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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • I disagree. Wanting to know, researching and googling isn’t a bad thing. Sure, googling does always make the problem seem larger than it is, but other thanthe anxiety there are no ill effects.

    Do go to your doctor. Let them take a look at you, and ask for concrete tests. I know a family friend who felt off and had gained weight quite rapidly with no change in lifestyle. She went to the doctor who brushed it off and 6 mo. later she died from a cancer the size of a large infant. The doctor said she should stop worrying about her weight. True story.

    Most definitely, this won’t haooen to you, but remember - doctors are human too. They’re also lazy and like to not spend their budget on tests. And then stuff like this happens. It was totally avoidable. The doctor just needed to take a fucking look. She’d have noticed somethig was off. Now she has no job. I’d say I was sad for the doc, but it wasn’t even incompetence that caused this avoidable death, but rather pure laziness.

    Morale of the story: Looking out for yourself is not a bad thing. Try not to worry, see a doctor, inquire and ask for a check-up. It takes only a little bit of their time. If they say all is fine without doing jack-shit, call them out on it. Hell, be a Karen if need be - it’s your health on the line, not your kid’s football match causing you to get home 5 minutes later than usual.

    Odds are you’ll worry much less when you know you for sure your’re fine than when you have no clue what causes your ailment.



  • The brain is, basically, a think-machine, even though it’s “just” a lump of meat. The brain tries to make sense of stuff and piece everything together “logically”.

    Oftentimes the braim makes stuff up - your brain is very good at lying. Take for example vision - the eyes contain a relatively hole in the retina, yet you see a perfectly clear image. This is the “intended” purpose, but the core mechanism bywhich this is done is much more deeply rooted into the brain’s main “function” - it’s one of the core things the brain does. Its “thinking” is very malleable.

    This can cause smaller “misinterpretations” of reality: Here’s a personal example: when my grandfather died, I periodically saw his reflection in the front door of his house. It would be visible only for a second, and then disaopear almost immidiately. I had to be moving relatively fast for it to appear, and couldn’t cause it to appear at will. 15 years later, I noticed it was actually my reflection, but since it was only visible in the exact same spot, from a certain angle, only in the evenings, with the porch lamp on and on a wood-textured PVC door, it took me that much time to piece all the puzlle pieces together and deduce the root cause. Me not having to visit his house all that often certsinly didn’t help the situation.

    The other is plain hallucination: Take arthritis. You have pain which is proven not to be caused by anything external. Your nerves just send the “pain signals”, and you feel pain.

    Additionally, sinesthesia isn’t just something someone either has or doesn’t, but it’s a spectrum, and, all the senses are in fact connected on a quite deep level.

    What you describe definately falls somewhere on this “misinterpretarion-hallucination” spectrum. Maybe there was nothing to smell, yet you felt you smelled something, caused fully by your unconscious influenced by past experiences. Or maybe there was a totally different smell that got turned into this smell, but you couldn’t pick it out - as is the case with my grandfather and I.

    This spectum can also be taken as the “physical-psychological” (cause) spectrum.

    Maybe it’s a one-off thing for you, or maybe it’s a chain of conditions that’ll get fullfilled again every now and then. There’s most likely a logical explanation since the brain is inherently a logical machine, but chances are it’s not. There are just too many variables at play as far as outside factors go.



  • Question about the years if someone knows: is “years hence” a fancy british way of saying “years in the future” or is it some antiquated large non-SI unit of time since I find any of the species described in shorter timeframes, the Vacuumorph beimg an egregious example (“200 years hence”) very hard to imagine “evolving” only 200 years in the future, even with the 90s outlook on technology (since it seems they said these earlier examples at least are engineered species in the book).









  • was Israel not attacked?

    If you’re attacked, you don’t have the right to escalate the situation however you please, especially if it’s against international law.

    I genuinely have issues trying to discern the propaganda from the facts.

    Sure, it’s hard. It isn’t easy sometimes for me either. You just have to take in information and draw your own conclusions. Of course, depending on the information you get your view will ve skewed. In my opinion it’s impossible to be biased, but you have to at least try to siniff out the propaganda and lies, which I commend you for doing.

    from what I gathered, I believed that Israel just took some land on which other people were living ~70 years ago, displacing these people.

    That’s true, sort of. Israel was given part of the land after WWII by the UN as a result of wellmeaning intentions. However, a conflict arose, culminating in the First Arab-Israeli war. Next was the Six-day war some 20 years later, followed by other conflicts. Then 5 years later, the Yom Kippur war. Other than that there have been other conflicts with the Palestinians, notably in 2007, 2012, 2014 and 2021. Finally there’s the current conflict which started last year.

    Of course, some of this was justifiable by Israel, but the problem is the way Israel treats Palestinians. There’s a good chance that if they weren’t treated as 2nd class citizens none of the later conflicts would’ve happened.

    Most notably, Palestinians were rsther explicitly forced out of Israel during the Nakba, itself a breach of International law. Nowadays, Palestinians are living under an apartheid regime: they are scrutinised much more closely during security checks, thir homes are appropriated by Israeli settlers, mkre often than not under the protection of the Israeli government. They don’t have the same civil rights as Palestinians are tried in miliary and Israeli citizens in civil courts. Military courts generally don’t offer the same legal or human rights protections, punishments are mlre severe, there’s limited legal representation of the defendant and no confidential communication with lawyers, and Israel isn’t an exception to this.

    Regarding escalation: the Palestinians are rutinely, and often violently opressed in a systemic manner.

    They can’t get building permits. They get kicked off their land by settlers. They get retaliated against indiscriminately.

    If you systematically opress someone like this, of course the desperate people will fight back in their desperation. What is unnecessary escalation is the disproportionate response of mass murder via starvation and bombing, as well as the systematic opression during the 70 years you mentioned.

    None of this would’ve happened if Israel just came to some land, holy or otherwise, planted a flag and fairly enforced their laws according to basic principles of human rights


  • British Ambassador to Japan Julia Longbottom explained that her decision was because the city did not invite Israel to attend. Longbottom told reporters that unlike Russia, which invaded Ukraine, and Belarus, which cooperated in the invasion, Israel is exercising its right to self-defense. So, treating Israel in the same manner would be misleading, she said

    U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel will also skip the Nagasaki peace ceremony. According to the U.S. Embassy, Emanuel does not want to politicize the Nagasaki event.

    the envoys of Group of Seven nations, except for Japan, and the European Union said that if Israel was excluded from the invited countries, it would be difficult to send high-ranking officials to attend the ceremony.

    Totally not politicized. I guess supporting Israel is a better look than opposing nuclear warfare.


  • British Ambassador to Japan Julia Longbottom explained that her decision was because the city did not invite Israel to attend. Longbottom told reporters that unlike Russia, which invaded Ukraine, and Belarus, which cooperated in the invasion, Israel is exercising its right to self-defense. So, treating Israel in the same manner would be misleading, she said

    U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel will also skip the Nagasaki peace ceremony. According to the U.S. Embassy, Emanuel does not want to politicize the Nagasaki event.

    the envoys of Group of Seven nations, except for Japan, and the European Union said that if Israel was excluded from the invited countries, it would be difficult to send high-ranking officials to attend the ceremony.

    Totally not politicized. I guess supporting Israel is a better look than opposing nuclear warfare.



  • As most others already said, the best solution is immersion, ideally by talking with someone. If you can’t find someone to speak with that would make it quite a bit harder to improve, but not impossible.

    For your situation (being able to understand but unable to express yourself in English) I’d reccommend the stereotypical “think in english”. I’d recommend talking with someone (ideally a native speaker, but even a fellow learner is incredibly efficient, followed by writing a diary abd participating in online forums (like you currently already are!).

    It’s best to have input from someone else who can correct you if you make a grammatical mistake, give general advice on what sounds ‘more natural’ or ‘better’ in the language and answer any questions you might have, as well as help you if you’re “missing one word” (from personal experience when learning a language it’s rarely a ‘it’s at the tip of my tongue’ situation. It’s more like I just don’t know this one word and I need someone to give it to me).

    Another thing I can say about your problem is I also suffer a bit from it. Whenever I try to talk in German I need a few hours to ‘warm up’ - to just get my brain to switch to German and having a speaker on the other side really helps. I can hear the language to jog my memory and the other side can (and often does) give me input on what they think I might be trying to say. (I’m a B1-level speaker so not even close to fluent but more than enough for doing basic interations within an environment open to helping with language issues).

    What I liked to do when I was actively learning German was trying to come up with different ways of saying ‘the same thing’, seing how they differ in their meaning, potential usecases, complexity, grammar, etc. It helps with vocabulary as well as the “thinking in German” part, as languages differ greatly in the ways they package the same message and taking a comparative approach helps greatly with being able to (casually) converse later. Having a fellow learner or a fluent speaker give you multiple variations of the same thing and analyze the differences for/with you would be a godsend for this approach.


  • Get your head out of your ass, it’s in your laws.

    My head just might be in my ass, but none of that is in my laws, as I’m not a US citizen.

    From what I’ve read online more than a few months ago, there were criminal charges in certain places for having abortions in certain other places where they weren’t illegal. Maybe it wasn’t for the people having abortions themselves per se (I don’t remeber anymore), but there definately was a doctor sending aborion pills/information that was sued as well as some police sharing data and peoole getting in trouble shenanigans. Or just straight up people looking stuff up on the internet and being investigated for it. Chilling stuff, really, whichever way you look at it.

    Also, with the way the US seems increasingly unstable (what with the Supreme Court doing whatever they please, more or less, as well as a potential 2nd Trump presidency), there’s a high chance that the current status quo changes for the worse, i.e. some of the ammendments/clauses you’ve listed get selectively overruled for abortions, as well as more states getting abortion bans (perhaps even as a simple “No More Abortions, Anywhere” Supreme Court ruling).