Absolutely not. No one wins an argument and it’s the least likely form of communication to result in any part changing their mind. Even formal debate with rules and timers doesn’t lead to changed minds often.

I personally strive to be factually and logically correct about anything I might discuss (that can be validated by facts or logic). Despite spending large portions of my time reading and researching so that I understand the world I live in better, I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve been able to change someone’s mind.

The truth is it’s very hard, bordering on impossible to change someone’s mind who isn’t open to it and most people are not. It’s easier to make a snap judgement and never reconsider it or let someone else form one’s opinion of something than to do the work to understand a topic enough to warrant having an opinion at all.

The extreme polarization of opinion and the politicization of basically everything makes it so that it’s rapidly becoming functionally impossible to interact with people of different ideologies as they now encompass most of one’s life.

I’d say less than 10%? The vast majority of my problems result from my own irrational actions and poor choices. I’ve had problematic idiots in professional and social settings but again the main issue in those cases are largely because I cannot stand willfully ignorant people. If I were more chill about morons, it’d be 0%. But that’s just me personally and I’m usually an outlier.

This is kind of a hot take, but I don’t think we should try to measure and assess IQ and EQ at all. The IQ test in use today tests very specific, very narrow types of intelligence and is not a meaningful measure. In a practical sense intelligence is mostly a matter of speed. Someone with a low or average IQ can solve any problem a high IQ person could, it would just take longer. At every step of thier journey a low IQ person spends more time. Learning the requisite knowledge, understanding the concepts, breaking down the problem, and crafting a solution. Most folks in that situation opt not to continue at some point along the way, but they would eventually get there with enough time and knowledge.

With EQ that’s learned behavior. Some people have a natural knack for it, but outside some types of mental illness, emotional intelligence can be taught.

Realistically, the world is too complex and too large to even remotely be able to predict the outcome of making everyone 50% smarter.

My best guess though is that it wouldn’t change much. If everyone is smarter, no one is smarter. High intelligence doesn’t automatically mean Mr. Spock. I used to be involved with Mensa and many of the people I met were nuts, lacked critical thinking skills, or were so full of themselves for testing well they were blind to external information. I myself am highly intelligent on paper, but if you looked at my life you would see a lifelong series of dumb choices and in many cases choosing the worst possible option even knowing it was.

What I mean is being smart isn’t as valuable a skill to have as one might think. Especially at the top end of intelligence, smarter basically equates to faster at solving problems. Raw processing power does play into it for sure but the difference between someone with an IQ of 130 and an IQ of 160 is how fast they finished the test.

The best way to make the world a better place would be to teach everyone critical thinking and emotional intelligence skills.

Subscribe only to niche/fan multimedia based subs (plus /r/creepypasta), never read the comments, and limit my usage to the minimum the person forcing me to use it requires.

Not books, but there have been a few creepypastas that had me on edge for weeks after reading them. There was one about a murderous doppelganger that disguised itself as a household pet that had me nervous around one of my cats.

I saw her napping in my living room and then a few seconds later sitting patiently by the bathroom. She must have slipped by me without me noticing, but I was a bit afraid of her for a while after.

Nope. All it really does is make the fight against perfectionism easier.

Good. I enjoy network security as a hobby and at one time a profession but even still I don’t envy your threat model. A state level actor as your adversary is next to impossible to foil. Tech-wise if it exists, they can crack it or recover it. Even a (software) shredded drive can be restored, it would just be very costly and time consuming for them. Heck it’s even possible to recover a physically smashed drive. On physical security, no amount of guns or prep can evade them. You’d basically need to hit the road in a car made before 2010 registered to someone else and use only cash to pay for things for the rest of your life. And even that’s not a sure thing thanks to the growing surveillance state.

Honestly there is little that could be done to protect one’s self in your situation. If going to prison isn’t an option for you, Hunter S Thompson always carried a revolver on his person in case he needed a way out, which he eventually felt he did.

My ex-wife. I have never loved anyone as much as I loved her. Unfortunately for me she couldn’t handle my transition and stopped loving me about the time I started to have a modicum of passing privilege. Being cooped up together during lockdown didn’t help either. It’s now been longer since we’ve been apart than we were together, but I still miss her and wish we were still together. But she’s remarried, has some kids, and lives halfway across the country so that door is solidly closed.

If you’re tech savvy, use an anonymous crypto wallet to setup a server outside the 5 eyes countries and their allies and put all of your info there. Then destroy (with fire) any hard copies of the data you have. Be sure to ‘shred’ the local files with at least 50 passes once they’re uploaded, or better yet shred the entire drive and reinstall your OS. Then configure a dead man’s switch so that if you don’t log into the server as root every seven days the server will automatically send a full copy of the data to the press (the more places the better).

But you’d need to use tor plus a VPN from a car parked outside the range of any security cameras that has access to a public wifi network. A burner laptop with a hardened linux distro would be advised, and your server should be hardened as well.

Even with hyper paranoid levels of security that still doesn’t guarantee anonymity.

If you’re not already fluent with security tech, it would be highly advised that you don’t attempt the above. My advice would be to ditch tech entirely and get the data out of your possession. Put it all in a freezer bag and bury it somewhere. Give the coordinates to at least three people you would trust with your life with instructions to retrieve and distribute it if you get arrested, go missing, or die. That way if the feds do raid you there is nothing for them to find. Also don’t write anything down, memorize it and burn anything physical.

I have been trying to pick back up watercolor. I did a daily series last year and posted them on bluesky for a couple months before a depressive episode sapped my will to paint. I’m not very good, but when I can adequately muzzle my perfectionism and just have fun with it, I really enjoy it. Maybe one day I might even be good at it.

