Libra00

Society should exist for the sole purpose of bettering the lives of all of its members. Anything that goes against that is inappropriate in my book. Right now democracy is going against that pretty hard in the US.

Heh, I do to a little bit, but starting in high school I was just actively correcting my twang hard until I just had like a generic American accent. Somehow from that effort I’ve picked up localisms from all over the US (I have moved a lot, but that was years later), like I use ‘soda’ instead of ‘coke’. Nowadays you’d never be able to tell unless I was drunk as shit, which I don’t do more than once every few years at best, cause even without the accent I don’t talk like an Okie anymore.

Interesting, I didn’t realize it had a name, I thought it was just immersion.

Flooding the zone (which now that I think about it is close enough to gish-galloping for there not to be much of a distinction), whataboutism, and moving the goalposts are all extremely common.

Whataboutism and moving the goalposts are the ones I see most often.

Depends on your definition of ‘difficult’. I can pull a motherboard and replace it, I can hand-edit the Windows registry to do some shit most people aren’t even aware is possible, etc. Are those things difficult? No, because I know how to do them. They are complex and technical and require a fair bit of knowledge and understanding to not screw it up though. Everything is difficult until you learn how to do it, then it’s not. Might be better to ask how hard it is to learn? Cause I can’t drive at all so I’m guessing it’s somewhere between multiplication tables and organic chemistry but that’s probably not helpful. :P

I’ve been on the internet for a long time and met lots of people from around the world, and one thing I hear a lot is that many of them learned English by watching American TV. Some of those folks speak better English than I do as a native, so maybe there’s something to it? Though they mostly did it as kids and for years and years, so maybe that’s not practical.

It’s pretty normal. There’s a graph that plots confidence as you gain new skills or knowledge, and it sounds like you’re on the down-slope of Mt Stupid and coming into the Valley of Despair.

I have spent my life learning for fun and if I can be said to have learned anything about the process it’s that the more you learn the better you understand just how vastly complex everything is, how many ways you could be wrong, and how insufficient your earlier simple assumptions were. Like yeah, maybe trans people are just mentally ill because there have been a few cases where that seems to be the case. But does that make it okay to deny all of them the agency and dignity of being able to decide who they want to be? Even if we define gender-affirming care as ‘harm’, we seem fine as a society with people harming themselves with stuff like cigarettes, why are we not fine with people ‘harming themselves’ with gender-affirming care?

At the end of the day the question you have to ask yourself is: would you rather never be made uncomfortable by this realization that things are more nuanced htan you thought, or would you rather have the most accurate information about the world that you can get? Because you can’t have both. Moral/intellectual certainty is a pipe dream, that way lies true evil, because no one cares less about others than someone who is absolutely convinced that they’re right/just.

That’s fair, i didn’t catch the ‘certain kind’ in the original. My bad.

And yeah I was by no means saying all old people will be fine anyway. But I’ve played a fair bit of it and all you have to do is type or sometimes draw on your phone. People do the former all day, and the latter isn’t terribly different from just navigating since it’s a touchscreen. shrug No doubt some people will find a way to block even that from their mind, but.

That’s not an accurate analogy. A more accurate one would be: ‘Most old people don’t know how to weld.’ ‘Really? I’m old and I know how to weld.’ I’m pointing out that broad generalizations are inaccurate at best.

How old is old? Cause I’m 52 and have no trouble with it. :P But I also worked in IT and cybersecurity for ~20 years, so technology never bothered me.

Concurrent: at the same time - if you eat two cookies at the same time you’re eating them concurrently. Cumulative: accumulating/growing over time - If you eat a cookie now and eat a cookie later you’ve cumulatively eaten 2 cookies. Bonus points: wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to google ‘define:<word>’ than to make a post here to get other people to answer for you? You’d get the answer a lot quicker the other way, too.

Jackbox. Each one has several party games, everybody can play on their phone, and it’s lots of fun while being fairly simple.

Because light is affected by gravity but gravity isn’t. Gravity—the curvature of space-time—can’t stop changes in the curvature of spacetime from propagating outward. But also that information isn’t coming from inside the event horizon, it’s coming from spacetime around it.

This is a long one. I used to have very frequent, intense, vivid dreams when I was younger, and this one stands out even among those. I had this dream when I was in my mid-20s, and 30 years later I still remember it like it was yesterday.

I dreamed about these monsters called blood-bats that were ~3’ tall, squat, red-skinned, winged monsters with 3 big black claws on each hand. They would claw people and leave long, white lines on their flesh, draining them of blood and also the will to live. I dreamed I had gone to Marrakesh (for some reason) and the streets were filled with people who all had these marks on their arms or chest or whatever, and they were all just shuffling around like they were zombies, staring at the ground, etc. They were all kind of moving in one direction, so I pushed through the crowd in that direction and eventually discovered a palace that appeared to be their destination. Inside the palace was this long, wide great hall that was lined by these little booths that each had a priest of some religion or other in it. The people were all lining up to go into the booth of their choosing where they would kneel on a small carpet, the priest would bless them, and they would collapse and a pair of orderlies would put them in a body bag and carry them away.

