Yeah, and I think the better way of phrasing such a thing is “you’re defeating yourself before putting in a good external effort.”

I remember being young, a virgin, and struggling to get laid. And yeah I really thought I was trying, but it was more like I was trying to try. I wasn’t chatting people up, I wasn’t going out, I wasn’t socializing much at all, and when someone literally fell into my lap hitting on me I pushed her away. I was dealing with my own mental issues and while I wanted to get into a relationship or even just laid, those issues stood firmly between me and actually trying. Hell, it had turned out I had been hot the whole time.

Joe Rogan becoming an overdue antifascist would be a hilarious twist of history. Like I don’t think he’s ever going to be a leftist, but he seems to somehow be less brain dead than a lot of Americans, and fuck that’s sad.

I’m saying that the people currently holding a farcically post modernist take on the idea of evil, are often also ideologically opposed to post modernism. You may say this is contradictory, but to that theoretical you, I say, “yeah, but the main ideology that does this is fascism, and they don’t care if they’re self contradictory”

This person may also rant against postmodernism

And furthermore, to them the government can’t be fascist because they supported all of the fascist parts of it.

Hitler was actually extremely childish as was his entire regime. The similarities are remarkable.

Henry VIII of England was basically what would happen if a pro American football player was a powerful king. He’s suspected to have had CTE.

Versailles was basically a cruel experiment on the mental health of trapped nobility and rulers, that involved basically nothing but petty social games for power and prestige, but no options to use them.

Rome had plenty of emperors like this including Caligula and Nero. Nero had a neck beard and unhealthy attachment to his mother. Meanwhile if half of what was written about Elagabulus is true then we have proof of how bad of an idea it is to give absolute power to a horny teenager with neither qualifications nor training.

Speaking of weird mommy issues, Wilhelm I of Prussia/Germany was a weird childish man whose family spat was the first world war. On the other side was Nicolas of Russia who wasn’t much better.

Also Ghaddafi was nuts, like in funny and horrifying ways, but definitely never matured after taking power young.

So yeah, I’m conflating kings, emperors, and dictators as all more or less the same, because they kinda are. Julius Caesar took the title of dictator, was assassinated to prevent him from being a king, and was invoked by the emperors. We have a modern tendency to think of dictators as people who came to power through coups or the military, which can lead towards more mature and sane figures, but we still use the term for the hereditary absolute ruler of North Korea (it’s a socialism themed monarchy) and we don’t use it to describe the huge portion of roman emperors who were generals installed by coup. Additionally, history indicates (to me at least) that you likely have to be a bit nuts and immature to overthrow an established republic, because of the behavior shown by citizens in a destabilizing republic.

I understand the urge to treat this administration as a freak of history, but they’re just too similar to the third reich to do so responsibly. And yeah those similarities include immaturity. It seems that a destabilizing republic is best hijacked by the narcissistic, and narcissists who are leaning into their disorder tend towards immaturity because growth often requires painful self reflection.

It’s also meant to say “look see we can make them regret it” as well as to draw into the paternal metaphor they keep using. Those weird comments they keep making about “daddy” being home to punish dissenters, feels very in line with this. The idea being that they’re trying to depict themselves as tough but necessary, and opposition as the same as a child misbehaving because of unenforced boundaries. In this regard they’re depicting her as crying to treat her like a child who has been spanked, and as such (in their eyes) one who will in the future respect their authority and eventually thank them for it.

They need to maintain the narrative that the protesters to contain both hardened rebels, and primarily be ordinary people who just don’t understand discipline and the need to enforce the rules.

Memes have contained dangerous misinformation for over a decade. The bigger thing is that this is government propaganda trying to pass itself off as bottom up relatable content.

Caesar dressing would be a delight for fries. Really any creamy dressing

As a girl, yeah i want that dinner

Holy fuck that’s nearly 1/20. That’s a wildly unacceptable margin of error. Hell it’s an unacceptable margin of error for a long term prison sentence

The problem with that argument is execution states are trying to cheap out over it. They’d love to get rid of the extra appeals capital cases get

Honestly there are so fucking many reasons against it. I can respect it as a penalty in international law, but for criminal law it’s nuts. It’s obviously cruel and unusual punishment (as is solitary). It gets overturned post mortem regularly. Increasingly they’re just killing people despite reasonable doubt being found. It’s a stain on our collective souls. It’s wildly expensive. And it’s ineffective as a deterrent.

It’s not even being valued or irreplaceable, it’s just knowing you’ve done the right thing even when nobody would have blamed you for not. It’s the fundamental dignity and pride associated with knowing that you have shown integrity and the understanding that when presented with an opportunity to display it that it’s absolutely worth it.

I honestly can’t imagine a better peak experience. Like, I’ve made choices that proved my ethics even at personal cost and felt extra good just not telling anyone for years about them. I still feel pride for some I engaged in as a child. It’s straight up the exact opposite feeling of remembering something cringe you did (of which I have many more examples). I sincerely wish that experience on everyone, though I hope most don’t get the martyrdom urge that led to it.

Unfortunately I grew up in the Cincinnati area and developed a strong sense of civic duty. Is there a way we could blame Kentucky?

As an American, honestly I feel like anticommunism was a huge factor in the decline of our civic virtue. When you start praising and empowering wealth over mutual benefit you weed the ethical and the dutiful from the leadership pool, both politically and culturally. Many left wing movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in America prioritized civic duty separate from the state (left wing) or through it (liberal).

I think the other big damage to it was the American civic religion. The country went from a huge machine we each had to play a part in, built on philosophies that everyone was supposed to understand, to a golden calf. The constitution went from the foundational rules meant to steward us towards the goals stated in the preamble it became a holy text thats name is cited, but its goals are not cherished. People often don’t actually think about how what they want fits in to a reasonable interpretation of say, the 4th-8th amendments.

Idk, sometimes I feel massively outnumbered here as someone who takes her civil duties seriously.

Uvalde remains the final proof that police militarization has been a complete failure. It has resulted in police that will hold someone down to deluge their eyes with pepper spray, but won’t protect children from a single shooter.

That makes sense. These days it sounds like a much better proposition to people, hell my wife and I recently built a batocera pi that she wanted for retro gaming, but I wanted as a TV box for kodi and jellyfin once I get it working. And that use case is the one that makes the steam box sound tempting.

Funny enough, while I’d taken issue with that aspect of the xbone, I’d fairly quickly started using my 360 thst way.