2019, eh? New Year’s Day Open Thread

@A.Noyd

do you…do you own my cat?

@Valentin
I dunno. Is your cat a large silver tabby with infection-prone anal glands and a severe dislike of other people?

~*~*~*~*~

@Lizzie
He shows gratitude by squinting his eyes at me. It’s actually really sweet. I’m pretty sure he thinks the yowling can summon food. He just started this a while ago. He’d see me get the food ready and yowl a bit in excitement. Soon after a yowl or two, the food would appear in front of him. Magic! Then he began escalating—yowling nonstop as soon as he saw me getting the food ready.

So now I’m trying to train him out of it because it’s really annoying. He seems genuinely confused by how his yowls are no longer effective, but still can’t manage to put two and two together.

I always thought cat squint is because they want to say that they trust you and that they are not a threat to you. I watch my cats do this to each other and also make a “chirrrrr” sound when they walk past each other. When they want to fight they make big eyes and thrash their tail and put their head in a weird way. They generally don’t yowl for food but they do meow very loudly. What they do in the night is yowl and patrol around with a toy, sometimes also in the day, but then if I try to play with them they look at me strangely like I interrupted something important!

I have a number of thoughts that all tie back into this in various ways, but in a kind of a loose tangle, so pardon me if this seems a bit scatterbrained.

@A.Noyd(?): on being versus acting angry, yes I know there is technically a difference but the one leads automatically to the other just as a stone pushed off a cliff will fall to the bottom. The pushing and the falling are distinct, but not separable.

There’s also a privilege issue here, about which more anon.

@epitome of incomprehensibility:

Interpreting many things negatively. *That’s* what I think Scildfreja was trying to get at. She wasn’t trying to say that a more constructive attitude magically fixes machines (I wish…) Obviously, it’s hard to get out of the habit of interpreting things badly when bad things are happening, but if #3 gets better, then you’ve got at least one thing going better, which is better than none.

This also ties into the privilege issue, and connects back to something I’ve been thinking about in connection with the litanies of haplessness related by Rhuu and others. Missed buses, slow service, and so forth.

That thought is that most of us have become very well trained in tolerating abuse. We are all being abused, some of us more than others. When that bus is late, and the one you were supposed to transfer to is early, you are being abused. When they shut off one of your utilities for a few hours because fuck you, that’s why, you are being abused. When any of these things are done to you, you are being abused. And when the system gives you zero margin for error, so for example a missed bus means you are “late” and being “late” is a personal failing for which a penance will be exacted from you, from being expected to stay late without being paid extra up to being fired and ending up in a debt/homelessness death spiral, yep: You are being abused. And gaslit into accepting this abuse as a somehow necessary part of life, a trial that we all must endure because reasons. And gaslit into accepting the negative value judgment that you’re chronically tardy, and various other things you are told are your personal failings even though they are the consequence of others failing you.

Why is this abuse happening? Why else, in this place and time: to maximize shareholder value, of course! The bus is late because they cut corners. Or because by driving slow they get better fuel mileage even if they chronically miss their own posted schedule (and get farther and farther behind it as the day progresses). Or etc. They shut off your utilities because at least part of what you pay is a flat monthly fee, but nearly all of your contribution to their marginal costs per customer disappears for several hours, so they make a few extra pennies that day, and those pennies add up. Or maybe the utility failure is a genuine “accident”. Except that accidents aren’t. There’s not really such a thing as an “accident” outside of a bona fide natural disaster like a tornado slashing through your city. Most of these so-called “accidents” happen inside of systems that are entirely under the dominion of man. Most of them happen inside a concrete box somewhere whose interior, short of a major hurricane or magnitude 6+ earthquake, is totally isolated from any vagaries of wind or weather, in a room full of nothing but humans and their assorted artifacts. And if something happens in a system that is entirely under the dominion of man, that something must be a consequence of the choices of people. It cannot be something that “just happened”, like some sort of spontaneous quantum event popping into existence ex nihilo. The widespread myth that things “just happen” is a self-serving lie by the corporatocracy, because widespread belief in that myth gives them license to operate as abusers.

