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Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

@babadookspinoza

30 Jan

TW: suicide

We need to be talking constantly about the spike in mental illness and suicides that’s accompanied the Covid pandemic not only so that people realize the value of limiting isolation as much as possible, but also so that desperate people realize this isn’t permanent.

A big factor in depression turning to suicide is the attendant feeling of hopelessness—depression makes us feel we will always feel this way. Having a concrete and (hopefully) temporary cause to point to can be huge in getting people to stop blaming themselves and despairing.

We had a patient yesterday who had stayed sober for years and was beating himself up for relapsing. I told him that a lot of people who had been fine for years are suddenly relapsing now. He honestly hadn’t even considered that the pandemic isolation might’ve been a factor.

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Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

@babadookspinoza

29 Jan

Relapse is part of the recovery process. Every time you resolve to quit and succeed in abstaining for any length of time, you’re building up a skill set that will eventually allow you to quit for good, or at least for longer every time. It’s not failure, because failure is final.

Obviously that’s not a reason to allow yourself to relapse. Relapse still fucking sucks and always makes the next stage of the process that much harder. But it is a process—sobriety isn’t a state that you achieve at some point and then that’s it. It’s a constant struggle.

Honestly if you never relapse then it probably wasn’t an addiction. People who’ve never been addicted have no fucking idea how hard it is to quit—they literally can’t even imagine it, so don’t judge yourself by their standards of how your recovery should be going.

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Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

@babadookspinoza

27 Jan

The US can’t run out of money for the same reason it will never pay off its national debt: through coercion and violence, the US has pegged almost the entire world’s monetary system to the value of the dollar, and US dollars come into existence as debt.

The US dollar isn’t backed by gold; it’s backed by 800+ overseas military bases and 6,185 nuclear warheads.

Don’t get me wrong: returning to the gold standard would be idiotic. But know that the excuse of “how will we pay for it” is a lie EVEN IF you insist for whatever reason on not raising taxes on the rich. But the ruling class is desperate to limit inflation, which hurts the rich.

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Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

@babadookspinoza

26 Jan

The entire conversation around the minimum wage is framed as a question of entitlements or “handouts” when the issue is really this: of the value produced by a worker per hour, how much should employers be prevented from stealing?

All the wealth generated by companies is ultimately produced by workers’ labor. Worker productivity is at record levels, but wages stopped increasing alongside it in the ‘70s. These are the “handouts” you’re looking for: stolen wages taken from those who work by those who don’t.

Minimum wage workers create FAR more value per hour than $7.25 or even $15, but the law allows bosses to keep all but the tiniest pittance for themselves. Why isn’t the law changed regularly to ensure that workers keep enough of the value THEY produced to live comfortably?

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Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

@babadookspinoza

26 Jan

I’ve been pretty depressed about the state of the world recently and one thing that helps a *little* bit is to remind myself not to take on other people’s guilt and feel the shame of shameless people. I’m only one person, and the world does not rest on my shoulders alone.

It’s still tragic regardless of who’s responsible but getting my head out of macro-level thinking and into my own personal life is really necessary every once in a while. Otherwise it’s just too much for any one person to worry about without having a complete mental breakdown.

I know we all struggle with this which is why I tweeted about it. If anybody has other strategies that help I am eager to hear them.

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Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

@babadookspinoza

26 Jan

We should be asking every day why we are currently causing a global mass extinction event and hurtling towards catastrophic climate change without changing our collective behavior at all. We don’t live in a democracy, and the plutocrats who rule us are going to get us all killed.

We’ve known about this for decades with virtually no policy changes. Profit incentive is incapable of taking the long-view of human history; that’s up to us.

I’m a big fan of nature documentaries and even aside from the human cost it’s unimaginably tragic that we’re allowing all of creation to be liquidated for the benefit of the already superrich. An incalculable crime against nature & humanity, perfectly legal in our current system.

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More from @babadookspinoza

Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

Future “Who Wants a Vaccine?” Contestant

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