moc_was_wronged

My misophonia comes from food noises. Music doesn’t bother me, but eating sounds make me sick and angry. It’s some kind of anti-ASMR. Oddly, my cats’ eating sounds aren’t an issue because they’re animals and they’re “supposed to be gross.”

Not saying mean things unprovoked and doing one’s share of the chores is being an adult. Having to put on an emotional show so the high-status, low-competence people in charge feel secure in their high status is… exhausting, pointless, and unsustainable.

I do agree that “masking is bad” is sometimes taken too far. It doesn’t justify being harmful to other people. But the chronic toxic positivity that workplaces demand, because people want to delude themselves into believing it isn’t corrosive to sell one’s time and dignity for survival, is exhausting and unsustainable for autistic people.

No, it’s the opposite. Daily performance check-ins are exhausting and humiliating. The cops show up at your house every day with guns drawn.

A trap autistic people fall into is believing things will get better if a metric is imposed. “Oh, now I just have to beat the metric, not worry about being well-liked.” No, now you have to do both. New written rulers don’t make the shitty unwritten ones go away. It just became monotonically easier to get fired and monotonically harder to get promoted.

When management imposes a metric or quota, it’s time to get a union. Unfortunately, this is not something we have the skills to do alone, but it is a way to fight back against those who hate us.

People like Tate, Shapiro, and Vance should be mocked. They’re ridiculous and toxic. But I hope we can all agree that they shouldn’t be murdered.

But also: political violence is all around us. People die because they can’t afford food, housing, and medical care. Health insurers kill thousands of people every year. What holds this system together even as it fails us? “Property rights,” also known as access to state violence. And when two states decide they or their people have “property rights@ to the same resource… you get a war. And sometimes the only response to someone else’s violence is violence.

I agree that (a) the red/blue culture war is a useless distraction set up by oligarchs to divide working people, (b) the Kirk murder will be catastrophic for the country in addition to being morally indefensible, and (c) political violence would never be necessary in an ideal world. But this doesn’t mean all struggles are pointless. All political and economic systems are inherently violent and the best you can do is to find resolutions that are minimally so.

It gets weirder. What is a set? For finite sets, we know it intuitively. But consider the Axiom of Choice. There is a consistent mathematics in which a choice set is a set, and one in which the same meta-mathematical object is not a set. (Unless, of course, ZF is inconsistent.)

Hustle culture is a tax on people who think they will always be in the top 0.01% if they just manifest hard enough.

(That was trolling.)

* employers can rescind job offers over 20-year-old social media posts.

* rents are sky high and constantly increasing.

* health insurers routinely kill people if they are deemed too expensive to be alive.

* a literal fascist rapist billionaire is now president.

Consequently, we have a society no one will defend. It’s not that people like Putin or Xi. What Putin is doing in Ukraine is unforgivable, even if the West is partially at fault too.

The human rights issues of US-led capitalism have always been severe, but 50 years ago there were redeeming qualities, at least domestically. These days, those are gone, and I don’t blame Gen Z for deciding there is nothing about our society to defend.

That said, abusive corporate environments (and they’re pretty much all abusive) turn people into automatons. Execs can thus wave LLMs around and say, “Look, you’re so useless a machine can do your job.”

And even then it does a shitty job. It misses special cases and causes messes. But it’s cheap in the short term, which is all that matters to the boss’s career. Things will go to shit in a few years, but if you’re good at executive social climbing, you are three promotions away from your bad decisions by the time anyone figures out that’s what they were.