He just means technically we will probably survive. Maybe.

I don’t drink or eat a lot of carbs, I am trim and lean. But I still wouldn’t dress like that simply because bare midriff doesn’t look good on men unless you’re fully trying to imitate the 80’s movie aesthetic for laughs.

if i dressed like that, she would probably injure herself laughing.

I turned my love of staring at spreadsheets documenting other people’s wealth and weeping for myself and humanity into a career!

That’s not a definition of middle class at all.

Christ that’s the point of what I wrote and the point of this post. That’s some reddit-level density my friend.

If you define “middle class” as having a phone and a car and a job, then yes, there are countless middle-class families who get some form of assistance.

Middle-class, working families who live in their fuicking car.

The biggest reason for declining marriages is that people can actually make choices now and people don’t want to be shackled to someone they hate their whole lives.

People had radically different attitudes about marriage in olden times, when marriage equaled survival in many ways, and survival of your family, your connections, your career and your status, which was held through generations. It wasn’t thought of normally in terms of love and that’s a very modern view of marriage.

Romance and marriage for love certainly existed, but that was usually considered fantasy or stageplay.

My partner’s family from Philippines grew up in a home without appliances like refrigerators, like many, many people in developing countries.

So while now they have every modern convenience, old habits die hard and stomachs seem to adapt to even the most adverse conditions of foodstuffs.

Not mine. I love their cooking but can only eat food that I’ve seen opened or cooked in front of me. They will legitimately leave meat dishes out on the table for two days or more and then simply “reheat” and consider it good to serve. The cabinets are full of things like mayo, cheese dips, opened gravies and open bottles of fruit juice.

I have had some of the very worst food poisoning in my life from inadvertently eating something there like chicken salad that I thought was fresh, but made with hard-boiled eggs that had been sitting on a counter in summer heat for several days that a “friend” brought over so they “wouldn’t waste.”

Of course I’m the only one that gets sick, so I’m the “special one” that everyone now thinks has some terminal illness and treats me like a hospice patient.

Or thought the child was a small dog.

Yes, from holsters that require special training to simply remove the gun from.

Even if they weren’t special holsters, try unsnapping a leather or ballistic snap with a dino toy.

It’s just fake funny shit that gets distributed waaay too far because our species has lost all capability to think.

And here we thought it was bad trying to get a coherent message accepted on the left. Leftist infighting is legendary because the left has no idea how to dog whistle, which is a good thing. But the fact that there are 900,000 splinter groups with wildly different ideologies perfectly willing to fight tooth and nail to be the One True Leftism means the left knows infighting. Experts at it even. That’s why leftist policy is so timid and careful usually.

The right has ridden long and hard on the basic fact that most of their base are too stupid to think hard enough about ideology that they could worry about having to make them all work together. You easily get anti-vax moms riding alongside armband-wearing nazis on the right, because they’re both too dumb to realize that they’re supporting each other.

But all that is finally starting to come to a head (hopefully) as the current Democrat contenders are talking actual policy, as in, things they will do on a legal, prescriptive, professional level to enact changes. The right has gotten away with not doing anything for a long time because the left became basically the opposition group instead of actual challengers.

So they have to put their actual desires on paper, AND get them universally accepted by everyone on the right. It all looks a little different in that light. Seeing abolishment of birth control right next to their desire to abolish Civil Rights is making them sweat. These are NOT universally held positions of people on the right.

And honestly, most on the right, even the most frothing zealots, they don’t really want social disruption and rollbacks to the dark-ages. They are children. They are toddlers. They want to be heard and be recognized that they are angry, and they want to share that anger with the rest of their own little WWE Wrestlemania audience that lives in a fantasy world. That’s all. They don’t want to work on coalition building, they don’t want to phone-bank, they don’t want to have debates, they don’t want policies signed into law that will change their comfortable lives.

These are people who really need to discover some kind of Dungeons and Dragons gaming system that appeals to their anger and stupid worldbuilding.

