iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Lori Ryerson 🇨🇦 Focalocity Photography @loriryerson.ca · 21/03/2025

SOFT LIGHT IN THE GLOAMING; it's #SCAPE Friday. This is one of my youngest son's favourite #landscapephotography pieces of mine. Out in the desert, where humans are scarce. A soft light as the storm passes on. We could all use some soft light. #loriryerson #focalocity #quiet #nohumans

A dark cloud in the upper left, evidencing the passage of a rainstorm in the California Desert. A soft light in the late day. In the background, the desert hills. In the foreground cholla cactus at ground level, and the stalks of agave plants standing tall against the landscape. Photo by Lori Ryerson.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

cu8o8hoph4spowrotraben3vafrob2l.wordpress.com/dk6b6qyhhoam...

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

I'm really, really, really tempted to support you on this one, because Mr. Trump is a proudly ignorant, shamelessly amoral blowhard who has built a career out of spitting on educated people (people like me), while becoming the candidate of choice for literal neo-Nazis. bsky.app/profile/atru...

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

I've spent the last few years listening to self-styled "patriots" who follow him saying that "coal burners" (people in interracial relationships and marriages) should be k i l l e d and claiming that the multiracial children of such couples were inherently inferior "abominations."

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

I've repeatedly had to turn off the computer and go out, out of fear that my blood pressure would spike and I'd blow a gasket. So, from where I sit, slamming everybody who voted for that smirking pig would have an immediate emotional payoff. Until I slowed down, stopped and thought about it.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Mr. Trump is unquestionably a vile human being. But so was his opponent in that race. Kamala Harris is a blatant sociopath who, as a prosecutor, knowingly fought to keep innocent men in prison, just to advance her own career. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is an inconvenient fact.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

She built up a record that was so horrendous that even the New York Times had to say something about it. www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/o... archive.is/E1YRn In the US presidential race of 2024, our choice was one between an ignorant malignant narcissist (Trump) and a giggling sociopath (Harris).

nytimes.com

Opinion | Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’ (Published 2019)

The senator was often on the wrong side of history when she served as California’s attorney general.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

There was no righteous choice for a voter to make. Both of the major party candidates were evil and insane, and they were running under a system that makes a third party candidate victory in a presidential race a near-impossibility.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

To judge those who made a bad choice when there were no good choices to make is to tell one's fellow man that he is to be damned if he does and damned if he does not.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

The immediate emotional gratification of screaming at those who voted somebody we almost all hate shouldn't blind us to the fact that this is not a valid moral choice, and that by making it, we'd be helping to amplify the already nearly out of control hysteria in American politics.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

While almost guaranteeing that honest, reasonable communication will have little to no chance of happening, because all will be left in fear of how they might be judged. This briefly comfortable, easy answer also immediately deflects our attention from the real question that needs to be asked.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Namely, why do we go on finding ourselves with such atrocious choices? In 2020, our choice was one between the same narcissist who got elected, this time, and an obvious late stage Alzheimer's case whose dementia had already manifested in public (eg. "I am Joe Biden's wife").

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Until that question gets answered, and the problems pointed out by the answer get addressed, we're going to be going from disaster to disaster. Either we find out what needs to change, and change it, or the cycle of madness will continue until one of those disasters takes out our society.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

The search for easy answers might well be in fashion. It usually is, and has been ever since "the Great Communicator" of the 1980s (Reagan) did so much to normalize the questionable practice of addressing serious issues with glib, breezy soundbites. But fashions sometimes need to change.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Bullying the opposition into silence isn't going to change that fashion, it's just going to help reinforce it, because when one expects to be talked over (or even shouted down), a soundbite is likely to be one's response of choice.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

A brief answer, even if it's a bad one, is far likelier to be heard in the sort of uncivil discussions that an indiscriminate demonization the opposition will leave us with. Those who make them will be heard and having persuaded more listeners, will see their points repeated more.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

While those who persist in giving nuanced, well thought out answers, having been silenced, will have little influence, at all. Do you see the problem, yet? The evil character of the opposition that you're trying to bully into silence is the product of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

