Okay, which version actually happened over the past 50 years—yours or mine?

The one that stands out in my memory is the time that I interviewed with the owner of a small, retail business, who was an out, gay man. (It’s relevant.) When I got there, I noticed that all of the employees were 6’+, blond boys. I’m neither of those things. Immediately, he did The Look, and I knew it was over, but I still had to go through the motions of the interview.

(The Look consists of looking you up and down, and then peering into the empty space over your head, as if imagining the tall man that they want to see instead.)

Here’s the hitch:

It is a literal yet unfortunate fact that we must hold our noses and vote for anyone who stands a chance at beating a Republican in a national presidential election. Until such time as the parties have been taken over by people who wouldn’t nominate someone like that.

This strategy guarantees that the parties will keep nominating someone like that. (After all, they keep winning.) There’s no mechanism for replacing the party leadership in it, nor any realistic scenario by which it would happen.

In a nutshell, what this meme is about is all the people that we’ve run into who say, “both sides are bad,” because they believe the Republicans lies about Democrats, and the Republican talking points on issues. Actual centrists, in Republican lingo, are “the far left.”

Interesting. From the inside, it feels like the U.S. is the obnoxious high school jock that turned into a belligerent toddler.

Please adapt this comment to a post in !YouShouldKnow@lemmy.world to reach a bigger audience. It’s a truth that everybody Should Know.

A lot of people know that the conservative mind runs on fear and disgust. A friend years ago clued me into the key bit of insight that merges this observation with the “I’m a good person” ethic into a Grand Unified Theory of the conservative mindset: Underneath it all is a deep self-disgust. They fear more than anything else that they are not good people, and hence subscribe to an ethic which axiomatically says that they are. But somebody who truly believes that they are a good person could sit quietly at home in an aura of smugness. (Which, to be brutally honest, we can all probably think of some leftists like that.) The conservative, who doesn’t believe it deep down, has to have it constantly demonstrated.

And that explains everything about the performative cruelty that they go nuts for.

The example that perhaps makes this dynamic most obvious is the deeply-closeted, evangelical Christian, homosexual men. But, everything they do comes back to this truth. Like: “re-open Alcatraz” -> “exaggerated, symbolic vengeance against criminals” -> “performative cruelty against bad people” -> “performed by good people” -> “I’m a good person”.

That’s the problem with the 2-party system, isn’t it? One party can decide to be objectively terrible, and the other party discovers that it only needs to be ever-so-slightly better, because what are the 66% gonna do— vote for the greater evil?! And there’s a lot of personal benefit to the party insiders to be had! Trouble is, when the margin between the two parties is so small, electoral fuckery by the terrible party, and stochastic events mean that they sometimes win.

Which seems awfully familiar.

First off, I’m not an expert, I’m just a guy who poured mold-making silicone gel on the deck of my boat a couple of days ago, in order to capture the surface detail to re-create it after making repairs. The cured mold is definitely the same sort of rubbery feel as the gel wrist rest I’ve owned, just firmer. According to the ScienceDirect article, the basics are all the same: It’s a matrix of loosely-linked silicone elastomer molecules, but the final product can vary a lot depending on the amount of cross-linking, and the amount of fluid infused in the matrix. That ultra-soft product that you linked, like the mold-making stuff that I used, probably has dyes in it for user-friendliness. (To know when you’ve mixed the two parts thoroughly.) That means the product won’t be clear. Also, I think the wrist rests may have some sort of polymer (vinyl?) outer layer for durability. That would make it look a little different.

Silicone gel. Don’t try to use them as implants, though, they’re probably not medical grade.

TIL a new acronym, but one doesn’t need to infer the purpose of the system from what it does. The designers of the system said out loud that segregation was a feature. They gave speeches and wrote memos about it.

I keep recommending The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. In the book, he documents how the modern suburb was created through zoning in order to keep Black people out by making living there too expensive, both through the land cost and the car needed to navigate it. It’s really crazy just how open and deliberate it was!

There are multiple meanings of “support.” There’s an endorsement meaning, which can be explicit or tacit, and there’s an aiding meaning. The Democrats may not explicitly endorse it, but the Biden administration certainly did tacitly endorse it by directly aiding it. And most of the party has been tacitly endorsing and aiding it for decades.

Huh, that’s really odd conclusion to draw from Democrats literally supporting genocide. Harris couldn’t even be bothered to come out against it during the campaign even when they knew their support was a losing issue.

It’s a simple moral calculus, don’t you see? You must always vote for Hitler and help him kill 5,000,000 people, if the alternative is somebody who’s going to kill 5,000,001 people.

This was obviously the outcome no matter who was elected. Israel has always been very clear about this.

It seems to be that it depends entirely on the intent of the simulation: an experiment to find out what happens after setting the clockwork in motion, or a carefully stage-managed zoo. I say that because the partial simulation would require complete understanding of and integration with consciousness a priori, intent to mess around with conscious minds, and the Great Makers giving a shit whether we knew it was a simulation or not. That is, some sort of cosmic fishbowl for minds.

I won’t spoil it, but I bet you can guess what they say would actually encourage people to have children…

Often I feel that people believe that paved roads are naturally-occurring, geological formations. As evidence, I submit the people complaining about road construction and maintenance work as if it’s a ploy by the government to obstruct their travel, or the Lemming that I ran into a few weeks ago who was convinced that people in poor, developing countries have to drive cars, because it’s too expensive to build bicycle infrastructure.

This is why we call them “gender-affirming vehicles,” or “emotional support trucks.”

Just having fun taunting sea lions.