No mention of the giant rocket that left the surface of the earth and the video footage of both that and the surface of the moon itself?

This is why conservatism and conspiracy go hand-in-hand. You can’t believe the things that “feel” true if the “true” truths keep interfering with this pesky reality.

I can tell you the plain, clear answer but you’re not gonna like it. Nobody does when I tell them.

Hold some yard sales.

For real. Assuming you live in a neighborhood and there are people around and it’s safe to do so, this is one of the best ways to get to know the people who live around you. People go to yard sales to talk about shit and gossip, so it’s a great way to know who’s doing what, how everyone feels about their current neighborhood policies, who is running the school and who the local police or sheriff are, who is running for what position in local city, county and eventually state seats.

Having a grasp of your local political landscape gives you the power to get involved and educate people and get to know who is representing you, what the values of your area are, and you can influence elections or even challenge incumbents who often run uncontested. Any kind of local community organization and involvement is a pushback against the powers that be.

This is all because a lot of the people we have in seats of power in the USA did not earn their power fairly, they often have run without competition or were placed there by political organizations. These are the people who support the larger governmental powers. These are the people who cut checks, who receive checks, who write the bills that let the companies do the things they want to do to make more money.

Candace Owens is a product of this system that wants you to turn away from science and follow an authoritarian, because this is good for business. If you want maximum profits, get you a population that has no time, education or capital to change anything and get them angry at people who look different than themselves instead of their own government leaders.

If we purge the nobodies and clowns and paper-tigers who uphold this vision of America, we also get rid of their mouthpieces like Owens. She is not some passionate thought-leader, she’s just a spokesperson for a bunch of rich fucks who want to keep squeezing blood from the population.

Edit: they want you to be less social. They want you to retreat to your discord friend-groups and social-media safe-spaces. They want to keep you from organizing, from connecting, from uniting and forming groups with a shared voice. This is how you beat them, with shared voice.

“But I’m not sooooooooooooociaaaaal!” You cry.

I don’t fucking care. Adapt. It won’t be the hardest thing you ever do.

Since the shareholders only care about 6-month projections, they will always choose a shitty, short-term successes with rushed products with patches later or promises of continued bugfixing, than spending more money and time to make something that users approve of and passes all requirements.

The shit is already running pretty deep.

Every job I’ve had I’ve ended up becoming a liaison of sorts between the sales teams and the operational teams because I seem to be the Daywalker, who can walk between worlds and communicate with the techy nerds, take their issues to the loud sales assholes and make it all work.

It’s not an enjoyable role but it always earned me high marks because nobody else can stomach it.

Absolutely correct, I watched this happen to our tech team before I was also thrown in the chipper.

And it doesn’t help that a lot of the young people trying to get into coding and tech fields are not what you would call titans of confidence and charisma, these are mostly introverted and thoughtful people who have studied most of their lives under the belief that meritocracy exists, and they can prove themselves in the business world by doing great work and being a good employee.

Meanwhile glance over at the sales side of the building and there are people there making six figures a year who do next to nothing but party and tell lewd jokes, but are absolutely invulnerable to layoffs and downsizing as long as they can talk to clients and joke about sports with the CEO.

The disillusionment around the business world is real and unsustainable.

Truth.

Been job hunting in similar fields for a while and as a middle-aged person, I simply cannot get a callback from any of these companies, then when you actually visit them and see some of their workforce, you rarely see anyone over late-20’s, and it’s all these high-energy, eager-to-please, eager-to-work-for-recognitionbucks, fresh-outta-college kids who can be exploited and turned over rapidly.

I am job hunting because the previous company I managed was bought out, downsized, and all the senior employees making more than entry level wages were cut. This is happening everywhere.

More and more technology, overseas outsourcing options, and general service/gig systems for filling job openings has left companies treating workers as disposable as toilet paper.

This is because almost every business is now part of a huge chain of ownership, and the shareholders at the top, groups of very rich old white dudes, just gather together in their hooded cloaks and look at the bars and graphs every month and decide what investments are to be amputated, and which to be kept. Before going back to their private sex islands.

I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.

While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it’s not something I’ve ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.

This group has been the end-product of years of “distillation” in that the people who have issues with other people’s identity or politics or can’t set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what’s left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that’s intelligence.

The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.

Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.

They’re already being grifted, they have already passed the first filter.

People sometimes wonder why scam emails and phone calls are so obvious, with mis-spellings, bad grammar and poor English. The thing is that they do this on purpose. Running a scam takes time and energy, you want to work marks that you know can be manipulated easily, and if someone can’t determine that an email from “micosaft.pAypal-Customre-Sercicve.com” isn’t legit, they’re VERY likely to buy the story that they have to send money via Western Union to some random address in Kazakhstan to get their share of the king’s inheritance.

