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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Cynicism is horrible. It is slowly training your brain to always assume the worst in everything and everyone, and has little to do with expectations. Cynicism legitimizes the anger you already feel, and makes it “okay” to yell about it, rather than taking control of your emotions.

    You need a philosophy that allows you to take control, not one that justifies your helplessness. Mindfulness practices, and/or existentialist thought eventually leading to positive nihilism can help you.

    Edit: After rereading your initial post, I am doubling down on mindfulness practices. The goal of simply not caring doesn’t seem to be helping you, so perhaps it’s best to try and accept and understand your feelings for what they are, rather than attempt to reject them. Your anger is there, and it is real, but it is your choice to act on it, or let it pass. With time, the practice of “letting it pass” will hopefully result in this being the default position. The brain form habits, and if you start to build a habit of letting go, it’ll get easier.



  • Your ignorance on the topic of religion is what is astounding here. Reducing religion to “the supernatural” is to ignore centuries of philosophy and social theory.

    While widely practiced religion, particularly in the Western world, has been disgustingly reduced to nothing more than a series of corporate institutions vying for social and financial power, this does not represent “religion” as a field.

    People seek an understanding of the universe, and an answer to all the existential questions they have. Many people suffer existential dread as a result of their powerlessness in the face of the unknown. Seeking answers through religion is one way to quell such concerns and fears. Whether or not you agree with it, it has provided comfort to millions of people who suffer very natural, human fears.

    People also want to know what it means to be “good” and live a “good life.” Religion has provided a number of philosophical frameworks in which to seek such answers. If you wish to dismiss all religion out of hand, you’re fundamentally discarding much of the basis for modern philosophy as well. You’re basically left with consequentialism, which has a number of serious pitfalls.

    Religion is a lot more than the belief in God.


  • The answer to this is going to differ heavily from religion to religion. You’ve already been inundated with the atheist and agnostic response. Christian theology could give you a few different answers.

    The Bible could been seen as man’s interpretation of God, therefore God’s will is placed in terms we understand: emotions. Calling God jealous, angry, sorrowful, or joyful is a lot easier than asking you to understand a four-dimensional physical space. The latter is beyond your perception, much like understanding the “feelings” God exhibits, so it is simplified to terms you can understand.

    The second potential answer would be: why wouldn’t he/she be? You’ve made the assumption that emotions are bad or wrong, but if you throw out that assumption, there’s nothing wrong with an emotional God. Maybe being “beyond that” is in fact a mistake? If he/she made us in his/her image, then of course we are given emotions similiar to God. Ultimately, who are you or I to judge whether such feelings are good or bad, or make a being imperfect?

    Admittedly, I am deeply agnostic myself, because I ultimately don’t buy any of the explanations I’ve provided here. But I’ve taken time and energy to understand Western theology, rather than dismiss it out of hand, and these are the explanations I suspect you are likliest to find.







  • I’ll never cheer for an act of murder. But I am not broken up about this one.

    Genuine answer? He should be tried. Murder is still murder. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to catch the guy, given the chance.

    Far greater acts of evil and murder happen every single day, but I’m supposed to be bother by this one because the guy who died played by the rules of our broken-ass system? Or am I supposed to still be so blinded by the myth of capitalism, that wealth inherently represents virtue, that I should believe this CEOs life is worth more than the suffering occurring in every other part of the world? Should I choose to believe that the people he neglected to help - in hischoosing to chase the Almighty Dollar - are worth less than his life, because someone pulled the trigger rather than just watching people suffer while holding back the means to help? What kind of fucked up trolley problem is this?

    I’ll never cheer for an act of murder. But I am not broken up about this one.



  • I’m surprised to see the act of putting conscious thought into maintaining positive relationships with others defined as “[playing] theatrics.” There are far more theatrics and drama involved in making a point to talk shit and burn bridges in the guise of honesty than there are in simply turning the other cheek and moving on.

    Even if you are correct, telling your would-be boss in an interview that your coworkers were petty and childish is an enormous red flag. Speak to the kind of behaviour that happened, not what you think about it, if you genuinely want to be honest. “I felt overworked as a result of my coworkers failing to meet the expectations put on them by management” is not the same as “my coworkers were lazy.” One is a mixture of perspective and reasonably verifiable outcomes, while the other is a subjective value judgement. Spouting opinions and calling it “honesty” is not honest.




