You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.

Oh god concerts are so stupid right now. Can’t see anything because there’s always some idiot holding a phone up in front of your face.

I get annoyed when people hold the phone up high during the show. If you hold it in front of your face, no one behind you can see it. Don’t block people’s view.

The Republicans cause more abortions because they don’t do anything to fix the problem sooner. No sex Ed. No contraception. Nothing to allow labor to have stable home lives with financial security. Voting Republican to minimize abortion is counter productive.

Oh good https://nohello.net/en/ is back up.

Please include the context in your messages

We talked about starting a dungeons and dragons game to play during all the horrible long meetings.

Not what you meant, probably, but the pun amused me.

Computers often do what you said, not what you meant.

Honestly more experience with that might help some people who are habitually unclear in their thinking and communication

No. Don’t feel strongly about hats. Wouldn’t want to live someplace where wearing a hat is expected. I’m a band T-shirt and jeans kind of guy though.

and on her way to work every single leftist that she knew irl punched her in the face every single day.

But no there’s no corresponding “leftists are doing something like punching her in the face” in real life. Certainly not “every single” one. I agree that people are emotionally driven ( https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe is a good comic about it ).

There are extremists in any sect - the christian fanatics, animal rights ecoterrorists, whatever. But it’s not “the left” as a whole, or even a majority.

Unless, I guess, you consider a scenario like

“I just think gay people shouldn’t be so visible. It’s confusing to my children”

“That’s a messed up thing to say. Gay people are a part of life. Shunting them into the closet so you can avoid a mildly uncomfortable conversation is unjust”

to be punching someone in the face.

Sure, but “you were mean to me so now I’m joining maga” is pretty silly.

Some people are like that, I guess, but if someone rudely explains how racism is deeply entrenched in the US that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Rejecting their message because they were mean is childish.

I got a friend to play Path of Exile with me once. They hadn’t really played a lot of video games before. When they leveled up and it did all the sparkly lights they were like “oooh wow!!”

I was like oh, I guess I’m numb to that thrill since I’ve seen it a million times. But the sparkle reward was fresh for them and got their attention.

Evokes this comic https://thenib.com/fault-right/

I mean, not everyone wants to discuss politics all the time, and that should be an acceptable position to have.

This is probably true. I mean, if I started going off about how the workers are entitled to what they produce and fucking Joanne doesn’t do shit, so why does she get a fat salary while we don’t even get paid for thanksgiving, I’d be fired. Wouldn’t even move the needle.

I live in a red state, and I’d definitely say something similar if a magat tried to strike up a conversation about politics. Most of the time I just don’t have the mental energy to get into a discussion about it.

But sometimes the smaller conversations can change people. It takes a lot, and it can be infuriating when they just don’t get it, or relapse after another bender on fox news, but interactions with people they see as in-group change minds.

I had a coworker way back that was a big homophobe, and over the months we worked together I got him from “we should just kill the gays” to “i guess they’re not hurting anyone i just think it’s gross”. I understand that there’s not always energy in the budget for that, though.

I think there’s a difference between “I affirmatively do not care” and “there’s no purely way to be ethical, and that horror has fallen under my personal bar for attention right now”

I can maybe cut a little slack for someone who’s like “I don’t really understand politics or know history, so I don’t feel confident having a strong opinion” if they were curious and honest. We all start ignorant and not everyone had the good fortune to get a quality education.

But the aggressively ignorant and apathetic can fuck right off.

Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

I remember playing some shitty free MMOs in my youth. Kill 12 foobars, kill 10 bazbots. Being legitimately excited when they overlapped so I could do more than one at the same time. Some part of the brain just gets excited seeing numbers go up and progress bars fill.

Only slime balls, children, and cowards refuse to admit fault.

There was a joke at Bush’s expense, I believe, that was like “This man believes the same thing Wednesday as he did on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday.” Don’t be like that.

Reducing meat consumption is generally a win all around, and easier than going directly to zero.

That’s what I’ve been doing.

Most of the meat I end up eating is at a party or event someone else hosted.

Yeah I have a story I repeat a lot about a “data driven” company. They loved that motto. They had like “data doesn’t care about your feelings” on t-shirts.

Someone cited some studies about four day work weeks in an all hands meeting, and asked the CEO if we could look into that. He laughed and said “we won’t be doing that”

Gosh, if I could channel hypocrisy into energy that man would have dropped dead on the spot. Fuck you, guy.

I will almost never click a video unless it’s a natively visual thing. Like, a music video, a clip of a movie, whatever.

If it’s like “you should learn more about the My Lai massacre - here’s a great video” I’m just going to roll my eyes. Use your words. Embedded media is probably fine. Like an article with illustrations or video supplements. I’d much rather just read like a wikipedia article like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre