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.

Should have took a lot more.

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.

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 legitimately do not get the logic here.

I’m never not going to post this glorious video from Folding Ideas about Flat Earthers. It’s a tranquil and thoughtful examination of the evidence of Earth’s curvature in act one that is actually very beautifully done. The second act is about how people get pulled into these ways of thinking and how it never has anything to do with a logical position.

People do not have reasonable, rational brains. They have brains designed to explain your feelings. Whenever you feel something, physical or emotional, your brain writes a story to figure out how it happened. Sometimes the stories make sense because we can connect events in a logical way. When emotional states become disordered or compromised the brain can become very lost and it will start pulling together more and more stories to explain a feeling that just won’t go away. This is how people get attached to conspiracy theories and ideas that the universe is not what it seems. This is why otherwise smart people like doctors and nurses can become anti-vaxxers or how some scientists flip to climate change denial or other radical beliefs.

We are not a rational or logical species, we are a species that tell stories because we are overflowing with feelings.

I’m expecting a response in relation as to why i chose a cult.

This reminds me of one of those furries who always has to interject in any role playing situation that they’re furries and their character is a furry despite nobody in the gaming session actually asking or encouraging that person.

There’s a whole long LIST of things we can try long before settling on “first felon president.”

• First Woman President

• First Openly Gay President

• First Asian/Pacific Islander President

• First Albino President

• First Teenage President

• First Werewolf President

• First Teenage Werewolf President

• First Robot President

• First Robot Teenage Werewolf President

• First Normal President

We could go on and on too.