Clara Listensprechen @ClaraListensprechen4@social.cleverlibre.org

A gift is a gift. 🤷‍♀️

Dollar struggles on rate cut expectations; yen on back foot
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/dollar-struggles-rate-cut-expectations-yen-back-foot-4000706

Can't wait for the hand-wringing "principled conservative" takes from dicks like Ross Douthat about all the folksy decent Ohio diner Americans who will now feel "alienated by their greatest voice is being silenced," like making fascists mad is a bad thing.

I'm no great orator-statesman guy or political theoretician but if your country's got a bunch of marginally rebranded neo-Nazis in it, shit that makes them mad is actually a really REALLY good thing. It's an actual hard metric of running a country somewhat competently.

Siegfried Sassoon: Newspapers keep horrors of war out of articles, slain assumed to be gloriously happy https://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2023/12/19/siegfried-sassoon-newspapers-keep-horrors-of-war-out-of-articles-slain-assumed-to-be-gloriously-happy/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #peace #antiwar

Canada Lays Out Plan To Phase Out Sales of Gas-Powered Cars, Trucks By 2035 https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/12/19/2248229/canada-lays-out-plan-to-phase-out-sales-of-gas-powered-cars-trucks-by-2035?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon

Scientists created a searchable #FluorescenceMicroscopy image resource of #Drosophila GAL4 driver expression patterns with single neuron resolution. Check out some of the images below. #Neuroscience #12DaysOfeLife https://elifesciences.org/articles/80660?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic_12Days

German fossil fuel electricity production is in freefall this year. In the first half of 2023, it was down to 43.7% of Germany's total, even with the closure of nuclear plants. In the third quarter, it was further down to 39.8%. https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2023/09/PD23_351_43312.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2023/12/PD23_462_43312.html

we're seeing sideburn levels at about 65%

(65%) ■■■■■■□□□□

I am in favor of challenging the eligibility to run of every single Republican who refused to vote to certify the election results to assist Trump.

If you followed Trump's attempted coup to overturn the election, then you can follow him all the way down. #USpol #USpolitics #politics #fascism

That Thump Thump you feel
is our tire losing air...

Must have gotten punctured
when we ran over
the splintered remains of yesterday..

No need to despair
or create a task force to reinvent the wheel...

Let's just patch up the tear
and keep rolling forward

#poetry #poems #micropoetry #amwriting

APOD 2023-12-19: NGC 1499: The California Nebula by Steven Powell - via Astronomy Picture Of The Day from NASA at https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

GM Dealer Chat Bot Agrees to Sell 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1
----
- 29 minutes ago | 4 points | 2 comments
- URL: https://gmauthority.com/blog/2023/12/gm-dealer-chat-bot-agrees-to-sell-2024-chevy-tahoe-for-1/
- Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704234

But especially fuck techbroicism most of all. ✊

6/6

I think the best approach to Stoicism is to take it with a small grain of salt the size of a Sisyphean grain of salt~ That is to say, to approach it with a critical mind, and not follow it wholeheartedly as gospel. There is genuine merit to Stoicism as a form of therapy, as seen in CBT. If your house gets destroyed in a natural fire, the stoic advice of controlling your judgements and accepting reality to focus on how to best move forward is genuinely helpful. But this framework isn't perfect, and if applied too broadly, I worry it could very easily produce a world of people who accept too much too easily, in which injustice and atrocity will be passively accepted without any opposition. One could say that a perfect stoic sage would never misidentify something they can control, but this is a platonic ideal. And I just don't think it's morally responsible for us as a society to encourage this kind of thought process, when it's.. Well I hate this term, but it really is a slippery slope down into further dystopia and injustice. And I'd rather trust a moral framework that's less slippery and more stable. So at it stands, I don't personally support Stoicism as a philosophy and social movement. If you do practice Stoicism, all I ask is that you exercise caution and critical self evaluation at all times, and carefully consider these issues before accepting stoicism in its entirety. Take it with that grain of salt and a critical mind.

