The point of whisleblower laws is to make people feel like a lack of whistleblowers means a lack of things to blow whistles over. Then all they have to do is silence any whistles before they’re heard by the general population and boom, public trust in the system is strengthened without actually needing to do anything drastic like actually fixing the system.

I think they’re talking about “justified” madness. Realistic madness is just seeing things that aren’t there, or reacting extremely to mundane stimuli, but if you had somehow been given comprehension of some higher truth about the world that nobody else would ever believe, the actions you take as a result of that knowledge might seem crazy to those around you, even if they’re perfectly logical from your enlightened perspective.

I’ve seen this image floating around for a while, which breaks down the reasoning - or lack thereof in certain media - pretty well.

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Eh, I can understand your outlook when it’s something done specifically to post it to the internet, like when people film themselves giving money to the homeless, but the guy pretty clearly looks happy to have his pistachios; I’d imagine the story is real, and this guy just wanted to share it, even if there was a less altruistic undertone of getting positive attention online.

And at the end of the day, there’s a net good to doing things like giving people gifts and giving homeless people some money to help them out, even if done entirely for the sake of internet popularity. I like to focus more on whether the person being helped is thankful for it, and if they are, I just focus on that rather than the guy trying to make himself look good for doing it.

My groups usually think of them as a powerful fey creature who sometimes just whisks people away for an indeterminate amount of time, only to bring them back later.

A lot of cops are so high strung that you essentially have to pretend you’re having the time of your life while interacting with them - any nervousness or annoyance is taken to mean that you’re potentially a violent criminal who could kill them at any moment.

Just the realization that a woman holding a pot of hot water could hypothetically use it as a weapon, however unlikely it was in this scenario, was enough to make him instinctively shoot with only minor notice that still did nothing to prevent him from killing her even as she began cowering and apologizing.

This is the culture we’ve allowed the police to build in this country; the job is dangerous, and they’re only human, so they believe they should be forgiven for being scared regardless of the situation, and should be forgiven for taking drastic measures while they’re scared.

Voting is about choosing good candidates well before it gets pared down to 2 options. It’s about choosing a good local government, choosing good representatives, choosing good senators. If the only thing you care about is the President, then you’ll never have a good pool of options from which the parties will pick a presidential candidate. They’re not on our side - it’s our job to force their hand with a deck stacked with good candidates. But only the people who pay attention to politics well before election year get to have a say in stuff like that.

Okay, and how do you plan to get them into the hearts and minds of around 50% of the population in the next 2 months, when the vast majority haven’t even heard of her? It’s not enough to have someone who could be a good president, you also need to get people to vote for them. If you want most of the population to vote for someone, they need to be aware of them as a viable option years beforehand.

I agree that the 2 choices are pawns of the rich, but even if every person who knew about Claudia voted for her, she wouldn’t even get enough votes for her to make the news, much less win. We’re talking about tens of millions of people voting in unison for an election win to happen in this country. At this stage in the game, there are only 2 candidates with that kind of draw power. If you want to focus on the 2028 election (assuming there is one, since there clearly won’t be if Trump wins) to get a 3rd viable candidate on that ballot, that’s a noble plan, but by now this election’s potential winners are already down to 2.

Voting isn’t about closing your eyes and saying “I want someone good to win!” It’s about assessing which people might actually win, and voting for the one that best aligns with your views, however loosely. It’s about strategy. If you want to change that, you need to build national presence in the name of your preferred candidate, and you need to start years ahead of the elections. Big changes don’t happen at the ballot, they happen during the campaigning stage and beforehand. If your candidate isn’t on the news every day leading up to the election, most voters won’t even know they’re an option.

I put my alarm far enough away that I need to get up to turn it off. By then I’m already out of bed, which is otherwise the hardest part for me by far.

Yeah, my mom used to be upset that I didn’t hold onto my old pokemon cards, but not only did I never have any rare ones that would be worth anything anyway, I used them how I wanted to when I wanted to, and when they stopped interesting me, I gave them to someone who was still interested. I don’t regret that.

I realized that later, yeah. That’s not something that a kid would usually realize is bad on their own, though; if it’s something you and everyone you know has always done, most people wouldn’t think to question it.

For me it was when I was around 8 or 9 and met someone from Kenya. They could speak perfect English, wore normal clothes, and talked about having electricity. I’d literally never been told that those things existed in Africa - every reference to that continent only talked about tribes and jungles, save for Egypt which only talked about ruins and deserts. I asked around and found that most of the rest of the world has the same stuff we have, and most countries have a functioning government. I was so confused - why were we the country of freedom when everyone else has the same thing?

At the time I just assumed that there was something I was missing, or maybe the rest of the world just caught up to our idea, but eventually I came to the conclusion that they tell us we’re the country of freedom - and keep our studies of other countries to a minimum when we’re young - so that we can internalize the rhetoric that our country is the best before we find out that most other countries about the same, and often better in certain ways.

Small price to pay, imo. When my job was forcing everyone back into the office in 2021 I just picked out one of the headhunters who contacted me on linkedin, got an offer for a remote position with better pay, and brought it to my employer to get a raise and the go-ahead to keep working remotely. I’ll suffer the occasional spam email for the knowledge that I have options for another job lined up pretty much whenever.

People playing tag 💪

Most republicans I know believe that their party, like their country and their religion, needs to be followed blindly; if their party supports it, it’s good, and if their party rejects it, it’s bad. End of story. No more thought will, or should, be put into it.

The people who go on and on about how America is the best because “freedom” are now working out whatever mental gymnastics they need to perform to justify voting for the man who said if you vote for him you won’t need to vote anymore. They already chose to support Trump and his party - nothing they say or do anymore will change that decision.

That’s the issue with American politics. It’s so overtaken by corporate lobbying that “good candidate” and “electable candidate” are mutually exclusive.

I was never full-on incel, but I was definitely headed down that path. I was a late-20’s fat guy with severe acne all over my upper body, and I’d obviously never had a girlfriend. I looked ahead in life and just saw it going further and further downhill. I tried dieting, working out, etc, but none of my attempts at making a change ever lasted.

One day I saw a facebook post that one of my old highschool classmates had gotten married. The guy looked a lot like me, and at first I was mad - I had that classic incel thought of “why is he successful and not me?” But after sitting in that dark place for awhile, I realized that the answer to that question is that I can be successful! I realized that I’d never tried to put myself out there because I always viewed myself as not being worthy - I needed to be fitter, more attractive, better at talking to people, etc - but did I really? I wanted to find out, so I made an online dating account, cleaned myself up, got a friend to take some nice pictures of me doing things I enjoyed, and put myself out there.

I made a goal for myself to never start a conversation with “Hey” or something similar - I went through every profile I found and picked something specific to talk about. It took a while, and I missed a lot of opportunities by being awkward, but eventually I got good enough at holding a conversation to secure a few dates, and in only a few months of that, I found the woman who is now my wife!

I’m still fat, but having someone to look good for was at least enough for me to shower more regularly, which cleared up a lot of my acne. I’m still pretty awkward, but so is my wife, and we both find it endearing. Life’s not perfect - there are still issues - but I’m no longer looking ahead at my life and seeing only downhill trajectory; I have a sense of optimism I didn’t have before, and it mostly came from me accepting myself. I’m not sure if other incels are the same as I was - not realizing that the one they actually hate is themselves - but I hope that if they are, they eventually come to the same realization that I did: that they are worthy.

As someone who works with door hardware, this would be a pretty easy interview.

Well, there’s your problem - you forgot the sugar, so all you’ve made is lemon juice.