Somebody_Else

They will just declare that Republicans won all the elections

Its fantastic for what it is, its meh at what a lot of people try to make it, its garbage for a lot of stuff.

As a group chat, a place to hang out, or for a community that is looking for breakout rooms, its fantastic. I have a discord that’s just friends of mine, we have like 20-25 people, it gets 4 or 5 messages a day, unless we are actively having some discussion, sometimes people jump online and make an impromptu video hangout. Its fantastic.

Similarly, its fantastic for the magic groups I am in. Sure the meme page gets flooded, but thats what its for, you can post an lfg to the lfg channel, and find a game fairly quickly, then you jump over into a dedicated room and have fun.

Im in a couple of groups that organize for large events (think burning man groups), and its great for that. Discussions tend to be focused, we make breakout rooms for specific things (like camp layout, shift rotation etc). There are a couple rooms that are just for general chatter, but we only have like 20-30 people, so convos dont move that fast, its rare to have more than 3 in a week in the general hangout rooms, and rarely more than 2 at once.

Its meh as a community hangout, I am part of several board game store or magic store discords, and all of them are kinda…meh. You can occasionally set up for big games on them, and they tell you when tournaments or events are, but with too many people it becomes unfocused, individual stuff gets lost in the noise.

Its terrible as a forum, or as a general social media, searching for history sucks, nothing has permanence unless it is saved off of discord (its great for having a meeting about camp layout, but somebody needs to actually save the camp layout documents or they get lost).

One of the first things the Nazis did was go after educators professors and colleges…

Coming from a world where the word itself is not even widely know, the idea of being raised as child without any explanations about the world or comforts to be held, scares me.

I would rather teach a child the truth about the world than try and feed them some bullshit about a magic man in the sky that wants them to worship him.

I always heard on the internet of people leaving their religion as teenagers when they were raised by their parents religiously.

Raising your kids religiously is effectively child abuse

But what of a child. I am a very anxious person(as i have come to accept). Being told that there is nothing after death or that no one really knows, would have send me spiraling.

I mean, it sounds like you needed psychiatric help, not religion.

That said, logically, people have done it(even if i can’t picture it) so i am also wondering how people/parents grappled with this and struggles they faced, what solutions they come up with

My parents didnt raise me religious, they said it was way easier than trying to be religious.

When I asked questions, they either found actual data, or they told me they didnt know the answer.

When I babysit for my cousins, I give them real answers when I can, or I tell them that I don’t know the answer. Sometimes they ask really stupid questions, and that’s fine, the key is to take the question seriously. Its also ok to briefly cover things that are too complex for them, when they ask why do people need to breath, I tell them that we need oxygen, I dont try to explain how cellular respiration works.

Also, on the opposite of the spectrum, what happens when your child converts(?) to a religion.

Statistically unlikely, but hypothetically possible. Generally, I don’t really care what somebody believes privately, id be disappointed that they went for psuedoscience and hatred, but that’s their decision.

So.

Star Trek was genuinely groundbreaking when it aired. First was that basically no other sci-fi story had a hopeful vision of the future, so it was instantly different. Star trek was a meritocracy, it was post-scarcity, characters where hailed for being competent moral people, instead of morally bankrupt nepo-babies.

Second was that the show treated people like adults, a lot of the storytelling involved significant moral conundrums, and included scenarios with no easy answer.

Finally, the shows sci-fi setting let it tackle ideas that otherwise would be untouchable. Racism was shown to be absurd not by having black people and white people, but you could see a whole planet where people half-white and half-black would oppress (and be horribly racist) towards exactly the same people, but who had the white part on the other side of the body.

Finally, the casting for the show, and the characterization was amazing. Kirk is (imo) a boring character, but the dynamic of Kirk Spock and Scotty made for genuinely interesting interpersonal dialog.

Granted, its been done again and again, and done better (Notably, TNG is better in almost every way IMO), and so the formula got stale, and you cant help but compare Star Trek to the copies, several of whom inevitably did certain parts better.

A lot of the hype about Grease is nostalgia, no doubt about that.

But a lot of the rest is that a loooot of the songs are both catchy and very easy to understand. The movie also forms a social dynamic that is easy to understand for kids.

We learned to sing “Summer Nights” in school, and then friends and I would sing the song over and over, adding more and more childish humor that we found hilarious (because…kids). We also instantly got the implied social dynamic (boys just want to get sex, girls want to have mushy romance).

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Its not just that the humor is unfunny (and basically just bigotry porn with a side of cringe), its that none of the “friends” in the show are even friends with each other. The whole show is just a bunch of assholes being bigoted assholes and then you are supposed to think that its funny.

Do you base that racist assumption

You think its racist to be aware that most terrorism is from white conservatives?

on anything other than your own prejudices?

Its based on data mostly, I know you probably aren’t familiar with the idea, but it is possible to use past historical data to inform yourself.

