Sure, I understand that the system failed him, or at least failed someone close to him. But what he's doing is just generally raging against the leaders and using random excuses to justify causing chaos.
There's no focus, no message. No way for anybody to respond in any way other than flat out rejection. How can you respond to something like this if when you try, it's like "okay, I understand this this this, and this. But this one and these three others are unacceptable to us. But then there's another sixteen that we can talk about. Please give us your side of the story and we can continue from there." How do you form a conversation with that?
Not to mention that he's trying to gather people from the widest spectrum he can, each with a different grievance. How do you talk when you have a dozen "I won't budge on this one thing" when each one thing is something different? Just like the previous convoy, it's just plain civil disobedience for the sake of letting out steam, no actual attempt at making change.
I had a very strange conversation a couple of years ago. It seems that some people think that math is used only as a tool to control the population or something.
We were talking about something that most people would consider pretty innocuous, catch and release fishing. I mentioned that I had recently read an article that claimed that mortality among released fish was still high enough that approximately every second released fish should be counted against your limit because of the percentage of released fish that die of catch-related causes.
That lit the other guy's hair on fire. "That's math! You can't seriously think that math is real? It's all made up!" (Or words to that effect. Mouth frothing removed to protect the innocent.)
Over the course of the rest of the conversation, I "learned" that math was invented as a tool of oppression. Science uses math to create fake knowledge. Our senses are the only true sources of knowledge.
So a bunch of closet pedophiles are organizing another convoy to "save the children" from "groomers" and "pedophiles" which they are projecting on drag queens?
And yet my aunt does, in fact, exist. Blows my mind every time I see her. Her beliefs are so stupid I'm fairly certain she lowers the collective intelligence of any room she's in.
Give her a jar of cookies and tell her that one of them ate a child but you don't know wich one, so she has to look at it forever to make shure it won't happen again XD
The convoy's private Facebook group, which coun
nearly 300 members, indicates that it is focused
on issues like pedophilia, child trafficking,
grooming and indoctrination.
Funny, they NEVER protest against churches. Why is that?
I've always found it funny that the reason why science fiction and fantasy villains are almost always such lackluster characters is because science fiction and fantasy writers have to stick within the realm of plausibility whereas real life villains are not hampered by such trivialities.
Your sci-fi villain has to have a tragic backstory where he's using the power of the universe killing machine to bring back his dead girlfriend or something.
In contrast, your real life villain is organizing a civil war militia to protect himself from enemies that he imagines existing somewhere even though he has no proof whatsoever, and all over the Western world people are proudly following these nut bags and even buying the merch.
In the real world the biggest villains actually believe that they are good, and they use that belief to justify that everything they do, even bad things, are done in the pursuit of good. They are convinced that they are doing good and that they are pure, good people, and they don't ever feel bad.
Villains aren't like some Joker, or Dr. Evil. They are culty and give themselves a license to control and harm other people.
Honestly, is risky, but that could make for a pretty interesting sci-fi or fantasy villian, if handled correctly - but it'd be a fine line between playing it deadly straight and melodrama overload.
I feel like many of these people are at that point where they're trying to make themselves into a hero to shore up all of the other fundamental deficits they have in their character.
One thing that I realized when I was going through mental health issues of my own was that a lot of the core of my issues centered around wanting to be someone who was important, a hero, someone that saved other people and for me that boiled down to acting like I already was the hero and doing things that I thought of hero would do like pointlessly sacrificing my opportunities for other people who did not appreciate me or attach any meaning to it.
I realized that once you're smart enough to start meta-analyzing your own life, there is a trap for you and that trap is your internal need for importance.
When you base all of your thinking around that, making yourself into the hero of your own life, then that thinking will cause you and more importantly , the people around you, so much grief.
My only saving grace was that I couldn't convince other people to go along with my self-appointed hero worship. I imagine if I had I might have ended up just like them so really it was my own lack of charisma that was my salvation I guess.
“Save the Children” has been considered the cry of people that can’t put forth a reasonable argument for the thing they want for decades. Right up there with the people that like exclaiming “muh rights” and then either complain about something that’s never been a right, or immediately following up by trying to remove other people’s rights. I feel like using “save the children”(or similar variations) is a pretty good indication that I’m not going to agree with most of what follows.
