Not sure if these count, but:

• Some More News
• Behind The Bastards
• It Could Happen Here
• Knowledge Fight
• Citation Needed (with Molly White)
• Tech Won’t Save Us
• Better Offline

The fantastic animated show, Pantheon explores that very idea at the very end of its second and final season.

Given a long enough time frame, the vast majority of an immortal life would be spent buried beneath something or floating in the void of space. Think about it, you outlast planets and stars. When those go dark, but you don’t die…nothing to do but float in space.

You might counter that with, "well yeah, but eventually I’d find other sentient life forms and/or people again.” And sure, maybe, but that wouldn’t last as long as you…and then you’re just alone floating in space again, for the vast majority of your life. The only thing to look forward to, since you will outlast everything, is the end of time itself.

Because it’s not a bad thing to ask another person about their experiences in life. And putting it within the context of a particular life choice adds a layer of focus to the conversation.

Given your logic, no one should ever ask anyone else any question about their personal experiences other than to retrieve information.

I use Thunder currently. My first Android Lemmy client was Jerboa, which was fine.

I’ve tried Voyager, and I can’t remember right now why I didn’t stick with it, but I ended up just gravitating towards Thunder. It’s UI strikes the right balance between feature full and minimal imho.

No Murder.

No Rape.

No Pollution.

locate, from the mlocate package. So useful. Honorable mention goes out to tldr.

Just use firejail to sandbox it and find out.

Ublock Origin, NoScript, Chameleon, Libredirect, DarkReader, OneTab, Stack Overflow Prettifier, Classic Mode For Wikipedia, Vimium

Let yourself feel whatever you feel and observe it. Think about how you would react if you saw a close friend or family member going through that. Most kind people would say something comforting or express some form of compassion.

The most important thing to remember is that there will be lots of good and bad things that happen in life, and holding on/ruminating over the past and obsessing over/fearing the future are probably best avoided.

A little reflection and self compassion is good and healthy, but long term rumination and self loathing is when things can get unhealthy quick. Discerning when one turns into the other is difficult, but do your best and try to be self aware of how you’re feeling as you navigate these truly difficult emotions.

Know that this experience, the emotions and the thoughts caught up in it, are part of what makes you human, and that ultimately, it’s one of many experiences that will add up to who you are and who you’ll eventually become. In every moment, you are, whether consciously or subconsciously, engaging with the world and the circumstances you find yourself in, and becoming who you want/need to be.

Be aware of that, and control what you are capable of controlling about who you want to become. It’s like navigating a river, you’re not completely in control nor out of control. Ultimately all you can do is try your best to get to where you want to go, knowing it won’t be perfect nor will it go exactly to plan, but nevertheless you carry on.

Tell that to Linus Torvalds.

Yeah, I’m surprised at how many people here would simply like to add tobacco to the list of controlled substances and add more fuel to the shit firestorm that is the Drug War.

Do I believe the tobacco industry should be far more heavily regulated than it currently is? Absolutely. I actually feel that way about most legal drugs.

But imprisoning people for doing what they want with their own bodies in their own homes has already proven to be ineffective at curtailing drug use and abuse.

Additionally, the inhumane treatment of prisoners and former prisoners is a whole separate topic, but related in that the Drug War is just a corrupt mechanism to feed the prison-industrial complex. Why add another drug (tobacco) to the list of drugs cops can plant on your person and send you off to jail for?

Lol. Emphasis on the H in IMHO. I meant no offense, it’s a valid point.

I have about 25 or so shell scripts I use somewhat regularly and well over 300 aliases. I actually specifically don’t wrap package manager related scripts for no reason in particular, but many often do.

My rule for an alias is if the amount of custom flags gets lengthy, and I use it often, yeah it gets an alias. Here’s an example of using yt-dlp:

alias ytdl='yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all --write-auto-sub -f "bestvideo\*+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best" -f mp4'

For shell scripts, my rule goes that it should probably have multiple features related around a single idea, that way you can use getopts to create custom flags. For example, I have a script that wraps very basic, but commonly used, git commands, chaining the classic add, commit -m, and push behind a series of read prompts, it has -h flags for help -l for a minimal log output, -i to initialize a new repository (even using github api token to remotely create the repo if you want to use github), and -r to revert back changes to a specified commit.