That utility outage that was an “accident” was made statistically inevitable by the deliberate, rational, devoid-of-empathy choice of corporate bean counters to do so much, and only so much, to error-proof their systems, to ensure health and safety in the workplace, to apply ergonomics to the design of their things so that erroneously cutting off the wrong customer for nonpayment of some other customer’s bill could not happen from one single cack-handed employee fat-fingering a single button on a control panel somewhere. In a properly designed system, committing a drastic action results in at minimum an “are you sure? y/n” prompt or its equivalent. Big red buttons are under glass covers you have to break or lift to get to (or accidentally rest your elbow upon). Sometimes the glass cover needs a key to open it, at that. Then there’s what are called “interlocks”. If you have a car that won’t start if the doors are not all closed that’s an interlock. In the computer system at a utility provider, it would be easy to design an interlock to prevent mistakenly administering a penalty, such as a service termination or a late fee, to the wrong party. Suppose there’s a screen that displays a customer’s account standing along with a (virtual) Big Red Button to “zap user” that can be used to smack them with some penalty or another for whatever reason, be it nonpayment or using their service to send spam or whatever. Well, that button can be disabled so it can’t be accidentally tripped by an errant mouse click except under special circumstances: the online version of the glass cover. It opens automatically if the customer has a negative account balance: overdue to pay their utility bill. It can also be opened by putting in an extra password or some other task that cannot be performed inadvertently (unlike a mere button push), for when there’s a non-billing-related reason to punish a user. That extra interaction can include something like you having to type in the name of the customer who is being sanctioned. If you are on the wrong person’s screen the computer can flag the mismatch and fail to enable the Big Red Button. It can prevent mistakenly zapping user A because user B did something wrong, or at least make such an error far less likely, as you’d have to make the same mistake twice, and furthermore make it identically twice, in a row.

They can do all of these things. None of it is technically infeasible. Some of it is actually used in some places — especially in aircraft and medical settings, where the consequences of error can be both lethal and extremely expensive.

But when it’s a monopoly and the consequences of error are less-lethal and rarely if ever expensive, they don’t do these things. The sheer shoddiness of everything you deal with day to day, from transit to your internet service, from your own work environment to your homeowner’s insurance, is mute testament to that fact. Why don’t they do these things? Because they don’t have to, and it would cost them. For $150 a month or whatever you are paying for internet service don’t you think they can afford to install a few accident-preventing glass covers over various big red buttons? Of course they could. But they won’t, because they are not compelled to, and being cheapskates about accident prevention, and maintenance, and etc., and etc., will maximize shareholder value.

This might seem like I’m belaboring something obvious, but there’s a flipside to this. The people who are subjected to all these avoidable and preventable “accidents”‘ consequences must be kept compliant, prevented from demanding better, and part of how they do that is to monopolize, part is to heavily lobby the government to give them free license to “self-regulate” (i.e., do whatever the hell they please), part is to donate heavily to politicians and parties that will regulate business only lightly, or only in ways that help incumbents by raising barriers to entry while not forcing those incumbents to not be lazy, slipshod, and minimally productive. And part is gaslighting the entire population of a planet into accepting the shoddiness as normality, as unavoidable, as “just how life is”.

The reason I am elaborating so much on this is to point out that several people here (not naming names) have (inadvertently, to be sure) been helping to perpetuate this propaganda by telling me that I should just accept much of this as “just how life is”. It is ingrained deeply, this neoliberal BS! Even I probably still have some internalized myths widespread belief in which benefits the plutocrats rather than benefitting myself. It can be difficult to spot, let alone root out, but this is a necessary task if we are ever to overthrow our corporate overlords and institute something resembling a real actual society again. Until that time, we are all in a so-huge-it’s-invisible slave labor camp that we’re constantly being told is “freedom”. That was the message of the movie The Matrix. The Matrix still has at least a little piece of us, and as long as you’re counseling anyone to accept rude and sometimes downright dangerous mistreatment from our corporate overlords it still has a little piece of you.

And that privilege thing I mentioned before? That would be class privilege, of course, in this particular context. Here are the relevant elements of that privilege.