According to the data that came out after the 2024 election 78% of farmers voted for Trump. How is it a strawman if 4 out of 5 farmers are MAGA voters?

I did about 10 years ago. I was working as the entire marketing department for an Oil & Gas services company and I could not stand the owner’s son. At first we were friendly. He and I both struggled with mental illness and sort of bonded over being a little weird (I much more than him).

The problems didn’t start until he came back from a voluntary stay at a mental health facility determined to prove himself to his father. He took over my department (which was just me) and started making big sweeping changes to how I was supposed to work. He had a degree in business management and his only experience in marketing was that he was the CEO’s son.

We started clashing and arguing over every little thing and the more we quarreled the more involved he got. One day I was gchatting on my work computer with my SO at the time and expressed my frustration about the situation. Later that day he came by my desk to watch me work on a piece of collateral and saw that chat which I had forgotten about and left on one of my monitors.

From that moment on he was aggressively an asshole. His sister, the head of hr, put me on a performance improvement plan which is just HR code for looking for a reason to fire me. A few weeks later I was working on a major redesign of the website to reflect the new direction the President (my former boss) wanted to take the company, which Owner’s Son hated. He thought it was a waste of time so he set a bunch of really short deadlines he thought I would fail. When I came in on time and under budget for the second phase of the redesign he couldn’t keep the thin veneer of professionalism that kept our beef low key. He laid into the prototype as if it was final delivery and told me that if it were up to him he’d cancel the project (it wasn’t because I had gone over his head and got the entire C-Suite to approve the project). I was so angry I was shaking and all I could manage to say was that I was glad it wasn’t up to him.

I walked from his office to his sister’s and asked her to fire me (I gravely misunderstood the unemployment laws in Texas). After an hour of conversation she agreed and told me she would in a few days. Unfortunately for me my grandmother died the next day so I ended up taking a few days of bereavement leave. When I got back, while I was at lunch I got a notice from facebook that I had been removed as the admin for the company’s page so I knew before I finished my sandwich it was over.

I carried a grudge for many years after that and many times considered getting revenge. I even concocted a very vile plan to frame him for a crime by hacking his wifi and planting illegal content on his personal computer. Fortunately for everyone, I never did and eventually I realized the best revenge was to forget about him and live my life.

It has become somewhat of a thought terminating cliche I will agree. In the context of my comment though I think it’s appropriate. If the people we purchase things from must be morally pure and politically aligned with the buyer’s viewpoint, the majority of products available for purchase in the US fail that test. Even “good” businesses that pass the test still must rely on an exploitative and unethical supply chain for their materials and distribution.

Regarding the farmers market though, yeah kinda. If we shouldn’t buy goods from Walmart because they are owned by fascists and exploit their workers, why is it okay to buy produce from MAGA farmers using criminally underpaid undocumented migrant labor? The short answer is it’s not. The only difference is scale.

I’m somewhat of a hardliner on ethics and morals. In my opinion something becomes unethical and morally wrong if a single person is exploited. I have no interest in measuring inches and degrees of evil.

• Boyz n the Hood (1991)
• Do the Right Thing (1989)
• Rashomon (1950)
• Seven Samurai (1954)
• They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
• Yojimbo (1963)

There are a lot of films on other commenter’s lists that I would wholeheartedly recommend too.

This might be a controversial take, but yes. In the creative world it’s a conversation but there are a multitude of other domains where no one seems to care. IBM made proto-computers for the nazis to keep track of concentration camp prisoners. Volkswagen was created by Hitler. Continuing the nazi theme there are a lot of medical technologies that were made possible by (often) lethal experimentation on prisoners. Just about every publicly traded company is evil to some degree.

When it comes to the creative world we care for some reason. If it bothers you buy the media second hand. The creator gets $0 if you do. Sure it technically supports the secondary market which effects the new purchases because it makes reselling a viable option, but if you’re tracking things that far removed from you there is pretty much nothing you can ethically buy. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

I wouldn’t say we’re past the point of reform, we lack the political will in our elected representatives and the numbers to force the issue. It is possible, but very unlikely, that we could flip the house and senate with enough progressive politicians that reform would be possible. However the establishment democratic party is unwilling to take the necessary steps or support the needed candidates. Their aim seems to be to become more centrist than they already were and maintain the status quo.

Unfortunately though the reality of the situation is very complex, ambiguous, and inundated with misinformation. Most reforms in the federal government won’t change the policies in red states, which are by far more egregious than what’s happening in Washington. While it’s likely true that there are no true red states, just gerrymandered purple states, there are still a sizable portion of the US population that want some or all of what’s going on in red states and the federal government.

There doesn’t seem to be enough political will among the left to carry out a revolution. Even if there was, there are almost as many right wingers (who are better armed, equipped, and trained) who would stand in opposition and turn the revolution into the second civil war.

Realistically while there are things that could be done to mitigate or stop the far right, not enough people seem to have the bravery, resources, and will to do what needs to be done.

Currently I’m listening to Tom Waits’ 1983 album Swordfishtrombones. The specific song playing is Frank’s Wild Years although it switched to the title track while I was writing this comment.

Waits for sure has some great songs, but he’s an excellent album artist and I would recommend Swordfishtrombones. It’s one of his best albums and I would whole heartedly recommend it. Mule Variations, Bone Machine, and Rain Dogs are also fantastic albums. Fair warning though, Tom Waits is very polarizing, you either love him or absolutely hate him.

The female lesser prairie chicken, the only remaining wild chicken, will peck holes in their own fertilized eggs in times of scarcity making it one of the only other species on Earth that perform intentional abortions.