Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]

Define your variables. Wtf is “b,” the number of votes candidate B would have, plus one for no reason? Why is candidate T getting t votes and not t-1 votes? Terrible math, try again.

“Wow, the Fire Nation is just like the latest country the news told me to hate, good thing America’s around to Share Our Greatness™️with them!”

Exactly. The surgeon general tweeted out, “STOP WEARING MASKS” and CNN was publishing articles with all the anti-masker claims, including that they don’t work and could increase your risk of getting it instead, and people just pretend like it never happened and the anti-maskers came out of thin air.

It wasn’t just an idiotic ploy to deliberately spread misinfo to trick people into leaving masks for doctors, it was also about the government trying to cover their own ass for having sold off their emergency stockpiles for fast cash.

Fahrenheit is the temperature brine feels.

“Gender is what’s in your pants” alright then my gender is death

My brother is a veteran, and when he came back he started “self-medicating” with meth to treat his PTSD. He was constantly on the verge of crisis and making violent threats (carefully phrased to not be actionable). At the time, I was working at an Amazon warehouse, at times doing 60 hours weeks, and at the time I was on Facebook and if I got off work and wanted to check it, he’d see I was online and if I left him on read it would be a whole thing. I described it as being a 911 operator on call 24/7. I basically wrote him off as dead to me, but my parents wouldn’t and that was the worst part. I remember visiting and we tried to go out for dinner but then he texted my mom with another crisis and now she’s in tears again, like always. It was constant. And he’d accuse them of all sorts of stuff, my mom still had one of those phones you had to press the button multiple times to get a letter and if she had a typo he’d accuse her of doing it on purpose. All he did all day was be alone with his thoughts, going through the same cycles, shooting up meth and absorbing whatever crazy right-wing bullshit he was listening to.

My parents are pretty well off and they were there for him. They tried to check him into all sorts of mental hospitals and rehab, but he’d check himself out early. There was an incident early on where he checked himself into the VA and they tried to cut him off Xanax cold turkey, which is potentially life-threatening, and he responded violently. This put a flag on his record which made it difficult to get him treatment later, and he was also careful to phrase his threats ambiguously enough to not be institutionalized.

It was pretty clear to me that this was only going to end one way, and at one point I thought about going up there and killing him myself, before he could hurt an innocent person. But the cops kept a watch on his house until it happened and he took a gun and led them on a car chase to somebody’s house, pulled a gun on them, and got shot in the arm. When I heard it happened, I didn’t know if he’d live or die and didn’t care, I was just relieved that it had finally happened and that nobody else got hurt. He went to jail for a bit and that got him off the meth so he’s doing better now.

What really gets me about it though is how easy we got off, though. Compared to the people on the other side of the war, the people actually living in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, countless civilians. The children terrified of sunny days because that’s when the drones fly. How many times over do you have to multiply the pain and suffering I felt when I saw my mother’s face in tears to get even an inkling of the suffering inflicted on those people?

And it’s all just out of sight, out of mind. We went to war and people hardly even noticed, everybody just went about their lives as normal like it wasn’t even happening. People don’t even give a shit about veterans killing themselves on the daily in VA parking lots and waiting rooms because they can’t get care, they sure as shit don’t care about brown people on the other side of the world that the news treats as subhuman. And now, Bush gets rehabilitated on Ellen and the libs expect me to vote for Biden. It’s absurd how little people care about all the people they murdered.

Can’t believe ISIS would do something like that 😔

Always fun to see accusations with no link and speculate on what actually happened.

I was raised Catholic and left it at a young age and spent a lot of time uprooting the brainworms so I don’t think there’s much left. However, whenever I can’t find something I really need and start getting stressed, I’ll still recite, “Dear St. Anthony, please come around, my X has been lost and cannot be found.” It’s a useful way to calm down and focus instead of freaking out and panicking.

Other than that, I still retain a lot of the theology I learned in high school, and I can still sometimes get a little opinionated about various things even though I have no dog in the fight.

Years ago I tried my hand gambling on politics on PredictIt, and I didn’t lose all that much, but there were a couple bets I lost that seemed like sure things. Mostly the lesson I learned is that talk is cheap and there’s no real consequences for people saying one thing and doing the other.

For example, in the 2016 election, there was a market on whether no-name Carly Fiona would qualify for the CNN debate, and by the rules they set she didn’t qualify, but there hadn’t been as many polls in the right timeframe as had been expected. Still, they released a statement days before the debate, saying “rules are rules,” so I took a bet at like 90% odds thinking it was completely safe - then they let her in at the last minute and I lost big. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I think I lost a fair bit on a market about Trump meeting with Kim Jong Un, which was a pretty chaotic market. The most chaotic market I ever saw, which I avoided and wanted no part of, was whether Bernie would win Iowa in 2020, and watching it closely in real time made it very obvious that some really shady stuff was going on. Probably the most I ever lost was Biden winning the 2020 primary, which is about when I got out of it.

