seester

[seester @seeeeeester]

Always sovereign, never stuck.

[Rich Logis/Leaving MAGA 🇺🇸 @PerfectOurUnion]

Something that took me time to accept, when I was in MAGA, was how much my intelligence had been insulted. Worst of all, my persona as an aspiring MAGA pundit, and identity, were buttressed by lies, falsehoods and conspiracies that I had allowed myself to believe.

Leaving MAGA was good for my soul and psyche.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

Please watch this, even though it is deeply dishonest, extremely bigoted, and just plain dumb. You're getting a window into Trump-era evangelical politics. Millions of evangelicals are fed messages like this, constantly and relentlessly. It's damaging to hearts, minds, and souls.

[Amy Siskind @Amy_Siskind]

Media, please cover this man’s cognitive decline, with even one-tenth of the fervor you did with Biden. This is NOT normal! Good gawd!

[seester @seeeeeester]

Fantastic post. If it makes you mad, you might be in one of these cults

[Laura Wiley Haynes @haynes_wiley]

"Cluster B Cults in America"

I've picked one Right Wing cult, and one Left Wing cult.

Let's look at their parallels through shared Cluster B traits.

[Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs]

We went from “girls can play with trucks too” to “if a girl plays with trucks, cut her breasts off” at an alarming rate.

And they call that “progressive” 🤡

Save the tomboys.

[໊ @iamohian]

“you look tired”
thanks i’m trying to stay alive

[Anila Whitney @ANILAWHITNEY]

A mother in front of me at the grocery store handed her 2-year-old a lemon and said "smell this." The boy grabbed it with both hands, brought it to his face, inhaled, and made an expression so dramatic that the woman behind us started laughing. His eyes squeezed shut. His nose wrinkled. His whole body recoiled. And then he shoved the lemon back at his mother and said "again."

She handed it back. He smelled it again. Same reaction. Same recoil. Same "again." They did this 4 times before she put the lemon in the bag and moved to the onions. She picked up a yellow onion and held it under his nose and said "this one is different. Tell me what you think." He smelled it carefully. Looked at her. Looked at the onion. Said "not nice." She laughed and said "I agree. Let us find one you like."

They spent 40 minutes in the grocery store. He did not ask for candy once. He did not cry once. He did not reach for her phone once. He was too busy working.

The grocery store is the most underrated sensory classroom on earth and most parents speed through it with a screen propped on the cart handle trying to survive the trip.

Here is what that boy was doing while he was smelling lemons.

The produce section alone contains more sensory data than a $200 activity gym. A bell pepper is smooth, firm, hollow, and cold from the refrigerated display. An avocado is rough, soft, heavy for its size, and room temperature. A bunch of grapes is cool, round, and clustered in a pattern he has to figure out how to pull apart. A watermelon is enormous, heavy, smooth, and makes a sound when you knock on it.

Each object is a lesson in weight, temperature, texture, shape, and color. Each one requires his hands to adapt. The grip for a lemon is different from the grip for a banana is different from the grip for a bag of rice. His motor cortex is calibrating in real time. His tactile system is processing surfaces his playroom has never offered him. His olfactory system is cataloging scents that no candle and no toy and no screen can replicate.

And the language. The narration that mother was doing without thinking about it. "This is heavy. This is light. This is cold. This one is bumpy. This one is smooth. What color is this? How does this smell?" Every sentence was a direct deposit into his vocabulary. Contextual language. Words attached to objects he was holding in his hands. Not abstract. Not flashcards. Real words for real things he could see and touch and smell in the moment the word was spoken.

A study on language acquisition found that contextual narration, describing what the child is experiencing in real time, produces vocabulary gains 3 times faster than reading the same words from a book. Because the word and the experience are simultaneous. The brain does not have to imagine the lemon. The lemon is in his hand. The word and the object fuse together in memory.

The mother who hands her toddler a phone in the cart is solving a problem. I understand that. The grocery store with a toddler is hard. The meltdowns are real. The judgment from other shoppers is real. The phone makes it survivable.

But the mother who hands her toddler a lemon is solving a different problem. She is turning 40 minutes of potential chaos into 40 minutes of learning disguised as shopping. She is not spending extra time. She is spending the same time differently.