I was determined to find out what was really going on here, why all these people appeared to be grimly shuffling off to their ultimate demise, so I skipped out of the line and found myself in an elevator. As the elevator started going down one of the creatures came in through the hatch in the ceiling and attacked me, but I managed to fight it off without getting clawed and it fled. Pretty soon the elevator stopped and the door opened and I found myself in this vast open warehouse-like structure filled with thousands of hospital beds, each one with one of these creatures on it. There was an old man pushing a cart around from bed to bed checking on them. I approached and asked him what the shit was going on and he explained that these creatures were from another dimension, that they traveled between dimensions hunting sapient life to drain as a food source. The way they hop dimensions is they make someone where they want to go dream about them - usually only a few at most - and then when that person wakes up the ones they dreamed of would exist in that reality.

As soon as the old man finished telling me this I realized that I was dreaming and was about to wake up, only I wasn’t dreaming about 3-4 of these guys, I was dreaming about the entire race. In those hazy few seconds between being fully engaged in the dream and fully awake I was frantically searching around both the dreamscape and my bedroom for anything sharp that I could use to kill myself before I woke up and brought all of them here. Fortunately reality reasserted itself in pretty short order, but that handful of seconds might’ve been the most scared I’ve ever been.

Even weirder, several years after I had this dream a friend of mine described, without having heard about mine, a dream he had once had that featured virtually identical creatures, but in his dream they were torturing people in dentist’s offices and shit. Kinda freaked me out.

A spoofed one.

Turnaround to what, exactly? A retreat from fascism would be great, don’t get me wrong, but what we had before wasn’t exactly working otherwise we wouldn’t have found ourselves in this situation. As much as Democrats like to blame Donald Trump for literally everything (and he’s certainly done enough), he’s just the manifestation of peoples’ resentment and desperation at how much this country doesn’t work for most of its people.

Worse still, even if there is a return to the status quo from say 10-20 years ago, aside from not fixing the problem, that will just make everyone focus more on their relief at not being under a fascist regime anymore and thus they will become even more complacent about the things that didn’t work before. The politicians who opposed this backslide into fascism - and their ‘vote blue no matter who’ supporters - will be ever more convinced of the rightness of their position and thus have even less reason to change anything, so we’ll just wind up right back here again.

But also, let’s address your specific complaints.

They complain about big tech having your information, but turn around wanting you to sign a petition that asks for your information.

Yeah, let’s not actually try to, you know, do anything about any of this, let’s just sit around and let those tech-bros enshittify their platforms and cram ads down our throats. Let’s not inconvenience anyone with a protest or a petition or a call to your representative, for shame! Also if you can’t see the difference between a giant, all-devouring megacorporation having your data and putting your email/phone# on a petition then I’m afraid it’s going to take more effort than I care to muster to unfuck your worldview, so, uh, good luck figuring that one out on your own.

They complain about commercials all year long, but will tune in by the millions for a Super Bowl

Are you sure these are the same people? You’re painting with an extremely broad brush here. I only have anecdotal evidence to offer, but I complain about commercials and I haven’t watched a Super Bowl ad in probably 20 years.

They complain about unfair wages, bad workplace environments and shitty bosses but didn’t make so much of a fuss during the pandemic.

So your issue is both that they complain, and that they don’t complain hard enough? Talk about having your cake and eating it too, you’re straddling that fence so hard you’ve found a way to whine about both sides of the same issue.

So what gives, really? … fuck the majority of Americans

Apparently what gives is that you are confused and angry and lashing out at people you don’t know for perceived slights you don’t seem to understand, wishing for the impossible return to a magical happy place that never existed (go ahead, ask those of us who remember the 2008 crash how great the world of 20 years ago was, I dare you) because you don’t understand that there is a world of distance between ‘not a complete dumpster fire’ and ‘actually decent.’ You seem to be mad at people who don’t vote the way you think they should without even attempting to understand where they’re coming from or what their motivations might be, you don’t seem capable of learning from the mistakes of the past that led to where we are today, or even particularly interested in acknowledging that they exist. You seem convinced despite generations of evidence that just voting harder will fix anything, and you ridicule the fact that other people have not somehow received this ultimate self-evident truth from on high as you have. And worst of all you seem too exasperated or confused by all of the above to try to actually change anything, you fail to understand, much less support and encourage, the means by which others are trying to do that, and you’re way too up your own ass to realize that everyone around you is a person with their own internal life, hopes, dreams, etc just like you, much less to have a shred of fucking empathy for anyone who isn’t within arm’s reach (and I’m skeptical about even that.)

In short, what gives is: Fuck you, and while you’re at it read a book, you’re embarrassing yourself.

Meh, fair enough.

Neat, I’ll check that out, thanks!

Edit: Ugh, it looks like all of the book clubs that are tagged as ‘sci-fi’ are actually ‘sci-fi/fantasy’ (or sometimes sci-fi/fantasy/historical/romance, which makes no sense) which is not what I’m looking for. Do you happen to know of any that are pure sci-fi? Preferably ones that focus on big-idea sci-fi like Greg Egan or Peter Watts?

Sorry, Fable? I’m not familiar with that.

Don’t. Even if it’s not a cult (it totally is) it’s a scam designed to extract money from people. If you just want to give up a significant portion of your money and feel like you belong you’re welcome to buy a shitload of weed and come hang out with my friends and I.