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Some people like waste particles on their exposed toothbrushes. It keeps them healthy like vaccine: a daily tiny dose of literal shit.

I have the Purple Harmony pillow. It took some getting used to, but yes, it’s worth it. I use a silk pillow case because of my hair: 4C hair is dried out by cotton and people recommend not sleeping on it as a result. My hair has never been longer though, so I think that’s true too.

Just have fun dancing

I did this sort of thing once at a Halloween party. I was by myself just dancing and it was fun af. Some random dude told me twice that I was the best dancer there, and I got to dance with a really hot girl for 2 seconds.

So follow Kat’s advice. Just say fuck it and have fun!

The more nuanced follow up, however, is that it’s only worth the work if you’re putting in the right amount of work.

Yeah…this is why I abandoned by privacy journey a few years ago. It felt like it took a lot of work, created hiccups for very little reason, and was overall just not enjoyable. But I was able to get Bitwarden out of it, which, I think, is a pretty swell privacy-focused app.

Yeah, but who is today’s Buddha?

Yes! I’ve been on this journey!

Thomas Sowell’s bibliography is easily the best starting place. Just pick something and have at it. As a prominent conservative economist, his books actually make good arguments. It takes actual effort to deconstruct his arguments and identify where he’s wrong. He’s widely and highly respected in conservative communities and tackles a lot of the common cultural war issues.

Then there’s granddaddies Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. Also economists, they were directly impacted by the Cold War, and make intellectual cases that capitalism is the only economic system that leads to real individual freedom. And they also try to prove why the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and every lesser species of it undermines liberty. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom are staples.

Castigated by modern conservatives because they’re not serious about anything, sociology’s Emile Durkheim is a cornerstone of the discipline. I’ve never read it, but his book *Suicide *concerns individuals within community and the institutions of it. He talks about a type of suicide derived from moral disorder and lack of clarity, anomic suicide.

One book that I found incredibly insightful was Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. This book is genuinely fair to both sides, and it shows the historical roots of conservatism and its relation to the French Revolution, when the right and the left as political stances first became a thing.

Aye, those are preferences and largely entirely subjective (because I prefer vanilla over chocolate).

So at some point the question arises, “do I respect the individual?”

This question is always there.

I know exactly what you mean!

But there’s a really easy way to solve that problem: ask for clarification and then check to make sure your understanding of the concept matches theirs.

For example, when you say “We may appear to be communicating but we really aren’t quite”, the meaning of the word ’ ‘communicating’ slides between different meanings. From my understanding, in the first case you mean a shared understanding of the terms under discussion, and in the second case you mean talking past each other, where people don’t really address the substance of the discussion.

Right? And you’re saying this is a problem of language and the internet?

If so, then I agree that it’s a problem of language, and one that language can just as easily solve. I don’t think it’s a problem of the internet, though, but the social dynamics of internet certainly don’t help.

If your perspective differs, then to the extent that it’s not extremely outrageous, all the better!

Argumentation doesn’t require a shared perspective and shared axioms (except concerning the conduct of arguing). Fundamentally, it requires that we be willing to be taken on the perspective of others and lead them to where we are, or allow ourselves to be led to where they are. This isn’t common on online discussions because of the incentives of online “debates”, which isn’t to be persuaded or to spend time typing out thoughtful responses with which someone can bite and chew on to serve up something equally worthwhile.

In other words, it’s not that people disagree that’s the problem. It’s how we disagree that leads to the cesspool that internet discussions often devolve into. If you want to argue and try to understand another person, then there’s no reason that can’t happen.

Yes.

A reasonable position and uncritical acceptance of a narrative are indistinguishable without the reasoning behind it. And I sincerely wish I could give others the benefit of the doubt that they reasoned their way to their beliefs, and I used to. But that assumption has been repeatedly violated that I’d be stupid to maintain it.

That’s Fox News for you.

I mean, I agree, but that’s the rhetorical purpose of an argument by analogy: you can smuggle in a lot of problematic assumptions through an analogy that would be extremely suspect if you were to make the same argument deductively or inductively. You see these arguments all the time in politics

The top comment explains it better.

Well, that’s an argument OP would have to make, because arguments by analogy aren’t necessarily fallacious.

That’s not a fallacy. Their’s is an argument by analogy, where Y and Z case are analogous, perceived to have similar characteristics.

Your objection is that the two situations are not similar in some relevant way (need for self-defense, survival situation).

On the other hand, the world could have its first trillionaire within the decade!

And you know how like 1 billion seconds is 31.7 years…guess how many 1 trillion seconds is in years…

But unlike Americans living in an unaffordable country, our future trillionaire earned it…right?

That’s a lot of variations on the word asshole.

The 2020 census was a clusterfuck thanks to Trump wanting to include a question about whether the person was an illegal immigrant or not.

Ron Betts, a 72-year-old Republican who said he plans to caucus for “Trump all the way,” said he felt the former president “exemplified what Jesus would do.”

Nietzche’s The Antichrist apparently didn’t go hard enough:

One must not let oneself be misled: they say ‘Judge not!’ but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.