1. Men in suits and ties or otherwise showing evidence that they can back up their demands with legal force by whipping out a phone and dialing their lawyer are allowed to get angry, be irate, demand better from a business through its various representatives, but anyone else — poorer, female, black, or whatever — is to just meekly jump through whatever hoops the business demands of them. Yep, because the business fell down on the job you should do a bunch of extra work on their behalf. Unless you can afford a lawyer. This calls back to A. Noyd’s and Snowberry’s suggestion that we not show anger. Making a division between people where some are allowed to show anger but others are required to adopt a submissive posture is one of the oldest and ugliest oppression tricks in the book. It is part of how we are trained to meekly accept our lots in life, as designated by the corporate overlords! Just as before it was part of how the landowning class kept the peasants beaten down. Be submissive, or the system will show its violence. Unless of course you are a card-carrying member of the elite class, in which case you are no longer required to be submissive. In our society, the main marker of membership in the classes permitted to be non-submissive is the suit-and-tie ensemble. In previous societies, it was wearing royal purple and various other things. Always something scarce and expensive, of course, and often artificially so.

2. “Have a positive attitude!” and similar implorations. I suspect these are the modern, secular-“rational” substitutes for past religious heavens. Previously it was “you’ll suffer in this life, but if you are righteous (which just so happens to correspond closely with what behavior from you would be most convenient for the wealthy landowning class) you will go to heaven after you die”. Now it’s “have a positive attitude and everything will work out OK”. I bet there are homeless people starving and freezing on the streets who kept up a “positive attitude” as the past-due notices built up, continued to when they took the phone permanently off the hook as that was the only way to shut up the incessant ringing caused by collection agency calls, and even continued to when the eviction notice was stapled to their door, and right up until the cops/creditors came to take away everything they owned in the whole world and cast them onto the “discard” pile. Of what did their faith avail them? Nothing at all, of course. Going to the gallows with a smile on your face doesn’t make it any less lethal. But it certainly availed the wealthy landowning elites, once again. They got to squeeze this person for useful labor, and then they got to claw back the various skins-off-grapes they had paid them for their labor once they were surplus to the elite’s requirements. And they got to do all of this without the victim of their parasitism fighting back because they were stupefied by the latter-day opium of the masses: “Just have a positive attitude, and it will all turn out well in the end!” It’s a recipe for compacency and acceptance, and it is that way by design. Which means it’s more “Matrix” propaganda, another way of keeping people cowed and obedient and accepting of whatever slop (or capricious and arbitrary punishments) the elites are dishing out this week.

That brings us to a third aspect of all of this. Random and unprovoked beatings/lashings/other punishments of random innocent people are a well known tactic to keep the prisoners in a labor camp demoralized and fearful. What do you think all these late buses and service outages are? They are the modern version of random and unprovoked beatings! So another reason they deliberately do a shoddy job of maintenance and accident-avoidance is because it serves their purposes that the people be subjected to random indignities, hassles, and threats, to keep them cowed and demoralized. To keep us cowed and demoralized. To make us happy, grateful even, if we get through one lousy day without any serious problems, rather than considering that to be the bare minimum acceptable quality of one of our days and anything less to be a reason to fight.

When you are grateful just to have gotten through one more day without any too serious disaster, you are a prisoner who is grateful to have gotten through one more day of hard labor without being arbitrarily selected to receive a random unprovoked beating. When you look at someone else running to try to catch up with the bus you’re on, you’re watching one of the other prisoners getting caned and thinking “glad it wasn’t me this time” rather than “enough of this shit, if 20 of us rush the guards 18 or 19 of us will survive and everyone here will be freed”. Which is of course exactly what the guards are counting on.

And now rambling to another scatterbrained topic — but it’s another facet of this same problem we are all facing.

A realization I had last night is that those customer service people who never seem to actually provide customers with service? If corporations are functional psychopaths, the customer service people are their human shields. There’s a reason there’s such high churn in that job! The only reason anyone takes such work at all is undoubtedly because beggars can’t be choosers. And the growth of call centers here in recent years isn’t a sign that we’re undoing the past pattern of exploitation of cheap overseas labor. It’s a sign that we’re becoming as desperate for a job, any job, as people in India were ten years ago. It’s a measure of how far down the slope we’ve slid toward being third-world countries here in the West, in the former heart of the first world. They can now find people willing to be their human shields for a pittance right here. That’s how bad it’s gotten.

Of course, this means that any interaction with customer service is “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. If you’re polite and meekly accepting when they refuse to help you, then they’ve done their job and protected the psychopath standing behind them from taking a (metaphorical) bullet. If you’re not, maybe you can wound the psychopath, but you wound one of his hostages too.

