Michael

Bridging gaps, forming strong alliances and communities, starting movements, and organizing with like-minded people for change and mutual benefit is how acceptance becomes broader and is the catalyst for culture wars to fizzle out. These actions are the spark that allow people to broadly start to realize there is nothing to be afraid about. A person who is perceivably different or a minority existing, having rights, and thriving doesn’t harm anyone or have to be at anybody’s expense.

Our politicians and governments no longer represent us and the laws aren’t moving in the right direction any time soon. Fighting unjust laws and restrictions and winning politicians over is typically what you’d do as a minority to have your existence be legalized and protected, but I’d argue that we are past the point of no return - laws, reform, and protections aren’t going to come quick enough and we need to act urgently.

The more we polarize ourselves against others for holding less than tolerant views and sitting in judgement of them, the harder it is for us to focus on joining hands, organizing, and focusing on solutions and the change we’d like to see (and be). I’m not saying that we should put up with violations of our personal sovereignty, consent to being restricted unjustly by the law, consent to being subject to abuse (physical, verbal, or any other form), or enable or platform these behaviors.

Win the battles you can win - that means focusing on solutions with people that are actually on the side of all of humanity (which includes all people and minorities). The planet and all life on it is at stake.

I feel it’s ideal to be generally kind to others to hope for kindness back. Some might say that bigoted and hateful people don’t deserve kindness and I’d wholeheartedly agree - you don’t owe them anything and it’s not your job to force their heart open. But I feel it’s important to listen to our hearts and act on them - kindness has immense potential to soften hearts and dissolve boundaries - hate often has the opposite effect.

For example, do you let a person with conservative views who is intolerant, ignorant, and hateful stand in your way and eat your attention and precious life - or do you join hands with others in mutual support for progress and forward movement in our societies?

We can be an unstoppable force by moving out of the direction of the immovable objects and going beyond.

You can’t effectively address those who are transphobic and racist by fighting them, shaming them, and being hateful towards them. Bigotry and hate are fueled by a lack of understanding, acceptance, sometimes by a sense of superiority, fear, tribalism, religion, propaganda, incoherence and disconnection, confusion, and of course also by hate.

Adding to a cycle doesn’t break it, we need to move past these cycles of hate and hurt by joining hands with those who are on the side of all of humanity.

The people living in hate and fear who have dug their feet deep into the ground, blocking progress or even regressing it, standing with their closed hearts will catch up eventually.

And a great deal of the rights violations persist to this day, regardless of some of the treatments being viable presently to stabilize individuals.

Lifelong prescriptions are misappropriated and are too common (see Soteria Houses - they use psychiatric drugs in first-episode psychosis/schizophrenia with consent for stabilization and only for a few months to achieve remission in some individuals), people are kidnapped (sometimes in the middle of the night) and taken without due process by individuals who aren’t able to assess mental illness, medicalized rape or forced psychiatry is rampant (patient choice is disregarded), there is essentially zero outside oversight, court access is wholly insufficient, you generally can’t get second opinions, forced treatment orders still exist (so even when you’re released you have to get court-ordered intramuscular shots), and so forth.

Some medications like neuroleptics carry a pretty big risk (20%~) of causing a condition known as Tardive Dyskinesia, which can be permanent and extremely debilitating. Polypharmacy is rampant and unregulated (some people can be on a pretty extreme cocktail of drugs).

There’s still atrocities and those who fall through the cracks in the system, but there are success stories presently, which is contrasted by the horrors even in the 80’s (which was fairly tame compared to psychiatry in the decades that came before it).

Psychiatry is in need of reform, and it doesn’t seem like psychiatrists or the for-profit hospitals behind them are interested in enacting that serious reform.

What if locking people up indefinitely (as many were in institutions decades ago) and diagnosing them with subjective criteria isn’t ideal? I’m not dismissing anybody’s diagnosis or hand-waving real symptoms or illness - I’m merely suggesting that an authoritarian system where human rights are stripped with minimal outside observation (with sometimes flimsy criteria and fallible actors) is potentially damaging to mental health and is probably not conducive to healing. It can be a very imbalanced power dynamic, especially as it was in the institutions of the past as you pointed out.

