Thanks! The trick is to understand the emotions they aim for and the baseline rhetorical tricks.

Conspiracies stem from knowing you’re getting fucked, but that most people are good. It’s an attempt to find explanations when the world feels wrong. Someone did it. You just have to sell the truth in the tone that they’re used to hearing. Especially with vaccines where the truth does sound like a free lunch, until you realize that it’s governments and insurers paying for vaccines and it saves them and the economy money by you not getting sick or needing stronger medicines. These are the two groups that desperately want you to exercise, eat right, and quit smoking

Reflective solar is normal at least. But photovoltaics are weird. Even weirder is that they’re LEDs backwards, and the fact that transistors just are like that is why they’re encased in black plastic

The vaccine one would probably be better as: “independent thinking researchers developed a means of using your own body’s immune response to prevent diseases with a mere injection. Some of them even refused to patent it. But then the media started lying to you about them, trying to get you to stop accepting these miracles? Why, just so some companies could make more money selling you proprietary snake oil to keep you comfortable while you’re sick.”

It’s a beautiful graph. And the stats are great. But I’m in industry so I use excel

It was always evil with noble intents. But it’s also a group of people. No group of people is wholly good, no idea wholly incorruptible. Life is shades of grey. The fascists want you to think in absolutes, it’s easier to divide and conquer that way

Even if I survive the next four years I doubt my liver will…

I’ve had jobs that amounted to sitting around waiting for work and hated it. I’m the first to tell people that I work just hard enough to not be bored and to keep everything under control

As an American, please don’t give anyone ideas. I really don’t want to need refugee status to go out west.

I can’t imagine giving that up. As an American I once wanted us to join the shengen as one of my long term political pipe dreams.

It they luck out the removal of the fda might lead to mass ergot poisoning then. Actually, fuck, a cynical government could absolutely just dose large chunks of the population with entheogens, the cia has pulled shit like that.

So overturn or amend? Like I’m kinda surprised he’s even taking the constitution into consideration. Like he’s weird, he doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that once he’s done all he says he wants to do the United States of America will no longer exist. Caesar could not cross the rubicon and rule the republic, he could only control Rome. Nor could Napoleon take full control of the French Republic. Republics are finicky things like that, a dictator can only ever hold their land, not the thing itself.

The thing is, evolution makes sense, so long as you aren’t going to outright reject the idea that humans aren’t a different category of thing from the rest of Animalia. It gets weird when you get deep enough to see that we share an ancestor with plants and bacteria and even archaea, but we have enough evidence that by the time you’re being asked to understand that fact you can see that line and understand how photosynthetic microbes slowly built new systems while other microbes ate the remains of them before slowly bit by bit developing new traits to differentiate and fill niches.

They don’t want to think of themselves as such, because it’s a form of humility to understand that you evolved from a worm that just happened to have a particularly effective means of transmitting signals along the course of its body. They want to think their gods made them to rule nature.

I use it so often I write a function for it into my calculator in college. Because everything is a sinusoid or triangle it just keeps showing up

Nah they just understand the superiority of beans to triangles

I felt ridiculous watching it but it was so good. It’s the sort of show I plan to pull out to be the fun aunt alongside Avatar. I didn’t expect for it to make me cry but it did

You take that gold star filth and shove it. This is a skyline household /hj

Well they don’t actually believe in the constitution

Leaving the World Health Organization is terrifying

That was the era of more horrifying and particularly bad science. The 50s though, that’s the era that brought rules like “you have to provide an honest explanation of what you’re testing to human test subjects” and no they didn’t just think it up as a good rule to have out of the blue.

Well my friend’s wife is still very much bisexual despite being monogamously married to a woman.

Another friend’s fiancée decided to stop pursuing men before she met her wife to be, but she remains attracted to men.

My two friends in these situations are, like me, lesbians and just not attracted to men, as opposed to choosing not to pursue them for other reasons