Gayness is as real as Canadianness. It’s an imaginary line someone with political power tries to tell people they have to be entirely on one side or the other of. Don’t let other people’s imaginary lines define you. Go hug your partner.

Is she the one who got caught giving a guy a handjob in a public theatre or was that one of her republican doppelgangers?

My situation was a slightly concretized example of the OP. It sits within the OP’s conceptual space. It’s not justification.

You are now too defensive and emotional to reasonably interrogate or express this level of idea. It’s not worth my time to try to fight past that emotion. Have a nice day.

Maybe as he loses support, Vance will resign ‘in disgust’ and the congress will finally impeach him. American Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, becomes President Johnson for 15 minutes. The Republicans try to ride the wave of righteous anger to get the ‘moral’ Americans to support a return to ‘wholesome values,’ saying Trump ‘swindled the Republican party just like he did America.’ Trump dies awaiting a court date. He’s old, so no one calls foul play. Vance riles up the same anti-whatever-you-think-is-bad sentiment, but not as well, and is supported by AI billionaires who use their GPUs, left idle because they only have three customers willing to pay what it costs to run them, to pump out pro-Vance and ‘anti-woke’ propaganda. He tries to become President Vance. He hopes for two terms because he resigned before he could be succeeded into the presidency. The democratic party rolls out Joe Biden in an iron lung to run again. America looks at the options and organises the biggest mass shooting in history, in the form of an enormous mass suicide. The survivors blame the dead and vote for Biden ‘to teach the Republican Party a lesson.’ Nothing changes.

I see you are among those who are incapable of reasoning by analog.

The hypothetical is all there is when discussing a hypothetical. The metaphorical room is eternal and all encompassing because once you leave the ‘room’ you are outside the hypothetical. So, yes, you are ‘trapped in the room’ if you are going to engage in the OP’s hypothetical. If you want to deny the premise, you are trying to pretend you are playing the game but ignoring the rules of the game. In other words, you are lying, whether to us or to yourself. Don’t get pissy when people call out your ignorance of how to play, willful or otherwise.

Thanks for pointing this out. Blocking it now.

Think that through. You are in a room with only people dumber than you. How are you learning anything? They don’t have anything good to teach you. If you try to bring new knowledge into the room, they will likely not reward you for it, and quite possibly actively attack you for it. How long do you think you could maintain your intelligent view of anything when everyone around you is dragging you down with every interaction? You try to discuss science, they call you a nerd and tear up your textbooks to roll blunts. You try spending time ignoring them to study the construction of the walls of the room, but eventually you need some company. No one can survive in complete isolation. They tell you you’re the idiot for trying so hard, for caring about these things that no one else in your world cares about. And you hate to admit it, but they’re kind of right. You can study everything you want. You can write down findings for the rest of your life about the room, but when you’re gone, they’re just going to roll them into blunts. Even if you resist at first, they’ll outlast you because you need people to maintain your sanity. They’ll wear down your values as they, without even thinking about it, use operand conditioning to get you to use their slang, play their games, value what they value, disregard what they disregard. It happens all the time.

I mean… we do hate our lives. People who are actually content in their life are the minority.

Ascension

Wake up!

The Scribes

Wake up, Bitch

This old chestnut

A clip

An intro

The intro to a lot of songs make good repeating alarms.

Oof, losing the moral high ground to Ford…

If I’m the smart one, I have to do all the work I can’t trust to idiots, run the team or be on a team run by an idiot, be the most responsible according to any outside observer, and my success will still be mostly reliant on idiots.

If I’m the idiot, at worst I’d be mocked, but maybe I’d be too stupid to notice. At least the work would be more likely to be successful.

The versions of historical american presidents seen in the american mythology. The world could use a president as great as the George Washington patriotic Americans think he was.

It’s real, but it frames it as though it’s the employees fault for not doing self-promotion rather than the manager’s fault for not keeping track of all the team members it’s his job to support.

Rage bait is anything utilising its wrongness for engagement farming. In an attention economy, engagement is rewarded, regardless of type, so one of the methods is just to ‘be wrong on the internet,’ and many people will latch onto it faster than a vacuum on your pecker.

If we’re going to do this ‘democracy’ thing, we need a law that says once you hold public office, anyone a single step away from you in your family tree is barred from holding office. We have enough qualified people we should not have anything that even smells like a dynasty.

My old neighbor was a vet tech. One thing I learned from her is to keep in mind relative size in treats. For a normal size cat, a single slice of salami is analogous to a pound of salami for a normal sized person. Giving kitties treats is fun, but they aren’t that bright and will absolutely eat more than they can handle if given the chance. Even if it doesn’t kill them, it can cause them pain, and it’s on us to do what we can to keep them from hurting themselves.

What should they do? Responses sit either in the non-violent space, which is only effective when the people in power have a sense of shame for ‘failing to represent their constituency,’ or the violent space, which is self-destructive and, if you’re facing the gigantic american system, suicidal, and feeds into rhetoric about how the government needs to crack down on violent extremists, helping to legitimate further authoritarianism.

A cat in assless chaps, eh?

My ‘favourite sport,’ by means of being the only thing called a ‘sport’ I don’t find utterly boring, is sepak takraw. It has elements of hacky-sack which I like, and while I wouldn’t do them myself, pros regularly do backflips as part of the game, so it’s actually not painfully dull to watch either.

My favourite ‘exercise’ is just walking. When it’s not overly hot out, it’s quite pleasant but quite good for you in comparison to the amount of effort it takes.