“”"

That didn’t happen.

And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.

And if it was, that’s not a big deal.

And if it is, that’s not my fault. <-- here

And if it was, I didn’t mean it.

And if I did, you deserved it.

“”"

I hope all the republicans realize what horrible people they are before they die.

I’m told the best way to kill someone and get away with it is to hit them with your car. Not, like, drive into a crowd of people, but like nail them when they’re crossing the street or walking near the side of the road. Especially if they’re walking or on a bike. You can just say you didn’t see them or whatever, and our car-focused culture will be like “yeah ok that happens.”

So hypothetically if any healthcare CEOs are out jogging in their suburbs, someone could run them over and maybe not even be charged with a crime.

a state he won with 64% of the vote in last year’s presidential election

64% of Arkansas voters deserve to absolutely, relentlessly, get fucked. Sucks for everyone else, though.

Her first shock came two months after the shooting when a grand jury returned a no bill in the case, meaning it chose not to indict Iversen for killing an unarmed man.

The fuck is wrong with the jury. Also the prosecutor. Failures and scumbags.

Why should we have a market for housing at all? Not everything needs to be a market

The first and last points are flawed, though.

Several people are telling you a story, and they’re all slightly different versions of supposedly the same story.

Sometimes the issues are like “We should ban books” vs “We shouldn’t ban books”. They’re not slightly different so much as opposites. For something like “income tax should stop at 40% vs 80%” sure, but a lot of what’s on the table now is not that nuanced.

Which leads me to

You don’t really know any of them personally, hence have no predisposition for trusting the story of one over that of the others or even know for sure that at least on of the stories is the true (i.e. they could all be lying to you).

This implies that information and truth is unknowable. That you can’t open up wikipedia, click through to sources, read a book. You shouldn’t have to go solely on “does their body language seem confident?”. This is supposed to be the information age!

But I guess a lot of people cannot read well, and certainly don’t know how to determine what’s a good source and what’s not. I’ve seen people just go by some youtube video some nobody made and… oh, I see the problem. If you assume everyone and everything is just as credible as anything else, even some pseudonymous youtube video, knowing anything becomes dubious. Maybe this is why you have “Four dozen studies from nineteen universities have shown human activity is contributing to climate change” -> “well, CoolDog420 on their youtube channel said it’s just because the sun is having PMS, and I like his videos.”

That assumption that all things are equally credible is really bad. In college I took an intro to journalism course as an elective, and one of our first assignments was to go through a list of sources and determine which ones were good and which were not. Some were partisan think tanks, some were actually satire, some were real. It was a good exercise. Some students got taken in by all of it, and I think benefited from the professor walking them through how to investigate.

This is probably all downstream from under-investing (or outright sabotaging) public education.

I don’t know how to fix this.

I found a neat looking board game at the thrift store once. I looked it up on my phone to check reviews, and learned it would be cheaper to buy it new than what they were asking. Usually they have good deals but not that time.

I’ve adopted the policy of only buying a game if I plan to play it that day. Works well.

Also now that I’m unemployed I’m not buying anything. Reinstalled Morrowind (OpenMW) and realizing there’s quests I never even knew were here when I played this as a youth. It’s also super janky, but mods help.

Hasn’t every republican been worse for the economy since like Nixon? Why do people think Republicans are so good?

This makes a kind of sense. If you assume they’re not listening to any of the words, but just the tone, then I guess that might explain things. But I don’t want to think so many people are acting like literal dogs.

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I like to think that good education can help make people resistant to the emotional siren call of fascism and other “my in-group is best fuck you” problems.

True. It feels worse lately, but maybe that’s just mythology. In my imagination, in the not so distant past, if you wanted to get funding for a business you’d have to show the investors it was a good idea, with like spreadsheets and stuff. Now it seems more like a bunch of bros just decide based on feelings. Zoom, I read, got funded even though the investors thought it was a solved problem and foolish to go against the big players, but they were friends with the CEO and decided to let him have his fun for like several hundred million dollars.

The whole venture capitalist system is kind of bullshit. There’s so much vibes-based investing. The end game is often “and then we’ll be a monopoly and price gouge people”. It sucks. It all sucks.

Labor should unionize. Kill the bosses if need be. And then maybe we can focus on building things that are useful and well liked, instead of another ad targeting platform.

If more people had voted against him, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

It would be illegal to set that house on fire and shoot them when they run outside. I’m sure some people would mourn the death of some flag waving nazi sympathizers. (I think this is one of those instances that only allows you to be pro state violence, anything else is gauche.)