously dogmatic mindset which will only lead to suffering. Keep a watchful eye on those you do converse deeply about this with, to make sure they don't do anything colossally stupid either.

We could all be wrong, after all. And if we aren't, well, why make things that much worse for those we love?

Perry Mason Jar posted:

Why did someone recreate this, change the layout, and remove a word from the punchline?

Rime posted:

There are more important things in what little time we have left than acts of empty heroism to feed the ego. Cherish your family and friends and unless they are unrepentant chuds don't make their last years worse than they need to be by never shutting the gently caress up. Work hard to cultivate self awareness, as it is the first and best defense against a religiously dogmatic mindset which will only lead to suffering. Keep a watchful eye on those you do converse deeply about this with, to make sure they don't do anything colossally stupid either.

We could all be wrong, after all. And if we aren't, well, why make things that much worse for those we love?

Cold on a Cob posted:

the whole bit about being trapped in a car plummeting off a cliff in the dome video also makes this point quite well

Conspiratiorist posted:

I dodged that bullet by being unable to love anyone.

Chamale posted:

Another name for them was "taint bird"

T-Paine posted:

same

Decades posted:

Yeah I was a bit flippant in my recap but I found it really complex and fascinating and tragic all around.

Strongly agree

Cold on a Cob posted:

they couldn't even grok the "you got cancer and 6 months to live" analogy

toggle posted:

you need a holiday

Rime posted:

So like, absolutely every thread regular should listen to this podcast, for reasons I will elucidate below:

A. Michael is very obviously mentally unstable. They bury the lede on this early on when they mention he was an evangelical christian in college, but the signs are there throughout the tale. Obsessive focus on a (back then) non-tangible issue, relentless proselytizing on it, bursts of unnatural rage, hero complex etc. As Herbert wrote "Woe to the society which finds itself in the grip of a Messiah." A family unit is just a tiny society, as is our thread here.
While most of the seriously unstable goons have been weeded out of SA by this point, recent events demonstrate that there are still posters in CSPAM who fit this mental niche. We should be aware of this and looking out for one another. Despite my one-track posting around here, I don't talk about this poo poo much IRL and try to remain self aware enough to avoid falling into this kind of vicious psychological cycle. Regularly questioning if you are going a bit too hard on the confirmation bias kool-aid is important, and I hope most posters here do so.

B. As his daughters point out, his actions have achieved nothing. They were worthless. Years of speeches and presentations, jail time for turning off a pipeline, torpedoed career, and for what? He destroyed his daughters childhoods and his family now refuses all contact - and the world is still burning down at a furious pace. This dude really is a poster child that even if you go to Direct Action, it is meaningless against the inertia of 8 Billion people who just want to consume and a system built to facilitate that consumption at any cost. This is why very early in my climate posting career I pivoted to heavily denouncing both direct action and personal token gestures. The former, because at best you are just going to ruin your life and those of your loved ones to achieve nothing, the latter because it is almost always aggressively preached as a solution and rarely as just a perfectly acceptable way to assuage personal anxiety in the face of an insurmountable crisis.

C. As the ex-wife saliently notes, if it hadn't been Climate Change the dad would have attached himself to something else eventually. Be it Q-Anon, Pizzagate, or CoVid conspiracies. The family just had the misfortune that he picked the one thing which is demonstrably real and happening but not at a rate fast enough to vindicate him immediately, which complicates them coming to grips with his mental issues but also allows them to escape from the toxic relationship. Particularly obsessive posters over in the Succ thread should take note, lol.

Taken as a whole, this is strongly a warning tale for anyone too deep down the biosphere rabbit hole. Indeed, any rabbit hole. There is little to be gained other than suffering by pivoting your entire life around trying to save the planet, or any single issue, the trite old parables of "a single raindrop raises the sea" do not apply in the context of a global consumer-capitalist hyper surveillance regime. There are more important things in what little time we have left than acts of empty heroism to feed the ego. Cherish your family and friends and unless they are unrepentant chuds don't make their last years worse than they need to be by never shutting the gently caress up. Work hard to cultivate self awareness, as it is the first and best defense against a religiously dogmatic mindset which will only lead to suffering. Keep a watchful eye on those you do converse deeply about this with, to make sure they don't do anything colossally stupid either.

We could all be wrong, after all. And if we aren't, well, why make things that much worse for those we love?

Wakko posted:

gonna be real i will never understand ya'lls obsession with the forum for liberalism. is the idea that if you beat the liberals here it will make up for neoliberalism killing the planet. is it something with your dads. like what kind of damage makes someone subject themself to d&d

bag em and tag em posted:

Because the forums are an outlet for my cracking and pinging. I can yell at libs and laugh maniacally at the coming catastrophies so that I don't do that around people in my real life who I do not want to alienate and have happy positive relationships with .