It’s a myth that “anyone can get caught up in a cult”. While it’s true that cults have snared intelligent and sophisticated people, cults exclusively target the emotionally vulnerable. Just like email scammers intentionally use poor spelling and grammar to exclude all but the most credulous, cults have barriers to entry that are going to weed out skeptical people. You often have to dress a certain way; theirs a crazy amount of nomenclature; and strict status and hierarchys to obey. Only the people who have a strong desire to belong and conform are going to tolerate that.

I don’t say this like oh, I’m too smart to be in a cult. I say it to emphasize that cults prey on vulnerable people.

Honey pots are often not gathering intelligence themselves, but generating kompromat so that the target can be pressured by a third party.

This also works if the affair is organic, but enemies discover it’s existence first. For example, Clinton exposed himself to kompromat even though Lewinsky was in no way a foreign agent.

talking about gulags is guaranteed to trigger someone to bring up America’s incarceration rate.

I didn’t mean to imply the connection between America’s gulags and the Soviets. I meant to state it explicitly. And I also want to point out the meme itself is a whataboutism.

The difference between the two is getting narrower and narrower. Dystopian surveillance and murderous authorities? Check. Imperialist foreign policy built on multiple genocides? Check. Pogroms and oppression of minorities? Not only check, but the US is arguably worse than China or the USSR. Though I admit that may be due to the US having an extra century to do dirt. And don’t forget America’s the world leader in Gulags.

The idea that America is benevolent is stupid. The idea that she’s benevolent by comparison is running mighty thin.

These parasites and their private wealth rely on the government more than the Post Office. They were happy to cuddle up to Obama, Biden, and Trump. Blood is blood.

Hey, at least he’s doing honest work to supplement his salary this time.

Roberts wants the Court to be seen as nonpartisan, so he’s instructed the conservative Justices to take bribes from Democrats too.

The implication is that this is causal. Like being fascinated by killers makes you more likely to kill. Isn’t it more plausible that someone who is likely to kill is fascinated by people who’ve already killed?

If Breivik’s manifesto is all that stands between you and a mass-shooting, the manifesto is not the problem. I don’t think censoring killers names or writings is an effective way to prevent things like this. It’s a impotent and symbolic revenge against dead men.

American’s may seem litigious, but many of our legal protections require it. For example, the American Disabilities Act has no enforcement mechanism beyond suing non-compliant businesses. In some states, if you have a homeowners claim, you don’t sue the insurance company, but the individual. This leads to juicy headlines like “Woman sues 6yo nephew over a trip and fall”.

tell warn your friends about outlook.

Old tech is solid and reliable. Do you really want the modern tech ethos of “move fast and break stuff” to apply to Air Traffic Control? I wouldn’t trust the big tech companies to write software for red-lights without killing people.

He didn’t “build” shit. Nvidia didn’t become one of the biggest companies overnight because they innovated anything. They just happened to be making video game hardware that was dual use. First for crypto, then for AI. He’s rode the crest of the AI bubble to galactic overvaluation. If she gets this settlement, she’s arguably done more to earn that money than him.

Half the point of home ownership is judging your neighbors. HOAs are a legal vehicle to make the practice official.

Rotting potatoes stink worse than rotting meat. I once read about a family in E. Europe who were killed by potato fumes in their cellar. The mother was the first to be overcome by the fumes, and in turn the rest of the family succumbed while checking on what happened to the others.

Neat fact: the first enslaved people were trafficked into the US in 1619. Plymouth rock is 1620. The enslaved people were from W.Africa and it’s likely that some were Muslim. So that means that prayer rugs were in the US before buckled hats.

IQ is not an objective measure of intelligence. Nothing is. Intelligence is a colloquial and subjective concept like beauty, wit, or BDE. The idea that any of those things can be objectively measured is a logical fallacy. It was developed by eugenicists to do eugenics.

In his book, the ‘Mismeasure of man’, Gould wrote that he’s often encouraged to compare IQ testing to phrenology. But he says that comparison isn’t fair… to phrenology. We all know that phrenology’s methods are bunk, but it’s theory, that different regions of the brain are responsible for different functions is still mainstream neurology. IQ testing fails in both methodology and theory; phrenology is a superior instrument.

Any research based on IQ testing is suspect and unreliable.

Conspiracy theories: because reading history is hard.

Conspiracy theories: never more than 3 degrees of separation from the “protocols of the elders of Zion”

Conspiracy theories: supplying hallucinated facts thousands of years before AI.

If the marriage is sexually exclusive, why would you care? If the marriage was open, why would you care? If you’re worried about infidelity, then what gender they might choose still seems like a trivial issue.

My boomer mom cannot exist without the TV on. She literally will wake up if you turn it off. When she switched to streaming instead of cable, the “are you still watching” messages were a big obstacle. Oh, and she spends more time on video games than I do.

Anti-theists are single-digit basic bigots who think they found a loophole.