It's how they justify the unjustifiable. God and The Children have the same utility in the minds of monsters: anything you do is okay if you're doing it for them.
These people are literally a herd of cats in a room with a laser pointer pointed at a disco globe.
My mother is a conspiracy theory sucker. Being isolated during the pandemic with her idiot boyfriend literally spun her around from being a compassionate intelligent woman who ran her own successful business for over a decade to literally being afraid of everything and everyone.
Thanks for sharing that barely coherent rant. I'm now both 3 minutes older and I probably lost some brain cells trying to process his nonsense. Who reads this and thinks "Yeah, this guy's got a handle on reality and some good ideas."?
It's rage bait for people who are already angry at society.
“Get up off your god damned couch and show some passion for this country and some passion for the children that don’t have a voice, they get kidnapped, thrown in a railcar,” McDavid told viewers of one recent TikTok video, adding that children are being “tortured, hunted down like animals by – not the elites – by the degenerates on horseback.”
Oh man, I thought we outlawed organized small children hunts. Those bourgeoise snobs in their red coats and riding britches.
Also, where would one get a railcar of children. Is that what the "Dark Web" is for?
As a unit of measurement for harvested children, a railcar is called a railcar for historical reasons. The other unit of measurement, of course, is grade. For grade "A" children -- that is, your children of indebted or disgraced public figures -- you're talking about 100 kids/railcar on most dark web markets.
You can get more if you settle for lower grades, say if you're using them for research or food as opposed to labour or ritual.
They get thrown in railcars but the worst thing about the kidnapping is the Dementors. They fly all over the place and they were scary and then they'd come down and they'd suck the soul out of your body and it hurt!
Sounds fun. I do wonder what math they'll go into. As a queer person who nebulously loves math, I can see how normal conversations could be hijacked and turned into a math discussion.
Maybe that's what this will be: a program designed to pull queer teenagers together into a safe space where they can explore different areas of math guided by math pedagogy professionals. This might mean not always going the algebra-geometry-calculus direction, but rather maybe some fun probability stuff, graph theory, the traveling salesperson problem, the Towers of Hanoi, things in discrete math that could be fun to talk about.
Had to share a work van with one of these sort for work. I would get an hour of details on how math is just "a trick to make people believe certain things"
Also "Jews are from Saturn"
And "the chemtrails are full of microchips"
There is literally nothing you can do to sway any of their beliefs, because basic reason and logic are the enemy.
Rather, maybe we need to subvert their base instincts in a way they can turn them towards logic despite their preconceptions and inability to process basic information. Kind of like the mobile game market or unethical media companies which have free reign to influence these people for malicious self gain.
The issue is that ethical people are too upstanding to use such subversive means, which means they will ultimately lose out in our current socio-economic ecosystem
I think smart people need to fight evil with the same tools used by evil, until such tools are invalidated.
You just reminded me of this guy I worked with about 30 years ago. One time, pretty much out of the blue, he said “black people are from Jupiter and they’re a very war-like race.”
My dad and I were at some event with this guy. We didn’t go to events with him any more after that.
Chomsky is inconsistent about whether debate or deplatforming is the correct way to deal with people who take a position against universal human rights
The only Noam Chomsky I care about it is about two and a half feet tall and has a pointy hat and comes alive at night and does.... things to the local wildlife. I've said too much.
My fucking father in law is gonna eat this shit up. We're going out to his family gathering next weekend and my son has a really cute rainbow and pink outfit he's been dying to show off. For context, this extended family has an ex-in law who came out as trans and whom they violently hate, so my kiddo won't be exposed to them too much as he grow up. Alas, the old G-pa in law doesn't have much longer so we gotta go hang out with peeps.
As depressing as it sounds, I think it might be time to add a new entry to possible Drake Equation solutions:
"Stupid people stuck in a loop of hatred, bigotry and scientific denial kept society from moving forward fast enough to prevent destruction by climate change, conflict or lack of resources." And that's why we haven't seen any evidence of alien life. But societal evolution always follows that path.
I think their entire world view is based on projection. "I'm thinking about doing xyz so THEY must also be doing xyz." Every accusation is an admission. They imagine scenarios of drag queens molesting children so they think that drag queens must be molesting children. They imagine queer youth orgies at queer math camp so there must be queer youth orgies at queer math camp. They're angry about things that are only happening inside their own heads.