be proven correct
ADHD is having difficulty focusing.
Hubris is assuming your inability to stay focused is some kind of precog superpower.
Annoying to deal with kids who insist “I know what you were going to say” one minute and “You didn’t tell me that!” the next. Infuriating to deal with adults who double down with therapy language.
Reminds me of an old joke.
Would people cut trees down if they could scream?
Omg, yes, absolutely. That would be the only way to shut them up.
if you’re born into a religious family initially you just adopt it
Right. Because there’s no inherent reason not to do so. And little kids tend to want to follow along with what they’re elders are doing.
Compare it to how most kids initially believe Santa Claus exists because they were told so.
Kids are told that they get presents by pleasing their parents. And then the decision making / agency is displaced onto a fictitious figure. That’s a very neat analogy for religion in the aggregate. Whether or not you “believe in Santa”, you’re still getting gifts based on your parents’ resources and generosity. If you want the newest kids’ favorite widget, you’re following the letter of the law whether or not you adhere to the spirit.
You can also participate in some church community stuff without being a member or even going to church.
If you’ve got friends/family who are members/do go, sure. Because they’re your social connection.
But you’ll struggle to join a community event if you don’t know anybody - or even when/where the event takes place. Nevermind knowing what’s in the works, what needs volunteers, what needs money, and who is in charge of leading them. The more you want to participate, the more you need to attend the religious church functions. The more you want to get into leadership, the more you need to demonstrate your piety.
Everyone is born into the world entirely ignorant. Cultures, customs, languages, and superstitions espoused by their parents, teachers, and peers are adopted as a matter of survival. And as the individual develops more autonomy, they use the information they gathered in their youth to navigate into new cultures and belief systems, in pursuit of improved material conditions.
You can be born into a Catholic family and become Atheist just as easily as you can be born into an Atheist family and become Catholic. What has driven the modern collapse in religiosity is - at least in my view - the mass migration driven by economic expansion and ecological collapse. People aren’t just waking up one day and deciding they aren’t gullible anymore. They’re being shuffled around by tidal forces and torn away from the historical cultures and infrastructure that had reproduced their families’ beliefs.
As a kid, my mom was deeply Catholic and tried to get us to attend church. But we moved several times, and after each move we found ourselves at a new church (often not even a Catholic church) with an alien congregation and divergent dogma. So what had rooted her and her sisters and parents and grandparents in Catholicism never took root with me or my sister.
By contrast, my wife’s family lived in Galveston for four generations. Virtually her entire family is devote practicing Catholics. She only slipped through the cracks because… her dad moved around a lot, particularly after her parents got divorced. Everyone else - even two of her transgender cousins - are still practicing. Churches are, at their heart, social institutions. And I think modern New Atheists often miss that fact in their quest to Own The Dumb Pious Folks.
If the US was serious about their offer
As of early 2026, the U.S. has allocated approximately $175 billion to $188 billion in total, covering military, financial, and humanitarian aid related to the war in Ukraine. Of this, roughly $66.9 billion to $69 billion has been specifically dedicated to security assistance and military aid.
That’s more than the entire GDP of Ukraine when the war broke out.
It’s been over 60
But also, we keep paying one half of America to kill the other half. That’s got a stabilizing effect
Actually, we did all those things and now America is Great Again
Gotta spend money to make genocides
Why did Russia not invade Poland then?
Russia doesn’t border Poland
It requires us all.to thoroughly clean house in the midterms
That’s not how gerrymandered districts are designed to work.
You can do one party or the other, but never both
Epstein didn’t keep a low profile. He was everywhere, taking pictures and glad-handing other plutocrats and showing up at events.
Like, if anyone is on your short list, I would think it would be Elon Musk. Musk’s initial gambit was throwing a bunch of keggers at Stanford to make friends with the prior generation’s Silicon Valley failkids. That’s how he met Thiel and got into Paypal, made his first billion, and became an ahem Angel Investor for all sorts of glamour projects.
this was a
CIAMossad operation that gotout of handstupid and sloppy
Pretty much the history of intelligence services in a nutshell.
the rich pedophiles really REALLY started liking the setup
I do kinda wonder what the final shoe to drop was. But my money is more on Epstein extorting more money/freedom than his handlers believed he was entitled to.
The fact that Trump took over in 2017 and Epstein was arrested/murdered a few years later suggests - to me, at least - that he maybe called up his old friend and started making a few too many insistent demands. And it occurred to Trump (or someone in his immediate vicinity) that it would be easier to just arrest this guy and wack him than keep paying him off forever.
Asking Saudi tankers to do in 2026 what Iranian dissidents were forced to do in 1988.
Every time I read these stats, I have to wonder how many getting killed who are contractors, mercenaries, military families, or civilian bystanders that the media decides they don’t want to count.
Genuinely don’t know how this ends without either the US or Israel doing a nuclear strike purely out of spite.
The nukes aren’t a deterrent if they’re manned by the colonizing entity.
And Russia invaded Crimea in response to the Maiden Revolution, which ousted a friendly government that was giving Russia easy access to the Crimean ports. Crimea hosts the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Imagine the US response if The Philippines or Japan installed a pro-China government.
It’s probably because arguments about China with “western leftists” are very fresh in the minds of “western libs.”
China’s foreign minister says Iran war ‘should never have happened’
I can see how this would rub certain folks raw, particularly when Iran has been an Enemy Nation for two full generations and change.
It would be like going into every post about bad things US Republicans are doing to make it about how bad the US Democrats are.
I might argue that the problem with the American two party system is that it represents two different faces of American capital. Republicans and Democrats have an annoying habit of agreeing on far more than they disagree.
I don’t think you can make the same argument about US and Chinese foreign policy, even if you can argue they’re both functionally authoritarian police states.
Very weird that the response to this news article - both here and in the cross-posts - appears to be getting extremely mad at western leftists.
We’re so far afield from “Free Tibet”. Or even “Fuck the CCP”. It appears the knee-jerk reaction to articles like this is to get angry at rival Fediverse instances.
According to OP, they can’t even make it to the end of a sentence. shrug
I definitely get feeling annoyed when someone rambles. And I get tuning out when a work presentation or a school lecture drags on. And I get feeling frustrated when a conversation or discussion is sidelined by minutiae.
But the “Um, aktuly, I don’t need to listen to this because I already know the answer” shit is extremely toxic behavior that inevitably sets people up to fail. If you’ve ever had to deal with student drivers before, it’s the way someone responds moments before they bend a fender.
Getting Overwhelmed is entirely different from Knowing The Answer In Advance.