Invertedouroboros

This is what decades of qualified immunity and belief that cops are above the law does to a mother fucker. They see ICE commit a murder and they think ICE is on their team. Because at the end of the day they are.

Dude with autism chiming in here. I often compare it to being "born without a user manual". Ever since I was a kid it was like everyone around me just knew what to do without being told while I had to have even the most basic things explained to me. This is far worse in social situations because sometimes there are feelings on the line and often people just don't think enough about social cues to properly explain them.

I'm the kind of autistic that can pass as neurotypical with relative ease, but getting there was a real trial and error kind of process and I can't really say it was great for my mental health. The comment I'm responding to talked about how you never stop masking and how your constantly aware your not normal. That's what's fucked me up historically. "You're not normal so figure out how to at least pretend" was the bat I used to beat myself with and among neurodivergent folks that’s probably depressingly common.

Sometimes when I talk to folks about this they'll say something along the lines of "well if masking takes so much effort just stop doing it, I don't mind". And man do I wish I could sometimes. But when you learn how to do that basically from the start "masking", or at least some of the tools and behaviors associated with it, become fundamental to how you interact with the world. This isn't just something we can turn off or on like a lightswitch. This is something that we're constantly locked into. Sometimes it feels like just existing takes effort. And when that's your baseline? There's just not space for a lot else.

Like Bluefruit said, it's a matter of degrees. You can be neurotypical and feel this way sometimes too. At it's core, none of these feelings are special or inherently neurodivergent. It's the degree to which we feel them that's different. That and frequency. Everyone's had to preform for a job interview or something. But having to preform constantly, even for loved ones? It can get to be pretty rough.

That's fair, I was quite tired when I wrote what I wrote so let me expand on that a little bit.

That is of course true in most situations. I should have clarified this more but primarily when I said "I grew up watching the evening news" I was talking about war on terror coverage.

I'm not pretending that's not how people work, it absolutely is and that's the reason this was exploited. But... there's this kind of... preformative agony to the whole ordeal that, speaking as an American, does feel uniquely American.

Empathizing with the death of people you're close with is natural. But when, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, they are active participants in why people are dying, and then they're deaths are used to justify sending more people over there to kill and be killed...

...It kinda just soured me on the whole affair to be honest. And, given the events of last night? It's something I could easily see happening again. We seem to have dusted off everything else from the Iraq playbook, why not that too?

Anyways, we're not disagreeing. There was just more to my point that didn't quite make it into my post.

I've lived in the US my entire life. I wish I could tell you your wrong.

I can't.

Some of my earliest memories revolve around watching the evening news, listening to them say that "X amount of American lives were lost" and wondering why "American" lives were substantially different or worthy of note. A life lost is a life lost. And that's a tragedy no matter how you slice it. Where that life started or where it lived has no bearing whatsoever on it's value.

At least... that's what I believe. The current state of things has me thinking I might be in the minority on that one.

As to revolution, protest, anything that could even prove an inconvenience to the status quo... I'll believe it when I see it. Not to make excuses, but I think forces in the American culture have been working to defang popular protest since at least the civil rights movement, or perhaps even earlier. Even if it's demostriably wrong... I can't begin to tell you how demoralized I feel. My government just... went and did this. It's illegal. The very shape of our government is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And yet... here we are. One illegal invasion and (apparently) kidnapping of a sovereign head of state later.

...I wish it were otherwise, but it feels like there's very little that can be done about it. Americans just... don't seem equal to the task of holding their government to account. The one thing we are supposed to be good at.

I can't even begin to tell you how many outrages there were up to this point. Too many. Far too many for concence to allow. This... feels different. Is different. Has to be different, then the way we've been allowing things to ride.

But... I've been disappointed before. I'm certain I'll be disappointed again. I hope this will be different, but...

...I can point to plenty of times it should have been different before. Times that would have prevented this from happening. It's... hard to maintain hope in the face of that.

I'm not fully familiar with the phrase, but I generally try to set things up in my life so that things fall into place with or without further input from me. I've had (and have) a lot of problems with executive disorder in my life, so it's always a gamble for me. One day I'll be perfectly fine putting in ten hours of work furthering a single project, the next I can barely stand 30 minutes.

My way of managing this has been to look for "default states" as I call them. To try and find a way that if this is the last moment of attention and work I can put in to what I'm doing, things will still carry along to a positive or at least a neutral outcome.

It doesn't always work, obviously there are some things out there that just defy that kind of approach. But when I can get it working for me it's really nice because it allows me to take the brakes I need to avoid burnout without feeling guilty or gambling too much with the outcome of whatever it is I'm trying to do.

