I’m gonna be real here, most of that’s great, but I ain’t learning Japanese to visit Japan, I’m just going to use a translator app and apologize

I use nobara as a gamer and it works well for me

Yeah but in the suburbs of Buffalo and Albany? Or in the New York portion of the Appalachians or whatever their other mountains are called? New York is a geographically large state by northeast standards

Yeah I just ordered new ones and the features look awesome, definitely an upgrade over my 5 year old ones, but holy crap they’re starting to creep into used car prices. Thank fuck my insurance is helping

Hell, my grandpa fuckin forgot his native language…

I don’t know but it’s out of control, it’s spread to my fucking hearing aids

I wave the back of my hand with all my fingers up except my thumb, index, ring, and pinky

Exactly, his girlfriend is doing exactly that

I’ve voted for a socialist in local government!

That’s the thing, some conspiracy theories are going to be true, most aren’t, and some will bear a passing resemblance to the truth.

The main tool at our disposal here is skepticism. Are the claims being made plausible? Are the motivations realistic? Is there evidence from reputable sources? Am I approaching this with a critical mindset? Am I focused on the explicit claims, or am I allowing people to “yes and” this? Am I letting my emotions or preconceived biases and prejudices cloud my judgment?

Exactly, also people tend to tolerate what their peers consider normal. We’re basically always checking reality off of how those in our circle react to things. This means that if your circle assumes old men always want to sleep with 18-20 year old women, and they do so regularly, then if suddenly a 17 year old girl shows up in the mix and nobody reacts it can be easily rationalized. And from there you can slip to a lot of 16 year olds. And while new people may not be comfortable with it, they likely have financial incentives not to walk away or cause a scene, because he wasn’t just a pimp, he was also a matchmaker, then in that case the rationalization engine that is the human brain can go to town.

Qanon was correct in the same way your conspiracy theorist uncle was right about MKULTRA. There’s a quick summary that can give a pretty big overlap of them and reality, but that’s not why these people believe this, and the more details, context, or scope you add the less they align.

Qanon is an intellectual descendant of the satanic panic, and the framing it uses is very much in that line of thinking. It’s framing it as political enemies raping young children as part of a dark ritual that involves blood libel.

The Epstein situation in contrast is that the rich, powerful, and influential run in overlapping social circles and within them there are people whose role is to facilitate connections (Peter Thiel actually facilitates a similar role). These people may also facilitate other connections like drugs (there’s so much drugs in the Epstein stories) and pimping. The pimping for the elite, at least by one of these people, also seemed to disproportionately traffic adolescents and many of the rich, powerful, and influential clients, friends, and connections of this man seemed to either partake in his underage victims or knowingly look the other way in order to maintain these beneficial connections.

Both of these are very bad things involving the rich and powerful engaging in pedophilia, but the former is utterly fantastical and originates in a panic with no evidence and itself lacks evidence, while the latter is a realistic situation that has a lot of evidence for it

Yeah Japan has uncomfortable cultural quirks at times, and they’ve gotten away with a fair bit in the whole “pretending they weren’t evil in the 30s-40s” sphere, but like they’re not doing that much in the extremely bad category at the moment beyond the yakuza (and organized crime is outside government control by definition).

If you want to know who can get away with real bad shit it’s Saudi Arabia and it’s because the us financially benefits from their regime

Yeah, going slow, feeling the slip into the distance you expected to. I’m not a good driver, but I lose a lot less driving ability on ice than most people because I’m acutely aware of how my car will act on it. That said I live in the PNW these days so no more lake effect snow, not much freezing temps, and my ice driving skills only apply on flat land, fuck driving on snowy mountains.

My wife checks it out about once a year because she likes the idea. Her measuring stick is when you can get a decent feed by subscribing to communities instead of needing to browse by all

Mine doesn’t last that long because my wife loves the stuff too lol

Well here’s to her

I like a small handful a day while it’s seasonal.

That’s why my household buys it every year for certain

“Beg for the recipe, worm”