Sooner or later, the U.S. is going to have to face the reality that the only thing they should be seeing in a photo like that is a really good spot to have planted an improvised explosive device.

As a Canadian I look on in absolute horror like a deer spotting the hunter in the woods.

It’s the good-ol’ lizard brain and it isn’t going away.

It’s the part of the brain that controls emotions, moods, fear, fight-or-flight, etc… The Limbic Cortex

The sole purpose of critical thinking skills and knowledge of things like history, civics, etc… (whether that comes from education, experience or just good old fashioned intellectual curiosity) is to give the rest of our brain the context necessary to override that lizard brain. (In my opinion).

Too many people just don’t care enough about the world around them to bother with that and are content to just let their lizard brain run things. It’s these people that are susceptible to group-think, and it’s these people (ironically) who think that they are ones who are thinking for themselves when in reality it’s quite the opposite.

The truest line ever uttered in film…

“A person can be smart. But people are dumb, panicky dangerous animals, and you know it.” – Kay from MiB

We’ve all been hardwired with groupthink. We had to be. When a member of your tribe comes running by in a panic, you don’t have time to stop and think what the hell is he running from?, you just start running along with him. It’s the difference between living to hunt another day or getting killed by a bigger predator than you are.

The more people that are running. The more important it is (to our brain) to just start legging it. No one wants to be the straggler at the back that gets picked off. For that reason, group-think and herd-mentality skews incredibly towards the simplistic. In terms of evolution, there’s no time to worry about the why…you just trust that if everyone else is running, you probably should be too. In terms of modern day that is the susceptibility of uneducated people to dogma, polemics and confirmation bias.

A single person…and individual that has critical thinking skills and the ability to look at the wider context, can overcome that instint. They can stop and say “hmmm…maybe I should look and see if this really is something that is going to harm me.” They can reason themselves out of group-think.

But without that context. Without that critical thinking, you have almost no choice but to rely on the fact that if someone is telling you to run, they must know more than you…so get it in gear.

Whether that person is telling you to run from a predator, or to hate immigrants, it’s all due to the same inherent mentality in humans.

Exactly. But performative acts like this play to their base. And their base is almost exclusively people who haven’t read the very book they profess to follow.

Most athielsts (myself included) have read more of the bible than any of these people ever have.

It’s been the calculated plan for far longer than I can remember.

Conservative politics relies on stupid uneducated voters incapable of critical thinking.

The voters that, with a lack of actual knowledge of their own through either experience, formal education or even just good old fashioned intellectual curiosity about the world around them, will happily cede their opinion to the first authority figure who tells them what they are already presdisposed to believe and confirm their biases.

It’s the entire reason there has been a coordinated attack on the liberal arts and college education under the guise of “financial constraints” and the push in the last few decades towards trade schools.

Conservative politics requires stupid who are content to learn how to be a tradesman, without any of that inconventient history or critical thinking getting in the way.

You will never convince me that shit like this is more than just performative play-acting for the sake of their base.

They aren’t actually fucking praying. They don’t actually believe any of this shit. It’s a tool used to keep the support of their base of white christian nationalists.

That’s why we see them doing shit like this now than every before.

In a world where more liberal minded Christians are balking at how “unchristian” these idiots are turning out to be, they have to make these shows louder and more obvious…and make damn sure there’s a camera around, so that they can play even harder to the more extreme supporters.

If they were to quietly go about their business with no “performative acts of faith”, more people would recognize them as the monsters they are.

But with shit like this, 81 year old grandparents the country over can look at them and say “I don’t understand what they’re doing, but they MUST be the good guys because look how christian they are…”

If anyone thinks America is getting out of this without resorting to firing squads and hanging these fuckers upside down in town squares, they’re naive as fuck.

Transracial doesn’t exist because “Race” in the context that they want to use it doesn’t exist.

Genetically there’s only one “race”; that’s the human race. If they want to identify as a different culture, it’s purely a cosmetic cultural thing, not biological or genetic. Whereas as being Transgender is biological. Therefore, you can safely tell people like Rachel Dolezal to fuck off and go back to fifth period science class.