These days they hit the ground running the second the last election is over.

Man I collect library cards. At this point I'm a member of three different library systems. No joke, libraries are amazing and one of the best resources we've got left in this country. Go get a card man!

I don't necessarily disagree on the complexity point, but I don't think breaking up the functionality of a web browser fixes the issue.

Web browsers are one of those basic tools everyone who uses a computer relies upon. Breaking that up would not only lead to user frustration, I think it'd introduce brand new territories bad actors like Google could monopolize. Now that unified "web browsers" exist it's incredibly difficult to ask users to stop using them. It turns from "download this program" to "download these four or five separate programs and follow this guide to learn how to daisy chain them together into a browser equivalent.". That's a reasonable ask for some people. Hell, it's a reasonable ask for me frankly. But your average user isn't going to have the time nor the patience to attempt to make that solution work.

That is really neat! I wish we could figure out something similar in English.

This ranks so far down the list of problems with society that it's not even worth mentioning. But every day of the week should start with a different letter so they are easier to abbreviate! Having two "T-days" is just fucking nuts to me. I'm ok with the weekend days both starting with the same letter because that can just be a signifier that it's the weekend. But ideally? Every day gets it's own letter and you can just say "something happens T-day" instead of "something happens Tues".

Part of the social contract in America (at least... this is what I believed growing up here) is that we all kinda share in this thing we all have going. Like, let's say we get into a war. The government can (and does) ask citizens to join the military and fight and the reason that works is because we all kinda implicitly signed off on it. Yeah, sure, you had nothing to do with the country getting into a war. But because you participated in government, in the system, because we run this thing (nominally) by the standard of democracy and consent of the governed, everyone owns at least a small part of the responsibility for the country's actions. In the case of a war, that might look like joining the military and "doing your part". More commonly it looks like paying your taxes and still "respecting" the government, even if it's not the one you voted for.

Now, like I said, that's more than anything what I felt when I was a kid. Speaking personally, I'm in a very different headspace now as it relates to governance. I also feel like generally speaking all that's shifting, though I've very little to back that up save... gestures at the past couple of decades of American politics.

More to your question however, I think that the kind of social contract I laid out above kinda explains some of what you've asked. Even if you want to say it's purely performative, that's fine. But the fact that Americans are "asked" about how they should be governed implicitly puts the idea in our heads that we're responsible for what our country is doing. It's not just "some dottering old idiot at the top of the org chart decided this thing", it's we. America is doing this thing. Even if the truth really is that some dottering old fool made a decision out of personal ambition or greed. We get it drilled into our heads from a very young age that this is our government. And no matter how much you try to distance yourself from that... it still irks you, somewhere in the back of your head.

Maybe, at some point before I was born, that was expressed as a point of pride. I could see some folks being proud of what America was or what it stood for, once upon a time. Now though? I find it hard to believe that that mindset could find any other expression but shame. And weirdly, I believe that's true regardless of what your politics are. Different reasons are at play there depending on what your politics are, of course. But lately it feels like everyone's got some grievance against the government. Some reason to feel ashamed about what "our" government, what "we" are doing. Whatever that thing is for you, you don't want it being done in your name. But the central trick of American "democracy" is that you don't get to just walk away. Whatever is being done is being done "in your name" whether you want it or not. And it's been that way since before you were born.

A tangentially related correlate here is that I feel like a lot of Americans don't feel represented by their government anymore. I certainly don't feel that way, and I haven't since Obama was president. That was roughly back when I was young enough to uncritically believe some of the views I've expressed here. Things have changed a little bit. Anyways, the reason I bring this up is because part of what I think is going on is that the social contract is breaking down along the lines of nobody feeling like the government they have is actually representing their interests. Maybe, if this goes on for long enough, the social contract will change into something different entirely. Maybe this "shame" we all seem to feel will turn American society into something different than what it currently is, if it's given the time to do so. But, I can't really read the tea leaves on that one. All I know is things just can't keep going the way their going. Something's gonna break eventually.

Oh yeah no. If your working backwards from the end result I totally get that approach. I'm not making a moral defense here. All I'm saying is that while we're in it it's important to understand what's going on (and perhaps more importantly what isn't) in his head so that we have an understanding of what's possible. What he might be thinking. In that world, not that of the IC or one that's capable of assessing legal culpability, it's important to draw a distinction between a principled ideologically driven actor and one that's just floating on the whims of their shattered psyche.