I’m friends with two siblings who frequently refer to any/all of their friends as ‘habibi’ and it makes me feel warm fuzzies every time.
Reyali
Sociopathy is the inability to feel empathy. This is not inherently a bad thing, it’s only bad when people use that to harm others.
A common trait for sociopaths is seeking success, which is defined differently in different cultures. In the US, success is usually defined by fame, money, or power, so we see a lot of sociopaths in government, C-suites, and Hollywood. However, in India, success is more defined around family involvement, and so sociopaths there are often seen establishing those strong family ties and working to fit in.
Some studies suggest that 4% of the population have the brain profile of sociopathy. That doesn’t mean 1/25 people is evil. But when someone who is sociopathic uses that lack of empathy to harm people, that’s when they become a danger and should be called out for it.
Source: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, Ph.D (and my memory thereof)
It wasn’t good phrasing, but I think their point is she needs to take action on day 1, not start researching/planning on day 1. “Trying to find out” being the operative words, versus, “now that I’m in office, I’m going to do X, Y, and Z.”
Ok, it’s worse than I thought. I expect Trump to make comments about it being rigged, that’s normal enough.
What I didn’t expect, even despite the title here, is that he’d claim the White House pushed Facebook to suppress content in 2020, making it a rigged election. But he was the White House at the time!
Zuckerberg also referenced a now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop article in the New York Post. Zuckerberg writes in his letter, "the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election."
Trump writes: "Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee."
Great examples. The most valuable use for me has been writing SQL queries. SQL is not a part of my job description, but data informs choices I make. I used to have to ask a developer on my team all the questions I had and pull them off their core work to get answers for me, then I had to guess at interpreting the data and inevitably bug them again with all my follow-up questions.
I convinced the manager to get me read access to the databases. I can now do that stuff myself. I had very basic understanding of SQL before, enough to navigate the tables and make some sense of reading queries, but writing queries would have taken HOURS of learning.
As it is, I type in basics about the table structure and ask my questions. It spits out queries, and I run them and tweak as needed. Without AI, I probably would have used my SQL access twice in the past year and been annoyed at how little I was able to get, but as it is I’ve used it dozens of times and been able to make better informed decisions because of it.
Have you seen the panda that was raised by zookeepers? The zookeepers had to teach it to break bamboo, which was hard for them so they often grimaced while doing so. The panda learned to make a similar face, seeing it as part of the process. They’ve even caught the panda making the grimace after breaking the bamboo, like it realized that it forgot to do the thing and had to make up for skipping that step.
That’s a good one. A few others that help with my executive dysfunction are:
- “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” (It’s better to do something than to obsess over trying for the impossible goal of ‘perfection’.)
- “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” (This one helps especially with art and things I enjoy but struggle to do if I’m not instantly great at them.)
- “Laziness does not exist.” (This was inspired by a Medium article I read years ago which explained there is always an underlying cause of procrastination. Mental or physical ill health issues, uncertainty about the task, fear of failure, etc. When I am struggling to move forward, I now look for that reason and can begin to remove the barrier.)
HR response isn’t the only thing though. A number of years ago, my (F) partner (M) was sexually harassed by his female boss. He didn’t report it to HR, but he did sometimes bring it up around his friends. He had multiple people who base a lot of their identity on their feminism/acceptance/equality views tell him it wasn’t possible for him to be a victim of sexual harassment.
And then if he brought it up around more normie people, especially guys, the most frequent first question was, “Is she hot?”
The responses he got from so many people were part of why he never took it to HR. The other part was that she was smart enough to never do it in writing, so it would have been he-said-she-said. It was just easier to get a new job.
My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!
They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.
There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.
Texas is also a voter apathy state. A lot of the apathy comes from gerrymandering, which I’d call a form of voter suppression, so your point still stands.
Also reminder for every state except Maine and Nebraska: your voting district has NO effect on who gets the electoral college vote for your state. Even if your state is gerrymandered to all hell and there’s no chance your district will go blue, that has literally zero affect on whether your vote is counted for president.
So go vote, even if it’s hopeless for the local races. Your vote can help flip a state!
“First in Flight” was the original (because the Wright brothers’ first flight was in NC), then they added “First in Freedom”. It’s because NC was the first state to write/sign a Declaration of Independence from England, over a year before the Declaration of Independence.
But it was a fucking slave state. I’ve always thought the “First in Freedom” license plate was insulting.
Also, Mark Robinson is insane and a horrible person. Obviously.