The only way around this dilemma is to avoid the human shields entirely and attack the psychopath from a different angle. Boycotts won’t work against monopolies providing life-critical services like your heating in wintertime, so it pretty much has to be either government action or direct action. And our governments have been bought by the same bunch of psychopaths. It’s time we were marching in the streets, staging sit-ins and general strikes, and circulating petitions, all while demanding better! No other course of action will address our problems.

One other issue that has arisen here is skepticism that I’m being singled out for the aforementioned (semi)random beatings at a higher frequency than other fellow prisoners in this benighted, invisible camp. At first I was not sure how to address this matter, other than to note that the claim by Valentin (for one) that everyone gets exactly the same amount of this shit is entirely faith based. He thinks it’s symmetrical. I am pretty sure I’m getting an extra helping of shit. Without memory transplants or some such technology how would this be resolvable? There’s no apparent basis for comparison!

But there are some bases for comparison, when you think about it. We can count how many times in some period several people (one of them me) suffers some particular, specific, well-defined type of unwanted and gratuitous BS. We can also compare these things over time to see if it’s getting worse. (Spoiler alert: it’s getting worse).

Since that’s the type of incident that precipitated this discussion, let’s start with power outages. How many blip outages (off and back on again in under a minute or so) have each of you had over the past week? I’ve had seven. How many hours of total outage time so far in 2019? I’ve already racked up ten. And the year isn’t even four full days old. I’ve had power for only 89% of 2019 so far. Not an auspicious start to the year! Can any of you top that?

Going into the archives, the frequency of outages has definitely been going up since I moved here. Let’s look at the past ten years, now ignoring 2019, so January 1 2009 through December 31 2018. Back in 2009, the only outages I experienced were blip outages, and only in the summer. The majority of them had obvious and acceptable causes, such as thunderstorms or high winds. In 2010 there was a several-hour outage after a lengthy period of high winds, and blip outages here and there. Most were still attributable to the weather — the irreducible outages that would happen even if the power company cared and did its job perfectly. There were a handful of “blue sky” blip outages in both years, all of them, interestingly in the summer. Little old ladies can’t freeze to death in their apartments in the summer, so perhaps even then they were a little less invested in maintenance and reliability during the summer months, and a little more so during the winter months when an outage would have a greater likelihood of leading to an expensive lawsuit. The outages they’d have been worried about being extended ones, long enough to freeze people to death, but the preventive maintenance that was done to limit the risk of such an outage would presumably reduce the frequency of other failures too, including very brief outages.

As we proceed from 2011 through 2017, the frequency of outages that are not attributable to the weather goes up gradually. The amount caused by storms waxes and wanes with the amount of storms, which is somewhat variable from year to year; on the other hand, “blue sky” outages show a gradual secular increasing trend. Blue sky outages remain largely confined to the summer months, and in the winters from 2009 clear through to April 2018 there are very few outages, all but one of them attributable to freezing rain or high winds.

In 2018 the trend of increasing blue-sky “blip” outages accelerates sharply. In 2009 the average time my computer would be up at a stretch was very close to 5 weeks, and the cause of a majority of restarts was patch Tuesday updates demanding one to complete the installation process. In or around 2016 the average uptime was down to 4 weeks and power outages were a slightly more frequent reason for a restart than Windoze updates. The average uptime in the winter stayed very close to 5 weeks but in the summer it was down to 3! In the summer of 2018, though, it nosedived to under 2 weeks, with about three blue sky outages happening for every thunderstorm that caused one or more outages before it moved out of the area.

Worse, this time blue-sky blip outages did not stop happening around November, as in every previous year here. They continued into December, and the frequency of them rose further in the final week of the year, after Chrismas.

Judging by the past four days, this accelerating trend of shoddy quality is continuing unabated; mathematical calculations suggest that it will no longer be possible for me to use a computer by sometime in mid-May, as the mean time between outages will be down to minutes by then.

OK, that’s enough about power outages. Maybe I just have an exceptionally crummy power company or something. At this point you could still claim that I don’t have it worse. I may have shittier power reliability but maybe you have the world’s worst transit company (if so, you likely use them anyway because getting anywhere in Ottawa by car has become a living nightmare) or the most atrocious cable TV company in history (I have it on good authority that that’s Comcast). We need a broader sample.

OK, what about … colds?

You know, runny noses, sneezing, that sort of shit.

How many days a year do you have a cold? How many times does one cause you difficulty sleeping because of cold symptoms? Maybe five or six nights in a typical year?