Edit: Oh, your just a Nazi

The rape is the point, concentration camps are designed to torture people, rape is part of that.

Wait, you mean the worlds most corrupt billionaire was just…doing a pump and dump? Who could possible have seen this coming.

American culture might as well have been designed to create drug addicts very very quickly.

Religion teaches people to have no bullshit meter, and have no basis for understanding if something is true or not, schools bend over backwards to accommodate shit like creationism. On top of that, we actively encourage other kinds of pseudoscience, and generally give kids 0 ways to tell if something is pseudoscience.

Pharmaceuticals are such a big business, that its basically impossible to put real limits on pharmaceutical companies, and so they are encouraged to train kids to take pills as often as possible, for any reason. And kids have no training or education in how to spot or defend against pseudoscience (kids are explicitly trained to accept pseudoscience).

Since Reagan, the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has been growing steadily, wages stagnate while the cost of everything goes up every year, inflation erodes the power of the middle class regularly, the country actively encourages predatory business practices, pushes kids into college debt that is more or less untenable.

Toxic masculinity is all over the place, telling kids to not talk to people, making men lonely, taking money for endless supplements that are supposed to give you a bigger dick, or make you more “vital” or improve your mood or w.e. Toxic masculinity also treats addiction as a personal failing to be ashamed of, instead of something to be treated, and teaches that mental health problems are a personal failing, not something to be treated.

Weed was demonized so heavily (mostly at the behest of the alcohol industry) that basically everything wound up at the same level. And then somebody takes weed, and they go “well, weed isn’t so bad, in fact, its kinda nice” and then turn around and wonder if what they gold told about harder drugs is as much bullshit as what they got told about weed.

Alcoholism is basically a way of life for large parts of the country, and its glamorized, protected, pushed on kids etc. Same with smoking.

Most addiction rehab is just pushing religion on people, very few have actual councilors. Rehab centers are such a big business that they actively encourage people to get addicted again so they can get more money to not treat them.

Kids are often abused for being gay, being trans, being bi, often by their parents or members of the church their parents make them go to. Many are kicked out of their homes, or sent to be tortured until they can pretend to be straight/CIS.

So you have kids who have no idea how to tell if somebody is selling them a bag of lies, who are trained to accept psuedoscience, who have been pushed to not listen to doctors, who are drowning in debt they cant get out of, who have had alcohol pushed on them from an early age, who have basically no prospects for the future, who have had pills pushed at them hard their whole life, whos parents are almost certainly addicted to either smoking or alcohol or harder drugs, who to rehab and aren’t actually helped. Kids with mental disorders go untreated, kids are kicked out of their homes or tortured into pretending to not be who they are.

Its not really surprising that we have so many new addicts every year.

Standard conservative white terrorism at a guess.

Edit: Texas_Hangover is just a Nazi trying to ragebait.

This is 100% by design.

Republicans wage war against education because educated people don’t vote Republican

I had a similar experience with steak.

For the longest time growing up, I just wouldn’t eat steak, id eat meat, bacon was fine, chicken was fine, but steak made me wanna throw up. My parents would keep throwing all these sauces on it, and none of them worked. Eventually, at my dads best friends 50th birthday, and he had a really nice roast, I tried it (with no sauce), and suddenly I got it. Ate steak all the time after that.

Is Trump V Obama a rivalry? Everything Obama did, Trump has to do…but he just does it so much worse that its hard to say its a rivalry.

There have been droughts before, but the Colorado Basin is not typically in drought conditions.

The current drought is the worse we have had in 1200 years, the last time we can find a worse drought we had to invent a whole new way to determine water levels so we could get data going back 1800 years.

There have been droughts before, but all the data we have says that the current period would be dry, but not critically so…except for global warming.

Its really not “normal”, global warming has caused huge shifts in how snowpack is put down, and how aquafers are (not) being recharged, as well as hotter temps driving a huge change in rainfall patterns, so that vegetation drinks a lot of the snowmelt that would normally make it into the river.

Its basically a way to export water internationally, alfalfa takes a huge amount of water to grow, so grow it here where the water laws are basically whoever has money wins, and they ship it out.

To be fair, if they banned the bots and the Nazis, they wouldn’t have any traffic at all.

Having been a young white dude in the US, ive had all of the various christofascist or conservative terrorism organizations make a pass at me at one point or another.

Turning Point USA was recruiting from my school when I was a senior (right when it was starting up), a couple of the kids at my school were fairly well known for being in the KKK, and they tried to get basically every white kid at the school to come to their events. My college was a fairly small STEM college, so unless the FBI or the CIA count as organized crime, we didnt have a lot. After college the job market was still awful from Bush’s recession, I ended up with a job in a small town where the KKK, the Proud Boys, and the Republican Party held a weekly rally at the towns main intersection and liked to block traffic and generally be a nuisance…but the police chief liked to show up to the rallies (all 3), so you just learned to avoid certain areas on certain days.