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Listen to me. Listen very carefully:

They are trying to wear you out.

They are trying to wear you out, and they own most major social media now, along with many major media outlets. The disinformation machine is cranking along. You are going to have to slow the fuck down and read things before you help them wear out other people, too.

So you just saw a post about a real scary bill, hunh? Republicans want to make it a capital offense to pet dogs and repeal The Sky Is Blue Act of 1793, declaring the new official color of the sky to be squant? Damn, that sounds scary.

Let's go look up this fictitious "Make The Sky Squant Again Act" on GovTracker* & on the official legislative tracker on congress.gov!

Well, let's see... GovTracker estimates it has a 1% chance of even getting out of committee and a 0% chance of being enacted, while congress.gov says this bill has 2 cosponsors who have been in the House and combined total of less than a month. The bill doesn't have any actual text, and it was referred to 5 different committees.

That fictitious bill and a hundred others like it are quite literally not worth your time, and more than that, continuing to wring your hands about it and tell other people about the scary scary squant sky bill only does their work for them. It scares people, it makes them spend time and energy on it, and it wears them out. It is a legislative Gish Gallop, meant to throw so many things at people that we can't keep up.

Even calling or messaging your Rep in this case means their staffer has to waste time responding to you and letting you know that Representative Buttzonheads definitely won't support making petting dogs a capital offense, a thing that will never, ever happen regardless.

Staying engaged in this environment is going to require protecting your heart and protecting your energy, yes, but also protecting the energy of others. This is why WWII propaganda posters also included ones taking people to task for spreading panicky rumors and undermining morale.

Do you know why most observant Jews don't eat chicken and dairy together, even though the ban is on red meat and dairy together bc you're not supposed to cook the calf in the milk of its mother?** It's not because we think that chicken might secretly lactate or Just Because. It's because the rabbis decided that if I'm sitting out in public and eating turkey and cheese together, someone might glance at the turkey and mistake it for red meat and think, "oh, well, I know that Spider is a good Jew, there must have been a change, or maybe I can just justify it to myself that if Spider does it, it must be permissible to bend the rules just that much." And I would then be accidentally leading my fellow Jew astray. We are responsible for being even more careful for the sake of others than we are for ourselves.

It's the same principle here. We need to really be careful about the information we are spreading and check things past reading a news site. Is it true? Is it relevant? Is it meaningful? Is the news site one I recognize? Can I find meaningful independent corroboration on another site, which is to say, if I find an article about it on a second site, is it just quoting or rephrasing this site?

Yeah, that is a lot. But that's how we keep them from using us to lead our fellows astray.

*GovTracker is an independent site. They explain their methodology in their About section.

**I cannot say enough how I am not at this time interested in going on a Jewish Side Quest About Dietary Laws on this post. Usually, I love it, but hold off this time, please, y'all. Let's stay on target this once.

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HELLO?

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literally nothing will ever be funnier than Markiplier's Sinister Potion every time i see it i burst out laughing

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new reaction image

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do it barron. remember the lotus flower

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The who

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Okay so I got Rednote because I heard about the whole migration thing and I never bothered to sign up before, and the cultural exchange has just been really fascinating

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i could never leave here

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I went to the Wikipedia page on Les Champs magnétiques (a French surrealist novel written entirely as automatic writing, i.e. typing whatever words come into your head without trying to make them mean anything), which is one of the Wikipedia pages I remember being fascinated by as a young teen first discovering Wikipedia, when at least a couple of you were literally not even born yet, or like barely born. The very short article hasn't changed much since 20 years ago except that the example passage they quote is now a different one for some reason, which I noticed immediately on account of the vibes being wrong despite the new passage also mentioning train stations, and I had to go back to an older revision to see the one I remember from my youth:

The marvellous railway-stations never afford us shelter anymore: the long passages terrify us. So in order to go on living these monotonous minutes must still be stifled, these scraps of centuries. Once we loved the year's last sunny days, the narrow plains where our eyes' gaze flowed like those impetuous rives of our childhood. There remain nothing but reflections now in the woods repopulated with absurd animals, with well-known plants.

For some reason I felt like going back even further to the very first version of the article, created May 8th 2004, and I was rewarded with the fact that the user who initially created the article for Les Champs magnétiques (and the current version is still mostly their work actually) decided to get a bit self-referential and wacky with it; this is how their original version ends:

Keeping the spirit of surrealism, the rest of this entry is done using automated writing (spelling mistakes and all): A strange french book, is this book. I can try to read it but sometinmes I have trouble, especisallym wsince my essay is due in Monday. I have boorrowed a lot of books from the library. Perhapos I can do an automated essay? I mentioned it to my lecturerer and he said it would not work. I wonder if the wiklipedia people will accept this entry. I think they are too strict and it is a pity that surrealism is not an accepted technique if these people knew anything about post-modernism they would realise that everythign like this is valid on some level althought I guess I haven't really spoken about the book, yeah its good, there is poetry towards the end so it's not really a novel.

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“I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.”

— David Lynch

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“One day the sadness will end.

But I don’t think today’s the day.”

David Lynch

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David Lynch behind the scenes of THE STRAIGHT STORY, 1998.