dat_math [they/them]

  • 14 Posts
  • 308 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2021

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  • but it still feels a bit like I should almost sit them down and run them through the true possibilities of how shitty things can get in terms of never retiring/owning a house/climate change etc,

    maybe not in these terms (i.e., don’t traumatize them with doom, listen to them and pace the conversation appropriately for their capacity to think about the great unraveling), but I think this lies in the direction of a really good idea

    I had a serious and rather uncomfortable conversation with my partner about expectations regarding climate change, longer term planning for ourselves and where we physically want to be, implications that all of these factors (and our states of (un)health) have on family planning, that kind of thing where we really started examining our longitudinal wants, needs, and expected constraints. It’s been an ongoing conversation since then but I can’t imagine planning to be in any kind of long term relationship without having that kind of conversation in the first few years






  • Sure, though I’m going to omit a number of details and drastically simplify things.

    I stopped eating meat very early in the pandemic because I could no longer intellectualize my way around the cognitive dissonance of having the contents of the IPCC reports/summaries in my head and the taste of the meat in my mouth. This was the a fairly easy transition because I like cooking and I was already eating lots of food with beans in it. I spent some time shamefully addicted to cheese, kinda-half-thinking that the vegans who bullied me on this site (and for my pizzaposting in the old sub) were correct but (because of a spiritual and intellectual laziness that I’m working really hard on) I refused to properly educate myself about why they were right. Around 2021 a good friend went vegan after a series of acid trips in which much of their spirituality and moral philosophy reoriented. I’m most grateful that they were willing to patiently bully me into confronting my own hypocrisy and accepting the discomfort in that kind of introspection. Once I did that in a serious way, it became undeniably clear that my convictions that all humans have the right to clean air, water, sustenance, shelter, medicine, education/information, and the complete product of their labor is really a corollary to a more general principal guaranteeing these kinds of rights to all living beings.

    Actions/outcomes that helped push me in this direction:

    -learning biology, chemistry, neuroscience, and maths

    -taking lots of LSD, mushrooms, and some DMT over a period of years (I think this has made it easier to keep my mind open even when subconscious psychological machinery would reflexively close it to prevent discomfort and in tandem with the contemplation I’ve done on these substances has inculcated a powerful disgust for delf-deception, hypocritical thought)

    -hiking and learning about wilderness/conservation

    -seeing how hard the US national park service works mules and horses used to move supplies and do infrastructure maintenance in incredibly hazardous positions where a small misstep by a different animal that they’re tied to could cause them to land a hoof wrong around a sharp chunk of rebar sticking up out of a poorly-maintained trail step/berm just a few minutes after talking about the negative impacts of motorboats and helicopters on the local wildlife

    -practicing cooking (especially beans in a pressure cooker) as often as I could



  • The argument of viciousness puts us against “nature”. The argument of torture and exploitation does not.

    Do you not see humanity breeding chicks into existence solely to be shredded to bits as fundamentally different from having the bad luck of being eaten by a predator?

    If I specifically had the choice of how I was terminated, I don’t know if I’d choose being eaten alive by a predator over that.

    Why are you arguing as though being eaten alive by a predator is the only alternative?