If so, then I definitely have it worse, because 150 > 6.

You read that correctly: 150. I rarely have any kind of cold or flu during the summer — as is typical — but not long after there’s snow on the ground I invariably come down with one and it typically lasts until somewhere around mid-April. And this is despite my low level of human interaction, and thus, low exposure risk. The thing is, I get do still exposed eventually once cold season starts, and once it happens, it just lingers and lingers and lingers clear through until spring and the warm, humid air that seems to be these bugs’ Kryptonite. In the meantime, it flares up and dies down but never 100% goes away. My nose feels ever so slightly stuffed right now. It will probably flare up somewhat as soon as I lie down to sleep tonight — some postural sinus thing I presume — and a few times over the winter it will flare up a lot worse for about 48 hours each time. Those latter flareups always show a predictable course: first the trickle of sniffles and runny nose nonsense becomes a torrent, to the point of interrupting other activities and wasting a detectable percentage of my time. Sneezing fits follow, then on day two it morphs into a cough, which slowly diminishes and finally goes away around day three. Often I have some soreness in the muscles in my chest for several days after the respiratory symptoms have died back down to their long-term winter average (modulo the much milder, minutes-long flareups that seem to be caused by posture changes: going to bed, getting up, going to the bathroom, etc.)

The worst thing is, there’s nothing I can do about this. Not on my budget. Buying enough Nyquil (150-odd doses!) to enjoy restful sleep all through the winter would break the bank. How much Nyquil do you have occasion to ever buy? One or two bottles in a year perhaps?

Of course you might argue that cold viruses are not attributable to neoliberalism. But the inability to have a cheap enough remedy for the symptoms to be able to afford 150 doses a year indisputably is attributable to neoliberalism, and as for why I get it so much worse than other people, I’d have to guess it’s dry, electric-heating air or something like that. I didn’t have colds that lasted entire winters until maybe 15 years ago. At that time I moved to a place with an oil furnace (don’t remember what heated the one before that). More recently I went to this electrically heated apartment and it got worse. It has been this way ever since. Clearly, there are better and worse choices of heating system for aiding or hindering the body’s ability to avoid or to eliminate respiratory viruses. Equally clearly, the wealthier you are, the more you get an actual choice in that area, whereas beggars can’t be choosers. I doubt there’s an apartment in Canada I could afford that wouldn’t aggravate my proneness to winter colds.

OK, so that’s two things where I clearly have it worse. I could list more, but this comment is already getting long as it is. Suffice it to say, when I say I get more of this nonsense than other people do, I’m not making a faith-based statement. It’s based on objective, verifiable facts. It’s based on counting up and comparing numbers. It’s based on observations, such as that very few of the people I see on any random winter day are sniffling, and of the people I see repeatedly none are sniffling on more than one or two occasions over the winter, while I’m sniffling every single day. Or counting outages (or proxies, like machine-compiled statistics of system restart timings and whether they were after normal shutdowns) and curve-fitting extrapolation, combined with such obvious things as “if nobody could keep a computer running for more than a few hours to a day or two at a stretch before the power got randomly knocked out, desktop computers and WiFi units would have all been designed with batteries inside of them the same as laptops use, going back to the 1990s”.

So now that we have established as a matter of empirical fact that I get this stuff worse than most people do, and that even the degree to which other people do is a result of abuse stemming from the cold, calculated decisions of corporate beancounters deciding what will maximize shareholder value …

What are we going to do about it? Because the time for sitting around and talking about it, and only sitting around and talking about it, is past. We have Trump. We have Brexit. Power outage frequencies are climbing toward a point in the near term where any device that doesn’t have a battery will be nigh useless. We’re losing an entire city to a catastrophic fire or hurricane every three years now on average due to climate change. Trump is increasingly desperate, and cornered animals are then at their most dangerous. Kids are being interned in concentration camps and some are dying of malign neglect there. The average person can no longer make ends meet, to the point that they no longer have to actually go to the third world to hire people to do third-world jobs. The time for action on all of these things, and more, is now.

Also, you never mistakes. Other people do make mistakes, but only because they want to make your life miserable.

Surplus – WELCOME TO LATE STAGE CAPITALISM.

Also you have it worse. The worst of anyone, ever.

