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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • Part of keeping an open mind is realizing when you were wrong. Most recently, I have realized that liberalism, at least as practiced in the USA has no future, no possible way to defeat the rise of far right politics, and no real plan to even try. It’s an inherently unstable system that only worked because of the post-World War 2 economic boom and the ripple effects of that boom. Now that things are evening out again, American liberals are just sticking their heads in the sand imagining that it’s the 1990s and that all things can be fixed with a healthy stock market, when that wasn’t even really the case back then and it’s becoming more and more obviously false as time goes on.

    We need something drastic to change and fast, or we’re just completely fucked with Trumpism. Socialists and other left-leaning groups are the only ones that realize we need to fight hard and fight now, and establish alternative centers of power to corporations and the government, instead of just hoping that the corporations will be good or that the government will stop itself from doing bad things. I don’t even think a fully socialist economy will even work at least in the short term(not opposed to it in principle, I just think we need hybrid economies short term to ease into it), but if I have to pick between that and whatever the fuck the Trumpists are trying to make, it’s an easy choice.


  • I was super in favor of capital punishment until we had to do an essay on a controversial topic in my senior year of high school and as I was researching for it I was like “wait a minute this actually sucks ass.” Capital punishment kind of only “works” if your underlying assumption is that the justice system gets it right every time, which is not true at all. It also isn’t even a good deterrent- it makes no difference on capital crime rates whether the death penalty is a possibility or not. So the only reason to have it is that your own sense of “justice” requires criminals to be killed, even if it doesn’t actually help anything and even if it doesn’t prevent more crimes. And again, that denies any possibility that the justice system ever gets things wrong and wrongfully convicts someone.



    1. Accept the things you can’t change, and improve the things you can change. I disagree with the classical stoics on their emphasis on individual action and think that these principles can and should be applied on a societal level.

    2. Mind your own business. If someone is doing something that doesn’t have any real impact on your life or the lives of people you care about, ignore it. If someone is gay or trans that doesn’t impact you at all. If someone has weird religious beliefs, let them believe them as long as they’re not hurting anyone.

    3. The supernatural should be ignored for society level decisions because it cannot be proven and hasn’t been demonstrated. If someone wants to go to a psychic or astrologer for personal decisions I disagree with that but that’s on them.

    4. Everyone has a god they worship. It may not be Jesus or Allah, but it may be money, a sport team, or maybe a musical band. Ritual and community are things that make us feel good. Coming together with a group of people for a common cause to enjoy something together is built into our psychology. The problem of replacing religion with bands and sports teams is that it comes with the fun parts of religion without the discussion of morality or urging to do good that religion can bring. You don’t see Kansas City Chiefs fans giving 10% of their income to the poor, for example. My ideal world would have secular temples to Reason where people come together to sing and discuss philosophy and work together for a common good. This one is weirder than the others and I won’t be mad if anyone thinks this is absurd. I just think that we have rejected religion without having a satisfactory replacement for the good things it provides.




  • Pretty much any tax avoidance loopholes. The more money I have the more I see how ridiculously skewed in favor of the rich everything is. My income is taxed at a lower rate than my capital gains, meaning that not only did I make several thousand dollars last year on stock sales I did literally nothing to earn, but I paid very little on taxes for it. There is also a scheme a friend of mine uses to reduce his tax burden even more by recording losses that only exist on paper by swapping between essentially equivalent assets. The system is designed to punish poor people for being poor and reward rich people for being rich.




  • I feel like if you had put half the time and effort it took to do this into improving yourself and going outside you could have at least gone on some dates with real women at this point. Talking to an AI chatbot is not the same as human connection and will only lead to further depression as you realize that no matter how much you “love” your AI girlfriend she will never truly love you back because she can’t think or feel, and fundamentally isn’t real.


  • I think some mods are overly jumpy with chemistry type questions because uninformed morons will confidently answer the wrong thing and the mods are afraid it will get someone hurt. That or the subs in question just aren’t geared for this kind of Q&A. You’d probably get better responses from a chemistry subreddit.

    Scent compounds being potentially hazardous to some minor degree in their super concentrated form isn’t a huge issue, because that’s not how they’re going to be experienced and it’s hard to find anything that isn’t harmful in some quantity. The alchemist Paracelsus, who pioneered evidence backed approaches to pharmaceutical medicine wrote the old adage “The dose makes the poison.” Even water can kill you if you drink too much of it all at once, and pure oxygen is an extremely dangerous substance even though we need it to breathe.

    That said, I happen to know a bit about chemistry and just did a bit of reading. It looks like rose oil comes in two forms - one produced by steam distillation, and one produced by solvent extraction. The one produced via solvent extraction is more common, more concentrated, and according to Safety Data Sheets (SDS) I was able to find, has more potential health hazards associated with it. The other form, known as Rose Otto, is produced via steam distillation and is less concentrated. This means you will need more and will need to adjust your formulation, but according to the SDS this is a pretty safe substance. If your concern is potential hazards of making your soap during manufacturing, then that may be a better option I guess. I still think that it’s fine to use substances that are toxic in quantities that will never make it into the final product.


  • On one hand this is obviously absurd but on the other hand I don’t actually know how one could solve the sheer scale of pedophilia happening on their platform without some dystopian shit. It seems like there is a maximum size for something like discord because at the scale it is now I’m not sure how you could possibly moderate it. I’ll probably stop using it if they implement this but I can definitely understand why they feel like it’s a good idea.