Generally speaking aliases will get you what you need most of the time in a pinch, but shell scripting is more powerful, versatile, but potentially more time consuming.

Others have rightly pointed out that these abstractions can sometimes negatively impact muscle memory, but IMHO this only really applies if you work as devops or sysadmin, where you are often responsible for running many different Linux servers, but usually this isn’t an issue if you have access to the internet and can see your saved aliases and/or scripts (but yeah, instant recall of native commands trumps notes every time).

Additionally, another mentioned using git to keep track of your aliases, which I totally agree with. Whatever you do, back up your aliases and shell scripts, ideally with a git repo of some kind. This not only allows you to take your new scripts/aliases with you wherever you go, but also reference them later in case it’s not possible to use them on not your machine.

Hope this helps. Bash can be crazy powerful if you take the time to learn it, and aliases are a great entry point to recognizing that potential. Here’s one of my favorites that combines mkdir with cd:

alias mkcd='{ IFS= read -r d && mkdir "$d" && cd "$d"; } <<<' 

Good luck, and have fun.

I’m an astoundingly selfish person, and unapologetic about it. Makes for having relationships, romantic or otherwise, pretty much impossible.

I’m middle aged, dated, had relationships in the past, etc., and honestly just don’t have the drive to make relationships work. I do the bare minimum to keep my professional relationships in tact, which honestly is exhausting enough, and otherwise just keep to myself. It’s so much easier than when I was trying so hard to pretend I was interested in where another person was coming from or what they were going through. Now at least that effort ends after I clock out for the day, and there’s less socializing where I work, so there’s less of those kinds of social expectations overall.

Correct myself? Nope. Just reinforced my arguments.

And I’ll stand by my original statement. Don’t bear children. Leave the earth better off than when you found it, not having children is one of the easiest way to do that.

The only way I’m a hypocrite is if I’m a parent, which I guess you’ll just have to take my word on it when I say I’m not. Thank goodness I’m not. But hey, you and I aren’t ever gonna get along anyway, right? So you think whatever you want of me.

Lastly, can we all just take a moment and appreciate that we got into this because of a question about the effect on fertility rates due to microplastics in our testicles?

Now you had a long response to this and I’m not going to argue that your experiences are wrong. We have different experiences though, and we have different conclusions about them.

Fair enough. I will say that the novelty or whether things haven’t always been in decline doesn’t denote that therefore, having children doesn’t inherently contribute to worsening the climate crisis. It does. Faith that things will somehow be resolved by future generations and not by the present one is a lazy, kick the can down the road approach that I am obviously very critical of.

It’s not easy to adopt. The poorer you are, the harder it is. When you look into the process of adoption closer than “I want a kid”, there are some serious systemic issues that crop up. I’m not arguing that it’s not worth adopting, just that an ethical person considering adoption might end up working within the foster system instead. If that gives you an idea of how fucked the adoption industry is, that’s kinda what I was going for.

This is a very fair argument in which I am in general agreement with. I would also point out that the decision to therefore “have my own genetic kids” is not the right approach because, again, having children inevitably contributes to worsening the climate crisis.

I would also question the tactical usefulness of antinatalism when it’s a strategy embraced by the bourgeoisie to extract more out of the downhill trend. There’s no need to pay people enough to support a family when it’s a completely legitimate choice not to reproduce (never mind that people who don’t have enough money to support a family never get to exercise that choice).

If the group destroying the future is making short term money on people not having kids, who’s really being helped by not having kids?

There’s no incentive to pay people enough whether they have kids or not. There are no laws incentivizing nor disincentivizing employers to pay their employees more based off of them having children.

The people in power are incentivized to encourage the general populous to have children for many reasons, but one of them is simply that, like your job and other obligations, having children forces you to divide your concerns away from protests and other forms of activism, as I mentioned earlier. You’ve criticized that my argument that the assumption that change can only happen with more immediate action (“faster”), more time spent, and with undivided attention (ie “can’t do two things”) is plainly false.

