If the jewel which everyone desired to possess lay far out on a frozen lake where the ice was very thin, watched over by the danger of death, while, closer in, the ice was perfectly safe, then in a passionate age the crowds would applaud the courage of the man who ventured out, they would tremble for him and with him in the danger of his decisive action, they would grieve over him if he were drowned, they would make a god of him if he secured the prize. But in an age without passion, in a reflective age, it would be otherwise. People would think each other clever in agreeing that it was Unreasonable and not even worthwhile to venture so far out. And in this way they would transform daring and enthusiasm into a feat of skill, so as to do something, for after all, "something must be done." The crowds would go out to watch from a safe place, and with the eyes of connoisseurs appraise the accomplished skater who could skate almost to the very edge (i.e. as far back as the ice was still safe and the danger had not yet begun) and then turn back. The most accomplished skater would manage to go out to the furthermost point and then perform a still more dangerous-looking run, so as to make the spectators hold their breath and say: "Ye Gods! How mad; he is risking his life." But look, and you will see that his skill was so astonishing that he managed to turn back just in time, while the ice was perfectly safe and there was still no danger. As at the theatre, the crowd would applaud and acclaim him, surge homeward with the heroic artist in their midst, to honour him with a magnificent banquet. For intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick, and reality into a play. During the banquet, admiration would reach its height. Now the proper relation between the admirer and the object of admiration is the one in which the admirer is edified by the thought that he is a man like the hero, humbled by the thought that he is incapable of such great actions, yet morally encouraged to emulate him according to his powers; but where intelligence has got the upper hand the character of admiration is completely altered. Even at the height of the banquet, when the applause was loudest, the admiring guests would all have a shrewd notion that the action of the man who received all the honour was not really so extraordinary, and that only by chance was the gathering for him, since after all, with a little practice, everyone could have done as much. Briefly, instead of being strengthened in their discernment and encouraged to do good, the guests would more probably go home with an even stronger predisposition to the most dangerous, if also the most respectable, of all diseases: to admire in public what is considered unimportant in private— since everything is made into a joke. And so, stimulated by a gush of admiration, they are all comfortably agreed that they might just as well admire themselves.

Sören Kierkegaard, "The Present Age," 1846

it's like the perfect storm of strawman arguments and lack of depth in critical thinking

i feel repulsed by this image in a way that i do not usually feel when i see images like it. it's like, the opposite of looking at a happy kitten or something. just. yeugh

convinced me to vote for satan thank you

i dont want to think about that but thank you.

haven't seen it but i am horrified

i wont and you cant make me

man fuuuuuck this lady and her anti-truancy horseshit. poor families end up with obscene fines or maybe even jail time because their kids are missing school. meanwhile mrs. harris kicks back in her posh multi-million dollar home, safe and secure behind not one, not two, but three padlocks on her front door.

cool pic

Hmmm I’ll keep an eye out on my timeline for an instance that would be a good fit for you

I'm on mastodon.social. I'd move but I've no idea where to move to.

Aside from the obvious alt-right/nazi/anti-sjw instances (which most instances block) I pretty much don't bother engaging with anything from mastodon.social or cyber.space or the other big "flagship" instances because like... they're so bad lol. Many of the smaller instances don't even include them in their list of "known" networks.

I guess Mastodon is crumbling in the sense that the flagship instances aren't in a very healthy place, but the idea of a flagship instance was probably a mistake in the first place anyway.

This article is a mess but yea I don't use mastodon for basically the reasons they cite

musk really can't stand the idea of being in the same space as poor people can he

both my parents lost their jobs in that same McDonnell Douglas closure too.

the layoffs had long-lasting consequences in the labor market there. my dad was making minimum wage selling TVs at Circuit City for years afterward, because it was so hard to find work with a 2 year degree in EE as that plant had employed so many folks with those skills who all got laid off at once. eventually he had to move across the country just to find work.

oh man i loved that article when i first read it, then i was ready to think like oh i see it was hugely exagerated or whatever but damn no it was just like 100% a lie and hugely unethical reporting etc, and uh eff this owner and like im mad that this writer once made me sympathetic (and also not implicating jstpst or anything as i saw it first and was taken in on other sites)

every day america produces for me personally a delightful new grift

what the actual hell

augh this is so creepy

i'm so confused

oh no

hop on discord voice chat i want to try

FIGHT against ORDER

all good theories of political ideology are modelled on the dnd alignment system.

there is no scream loud enough srsly. there's no scream

this "you" just refers to missingno, right? other people can probably scream loud enough, can't they?