We need an answer to retain the rights of those involuntarily held as best as possible. I think it’s important to make courts more accessible to patients (and their loved ones), providing those held involuntarily with access to second opinions or different facilities (in some cases), and having established (and independently enforced) criteria for release - with appeals available for patients to argue their case for release with legal representation and other expert witnesses (e.g. other psychiatrists, qualified individuals directly involved in their care past or present) and perhaps even family members and other people who were involved with the patient.

Involuntary commitment (for any extended period) should be reserved for the severely mentally ill, who are determined by independent review to be in need of treatment to stabilize - and only those who are a danger to themselves or others, those who committed crimes, and those who are actively violent should be held in higher-security (locked) facilities.

I feel the rest would benefit greatly from conditions akin to a Soteria House (without locked doors, forced medication, or coercion) - the Soteria House model could be expanded, adapted, or modified. Treatment could be loosely mandated by courts, with reviews conducted and alternative treatment plans established if the patient wishes to modify or discontinue treatment before they are thought to be stabilized by their psychiatrist(s) and care team. I feel that maintaining consent, valuing patient input in forming treatment plans, and avoiding coercion is key to address certain states of trauma - otherwise patients are potentially faced with more trauma.

For those who are not thought to be severely ill, but who are thought to be in temporary crisis (and who are not thought to be violent or a threat to themselves or others), stabilization could be attempted in a temporary hold to assess their state, and continued onward with care akin to Soteria Houses or intensive outpatient care and other forms of observation and forms of support (e.g. with their environment and other distressing situations they are facing).

And to respond directly to you, I definitely feel like society was incapable or very underequipped to fix the institutions back then. Society is still largely unable to address distress and its very real manifestations or consequences - such as homelessness and the prevention of individuals from becoming homeless against their will.

Chaos, artificial scarcity, and violence feeds the system and justifies its existence.

Otherwise, why would we still have a mass incarceration system? Why is it still punitive in nature with terrible and inhumane conditions normalized?

A cycle is created that makes people unemployable and industries and those in power reap the benefits at every stage of these people’s lives - any police contact is effectively a scarlet letter. Specifically, many corporations benefit from the slave labor sourced from prisons and the private prison industry is its own can of worms.

With AI tooling screening job applicants with proprietary criteria, public data brokers, mass surveillance disguised as “adtech”, people search websites, social media (where people have a tendency to overshare personal details), systematic reporting of arrest records/etc. in newspapers (generally with no updates to reflect the person’s current situation); you can literally be unemployable in the US with no conviction or crimes that have been expunged or sealed.

If you have a felony or misdemeanor on your record - good fucking luck getting a job in today’s market - background checks are normalized and are extremely accessible to employers. It’s no wonder why people turn to crime to exist, discrimination is effectively legalized - there is insufficient regulation and protections for job applicants.

The only way to prevent crime is to rehabilitate those who commit crime and to provide services to enrich people’s lives before they would otherwise commit crime. We also need to respect people’s privacy upon rehabilitation - we shouldn’t be permanently labeling (or dehumanizing) those deemed to be fit to return to society (e.g. people that aren’t violent or who aren’t a threat). We have to give them a path to participate in society.

It definitely seems to be the case for me. VPNs and other privacy settings can trigger the aggressive captchas as well.

And then failing that one too because you take literally any measure to protect your privacy. And then the next one.

If these countries were given the ingredients to be able to develop and there was no outside demand for mined materials, these children wouldn’t be in the mines.

Big if, but less of an “if” if more people are made aware. It’s absolutely sickening how much we rely on lithium considering how it is sourced.

We are collectively enabling modern slavery and child slavery. These corporations prefer to act innocent because they aren’t sending the children themselves into the mines, but they buy the materials they mine regardless (and there’s no way that they don’t know the reality). Many corporations profit off the back of these people and children and they should be required to pay significant reparations.