I would not recommend gambling like that because if you have money on the line there’s an incentive to be glued to the news in a way that can be really unhealthy. Honestly the stress was worse than the money I lost. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, the fees will get you, also it’s generally more about predicting what the market will think so you can profit off the swings, and personally I think it’s kind of a distasteful way to engage in politics. At the same time, it can be a learning experience - it definitely got me in the habit of asking “And what consequences will this person face if they’re lying off their ass?” every time I see a headline about someone saying something, and of not paying as much attention to statements in general.

Tfw you’re hanging out in a cell getting ready to testify against a bunch of super-powerful people, in a prison that’s prevented every attempted suicide in decades, after having made repeated statements that you have absolutely no intention of killing yourself, and then suddenly both the guards leave to go take a nap, and at that exact time, you notice that the multiple cameras watching your cell all randomly glitch off at the same time, so at that moment you decide to kill yourself using a method that’s indistinguishable from being murdered

I thought that there was one guy named Michael J—son who used his fame as an NBA star to launch a career as pop singer, radically changing his appearance in the process. I don’t think I realized they were different people until high school.

That’s completely wrong lol. Nowhere is there an assumption that birthdays are randomized each time, you just don’t understand the math.

I’m sure it’s not the worst but I felt like the adaptation of Watership Down changed the tone/message compared to the book. Now granted the infamous violence is present in the book (though seeing it is more visceral than reading about it). But in the book there’s a nice story at the end where Hazel is injured (iirc) and is taken in by a little girl and her parents who take care of him while he recovers before releasing him back to the wild (which only adds to his legend, of course).

Removing this bit, the only positive interaction with a human, makes the message feel more like, “Humans are bastards and inherently anethma to the natural world, which is also a brutal war of all against all even down to the cutest softest creatures.” It just makes you feel bad, whereas the book might make you feel bad at times but it also offers an example of what you can do right. It’s kind of a pet peeve when a work with environmentalist themes falls into that line of “Humans are the problem and there’s nothing you can do but feel bad about it.”

I have no idea what thought process led you to post that but ok.

There were a lot of really simple, basic improvements that the peasants in China desperately needed. Anybody could’ve done what was needed, but nobody else was willing to, because nobody else cared. There was no special technical economic policy that uplifted them, it was just a willingness to address their needs that no other faction possessed.

Of course I know that, did you not read what I said?

“China’s conditions were much worse off than places like the US, so obviously it’s possible to improve conditions to be better than per-revolutionary China (which is not saying much) without communism.”

It’s not hard to double your life expectancy when you’re starting out with the same life expectancy that existed in the Roman Empire almost 2,000 years prior. Thanks, Mao!

It really is wild that no other faction was willing to do anything that would increase Chinese life expectancy above that of the Roman Empire, yes. I agree, thanks, Mao!

It’s pretty funny that you criticize Deng for implenting economic reforms that led to further industrialization, while also crediting the rise in life expectancy to that very same industrialization.

What even is your ideology? And can you answer my question about who should’ve come to power instead of the communists?

Over 60, actually. I think that doubling live expectancy over a single generation is, in fact, pretty impressive.

So I take it you’re not a Maoist or a Dengist. Can you tell me who you think should’ve been in power in China instead? The KMT? You can see how much they did on the graph, if you don’t find the CPC’s numbers impressive then I’m sure you’d hate them even more. The invading Japanese perhaps? The European colonizers? Or maybe you think the Qing dynasty should never have been overthrown.

Deng was alive and well when two of those stock exchanges were opened

That’s… what I said? Obviously, Deng was the one who implemented economic reforms, such as opening stock exchanges and allowing foreign investment. Some Maoists consider this to be right-deviationist and counter-revolutionary, and that he should’ve continued more in line with Mao’s policies. That’s why I asked if you’re a Maoist, since you consider his reforms incompatible with socialism.

I’m not sure who’s whole argument was “look at the improvements only possible under Communism.” China’s conditions were much worse off than places like the US, so obviously it’s possible to improve conditions to be better than per-revolutionary China (which is not saying much) without communism. It’s just that in China’s case, it was the communists that did it.

Oh, so you consider Deng’s reforms to be right-deviationist? Are you a Maoist, then?

Whether you consider the CPC to be communist or not, the fact still remains that they’ve made a lot of improvements in the lives of the average Chinese person.

Yeah I got that, at least after they posted a rickroll. Guess being an idiot is a defense mechanism when they realized they had nothing.