You do not need to be perfect. You do not need to narrate every aisle. Start with one thing. One piece of produce. Hand it to him. Say its name. Describe one thing about it. Let him hold it. Let him smell it. Let him drop it and pick it up.

You will look ridiculous talking to a toddler about the texture of a bell pepper in the middle of a crowded store. Your toddler will be learning more in that moment than he would learn from 2 hours of the most expensive educational app on your phone.

Both things are true. Look ridiculous. Keep teaching.

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

He belongs in prison. Or a room with padded walls. Or both.

[Granite Man 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @GraniteDhuine]

Love is literally the whole point.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Nobody’s denying that you’re human or that you shouldn’t have the same rights as every other human. What you aren’t entitled to is everyone else’s agreement that you are what you claim to be, compliance with your quasi-religious views or the removal of women’s sex-based rights.

[Alex Pérez. @honordetigre]

Recordatorio estoico:

Si tu paz depende de que todo vaya bien, no es paz, es control. Aprende a permanecer estable en la incertidumbre. Eso es el crecimiento de verdad.

[S. Williams @ShakWills]

Grief becomes all kinds of things.

[Lady Laughingloudley @blah_blablather]

And what would the Roman philosophers make of transgenderism’?

They would care less about the label than about the formation of character and the corruption of judgment.

Cicero would ask whether the movement trains citizens to perceive reality clearly, speak truthfully, honor natural distinctions, and preserve justice between persons. If instead it requires people to affirm propositions they believe false, punishes dissent, converts private feeling into public obligation, and demands institutional conformity, he would see that as corruption of civic fides—the trust without which republican life decays.

Seneca would be merciless about making identity out of inward disturbance. A troubled self is not healed by enthroning the trouble. Appetite, fantasy, shame, self-disgust, erotic fixation, or instability are not sovereign merely because they are intensely felt. The task is to govern the passions by reason, not reconstruct the world so the passions never meet contradiction.

Epictetus would make perhaps the simplest objection: your body is among the facts given to you. You may dislike what has been allotted; you may suffer over it; you may alter what can prudently be altered. But freedom begins with learning the distinction between what is and what one wishes were so. To demand that other people participate in dissolving that distinction would look to him like slavery to impression rather than mastery of self.

Marcus would turn toward duty. A society owes distressed people compassion, restraint, decent treatment, and protection from cruelty. It does not owe them falsehood. Compassion severed from truth ceases to be a virtue because it begins injuring everyone around the person it means to console.

And Tacitus would be interested in the institutional phenomenon: the sudden vocabulary, the mandatory formulas, the punishment of dissent, the eagerness of ambitious institutions to demonstrate ideological purity, and the peculiar spectacle of educated people professing obvious contradictions because the social cost of refusing them has become too high.

The Roman diagnosis would therefore be something like this:

A private disorder becomes a public danger when society stops asking the afflicted person to reconcile himself to reality and instead commands reality, language, institutions, and other citizens to reconcile themselves to his affliction.

And the specifically Roman moral failure would be intemperantia: the refusal to govern desire; vanitas: mistaking self-conception for reality; and iniustitia: making innocent third parties bear the cost of another person’s internal conflict.

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

Nothing is ever as bad as you think it is because no one cares about you as much as you think they do.

[مريم حسنا @Maryamhasnaa]

It’s time to get super clear about what you’re giving your attention to and what’s a distraction.

[seester @seeeeeester]

@John_Dabell Dear John, you’re literally a hero. I hope you know what an impact you’ve had on people’s lives who have never even met you (it’s me!). I have taken lessons in strength, courage, conviction, and optimism from you. Wishing you peace of mind, continued strength, and joy.

[femiiiiii. @femiiiszn]

just found out it doesn't matter how early i go to bed, i just don't wanna go to work.

[WE THE URBAN @WeTheUrban]

Hear me clearly:

You have to stop putting off your life until you’re caught up with it. Something will always need to be done. You are allowed to enjoy your life before everything is handled.

[Dr. Thema @drthema]

May you frustrate every manipulator by refusing to dim your light.

May your radiance repel every shady character who tries to take up space in your life.

[Resko★ @Bloke_Baz]

in my head, it is now the holidays. do not schedule meetings with me. do not follow up with me. we can talk in January