Maybe it’s my psych degree, but I refuse to believe that any human is completely irredeemable. While many mental illnesses cannot be ‘cured’ in a traditional sense, they can be treated and even incredibly dangerous people can heal. When you kill someone, you remove their chance to heal forever.

There’s just no excuse for capital punishment. It’s a vile practice done for the benefit of other people’s perverted sense of justice.

Really depends on the debate club, there are plenty in conservative areas that are basically just right-wing influencer spawning grounds

Best guess is slow growth that eventually plateaus around maybe the 10% mark if we’re lucky.

People are slaves to comfort, and ultimately that is what Microsoft and Apple are trying to sell. They want something that idiots can’t break, and they know the best way to do that is lock down the OS so much that you’re hardly able to interact with it at all. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people fundamentally unwilling to expend the very, very small modicum of brainpower necessary to use Linux these days, and I just don’t think there’s any chance of reaching them.

Wouldn’t the issue be that the message of the prequels was too muddied and not understood by general audiences? Like I feel Lucas really did try and put together a story about how fascism can flourish in the face of weak liberalism, democracy dying in thunderous applause, etc but it didn’t quite land because almost all the dialogue was written by an alien.

so far my cats have watched Inuyasha, Bleach, the One Piece 4kids dub, and Ranma 1/2. Considering they seem just as happy watching the TV’s demo reel, I think they just enjoy the lights and colors. It’s some enrichment in their environment though, so I always try to put something on for them if I’m gonna be out of the house for a chunk of time.

this is the part that really baffles me, though I guess I can’t expect much from the class that seems to be literally incapable of foresight.

Like say AI actually does get there. Some company is able to crack human consciousness and we get truly intelligent AI, good enough to replace your workforce with… that AI isn’t going to be free. It’s going to be a monthly fee for your business. and then when you’re fully reliant on AI, when skilled labor is simply too difficult to cultivate any further, it’s going to inevitably enshittify. These corpos will end up slaves to the AI company.

It’s like they fundamentally cannot see that they are giving up control. They’re so fucking stupid.

I think anyone who seriously wants to defend society as we know it needs to have their brain examined. Studying it could help us prevent future generations from becoming so stupid.

I would make the argument that our species resorting to violent conflict over shareable resources is a pretty damning indictment of human nature.

Tribalism exists, it’s a scientific fact. You can overcome the biases it imposes through cognitive effort, but at a baseline we are predisposed to hate anyone who we believe “doesn’t belong.” That’s not inherently evil, but it is asshole behavior.

what if we kept the animals in a big dome

There was a brief time when Tommy Chong was on a band under the name “4 N*'s and a C*,” and every now and again I remember that fact and think “What the actual fuck was he thinking.”

I dunno if it was the best, but the pizza that lives in my memory was a whopping 24" pizza from a local place. That’s over 450 square inches of 'za, or 11 square meters for the Europeans.

It was glorious, and took four incredibly high stoners about a day and a half to work through.

I’m talking from a US perspective, but I work in an education adjacent field that reviews a lot of homeschool student’s academic records from across the country. IMO, there are two types of homeschoolers. There’s the students who are truly brilliant living in a part of the country that doesn’t value education, and they’re practically forced into homeschooling (or a popular online program like Stanford Online High School) in order to receive an actual education that could challenge them. They do get less socialization than their traditional schooled peers, but they’d get mercilessly bullied at a traditional school so it’s hard to say how much value that socialization has.

The other type are the religious fundies. I have even more hands-on experience with this style, as some of my cousins were homeschooled in this manner. IMO, this shit should be illegal. It’s accepted because someone is typically monitoring these students’ academic progress, but I can say with confidence that Republican states are letting a lot of shit slide. It’s religious indoctrination at a level beyond what you would even find at a religious private school. Typically, these students are better socialized than the other homeschool students, though with the caveat that all their socialization happens in religious settings.

sorry full of valuable resources? what, corn? dataservers? pedophiles?

the U.S. is not some piggy bank waiting to be cracked. Realistically, the current US military exists to defend America from all the nations it’s pissed off by invading them in the past. It’s a self-fullfilling system.

actually, from a historical perspective, it’s been the Dems who have accelerated ICE. Biden and especially Obama were much more instrumental in the agency coming into more and more power. Trump’s getting to play with the toy now, but it was bought by Dems.

I’m about to take a super shit on the villain of the week

don’t let the others get you down, wanting to lick/bite is perfectly normal bottom behavior

past me is an asshole, and future me is a chump.

definitely a hole duh

the civil rights movement has been incredibly whitewashed in US education. Americans were overwhelmingly against de-segregation, there was tons of violence against black Americans, and that violence was not solely committed by police officers.

The Klan might seem like a relic of the past now, but the KKK was incredibly powerful during the 50s and 60s, to the point where in my home state, 1/3 of men were Klansmen and were a significant political bloc. They weren’t just voting in politicians that supported their vile views though, they were lynching people and burning crosses on lawns and shit.

I’m pretty sure the shock of taking so much damage at once would kill you