We often used to get video games for Christmas, but wouldn’t be allowed to play them straight away because we were spending quality time with family etc. Then we’d get up early on the 26th and pack the car to go on a 2 week camping trip, still not having played our precious new game.
We would take the instruction manual with us on the trip and spend those 2 weeks intensely studying the controls, the lore, everything. By the time we returned home we were fucking ready.
Rules and leaders don’t have to be harmful or coercive though. Even very egalitarian communities need norms. Hell even an anarchosyndicalist commune will have some shared set of expectations of its members.
Like you said, cults are about control. I have a hard time seeing much of a parallel between the necessary structure and norms of a community or club, and the coercive nature of a cult.
Support groups for sure, but I was more thinking of things like sporting clubs, dog parks, skate parks, artistic communities, soup kitchens, men’s sheds, book clubs. Third spaces.
Anything where participation is voluntary, hierarchy is absent or minimal, and people come together to share interests, resources, time, or company.
Community.
They’re all groups of people with some kind of shared purpose or values. Cults are harmful and power based. Communities are helpful and consent-based. Religions can fall either way, or somewhere in the middle.
Protein is protein right? I’m sure any half decent chef could figure out how to make insects tasty with a little trial and error.
Well the problem is that “bug” is not a scientific term right? Or even if it is, colloquially I think it could easily refer to either insects specifically or arthropods more generally.
Certainly a lot of people refer to spiders as bugs despite them not being insects.
There is probably little practical help you can give, but don’t underestimate the importance and impact of social and emotional support.
When someone is in such a shitty situation, just knowing that there are people who care makes a huge difference. So just be a good friend. Listen and empathise when they need to talk about shit. Give them a laugh when they need cheering up or distraction from the bullshit.
Honestly I think the vast majority of people on the left would agree with most of what you said. A lot of the corporate rainbow flag waving is pretty performative and cringe.
The whole pronoun thing is pretty simple really, just don’t say “he” to someone who says “I’m a she”. That’s really all there is to it. 99% of the the time you can tell whether someone is a he or a she. Sometimes it’s not obvious, or you might get it wrong. As long as the other person can say “hey I’m a he actually” and you respond with “Oh my bad bro”, then you are all good.
I know there are some people out there who try to make the pronoun thing into some huge deal but that’s really all it is. I know plenty of trans people and non-binary people and they’re all chill, they just don’t want to be called by the wrong thing. And honestly, neither do I!
Genuine question which I promise I am asking in good faith: what do you think “wokeness” is?
This is a thing people miss. “Oh it can generate repetitive code.”
OK, now who’s going to maintain those thousands of lines of repetitive unit tests, let alone check them for correctness? Certainly not the developer who was too lazy to write their own tests and to think about how to refactor or abstract things to avoid the repetition.
If someone’s response to a repetitive task is copy-pasting poorly-written code over and over we call them a bad engineer. If they use an AI to do the copy-paste for them that’s supposed to be better somehow?