Now that we know we will be causing not death but merely suffering, we can continue to dismantle people’s rights to do what they want with their own bodies. Any questions, liberals? 😈

I don’t have strict standards, but generally:

• usually upvote someone who responds to me with something substantial, even if I disagree
• downvote things that are antisocial (self-hate/self-harm, antinatalism, misanthropy)

What length of hair did you have?

Whatever you are… MAKE ME A PIZZA (Zoombinis)

Better to just use browser history, OP could search “YouTube cream” and likely find it. I had to change my settings to stop Firefox from deleting my oldest pages in history though.

Geoff Lindsay is great

I’m gonna pretty decisively say “no”.
By the very nature of memes, you don’t know if they are talking about real events or just joking, you don’t know who created it or their biases, and you only get an EXTREMELY simplified perspective & information. You are also limiting the news that you see, maybe missing out on something important in favor of something funny (not to imply that we should maximize the amount of news we see).

I disagree with your point B about memes, that they don’t ask you to pick a side. I feel like memes are often more biased than traditional news. Even in cases where news is extremely biased, you can be aware of the bias and judge them consistently because they are not anonymous.

The improvised Country Roads scene may be my favorite moment in any Ghibli movie

1. Only Yesterday - Probably my favorite movie ever. It’s so authentic and personal and real.
2. Spirited Away - Really emotional and dramatic and surprisingly NOT overrated at all.
3. The Wind Rises - Feels very personal while also feeling broad and important.
4. From Up on Poppy Hill - I love complicated family situations, and I like the aesthetics and music.
5. The Secret World of Arrietty - The philosophy of the characters in this one is actually really interesting.

I like every season, but summer the most for longer days.

You say in another comment that this is indicative of a failed American education experiment, and that there’s a generation of illiteracy. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but it’s a much bigger generalization than “Kansas English undergrads” (which is such a specific category, why should I care about data that relates specifically to Kansas English undergrads?).

But my main gripe is the use of just one text. “People cannot understand this one book (therefore literacy is deficient)” is a much less convincing argument than “people cannot understand these 6 popular books from this time period” or “these 30 randomly selected fiction works” etc.
Is it well-established that Bleak House is representative of all the works we think about when we consider “literacy” and “illiteracy” as people’s ability to understand texts?

This is interesting but with n=85 and Bleak House being the ONLY sample text they use, I wouldn’t really put much trust in the results.

It’s tough having a high IQ. Most people don’t understand the world and the flaws of humans, at least at the level I do. As such, I find it hard to connect to other people. Most people are morons. I feel deep sorrow in knowing the direction the world is going and that the inhabitants of the world are mostly idiots.

…

Why do so many people (in this thread) unironically feel this way? “Intelligence” is a socially constructed and often useless idea that includes and excludes many things seemingly at random. For example, chess is often thought of as something that’s very intelligent, but skill at chess is (just like nearly anything else) based on practice & experience. Just because you’re good at chess and did well in school doesn’t mean that you alone can understand the problems in the world at a deeper level than an average Jo.

Everyone should read “What Is Intelligence, Anyway?”, a short excerpt from Isaac Asimov.

I’ll paste the part I think is most important, but the whole thing is worth reading:

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

This also reminds me of something I realized recently: 24 hours is NOT the amount of time it takes for the Earth to rotate 360°. Because the Earth (assuming North is “up”) rotates counterclockwise and orbits counterclockwise, each day is slightly more than 360°, probably close to 361°.
So if we assume a year is about 365.25 days, Earth actually spins 366.25 times. One rotation is just kinda “eaten” by orbiting counterclockwise.

Actually 🤓 if we use the sun as our reference, they could not be light years away and would in fact be relatively close to the Earth, the distance being at most the diameter of Earth’s orbit, which even at most is less than 20 light minutes.

Yes, in books and stuff, but often it is horizonal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/etymologies-for-every-day-of-the-week

Separate, but they still had equivalents / parallels. Tuesday is named after the god of war, Thursday is named after the sky/thunder god.

Yes but if I remember correctly, each of those Norse gods are correlated with the Roman gods who share names with planets, which is how you can draw a connection between the planets and weekdays for English. The same connection exists in many languages across the world including Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese.

The “sexual violence” tab on this page from worldpopulationreview.com makes it seem like India is very average.
However for sexual assault in general, it is so underreported in every country that I think it would be hard to tell if such data were more influenced by actual prevalence or just how often it is reported.

The gods that the weekdays are named after also have associated planets, so really every day is named after a celestial body already.
Ex: Saturday is obviously Saturn Day, Thursday is Thor’s Day, with Thor being the equivalent of the Roman Jupiter, so Thursday is indirectly Jupiter Day, etc.