5/6

Is this "techbroicism" misinterpreting and misusing the original stoicism? You could argue that, but I'd argue that the original stoics were equally complicit in failing to adequately address the injustice of their own societies. As far as I've read very few of them (barring Epictetus) actually criticised the institution of slavery, like you have Seneca saying you shouldn't beat your slaves but never questioned having slaves in the first place. And some like Musonius Rufus even preached that female stoics exist to serve their men, which is especially yikes... Not just failing to address patriarchical misogyny but actively perpetuating it. It feels like these examples prove these assumptions erroneous, even when looking at what we know about the original stoics. The world is not just and ordered and good, and people are not capable of perfect judgements about the world, not even the most lauded of stoic sages. It's a philosophy that preaches the importance of confronting reality, but ironically, it subtly reinforces passivity and defeatism, detaching oneself from the world instead of existing within it authentically and honestly and with drive to challenge things. And that really worries me.

4/6

It reminds me of that very common saying in Japanese vernacular "しょうがない", or "it can't be helped". The more people are conditioned to discard things they can't control, the more likely they are to stop trying to control things they actually can. And when we're dealing with such an unjust and dystopian world today where huge swaths of the population are starving because it serves the economy, or entire populations are being subject to genocide just for existing... When we all have the power to do something about it if we just work together, it feels extremely "convenient" to me that Stoicism is being pushed so hard right now from wealthy influencers from silicon Valley and the like. Almost like the corporate elite are wielding stoicism as a weapon to quell the growing global political unrest by conditioning people to stop worrying and just accept that they can't do anything about it and focus on themselves instead. I freely admit that's a pretty conspiratorial thought, but it doesn't really matter if that's the case or not. Regardless of whether it's intentional, that outcome seems to be the inevitable endpoint of the Stoic movement to me.

3/6

And I just... Don't agree with these two assumptions. Whether you're looking at Greek or Roman society with all the misogyny and slavery going on, or you're looking at the dumpster fire of modern civilisation, the world is kinda fucked and full of problems. It's one reason I relate more to the Gnostics, which came around a few centuries after the Stoics when none of those prior philosophies seemed to be making society better. But also, I just don't think people are capable of making purely rational judgements about the world. We are not omniscient machines, we are imperfect humans. Not to say I don't believe in humans capacity to do good; it's not my intent to deny the idea of Pneuma or that humans have a spark of the divine in them, but I believe we need to start with the admission that we will never be perfect decision making machines (or even that such a thing can't logically exist).

If these two assumptions were true, then I believe stoicism would indeed be a perfect ethical framework for everyone to follow. But since I don't agree with these assumptions, stoicism introduces a big problem: People will inevitably misuse the dichotomy of control to falsely assume that they have no control over things they do. It's a feedback loop which implicitly encourages people to accept helplessness.

2/6

Going back to my Stoicism rant, I've done a little more research and thinking and I wanted to provide a better articulated follow up, since my original post was a bit heated and poorly articulated, and I wanted to do the topic better justice.

As many have pointed out, there are definitely parts of Stoicism that are clearly being distorted in the modern day by techbro types. Someone dubbed it "techbroicism" which is a hilarious name to me 😂. So I'm trying to wade through the mud and focus on the original Greek and Roman sources on Stoicism still remaining, but Stoicism to me reads as.. Privileged white fuckboys finding comfort in detachment and ignoring the obvious injustices of their society. And I don't mean techbros here, the Greek and Roman philosophers are the original privileged white fuckboys to me 😂

So, the central axiom of Stoicism is the dichotomy of control. Learn to distinguish what we can control, and stop worrying about the rest. On paper this is a perfectly valid principle and I can see many ways that this could be used to help people cope with difficult situations. I don't want to deny that there is merit to this philosophy in certain places, like in cognitive behavioural therapy.

My issues with stoicism in its original form stem from these two assumptions Stoicism makes:

1: All stoics are capable (or can become capable) of making reasonable judgements about the world.
2: The World (nature) is ordered, just, and good, as per Logos.

1/6

Support Ukraine today or fight russia tomorrow?
The Russia-Ukraine War is not only a struggle for Ukrainian independence against resurgent Russian imperialism. As Putin states, it is also a war to destroy the existing world order. #StandWithUkraine️ 🇺🇦
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/support-ukraine-today-or-fight-russia-tomorrow/

I don't have the training or expertise to fuel my motivated reasoning so as to disbelieve this emotionally disturbing result. Darn it.

"Albedo-induced warming effects of urban greening may outweigh the cooling effects of increased evapotranspiration."

#UHI
#UrbanGreening
#UnintendedConsequences

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023JD038764?af=R