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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Empathy isn’t a feeling that happens to you, it’s a skill you practice.

    Everyone knows about common human emotions. What you don’t know about a stranger is when they have those emotions and when they don’t. What most people think they’re doing when they say they’re being empathetic is engaging in projection. They’re imagining themselves in that situation and assuming the other person is feeling the same way they are.

    Do I even have to tell you how often that’s wrong? Many, many people think another person is angry when they are angry and they project their anger onto the other person. It totally baffles them!



  • There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.

    To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.

    Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.

    To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.







  • Vaginal birth isn’t always excruciatingly painful. It depends on the mother’s body type and health but it can also be improved with a proper birth position. Humans weren’t evolved to give birth laying on our back like in the movies, we were meant to give birth in a squatting position.

    Some women have even claimed that their vaginal birth was intensely pleasurable, causing them to achieve orgasm. Of course no one wants to hear this, as clashes with all sorts of taboos against women’s sexuality and giving birth in general!









  • We’re talking about two different things here.

    Actually trying to end world hunger vs pushing a button and having it happen. The former is really hard and probably way beyond the means of any individual, no matter how wealthy. The fact that Elon promised to do it is only evidence of his extreme ego, not his ability nor his ethics (which his donation to himself calls into question).

    If he could push a button and end world poverty at a nominal cost of $xxx billion, I think he would do it. But to actually put in the work over a lifelong project which has a high potential to fail? I don’t for a second believe he’s capable of that. But who is?