  • The only way to start bridging this division is to keep in mind that they’re people too. I’d even argue against calling Trump Voters strictly shitty, hateful people (though truly shitty, hateful people are among them). More often than not, they’re scared, hurt people. They’re people who have been convinced that if they don’t defend themselves and their neighbours, the “other” will come for them.

    Never forget that these people all genuinely believe that what they are doing is right. Attempting to dismiss and demean them is only going to further validate that they are right and you are the enemy. We need them to see the right-wing brain rot that has wormed it’s way into the hopes and fears for what it is, and we’ll never get there through further division and demonization.


  • “I’m a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I’m talking about”

    Should we call it a fallacious call to authority, meme on it for being a “how do you do, fellow gamers” moment, or simply mock the guy for whoring himself out in favor of daddy corporate? I could write an essay on the ways this is an absurd statement.

    Gamers hate Denuvo because it doesn’t “simply work”. It limits paying customers from accessing their content, bogs down mid-range machines that are already overtaxxed by poor optimization and, in admittedly uncommon cases, full on breaks some games until patches and fixes roll out. Stop pretending that “gamers” are out here rioting because they’re too cheap and immoral to pay for content. Quit your fuckin’ lying.


  • Right. People fail to recognize that blackface is a practice created by white people to entertain other white people by making fun of black people, portraying them as stupid and uncultured. While I think asking questions about what is and isn’t okay is good practice, there’s no cultural history connected to what OP is asking if he should do. That said, I am not someone with the skin conditions in question, so I’m not the one to decide whether it is “fine”.

    I do want to offer the argument that you should do your best not to give people opportunities to miscontrue your intent. You are correct that, in some cases, black burn victims can have lighter patches of skin where they were burned, but this is both not universal and not an experience everyone will have had. If you’re making a cosplay that requires a bit of mental work on the viewers behalf, you probably don’t also want it to be a cosplay which could be perceived as insensitive if people fail to make those connections or put in that work.



  • Listen, man, I can get stuff wrong sometimes. I’m still not convinced I am in this case, but, even if I am off on one very specific niche use of a word that rarely, if ever, comes up, attacking my entire livelihood over it, as though it defines every facet of teaching English, is an insane overstep.

    I am not so arrogant as to assume words can only ever have one meaning, nor to attack a stranger on the internet over a disagreement on that meaning. I have also made no such logical fallacy. You asked if I was “sure”, and followed up with a suggestion that I had never spoken with a native English speaker. I said yes, I am confident, and then offered up my background as evidence that, at the very least, your assessment on my experiences is incorrect. I can see how you could conflate that as a call to authority, and perhaps should have phrased things in such a way that doesn’t leave room for such assumptions. That said, I’d advise against jumping down people’s throats based on assumptions, else you’ll end up doing things like building a strawman argument, while simultaneously accusing others of logical fallicies.

    I’m done with this. The level of vitriol this discussion has been laced with is unwarrented and suggests that any further conversation is a waste of time. This entire disagreement should have been:

    “Hey, I think X is right.”

    “Well, this says Y is right, so you must be wrong.”

    “I mean language is funky and weird, a lot of words mean different things in different spaces, so whatever.”

    “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

    Everything beyond that was grossly unnessecary, terminally online, internet arrogance that we’d both be better off without.


  • I’m not sure if you found my original statements challenging to follow, but nothing you’ve said contradicts what I’ve said. Parts of the definitions I’ve provided are strewn in the definitions you’ve provided, and differing definitions of specific word case isn’t unusual, even within similiar cultures. Language is fluid, and the same words can mean a lot of different things.

    There is often a gap between common-use language, and the academic function of words (see “racism”). This is why I emphasized the relation of the definitions I provided to the fields of anthropology and sociology, as well as why I stated it is a use almost exclusively found, in my experiences, in academia.

    I don’t appreciate the strange, ignorant, tongue-in-cheek jabs at my background. If you think I have something wrong I welcome you to say so, but the strange sense of superiority you’ve attached to your comments is unnessecarily insulting.