Neat! Thanks for taking the time to answer. I agree that talking about this stuff is important, we should de-stigmatize it wherever we can.

“Facts backed up by evidence is too woke”

- the party of “fuck your feelings!”

Total seriousness here, what’s it like being a sex worker? Do you have a pimp or do you get to self-direct? How do you keep yourself safe? Do you do any type of screening to weed out problematic clients? Why sex work and not another career path? (no judgement, just curious)

And as we all know Republicans have unanimously condemned Epstein

What a sick sad world we live in that you aren’t wrong.

Pretty much. Even when someone is spot on accurate there’s at least one dickhead redditor that has to “well achktuallty”. If I had a better place to go to I would’ve left this festering dung heap years ago.

Anyone else would’ve gotten way worse. Why these types of people keep getting off so easy is beyond me.

But he’s such a promising young man with such a promising future ahead of him! We can’t ruin a life over an innocent little mistake! Who among us hasn’t dabbled in a bit of treason and attempted overthrowing of a lawful election? Unless he’s black or a Democrat, then obviously the full force of the law applies.

No one is owed an explanation, but it’s still a shitty feeling when the other person won’t at least say why.

But I can see it from the other side. There’s an ever present fear of the rejectee getting belligerent or worse (something women have especially had to deal with when turning down men). What this says to me is that we need increased emotional training and support for dealing with rejection. We need to internalize for ourselves that if someone rejects you it’s not about you, it’s about them, and if they’re afraid to tell you why that is also about them. And particularly for men, we need to give them a safe space to feel and process that rejection, not just tell them to “man up” or “get over it”.

It’ll be what’s at stake for every election going forward for as long as the people behind Project 2025 live. Even if Trump finally sheds off his mortal coil, those fuckers aren’t going anywhere. EVERY election will be the most important election ever. We have to win every single time, they only have to win once. This isn’t sustainable.

Which is self-perpetuating. On the off chance the government gets off its ass to do something about school shootings, this new industry will complain that it’s putting them out of business.

We can’t seem to grasp that some industries don’t need to exist forever, let alone at all. We don’t seem to understand the concept of a job being finished.

And you think Trump is a better alternative?

Pretty much. The US government was designed on purpose to be as slow and inefficient as possible. I don’t personally agree with that design philosophy, but I can’t deny that it prevented the whackos from making sweeping reforms.

There’s just one problem: the whackos were persistent. They unyieldingly pushed for their whacko policies and reforms. Actually make that two problems, because the second problem is that the rest of us kept letting them get away with it. They kept pushing the line a little further each time, and we never pushed it back when they were done. We kept thinking “maybe they’re appeased now” and then we ducked our heads back down because we didn’t want to focus on anything else. We didn’t want to take any responsibility for maintaining our society beyond the barest minimum.

Well now the whackos have finally pushed the line right to the tipping point. Actually slightly past now that they’re empowered to accelerate the line more and more. We kept on letting them get away with it, never challenged them or called them out, let them buy up our media apparatus so they could gaslight more of us into thinking we’re actually the whackos. They’re finally at our doorsteps and we have nowhere else to fall back to.

That’s probably because you have a company culture that is comfortable with LGBT, and presumably other minorities. The problem with discussing politics these days is that “politics” has been mutated into meaning “acknowledge, much less tolerate, the existence of minorities and their grievances”.

I too have watched this xkcd’s What If video

You put the passive in passive aggressive.

I vividly remember waking up on that November morning in 2016, the previous night thinking “surely rational thought will prevail”, then opening Alien Blue (the TRUE reddit app imo), seeing the election headlines, then saying to myself “….goddammit”.

Why not install the howitzer IN your shed? ¿Porque no los dos? Checkmate, atheists!

The enemy is conveniently both a genuine threat and a pushover. I wonder who else uses a similar talking point…..

(spoiler: it’s fascists)

The key to good bait is to not make it obvious. ;)

I never want to discourage anyone from having idealistic expectations of the world. It’s true that the real world is harsh, but calling everyone naive and dumb for wanting to change that is doing the future a massive disservice. Things have improved precisely because someone dared to think “but what if the world could be a better place?” Tearing down people’s optimism is just a mechanism to keep justifying the status quo.

But for sure, it felt like we split off into a bad alternate timeline back in 2016. It never occurred to me that so many people would collectively vote to inflict as much hatred and misery as possible on everyone else. And then keep on voting for it. I know it’s not feasible, but I wish this country could split in two or more. The crazies need their own space to be their craziest selves and leave polite society alone.

I can acknowledge that they were lied to and misled. Opportunistic conmen played on their fears and insecurities, told them what they wanted to hear. That they’ve done nothing wrong and they don’t need to change a thing and they’re under attack by a vague enemy that is somehow both strong and weak. I can even acknowledge that this could happen to any of us, even you and me.

But I don’t care.

I’m not mad they fell for it once. I’m mad that they kept doubling down in the face of all evidence to the contrary. That they were too lazy to quit eating the steady diet of fear and hate mongering. That they saw what it looked like with a madman holding the national reins for fours and said “more of that, please”. That not once did any of them stop and think “doesn’t some of this rhetoric sound like bs?” That they sat and cheered on AN ATTEMPTED COUP DÉ’TAT of the nation they claim to love so blindly.

They were manipulated and brainwashed, fine. But they made their own choices along the entire way, nobody put a gun to their heads and made them do anything. They said and did and enabled a whole lot of shitty things, and no amount of manipulation can wash that off their hands. The ringleaders should of course face the steepest consequences and be made examples of, but their followers? Those lemmings who allowed themselves to be deceived with false promises? Fuck’em. They’re all dead to me as far as I’m concerned.

Beat them with the carrot. Two birds with one stone.

Same. I appreciate the context he provides to explain why things are happening the way they are.

Deflects charged particles, but those mainly come from the sun. The cosmic background radiation is mainly ionizing EM radiation, which magnets won’t do jack against. Water turns out to be a pretty good shield for that as the hydrogen in the water is small enough to interact with (i.e. get absorbed). But water is also kinda heavy, and weight mass management is crucial when trying to get something accelerated through outer space.

edit: technically it’s mass, not weight. Weight is relative, it’s mass that stays constant (ignoring things like expended fuel).