Person A quietly swipes a pen off your desk.

Person B robs a bank at gunpoint, and it goes bad, murdering 12 people in the process, including kids.

“Obviously both sides must be talked about with the same weight of seriousness.” “That was my favorite pen, how dare he!!!” “They’re both thieves, and there’s no difference between them.” “They’re both the same.”

Fuck that.

Many channels I watch have already been mentioned, but one comes to mind that hasn’t been: if you like Stuff Made Here and NileRed, you’ll love The Thought Emporium. Dude is a mad scientist, for real. His current long term project is trying to make a neural net that can play DOOM… except he means real neurons. Biological neurons grown in his self built lab, sourced from rats.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a rare modern fairytale, in the old sense of the word, not the Disney sense.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if they didn’t burn everything at the end. I mean, I get that sanitation in that situation was pretty darn important, but it was the author’s choice to choose something that required that outcome. That ending made me sad for a long time. Definitely didn’t know how to handle it. Not sure I can even now.

I would bet on it being a little bit (well, a lot) of ablism mixed with people wanting only answers that they personally can use. Which circles back on the ableism… people don’t want to believe that they could suddenly join this minority group at any time.

I had to be in a wheelchair for a year. The internalized shame from pervasive background ableism is horrible.

Oh yeah, I fully understand why the stupidity happens/happened. I don’t know how to fix it or if it can be fixed… that’s why I posted it here, in the unsolved problems in your field thread!

I will genuinely never understand racism against tribal members or descendants thereof. I know, I know, racism in general is not rational. But this particular form of it still baffles me.

How to get supervisors, superintendents, school boards, and even politicians to let teachers teach. It’s understood that overtesting reduces learning. It’s understood that rigid curriculums don’t work, and you really should be tailoring lessons to the capabilities of the class. All kinds of educational philosophy is understood well and in depth… but being permitted to apply any of it?

More like… take the orange, with the peel still on it, into the shower. Dig your fingers straight through the peel deep into the center of the orange, and then rip it open. Smash your whole face into the middle of the orange, shoving the sweet insides into your mouth and not caring that much of it is smearing on your face. Then shower normally… no sticky residue because you’re already in the shower and it washes right off.

A 1-800 number is immune to long distance charges, free to call by anyone in the US— the owner of the 800 number pays any fees associated with the call. Traditionally, 800 numbers are owned by companies in order to sell stuff. (The 1- portion of a 1-800 number means that it’s a long distance call… which was a thing when I was growing up in the 80s/90s, but basically isn’t a thing anymore in the age of cellphones)

The opposite of an 800 number is a 900 number. The person calling a 900 number has to pay, usually by minute, and most of that money goes to the owner of the 900 number. Famously used for phone sex lines.

The question is how many of those suicides were conducted by jumping off the bridge. And don’t say “they’d just choose another way to end themselves”. Studies and historical evidence shows that making suicide even slightly less convenient to perform actually does save lives. People get fixated on a method that seems easy. When that method is no longer easy, it gives them a chance to not go through with it.

Hey guys, is it okay if I don’t hate Jewish people, I just hate people who do Jewish things or otherwise associate themselves with Jewish culture or identity? I mean, if they just stop being Jewish then I won’t hate them anymore!

No. No that’s not okay either.

Narcissism is a spectrum. At the one end, you have people with low self esteem who look to getting reactions from others to feel better about themselves. At the other end, you have people with full on disassociation, that is, a lack of any sense of “self” at all, except from the reactions they get from others. It’s pretty clear Trump is pretty close to the pathological dissociative side of the spectrum.

The reactions narcissists get from others is called “supply”, and each narcissist looks for a specific flavor of supply that fills the void in their life, whether that’s a mild feeling of inadequacy or full fledged lack of self. Some supply is being loved. Some supply is being seen as a villain. Some supply is just being the center of attention. For Trump? It’s pretty clear that his supply is being seen as “successful”.

Narcissistic supply is an addictive drug to narcissists. It gives an instant high— a high of feeling “normal”— and also has instant lows. The moment supply is cut off, the narcissist’s mental dismay returns. Supply also has a problem of levels. A bigger dose of supply feels great, but it ALSO makes any additional supply that isn’t as strong as that one time feel like nothing.

Narcissists are junkies. They need their hit of supply, and will do literally anything to get it. And to get it as big as they’ve ever had it before.

While president, Trump got the biggest hit of supply the world has ever seen. Losing the presidency has lost him that supply… even the attention the news still gives him today isn’t anything like the supply of having the eyes of the entire world on him all the time.

As a junkie, he will do anything to get supply back. He would literally kill to do so. It might yet come to that.

Media reports help as they influence and are influenced by larger numbers of people. When a media outlet no longer feels it necessary to specify to their readers that meta was formerly known as Facebook, that is an indicator of wider acceptance. Local anecdotes are less useful. Your friends and acquaintances don’t say meta. Mine do. That doesn’t really say anything about broader trends.

I feel like meta is slowly succeeding at getting people to call them meta when not referring directly to the Facebook website specifically. Like for their idiotic VR initiative and whatnot. Slowly. And it helps that it’s in the context on non-Facebook-the-website activities.

Twitter has no such advantage.

…and the swastika is just a Hindu good luck symbol.

I’m sorry, but sometimes someone horrible takes a neutral or good thing and does something so profoundly evil with it that it forever changes that thing, tainting it by what has been done. Doesn’t matter what the salute was originally. Now it means only one thing.

Rich people have always had the freedom to be who they are. You think wealthy gay men were beaten up in back alleys? Maybe they couldn’t announce it to the world but they pretty much got to live their lives in peace. When you don’t have to work to survive and when the world bends to your will it’s amazing how culture doesn’t seem to effect you so harshly anymore.

It’s not that culture isn’t important. It’s that the ability to live in peace for who you are tends to come automatically when you have your living taken care of.

Don’t you mean Wyoming?

PTSD is awful. Really really awful, and I speak from personal experience. Now, I know every case of PTSD is different in terms of triggers and what happens when triggered… but from what I know of the mental disorder that I have, I find it hard to imagine being forced by the mental illness to drink and drive drunk. I can imagine drinking to avoid the results of triggers, but from my perspective, that still doesn’t absolve the choice of drunk driving.

Resisting arrest I can kinda see, depending on the exact form of how he manifests PTSD. My own version is more panic and pass out than get violent, but I know training can make you go the other way. But that still brings us back to drunk driving. I don’t think someone with PTSD is any different than any other normal person when it comes to not getting into the driver’s seat after imbibing.

That’s just not how ptsd works, please correct me if my limited perspective is flawed here.

My two year old son is just learning a few words right now. I’m looking forward to the day I can have an honest conversation with him, explain things using words, and get to know what’s going on in his tiny little adorable head.