I made a decision not to try to help you again after the last time you went off like this, and i probably should have scrolled on by this time. Interacting with you in an honest way is a drain on my limited amount of “can deal” in a day, and currently i think you will find that *I* am the most disadvantaged person in the world, because i spent a huge amount of money to fly home, then was sick for half of it and now have been sick during my week off. I’ve had to cancel all my plans, even the ones that were ‘lets play life is strange 2’ because my energy was so low. ^

You don’t want to hear that *everyone* has disappointments, illnesses, money problems, shitty infrastructure and and and!

(did i mention the power at my old work that would go out in a windstorm? How much do you think it cost my small company to send over 100 highly trained people home early *with pay* because we couldn’t work? But sorry, your infrastucture problems are the worst.)

You feel hard done by. Fine. Next time you come in here with a screed like these, i will just post “Yes, Surplus, no one else in the world has it as bad as you.” And not try to actually help you. You only ever want affirmation and not empathy (because no one understands how badly *you* have it), and certainly never solutions.

Good luck dealing with your problems. I know they are real, and that they impact your life. I don’t believe we should be playing Oppression Olympics, but since you want to, fine. You win.

^- i am not the most disadvantaged person.

Cyborgette – that is terrifying!!!!

Oof, that’s a lot of text. It will take me awhile to digest all that. Patience please!

And yeah, I certainly hope you American ducks down there are able to overthrow an emergency powers declaration. Congress is responsible for that, right? I sure hope so.

Ok, I haven’t finished reading your wall of text, but this?

Men in suits and ties or otherwise showing evidence that they can back up their demands with legal force by whipping out a phone and dialing their lawyer are allowed to get angry, be irate, demand better from a business through its various representatives, but anyone else — poorer, female, black, or whatever — is to just meekly jump through whatever hoops the business demands of them.

That’s not true. When I worked in customer support, threatening legal action was the fastest way possible to shut down all avenues to actual assistance and get redirected to the legal team. You’d get a big red warning message in your account to only transfer to legal.

Being abusive to the staff was the second fastest path to shutting down your options. Based on everything you’ve said here so far, this is the bucket you fall into. It can be fixed by…*gasp*…not abusing the staff.

People who were experiencing hardship would get special treatment if we could. Sometimes they would request it, sometimes they would just explain their situation and we’d be like, “hang on, I got you.” What you’re saying might be true in some cases (doubt it for any large corporation on the lawyer bit, though), but it certainly isn’t universal.

What significance does the term “national emergency” have in the US? Is that just talk, or would it give the current government certain veto powers (like the War Measures Act did in Canada)?

And, like that one, @Moggie’s “State of emergency? Sounds more like dictatorship to me” seems about right 🙁

@Surplus – I phrased things badly. “Constructive” was bad wording; it makes me wince just re-reading it. For a writer, I’m a pretty terrible communicator 😛

Let me try to explain. The problem with complaining about yourself isn’t that your complaints aren’t valid. But it can get in the way of your other, more important points. This whole last paragraph, starting –

What are we going to do about it? Because the time for sitting around and talking about it, and only sitting around and talking about it, is past.

– is worth repeating, but people with less patience than myself (I have ADHD; my attention span is inconsistent rather than nonexistent) might say “meh, Surplus is just complaining again” and look the other way.

Part of “what are we going to do about it?” is what we’re already doing: to form a community of like-minded people and share information, so that we can do more. It’s not all, but it’s some.

Let’s be friends? If you want to talk to me off WHTM, I’m @xylitolcyclone on Twitter. Yes, Twitter is terrible – as @Rhuu said, late-stage capitalism, rewarding popularity, etc. – but just in case you want to say hi, I’m there. That goes for everybody who’s on Twitter. Anyway, stay strong. You’re not in this alone. <3

Sorry for double post but there is just a lot to talk about here.

#1 – a positive attitude

We fan be sure most of the suffering we experience is caused by capitalism, or by the kind of selfish and violent governments that rule us and surround us. But positive attitude is not faith in god – positive attitude is something to protect you against the forces you can’t control and can’t change.

This is Pavlo Hyrb

He is 20 years old and he was in Russian custody the Krasnodar Region since he was 19. He was lured to Belarus by a young woman he thought loved him, who was pressured by the FSB to assist in his capture. They arrested both and charged Pavlo with terrorism for something his friend written on his Facebook page. He has a kind of genetic disorder called hypertension which effects lots of things and means he needs medication and medical attention. I shared this picture because this is early in his capture – now he looks much worse and I don’t want to share that because it is distressing and sad. He is denied medical care, medicine and his Ukrainian doctor can’t see him, the FSB subject him to psychological abuse every day.