What is in our power to stop this? We can spread the awareness of our exploitation of third-world countries - including their children, we can develop technologies that don’t rely on rare materials or difficult to mine materials, we can employ automation to mine what we do need in first-world countries, and we can hold the corporations that profit from these supply chains accountable.

There are battery technologies (e.g. sodium-ion) that we could grasp and avoid mining altogether for energy storage. China is proving that sodium-ion batteries are a very promising technology, even in cars, and the sodium can be sourced from seawater or from the byproducts of desalination (the latter which likely needs to be very quickly scaled considering the fresh water crisis).

When you put it that way, I guess we better hand over thousands every year to Apple for the new iPhone. Wouldn’t want a child slave to be unemployed.

Buy 10,000 disposable vapes every year while you’re at it (if you really care). Maybe a couple cents will trickle down to the children you claim to care about.

If you’re worried about these children losing their wonderful life in the mines, feel free to support them through other means.

Make it your life’s work to spread awareness, bring aid to the affected countries, and support their development - you only enslave yourself by learning to do absolutely nothing against what you see as oppressive.

And getting companies that profit off of these children to support them would likely be fair. Apple, Google, and many others can handle the hit.

Your trolling aside, we all share a personal responsibility to not buy from companies that e.g. utilize cobalt/lithium in their products - slavery/child labor is rampant in those supply chains and Apple et. al are responsible for supporting it.

If there was no demand, these children wouldn’t be forced to work in mines - it’s that simple.

You enslave others by consuming most common products on the shelves. Modern slavery (and child slavery) is more expansive than most know and third-world exploitation is rampant - western supply chains are not immune.

While you support the enslavement of others with your consumption, corporations continue to become more and more powerful.

You too.

I’m not frightened, I just don’t need to elaborate further to you online. I am not naive - I’m simply aware of the technology being used against Americans and its capabilities.

All Trump has to do is twist the definition of “terrorism” to defend his power against people not committing any crimes and suddenly mass arrests start happening with AI’s guidance before literally anything can manifest. He’s proven that due process isn’t a concern, and has already considered suspending it.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2025/04/08/the-worries-about-ai-in-trumps-social-media-surveillance-00279255

Organizing or openly admitting to anything of the nature should never be done online with the technology being leveraged against us. There are movements that exist online in spite of this, do yourself a favor and look them up to see what they are doing.

What are you doing to do?

Convince others to stand in their power and do everything in my own power. I don’t need to elaborate further.

How are you going to change a thing?

Like I said, a critical mass of Americans need to realize their power and demand better.

If you want to spread feelings of helplessness, encouraging others to see themselves as small and powerless, while also continuing to blame progressives (the people who want to achieve progress), that’s your decision.

I’m hopeful that you choose differently.

Who has a better chance than Harris?

The voters should’ve been able to determine that with a primary. Instead the senile old man held on until the last minute and there was literally no time for a primary. After that, Democrats wasted a billion on a failed and rushed campaign.

I already said what I’m going to do. Everything that is in my power, and encouraging others to stand in their power.

What are you going to do? Keep blaming the Bernie Bros until Trump takes away all of your rights and installs himself as dictator?

If Democrats could’ve budged even a little bit to the left, they would’ve won and stopped Trump. But they couldn’t. They also couldn’t hold primaries before the presidential election.

You don’t need to be a psychic with a crystal ball to determine that Kamala couldn’t win, especially not with her strategy of shifting to the right and appealing to voters that literally don’t exist.

Democrats spent more energy systematically suing third-parties off the ballot than attracting the voters they were so afraid of losing to third-parties.

What do I need to move on from or do about it?

Stop playing the blame game and do literally anything. You’re projecting your own personal inaction and frustration onto progressives.

In a constitutional crisis, while the last shred of democracy is at stake, do you simply vote your way out of the mess?

There’s no checks and balances

Then you admit there is a constitutional crisis?

Playing the blame game doesn’t solve anything or improve the situation. Maybe you need to move on?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding <- You are here.

What are you going to do about it?