Conservatives clearly don’t even understand words.

Which is wild because these are the same people who treat words like we found them in a fucking meteor crater and have to uphold the ancient definitions of gender, sex and relationships between people AT ALL COSTS.

No, you don’t.

You miss who you were when everything looked like this.

You were young, you were discovering the internet like a new frontier, every new app you tried or new album you found or new comedy website was like discovering a new country. You could while away hours without responsibility or care or trauma, or at least nearly as much. You were not cynical and jaded yet.

Nostalgia isn’t a longing for when things were simpler, it is a longing for when you were simpler.

It seems so obviously counterproductive that the only thing I can think is that they’re enjoying it, like it’s a kink to get into other people’s sex lives and tell them what they should and should not do.

No, seriously. If you spend time in the conservative, christian communities like where I grew up, you hear these people just spend night and fucking day thinking about “sin” and the ways that nasty, dirty, eeeeevil sinners like to sin and all the details about what manner of sin they partake in… and so on.

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Next thing you’re going to tell us is that we SHOULDN’T become absolutely obsessed with the personal habits and sex lives of other people whom I will never meet nor be involved with in any way! Preposterous!

The best story I ever heard about this was a single dad who had to take his teenage daughter to the doctor because she got an infection from inserting a toothbrush handle or something else that wasn’t sanitary, and instead of giving her ANY kind of scolding or negative judgement, he was very loving and helped her laugh it off, and then he just left on her pillow a $100 gift card to Adam & Eve or some other large, commercial, adult site that lets you buy gift cards.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to even suggest an age here, but I think as a parent you will know when it’s time to have the talk/leave the card.

You have obviously never been in a movie theater men’s restroom, a sporting event men’s restroom, or any busy gas-station restroom. The floor is entirely pools of piss. I rather stand on a grate that someone pissed on.

There’s a reason many homes ask guests to take off their shoes.

Pretty sure they are germanic in origin, but I would have to double check.

Originally, in the middle ages miners experienced toxic gasses and other weird effects while mining iron, such as ore exploding when smelting. They attributed some of the problems to mischievous creatures they would call Kobolds hiding in the mines.

It was eventually discovered that these problems were caused by another whole element creating impurities in the ore, when separated and identified, it came to be known as Cobalt.

I don’t see it changing anytime soon. If I may go off on a tangent.

If any of us have gained anything of material use from the “AI revolution” it wouldn’t be plagiarized drawings of Taylor Swift as an anthropomorphic fox with six breasts, it would be the dawning realization that we’re not so special.

If so many of us can be tricked with a predictive text app into believing something is aware and alive, a technology in its infancy, what are the next several decades going to look like?

I don’t believe in the AI hype, the “singularity” subreddit is packed with the most delusional people in the world. And they sound exactly like Christians, Trump supporters or scientologists or any other cult.

It’s inherent to our experience here, that our brains trick us into thinking that thinking is special, that our conscious experience is somehow separated from the universe.

The harsh reality is it’s not separate from the world. Most of our decisions are made up to an hour in advance, most of our life is rehearsed by parts of your brain that don’t talk, that don’t narrate. You are made of thousands of layers of “entities” that sort and assemble information and then make you think you’re able to control the world around you with something called “choice.”

So now, understanding these hard truths about the human condition… when will it get better? When will we start to set aside superstition and fear and mythology to make us feel better about that gnawing fear we all have, the one lingering in the backs of all our minds that we can’t quite touch, the fear that we really aren’t in control, we really aren’t that special. We made cities, but can ants. We travel in space but so can fungus. We go to war with each other but so do chimps.

We are not letting go of religion or mysticism. Not in our current form. Maybe if we’re really, really lucky some of the most delusional techbros are right, and we will have a system in our lifetimes for “upgrading” our brains and expanding our ability to comprehend and understand each other. I am not holding my breath though. These are the same people who tried to convince us that NFT’s were the future.