One of the best. But messy as heck to eat.

Whether it’s a roast pig, or a burger, or a pizza, there’s a reason pineapple is always brought up.

Controversial or not, the concept of something being both savory and sweet at the same time is popular (and frankly…delicious) Heck, it’s the whole reason Chocolate Covered Peanuts exist.

Pineapple is easily the best for that kind of combination. Apple comes in a close second (hence having an apple butter pork tenderloin, or apple sauce with pork chops, etc…

Why pineapple gets singled out and derided over every other fruit that does the same thing is just weird.

Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis. It led me to my favorite genre of…well…anything… It was my introduction to Cyberpunk, essentially. And in a lot of different ways, it’s factored into most of hobbies (writing, painting, etc…)

Been running Manjaro for years. Don’t really know what would make me change.

I guess maybe if I suddenly started getting more and more dependency errors when upgrading packages from the AUR it would make me consider jumping to put Arch.

But right not that’s not the case. So the benefit of switching is out weighed by the pain in the ass of having to say Everything up again.

They’re not acceptable. In fact I can’t think of a single one except burnt that is still actively kicking around.

Who told you it was acceptable, if you don’t mind me asking. And if it was your english teacher, please ask them how they managed to get here from all the way back in Shakespeare’s time.

Past 30, age is less about biology and more sociology.

I’m a 49 year old male. But I’m divorced, no kids. Still living a bachelor life quite happily while most guys close to my age are married with the kids and coaching soccer on weekends in a minivan. As a result, my friend group almost exclusively skews younger because those are the people who are in the same stage of life as I am (regardless of biological age).

The same works for relationships. Past a certain point it doesn’t matter how old you are, as long as your sociological age is compatible. (Ie. Your way of life)

Edited to Add: The rule we always learned in highschool when we were stupid kids with nothing better to do is “half your age plus 7”

51 divided by 2 = 25.5 + 7 = 32.5.

So by highschool rules, you’re just a little bit outside the lines, but close enough that if you’re both attractive most people will ignore it.

I apologize if this sounds flippant, but it’s FICTION.

Literally ANYTHING works if its written well enough…

Why are corporate IT policies the way they are?

I thought about this the other day when asking my IT department why they won’t let me carry a USB stick between home and work to be able to work from home and instead lock down the USB access and instruct me to use Google Drive instead…

I decided that most corporations only cosplay their IT security inasmuch as it only matters up to and not beyond the point of economic convenience.

If any of these companies truly cared about security, they would at the very least be using a hardened fork of Chrome with Google Services stripped out. They’d be self-hosting their own servers connected only via a VPN or some sort, etc… etc…

But that shit takes money and staff to maintain it. So they’ll give everything to third parties to manage instead and then send out pop-quiz emails about phishing every couple of weeks followed by sternly worded emails when a person fails it.

(Sorry…off my anti-depressants until pay day, so I have a lot of micro rants that have built up…haha)

Most IT nowadays is just simply the ability to google. What sets a professional IT person apart from an amateur is that the professional has an educated guess as to what to google in the first place.

Non-professional: “My computer is making a weird buzzing noise”

Professional: “What are the symptoms of a bad cooling fan?”

##What

###You talkin’ about

####Willis?

I guess they commonly know to use asterisks for italics and bold

I wouldn’t guess that at all. Pretty much everyone I know in the “normie” world would AT BEST use ctrl-i and ctrl-b if they’re not just pressing the icon in the gui.

Hell, most of them look at me like I’m a goddamn morlock when I tell them to Shift-delete in order to skip the recycling bin.

For the most part, yes. By design. Conveying something in a movie is more challenging in that it has less time to do it than a book has less time to do it. So it HAS to be, to some degree, more blunt and on-the-nose than a book can take its time being.

You can write five pages of internal description discussing what your main character thinks about the world around them. But you can’t show that in a movie and so you have to figure out how to get the gist of it across in a few lines of dialogue and some emoting.

It’s why show don’t tell is a rule. You have to simplify a movie in comparison to a book or else your audience will be sitting through a ten hour film.