But why do I share this? What is this about positive attitude?

There is very little we can do to support him, we can’t stop the mafia state of Russia torturing and lying to this young man – but we can help him, and it already proved to help him, by sending positive thoughts in letters. In fact, Ukrainians and supporters all over the world are doing tjis for Ukrainain prisoners in Russia and Crimea, to try and do what they can to help the suffering feel less. I will also write a letter to Pavlo when I get home.

Here is a tweet showing Pavlo’s response to this communication:

https://twitter.com/LetMyPplGoUA_en/status/1080804340808540161?s=19

(I don’t know how to embed the picture – if anyone can embed in another comment for me i will appreciate that a lot!)

You can see how hard he tried to be positive, he says “friendship is magic”, and it breaks my heart to see this drawing, but this positive attitude will of course change nothing, but it can help him survive this suffering which for most of us we can’t even imagine. He knows inside that he is not just in a risk of jail for 20 years, but that because of his genetic condition, his life is in danger. But by remaining positive, by being brave, he protects his brain, he protects his sanity, he reduces his suffering just a little bit, and most of all, he has *hope*.

Positive attitude and mental strength will not stop the bad things from happening, how can it? But it is *vital* if you want to survive and live in suffering that you cannot control and cannot escape. It is good that very few people will live with the suffering with which Pavlo and the other hostages live, but positive attitude is still useful for us in all our lives. It makes enjoyment of life possible, it makes living possible, it is a protection for our brains and our sanity. I am not saying it is easy to do – in fact when you need positive attitude the most it is one of the *hardest* things to do, but it is necessary, it is important, it is not just somehting we can dismiss and say it is bullshit faith likw faith in god or religious (which is also not always bullshit and helped lots of people before).

Whoo! Okay, wow, that was a lot of reading to do. This week has been an avalanche of people falling apart and needing a shoulder. At least this is mostly written down!

@Surplus, apologies for being so slow. It’s a lot to catch up with. I’ll admit I got pretty blisteringly angry at points, but I’ve thrown all that out and have boiled down to a more coherent story. I’ve skipped over a lot of stuff, which I can go over if there are things you’d like me to address. My focus here is on why you, particularly, seem cursed with bad luck and bad interactions.

Gonna start a little abruptly here. I’d edit it down again but I’ve already been at it, like, two hours. I’m afraid I’m spent! Mea culpa.

EDIT: I went and went through it again. I’m a glutton for punishment.

So now that we have established as a matter of empirical fact that I get this stuff worse than most people do, and that even the degree to which other people do is a result of abuse stemming from the cold, calculated decisions of corporate beancounters deciding what will maximize shareholder value …

We haven’t established that as empirical fact. Everything I read from your explanations above is still more easily explainable by you more readily interpreting events around you negatively, and those negative events feeling more frequent and significant. Importantly, this distortion in your perception appears objective to you.

Shall we do power outages? Let’s do power outages. I’m gonna skip to the end here.

In 2018 the trend of increasing blue-sky “blip” outages accelerates sharply.

These “blue-sky blips” aren’t outages, they’re PF Variations, caused by dirty power usually. There can be a few reasons for it happening. Older distribution grid hardware can cause it, for example. It’s expensive to fix and generally involves actual prolonged power outages as they replace the equipment. (Anyone who works with hi-volt, please come and correct me on this stuff!). The province has to decide to either raise taxes and deal with it, or keep the taxes lower and everyone gets to deal with occasional undervoltages as they gather the money for a slower replacement/repair pace.

But I doubt that’s the issue. See, CSA regulations (and UL and others) require all electronics sold in Canada to have little devices called MOVs – Metal Oxide Varistors – as part of the power system. They’re tiny fuses, little blocks of metal that oxidize to eat up voltage spikes. Tend to last three to five years on normal residential power, more sometimes if you’re lucky. When they’re gone, the variations continue on into the hardware. When this happens to a motherboard, it reboots. Sounds to me like that’s what’s going on here; more likely than a grand conspiracy anyways. Happens to any piece of electronics that lives on normal residential power.

Okay, now. Colds? Six days a year, I think you were suggesting?

