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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • People have been studying the psychology of mass killers since the 70s. Without an actual living subject at hand in this case, it’s hard to do anything more than speculate. I tend to agree that it would be useful to know more about what pushed him to such an act, but how do you suggest going about this? Should we round up and interrogate everyone he knew in his life? Would that even be productive?

    Motive isn’t as mysterious as we like to pretend it is. All it really required was a loss of fundamental empathy for his fellow humans. We see that everywhere these days. He’s not unique in that respect. What’s unique is the lengths he went to to commit this act. He seemed to want the spectacle of it. Like many serial killers, perhaps the idea of murder gave him a rush of feeling he couldn’t find anywhere else in his life, and so he figured why not get as much of that as he could?

    Again, it’s all speculation. And it’s also not hard to trace it back to a sickness eating at the roots of our society. What do you do with that knowledge? What can any of us do but try a little harder in our own lives to be kind to others and generous to those who might be quietly slipping down into the lake of poison seething under the world?








  • I don’t!

    My wife does it for me, lol.

    I have a group text with my immediate family so we can coordinate semi-regular get-togethers, and I do the same with my own kids, but that’s it.

    (There’s no way I’d be able to get my parents to learn how use anything more complicated anyhow, and just getting everyone in my own household to use a shared calendar was a whole thing. Simpler is better.)

    My wife, however, likes staying informed, if not always in touch, and so dutifully does all the obligatory proud parent posting on facebook. She lets me know if anything important comes up from one of the relatives on there.

    Distant family stays distant, which is how I like it, because most of them are pretty right wing anyway and the less I have to engage with their gibberish the better. Otherwise I only visit facebook occasionally to browse a shitposting page for a podcast I listen to. It’s better this way.





  • CeruleanRuin@lemmings.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat’s your best Essex Girl joke?
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    6 months ago

    The fact that it’s usually women doing the dumb thing is problematic, but these jokes are easily mapped onto whoever you want to denigrate. As a Montana, these were often jokes about North Dakota, and as the scion of a large Norwegian clan, I also often heard these as Sven and Ole jokes.

    To me the latter is actually a funnier way to approach them, because it’s two characters who everyone knows are dumb (and who are stand-ins for those people in your life who act this way) and you’re not just blanket insulting a whole group of people.