Being in maga is basically that. If you’re wearing a red hat and waving flags and spouting off FOX news lines to anyone who will listen, you’re a mark.

The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually “okay” people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.

The problem is though, they are dumb. Don’t get me wrong or think I’m sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20’s after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.

A lot of people haven’t learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don’t exercise it. My take is that we’re expecting people to exercise muscles they’ve never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate “care” into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their “news station” praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who “hate america” and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you’re so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.

We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.

I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.

I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don’t make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.

Let’s save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it’s pure evil.

I mean, everyone has been crying and whinging for years, decades even, that the USA needs to ramp up semiconductor fabrication in case shit goes south in Taiwan. We are finally getting some domestic production power and we’re getting outraged by the traffic delays? America will sink itself because of our people’s own addiction to comfort and complaining about any slight to that comfort.

Alternatively, and more realistically: drugs.

Talking to Christians is a good way to test Theory of Mind and if other people have it.

Conclusion: no.

I swear on everything that I can, that should I die and learn that the universe really does work this way, I will scream into the void and then will attempt to destroy my own immortal soul and renounce all of existence.

Basically. As a man of science I know that if a God really exists, it would have to be an entity so beyond our capability to comprehend or even describe, and most certainly not an old man on a cloud. It would be an entity that exists in all points in in the universe, flaring quasars to annihilate entire galaxies and birthing solar systems from cosmic dust, folding space into black holes and controlling all points in time itself.

So yeah, if God is real, then he has to be more like I describe, and that’s NOT a God who cares about your sexual habits or how often you pray. But he can certainly beat up your God.

I have a friend who had some mental health problems and turned to religion. He’s basically lost to me, he can’t have a normal conversation anymore about anything, it just comes back to the lines he keeps reciting.

He was talking about the “coming apocalypse” and despite me showing him all the countless failed-apocalypse prophecies of the past, and he said that when Jesus returns he would give everything he has and follow Christ no matter what.

I asked “Doesn’t it also say there will be false prophets and anti-christs? How will you know you’re following the 'right” jesus?"

He said “Oh I will know. He is in my heart so I can never be fooled.”

“Then what about all the people it says will be fooled? How do you know you’ll be different? If countless people are fooled by a false Jesus, don’t you think it will be very convincing? How do you know you’ll know? Wouldn’t it be safer to be careful, otherwise why would the bible need to warn you?”

Just dead silence and staring straight ahead for an uncomfortable amount of time. He never answered.

It’s up to the people to use their brains (…lmfao)

My radicalizing adult realization was that as a species we’re incredibly dumb.

And I don’t mean that in terms of the usual way in which people say “people are dumb!” and throw their hands in the air to explain the latest absurd thing.

I mean on a deeper, more fundamental and hopeless level. We are not reasonable, rational creatures. Just because we figured out what rationality means and can employ it as a tool, generally across most of our species we are survival machines, and our brains are tuned to do one thing only, which is explain why you feel things so you can predict danger.

This makes us ridiculously easy to manipulate and sway, because we have vastly deep brains that will create an entire universe of stories to explain an emotion, and it will do this in your own voice so you think it’s your own good ideas and it will fool you into believing your own stories, even if they don’t make a shred of sense. This is why you can have educated, smart people like doctors and nurses become anti-vax or climate scientists denying climate change. We are entirely emotional creatures and we trick ourselves into believing our fears all day long, every day, and we can’t ever get out. We’re stuck down a hole with no way out. Lost in our own world of biases and attaching to backwards storylines to explain them.

Hasn’t been linked to reddit yet probably.

Getting away from reddit has shown me that there are unspoiled places in the digital world out there, communities of people who actually care about the topic and not performatism and internet attention.

because the damn liberals canceled glue on pizza!

This was America’s first and closest foray into fascist takeover, the same exact way that other democracies have fallen this last century or longer.

Just because it was really dumb this time, and in the end the guilty party was actually found guilty by the law, we are nowhere close to out of danger on this front.

Trump will be dead in a few short years and we’re all going to stop talking about him, this is assured, and in that huge, gaping power vacuum with millions of followers ripe for the plucking, they’re going to be coerced by some new figure and led to the exact same ideas about burning the country to the ground just so they have a leader who “hurts the right people.” And this new leader of the vulnerable masses might not be so dumb or so wildly delusional and may actually succeed at the same exact plan.

Get more involved in your local politics people, state, county, city and community elections are what prop up fascists in the upper reaches. Know who is actually representing you.

Every fuckin time there is any large political story that doesn’t involve Trump being fellated, Tim Pool makes war-provoking tweets.

Which is wild because this is a dude who wouldn’t survive five minutes in a conflict.