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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • He’s cooked.

    For the unaware, Japan has like a 99.9% conviction rate after arrests, because they basically don’t arrest unless they’re absolutely 100% positive that they can secure a conviction. The suspect also has no right to an attorney, and police abuse is common; Even if you’re innocent, they’ll just keep you in an interrogation room without any food or water for 72 hours until you “confess”. They’ll literally just rotate cops into the interrogation room, without giving you a break for food or sleep.

    And Japanese prisons are some of the strictest. You’re basically expected to remain silent, and every moment of your time is accounted for. You get like 20 minutes to eat each meal (in your cell) and then like 30 minutes of “recreational” time outside, where you’re expected to kneel in place in an empty courtyard. Moving to and from your cell is akin to old elementary schools where everyone would have to line up single file and silently walk from one place to the next while following the teacher. And that’s pretty much your daily routine for the entire time you’re in. You sit in your cell, slam down what little food you get, silently walk to the courtyard, silently kneel for 30 minutes, silently walk back to your cell, and slam down dinner before bedtime. Any deviation is dealt with swiftly and violently by the guards.

    Japan has a very skewed idea of criminal justice, because the prevailing attitude is that if you’re in prison, you must have done something to deserve it. It’s sort of a cyclical problem, where their insanely high conviction rate means that the public already assumes suspects are guilty before they have even been convicted.


  • Something something Dunning-Kruger Effect. Dumb people who know very little about a topic will tend to overestimate their knowledge about said topic. As you gain more knowledge about the topic, the more you realize you don’t know, and the less confident you are about it.

    In extreme cases, it ends with the person having Imposter Syndrome. When a person is very knowledgeable and experienced in a certain topic, but believes they aren’t qualified enough to be considered an expert. They feel like an imposter who will inevitably get outed by someone more knowledgeable than they are. So they have a lot of anxiety about speaking on the topic, because they’re afraid it will result in them being outed as an imposter.






  • Here’s a harsh reminder that Trump is farther ahead in the polls than he was with Hillary at this same point in the election. The polls showed a landslide win for Hillary by this point, but that obviously didn’t happen. Now the polls show a much closer race for Kamala, which means (if the same thing happens again) then Trump has a very real shot at winning again.

    Though to be fair, it looks like Kamala has learned from Hillary, and avoided the “we’ve got this, no problem, don’t even worry about it” attitude that Hillary had early on in the race. Hillary wanted to exude an air of confidence early on, like she had been working towards the presidential race for decades. That ended up being her downfall, because it meant a lot of democrats just fucking stayed home. Because if the person is saying not to worry about it, why do I need to bother voting? The issue is that when every person told themselves that same thing, it meant Hillary lost a lot of votes due to apathy. If you go back and look at her campaign, there was a very drastic shift in Hillary’s messaging a month or two before Election Day, when her team realized that democrat voters had become apathetic. It suddenly shifted from “we’ve got this” to “oh holy fuck please fucking please vote



  • I once played D&D with a paladin who basically followed this. He was an Oath of Vengeance paladin. For the unaware, OoV paladins often have zero chill. They’re typically something akin to Batman with magic powers. My goal was to avoid that.

    His oath had something along the lines of “Without the capacity for violence, pacifism is not a choice. Pacifism without choice is victimhood. I will choose pacifism whenever possible, but will not watch idly when people are victimized. I will ensure the victimized are made whole, and the victimizers know the pain they have caused.”

    Basically, he would try his best to talk his way through encounters first. He would give enemies every opportunity to back down. He had incredibly high charisma to try and persuade, intimidate, or deceive others out of attacking. After all, he was attempting to choose pacifism whenever possible. But if he believed that a bully was victimizing someone, the gloves came off and he channeled all of his pent-up fury into making the bully regret their actions. And since paladins use charisma to cast their spells, his smites were painful.

    The DM loved it, because it helped us avoid falling into the murderhobo trope that combat-oriented D&D players often fall into. It also gave him a chance to actually flesh out some of the NPCs who would have just been throwaway no-name combatants.


  • You will notice that it is usually Democrats who have no qualms with cutting ties with their families over trivial ideological differences.

    Because the “trivial” ideological differences aren’t a two-way street. Democrats want people to be able to live as they want. Republicans are working to exterminate certain groups. As a conservative-passing liberal, (I’m pale enough to pass for white, and work in a conservative-biased industry), it’s really really hard to stay friends with conservatives; They’ll inevitably get too comfortable and drop an N-word because they think I’m safe. Or they’ll call one of our mutual BIPOC friends “one of the good ones” like it’s supposed to be a compliment.

    In short, liberals aren’t an existential threat to conservatives. Liberals may have an issue with some of conservatives’ choices, but “owning guns” isn’t something inherent to your personhood. You aren’t born with a gun in your hand, and you won’t immediately die without a gun. On the other hand, conservatives are an existential threat to liberals, because they take issue with innate traits, rather than their individual choices. You can’t choose to be black, but conservatives will judge you for it regardless.

    One side is saying “I’d like people to exist without judgement” and the other is saying “you don’t have the basic human right to exist.” And then the latter makes fun of the former when the former cuts ties.





  • I work in live production, and have actually encountered the Brown M&M’s clause in real life. It was a small 5 person band. We had the show’s producer sitting backstage, picking brown M&M’s out of the fishbowl for probably 45 minutes.

    They showed up for sound check, and immediately went “holy shit you guys actually pulled out the brown ones? We added that as a joke!” The producer was in earshot, and I got to watch him take psychic damage in realtime.



  • Or just buy a domain for like $12 and use it for catch-all email. My custom domain routes everything to a single inbox, and I can tailor the email address specifically to who/what I’m making an account for. And if I ever see spam hit that address, I can just set a rule to automatically spam anything that comes in at that address.

    For example, maybe I sign up for a Target account using Target@[mydomain]. Then a few weeks later, I see spam addressed to Target@[mydomain]. I now know Target has sold my info, and I can automatically route everything addressed to Target@[mydomain] directly to spam. Now I have no more spam hitting my inbox, because it all automatically gets sent straight to spam.