I’m not making a faith-based statement. It’s based on objective, verifiable facts. It’s based on counting up and comparing numbers. It’s based on observations, such as that very few of the people I see on any random winter day are sniffling, and of the people I see repeatedly none are sniffling on more than one or two occasions over the winter, while I’m sniffling every single day.

Okay, so, anecdote time. Before I figured out that I had a wheat allergy, I was sick constantly. Incessant sniffling and difficulty breathing. Nausea, fainting spells, impossible to sleep at night, chest pain, you name it. Depression, anxiety, paranoia. All from an autoimmune condition. And yes, that’s what the sniffling was from – a stupid allergy to wheat proteins. I’d say I was easily sick as much as 150 days a year. Have been improving steadily the past six months or so since I got it figured out, fortunately.

I’m currently suffering some rather significant chest pains, as further example. I used to think they were panic attacks. Turns out that there was a smidge of gluten in lunch yesterday and I’ve been reacting since. When I’m under stress – writing a contentious forum post for example – that reaction turns me into a mess of symptoms.

I’m not just saying you have a wheat allergy, by the way – though who knows, that might be the case! I hope you’ve talked with a doctor about your frequent symptoms. I’m saying that I’ve been punished just as unfairly as you have in that regard, and it’s not as big a difficulty for me as yours has been for you. My lens is different, and it makes the big obstacles small, and makes the small ones disappear.

Capitalism – you talked about that a lot. All true! But also not applicable to examining why you, personally are having these issues. Everyone lives in the same crummy system. So let’s leave that off.

Now to the point where you were talking to me specifically:

2. “Have a positive attitude!” and similar implorations. I suspect these are the modern, secular-“rational” substitutes for past religious heavens.

a) Your suspicions are incorrect,
b) I’ve put a lot of effort into my personal motivations and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t minimize them so swiftly, and
c) You follow the above with a long block of text making up reasons why “having a positive attitude” is stupid and shallow and meaningless. Take it up with Marcus Fucking Aurelius. I’m a stoic, if you want to classify me. My beliefs have a long heritage of being sober, rational and a clear path to objectivity.

You’re missing my point by a mile. I’m not telling you to “smile on the way to the gallows.” I’m telling you that you’re seeing gallows-scaffolds where there are streetlights.

(This is where you say “stop gaslighting me,” usually. I’m not gaslighting you, either. Gaslighting is a manipulation tactic in which an abuser fucks with someone’s reasonable perceptions to make them pliable for abuse. I don’t want to make you do anything outside of helping you feel better.)

I’m not talking about the “power of positive thinking” or anything like that. I’m talking about how perception works – and specifically how it doesn’t.

I want to go back to your “I get colds a lot more frequently than other people” line here. I’m sure that you are objectively aware of having the sniffles frequently – I’m not going to quibble about a misplaced universal. How can you possibly know that no one else does? Because they don’t do it around you? I sniffle all the damn time, because I have horrible inflamed sinuses that I’m probably stuck with for the rest of my life now. I’m not known as someone who sniffles though because I try to do it quietly when I’m around people. How do you know that isn’t commonly happening around you?

This part is the important part here – you don’t know, because you can’t know, because you only get a perception of other people in small glimpses, and your brain fills in the rest with whatever else is lying around your cognitive landscape.

If you’re habitually feeling good, you tend to infill those gaps with positive or benign traits. If you’re habitually angry or upset, they’ll be more negative. That’s confirmation bias in action. Silent, background processes in your brain, turning the chaotic nonsense of our perception into a smoother surface that we can make predictions on. Those predictions depend on how our brains craft that conscious surface, and it seems like your brain crafts a surface that sees a lot of threats out there. More than most people, by far.

That’s your problem. That thing, right there. That’s what you have to fix.

That having been said, if this malfunctioning filter exists how does one go about getting the darn thing repaired?

To the actual heart of the issue, then.

Just like anything else – you have to find out what broke it. Once you know the nature of the damage you can start adjusting things to get a clearer perspective on reality.

That’s a lot tougher than it sounds. Usually that break happens early in life, when our perspective on the world is forming. So you have to dig deep. I can’t do that for you, everyone is different after all, and the things that help one person often won’t do a thing for another. I can give you suggestions and ideas, but I won’t until you confirm you want them; I don’t want to presume.

That’s it. All the love and healing.