By just assuming that ANYBODY who made a different choice than you did in the election just HAS to be an evil person in need of cancelation, you're assisting in the rise of un-nuanced Far Right politics, by reducing the reach of the voices of those who would have undercut them.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Antifa was the (perhaps unwitting) creation of the Bush-era "support our troops" neocons, who would demonize anybody to the Left of ... well, Bush. The MAGAs are the creation of Antifa and its allies. In both cases, the same thing happened: hysteria drove the true believers to shout down dissent.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

In the effective absence of nuanced dissent, crazy people who would otherwise have seen their indefensible ideas get torn apart, right before they got laughed out of the room (figuratively speaking) were spared that humiliating experience, because those who would have done that, weren't heard.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

This time around, we saw the Left setting fire to buildings with people in them during the BLM riots in Chicago, and the Right set up non-ironic Adolf Hitler fan clubs on Gab, while it added to its gun collection. What are we going to get if the collective crazy ratchets up, again?

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

To leave that a matter open to future speculation would be wise, but one needn't guess as to where those who love the screaming the most would like this all to lead, because they will gladly volunteer the answer to that question. cu8o8hoph4spowrotraben3vafrob2l.wordpress.com/buslpoyagadr...

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Yeah. Civil war, in a nuclear armed country. A civil war in a country in which dissent had come to be seen as proof positive of evil intent. Such a war would, at best, turn nuclear and then spread. I say "at best," because there are things far worse than a hydrogen bomb.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Things that you probably don't know about, which even Mr. Trump probably doesn't know about, because ever since Oppenheimer, scientists have learned to be a little more guarded about the matters they discuss. But let's be realistic: desperate governments can be awfully "persuasive."

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Say, around the time they've lost some of their cities, want a decisive edge in the war, and aren't too particular about who they have to torture in order to get it. That's the future we're headed toward, Aaron, right now, bit by bit, and we'll continue headed toward it until things calm down.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Which they will, in one sense or another, either because the population will have collectively come to its senses and stopped trying to see just how much of a psychopathic frenzy it could whip itself up into, or because it will have destroyed itself in one way or another.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Rotting corpses create remarkably little drama. Maybe the ground will be covered with dead bodies from the war that this constantly encouraged hysteria is leading us toward, or maybe because, faced with an existential threat, somebody in power will decide that he must do questionable things.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

You know, for the sake of the greater good? Remember that line? Remember back during Covid, when some of us were trying to warn some of you that your love of Utilitarianism would take you to a dark place? This is part of what we were trying to get you to understand.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Really, without success, thanks to all of the emotionalistic screaming about how we supposedly wanted to m u r d e r somebody's morbidly obese, immunocompromised grandmother by walking alone in the woods without our masks on. But the point remains.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

In a world in which the individual is seen as being nothing more than an egg which might have to be broken in order to make an omelet, you never know when your shell is the one about to be cracked. A utilitarian society is one in which human life, including your life, can easily be taken.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Once one has normalized that kind of thinking, it's likely to come back to haunt one at the most inopportune moments.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Say, like when one's friends (if one can really call them that) have been out encouraging "the Resistance" to rise up, and somebody with the World's most powerful military at his disposal decides that if he just has the opposing faction mowed down like a lawn, that the threat will then be over.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Imagine a future in which the president decides to have those under his command slaughter everybody on the Left, be they violent or peaceful, deciding that the army should "kill them all and let God sort them out."

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Imagine one in which the Right is OK with that, because while you were demonizing them, in nearly every sense of that word, they've been returning the favor, and they've come to see you as the president has - as an existential threat to be ruthlessly eliminated, for the sake of the greater good.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Imagine one in which as you try to go online and rally the troops on Bluesky, you can't, because nothing remains of the San Francisco Bay area but a sheet of radioactive glass.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Then think back to the time, back around 2016, when Antifa pledged to "bring down the Trump Regime" through the use of street violence and pretended that they weren't talking about an attempting to carry out a coup d'etat.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Those who go on sowing the wind should expect to reap the whirlwind. Talk about whether that is right or wrong is hardly relevant, because right or wrong, it's simply a basic, inescapable fact of life. If you go out seeking a fight, you're going to find yourself in one.

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Oniontown @please-calm-down.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Those who you intend to beat into submission won't simply lay down for you and let you do it, anywhere outside of a Fetlife scene. It's just not going to happen and no amount of self-righteous, entitled preaching from anybody will change that fact.

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