I’d argue that while beneficial societal change does happen slowly over time due to long uphill battles by protesters, that this change would have been more dramatic and rapid had people had had less obligations to keeping the bourgeoisie wealthy and with a fresh supply of future workers, and therefore had more time to devote to protests and activism. But I’ll concede this is a hypothetical.

If our goal is the emancipation of the working class, how does embracing the destruction specifically of that class by giving up on reproducing that class move us toward that emancipation?

Well, to be fair, the original argument I was making was that the point of not having children was to leave the Earth itself better off than when we came to be on it regardless of whether we go extinct or not.

The decision to not have children in this context is an act of defiance, a breaking of a malicious cycle of contributing to a global society that has over generations come to the conclusion that modern comforts, societal hierarchy, and inherited cultures, are more important than ensuring the longevity of the human race and the majority of life on Earth as we currently know it.

The only ones who ultimately benefit from this endless cycle are those who have figured out how to exploit the majority of people and resources around them to their whim. The decision to not have children isn’t a decision to somehow deprive the powerful of anything, other than future participants in their game.

The amount of labor involved in social reproduction is significant, but has literally never stopped people from participating in collective action in the past. I can’t help but look at your argument that people can’t work to change society if they have to do family labor as absurd and ahistorical.

My argument is that the change a person can make is proportional to the time they can devote to it. Protests that are most effective are literally the ones that occur where people have nothing but time. They walk out of their jobs, they refuse to work, and yeah, they take time away from their families to do so. All I’m saying is that if you have no children you’re obliged to take care of, you have more time and energy to devote to the cause, and can thereby make for a more effective societal movement.

I mean, look at the panthers, their most significant program was feeding children.

Good example, and I won’t argue it. As mentioned previously, my take that these movements would have been more effective had they had more time had they not had children is a hypothetical that I strongly believe to be true, but has no historical basis because the majority of people end up having children.

That said, I’ll concede that having children of your own often inspires those who would otherwise not have participated in social activism to do so. I would contest that you can achieve more by fighting for the children of others than by dividing your attention between raising your children and fighting for their future.

I gotta take a moment and respond directly to your personal attack that I lead a very privileged life. I’m not gonna get into the poverty Olympics or dox myself, but you don’t know me or anything about my life.

Fair enough. You’re right and it was mean spirited and wrong of me to do so. I’ll not make excuses and simply apologize for doing so. I got overly heated up in making my argument, and should have never made it about you personally. I apologize.

Then let’s go over your post, line by line.

“Bad for the environment” means “Bad for us humans”, nature will take care of itself, just not in a human scale lifespan. So not populating because of the environment doesn’t make sense.

That’s incorrect. Nature is an ambivalent unfeeling aspect of our reality. This is the hand waving comment I was referencing earlier. It amounts to “The Earth will be fine. Humans should only focus on the environment as much as it relates to humans.” I heavily disagree. Humans should focus on the environment to ensure that it remains in a state that sustains as much biodiversity and life for its own sake.

Why have a better environment for humans if there are no humans? I’m not saying we don’t need to look after the environment, on the contrary, we need to better ourselves and the environment because otherwise we go extinct anyway.

I believe I addressed this as well. This is anthropocentric thinking. “Human beings should only care about human beings” sort of thinking. My argument is that the fight for a “better environment”, as you put it, is not for the sake of preserving human beings, but rather for the sake of leaving the Earth in a state that is better for biodiversity as a whole, that is a better world period, whether human beings go extinct or not.

Ultimately I hold human beings to a higher standard than the average person. I believe we are beings capable of great compassion for other living beings on this Earth, but most seem to think we are little more than a thinking animal. I am less concerned with preserving human survival, and more concerned with the legacy humans leave once we are gone, even if there is not a soul to appreciate it, it is still worth doing in my opinion because I believe that is the pinnacle of what humans are capable of, i.e. Compassionate Selflessness.

