It’s infuriating that the mob just went on with their day.

I do wonder what the right wing fanatics are going to say about gun control when someone shoots a would be lynch mob dead.

There’s a whole Wikipedia article on that phrase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_God_for_Mississippi

Google is run my by assholes and idiots. Break it apart.

Edit: fixed silly typo

I feel like we should run honeypots like this, and anyone who falls for it goes right to, like, therapy and “how not to be scammed” training.

WhatsApp, sms, and Google chat (hangouts? Meet? The thing built into Gmail)

None of them are great.

One of my friends is some sort of neurodivergent and just… won’t install signal. It’s “too much”. I don’t understand this. It’s 30 seconds of “click this link I sent you, then click install”.

The “american dream” has always had a problematic contradiction. You should work hard. Working hard is good. You should work hard so you don’t have to work anymore. Working sucks and you don’t want to do it. You want to be the guy on a golf course getting money while those hard working people assemble widgets for you.

Well, which is it then?

The freedom was always kind of dicey. Sedition act of 1798, for example.

Women also historically had a bad time of it. And the native peoples. Queer folks, too. Religious freedom is hit or miss.

It’s been pretty good for wealthy people, historically. They’ve been pretty free.

I’ve seen some funny comments, but the ones that are like “ur so hot” are baffling.

It almost certainly was not a sincere threat of violence. No one is asking you to condone threats of violence against children. You can narc on your friends all you like, but that’s a separate discussion.

“”“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”“”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3238058-we-live-in-capitalism-its-power-seems-inescapable-so-did

Did they? Was this a genuine threat to student safety?

And even if they did get it right, how much privacy is worth giving up? How much would you like your speech chilled?

Conserve what works, discard what weighs you down, build newer and better, rinse repeat.

It’s really a marketing coup for Conservatives that that’s what people think conservative means. Unfortunately, that’s not what conservatives typically mean. And when it is, their idea of “what works and what weighs you down” is usually like “let’s not let women vote”

I don’t think the government should be reading private messages

You can’t just kill them. You need to deal with the forces that enabled them. But getting rid of them would be a good start.

Conservatives are bad people. They value in-group solidarity and personal power more than anything else. Cartoon villains.

Good. Send them to training. Better than sending people to jail, probably. Can we send people to therapy too?

I don’t know how to grade myself on clarity of communication, but I’ll share some things I think have helped.

Avoid long sentences. Many people don’t read well, and even those that do will get lost in a long block of text.

Read back what you wrote out loud.

Do not neglect the emotional front. Conversations and convincing are about emotions more than facts. Acknowledge their position. Make them feel heard.

Read more. Read a variety of things. Op-eds in newspapers. Books of various genres. Old stuff. New stuff. Feed your brain more than word junk food.

Ask questions. Sincere questions. Don’t try to trick them. People are usually happy to talk about themselves and their beliefs. Use this to find common ground and shared experience.

It seems like their calculations always return high prices. I can’t think of any service that has had the price drop significantly.

People are social creatures. They follow peer pressure. If you want to make the world better, one of the ways is to spend the effort to be better, to work on being kind with other people.

I had two different work friends, years ago. Both of them had low to mid grade homophobia. They’d say things. But after a couple years of me working on them, they stopped.

Was it worth it? Maybe. It was harder than just writing them off, but I like to think as a result of my spending the time with them, they hurt people less.