Donald “chronos” King @dlking@mastodon.online

Insomnia brain is now writing an essay about just how painfully short-sighted the Penrose "brains are secretly hypercomputers made of quantum microtubules" argument is. It's already jumping the rails into "yeah, but where do axioms come from" navel gazing.

Oh god, my trying-to-sleep brain is outlining an essay in which I tear apart the 14 signs of an ur-fascist worldview in the context of WH40K's unrealism, without ever saying or even implying the word "fascism". Just a vicious takedown of grimdarkness from a logical perspective.

https://nsfw.substack.com/p/the-next-muzzle-on-sexual-expression

The current situation in the Senate is really one of those "this asshole I hate is on fire, do I piss on him or do I look for marshmallows?" moments.

Happy Yeshua ben Yosef's Birthday (Observed)!

I'm reminded of my (dreadful) treatment of captured animals as a kid. Mostly frogs and turtles. A lot of them died at my hands because I wanted to "take care of them".

It took me decades to realize that me wanting to take care of them was a *me* problem, not a *them* problem. I had a responsibility to take care of them *properly* -- to ask my parents to help me research the right food, housing, and other needs -- or to not capture them at all.

Your child never owes you anything. *Never.* You gave them the "gift" of life in the same way that Homer gave Marge the "gift" of a bowling ball in that one episode of The Simpsons: it was really a gift to *yourself*.

If you find yourself not liking your gift, well, tough. The child is a living, feeling being and not a piece of property that you can treat as you see fit. Giving them a healthy childhood and raising them to be upstanding adults is the *minimum* you owe them.

I despise the mindset that parents are giving a "gift" to their children by bearing and raising them, or that children owe *anything* to their parents in the general case.

Having a child is something that you do as a gift to *yourself*. It fulfills your emotional need to feel useful & needed. The child didn't ask for this; it deserves the best possible upbringing, not because that makes you look like a good person, but because *they didn't consent to be your life's meaning*.