Now let’s address your latest comment:

So first you say: Don’t bear children. And now you’re trying to counteract my point by saying: think of the children…

Not having children is thinking of the children. Just think about it. If I tell you that having children will make the environment worse, and encourage you to not have children. Ultimately those children that do end up being born in that world with less people in it will inherit a world with an environment under less strain from less human beings.

I’m positive you didn’t even read beyond my first sentence.

Well I did read your post, and I stand by my initial response.

Cause I’m literally saying we need to get our shit together.

On that we are in agreement. The point on which we differ is on whether advocating for not having children is reasonable. I’ve made my case on this point, and unless you have anything to elaborate on, I don’t see how you’ve made a reasonable argument to the contrary. But of course, feel free to respond.

And also, in response to your separate name calling:

Oh no, I’m saying on a scale big enough micro plastics don’t matter. But you are missing my point, we DO need to take care of microplastics, because we want to repopulate… the poster I’m replying to is trying to convince us not to bear children. Edgy, but also quite stupid.

Another hard disagree. The human population is far beyond what it can sustain without oil. Oil goes into our fertilizers, our medications, our daily used plastic packaged products, etc. Without oil, we would not be able to feed and sustain the population we have now, the majority of which live in relative squalor. And we WILL need to vastly cut back on our oil consumption to stabilize the climate. Depopulation will either be forced through mass starvation due to lack of oil and degradation of our environment, or will be chosen by those who opt out of having children.

Repopulation is something touted by the rich to ensure a continuous supply of wage/literal slaves and armies for future nation states to hold dominance. Depopulation will be necessary in order to ensure the survival not only of the human race but also the majority of the currently existing life on this planet, as well as ensuring that the quality of life for those that do live in such a world can be expected to be better than what we have today.

Edgy? Meh, your perspective. Stupid? Debate me.

Idk about you but I watched the sopranos senior year of high school, and the premise of that show is literally “the party’s over”.

Didn’t watch that show, but I’m assuming you mean “the party’s over” as in the world is already fucked. Fuck that noise, even if it were, then the question only is “how hard did you fight to leave this world better than you found it anyway?”

I still love my parents.

Good for you.

No one hates their parents for having them.

Hard disagree from my own experience. I’ve met plenty of people across different backgrounds who hate or resent their parents for bringing them into this world, and then gave some half hearted “Your generation will figure out climate change” schtick when confronted with the naive question, “Why aren’t we all doing something about it?” The hate and resentment comes when you realize they were selfish and weak. If they really wanted kids, why not adopt? Oh but MY genes. MY heritage is what matters. Why?

Why not fight the good fight and protest instead? Meh, it’s just easier to live a comfortable life today than fight for a better tomorrow I’ll never live to see. I’m still a good person! I raised a beautiful family of people who will likely make the same selfish decisions, but because I cared and looked after them and them alone, I swear, there’s no way you can question my goodness!

Again, fuck that, hell yes I can and should question that bullshit, and break the fucking cycle of selfish idiocy. Not having more kids is the absolute least I can do.

Theres obviously room to work towards a better society while also raising children.

You live a privileged life for being able to fantasize that that is he case for the majority of people. Most people make little to no money, and had they not had children, might look at their shitty circumstances and had enough time and willpower to take a chance and upend the systems that oppress them. Instead, out of fear for their children’s wellbeing, they bow their heads and accept increasingly shitty conditions, all the while praying that somehow life will magically be better for their children. No, you can’t exert the kind of political pressure necessary when there are many more sociological pressures to simply feed your kids. The kind of pressure needed to actually change things requires your undivided attention and an exorbitant amount of your time.

Because I hold out hope that the living can change things. But only us, this generation, right now has that opportunity. Having children forces you to focus on raising them rather than fighting the good fight against climate change and the forces that keep it in place. Instead, I’d say your energy is better spent protesting loudly and relentlessly against the forces that enforce the status quo.

But hey, good luck trying to stay optimistic about that next generation not hating your guts as you raise them in an ever darkening world, if that’s the gamble you’d like to take.