As a Canadian I look on in absolute horror like a deer spotting the hunter in the woods.

It’s the good-ol’ lizard brain and it isn’t going away.

It’s the part of the brain that controls emotions, moods, fear, fight-or-flight, etc… The Limbic Cortex

The sole purpose of critical thinking skills and knowledge of things like history, civics, etc… (whether that comes from education, experience or just good old fashioned intellectual curiosity) is to give the rest of our brain the context necessary to override that lizard brain. (In my opinion).

Too many people just don’t care enough about the world around them to bother with that and are content to just let their lizard brain run things. It’s these people that are susceptible to group-think, and it’s these people (ironically) who think that they are ones who are thinking for themselves when in reality it’s quite the opposite.

The truest line ever uttered in film…

“A person can be smart. But people are dumb, panicky dangerous animals, and you know it.” – Kay from MiB

We’ve all been hardwired with groupthink. We had to be. When a member of your tribe comes running by in a panic, you don’t have time to stop and think what the hell is he running from?, you just start running along with him. It’s the difference between living to hunt another day or getting killed by a bigger predator than you are.

The more people that are running. The more important it is (to our brain) to just start legging it. No one wants to be the straggler at the back that gets picked off. For that reason, group-think and herd-mentality skews incredibly towards the simplistic. In terms of evolution, there’s no time to worry about the why…you just trust that if everyone else is running, you probably should be too. In terms of modern day that is the susceptibility of uneducated people to dogma, polemics and confirmation bias.

A single person…and individual that has critical thinking skills and the ability to look at the wider context, can overcome that instint. They can stop and say “hmmm…maybe I should look and see if this really is something that is going to harm me.” They can reason themselves out of group-think.

But without that context. Without that critical thinking, you have almost no choice but to rely on the fact that if someone is telling you to run, they must know more than you…so get it in gear.

Whether that person is telling you to run from a predator, or to hate immigrants, it’s all due to the same inherent mentality in humans.

Exactly. But performative acts like this play to their base. And their base is almost exclusively people who haven’t read the very book they profess to follow.

Most athielsts (myself included) have read more of the bible than any of these people ever have.

It’s been the calculated plan for far longer than I can remember.

Conservative politics relies on stupid uneducated voters incapable of critical thinking.

The voters that, with a lack of actual knowledge of their own through either experience, formal education or even just good old fashioned intellectual curiosity about the world around them, will happily cede their opinion to the first authority figure who tells them what they are already presdisposed to believe and confirm their biases.

It’s the entire reason there has been a coordinated attack on the liberal arts and college education under the guise of “financial constraints” and the push in the last few decades towards trade schools.

Conservative politics requires stupid who are content to learn how to be a tradesman, without any of that inconventient history or critical thinking getting in the way.

You will never convince me that shit like this is more than just performative play-acting for the sake of their base.

They aren’t actually fucking praying. They don’t actually believe any of this shit. It’s a tool used to keep the support of their base of white christian nationalists.

That’s why we see them doing shit like this now than every before.

In a world where more liberal minded Christians are balking at how “unchristian” these idiots are turning out to be, they have to make these shows louder and more obvious…and make damn sure there’s a camera around, so that they can play even harder to the more extreme supporters.

If they were to quietly go about their business with no “performative acts of faith”, more people would recognize them as the monsters they are.

But with shit like this, 81 year old grandparents the country over can look at them and say “I don’t understand what they’re doing, but they MUST be the good guys because look how christian they are…”

If anyone thinks America is getting out of this without resorting to firing squads and hanging these fuckers upside down in town squares, they’re naive as fuck.

All of the above. At least that’s how I feel anyway.

Move into the wilderness. Carve out my own patch and claim it as my own country (with a population of 2…me and my dog)

I’m automatically the only politician since my dog is horribly corrupt and terrible with taking bribes.

That’s good to hear. It’s been many years since I’ve stayed in touch with either my extended family or my friends who live down there. (Most of my family moved from Portugal to Canada, but a couple of distant cousins moved instead to Brasil…around Niteroi if I remember correctly)

I last spoke with them in the early 2000s, and back then it was a pretty crazy contrast between the rich and the poor. Almost no true middle class. You either were wealthy enough to have servants, or you WERE the servant and went home to your favela that (if you were lucky) had electricity.

Sure. That might end up being a socially healthy place for adults to end up.

But it will never work that way for young teens. Their brains aren’t done baking yet. They don’t have the emotional maturity to understand that enough to be “okay with it because it’s just a fake”.

That’s why we protect kids rather than just telling them “hey it’s okay…it’s only a fake.”

I’m not even going to begin describing all the ways that what you just said is fucked up.

I’ll just point out that online deepfake technology is FAR more accessible to the average 13 year old to use on their peers than “porno mags” were in our day.

You want to compare taking your 13 year old classmates photo off of Facebook, running it through an AI and in five seconds creating photo-realistic adult content featuring them, and compare that to getting your dad’s skin-mag from under his mattress when he’s not home, cutting your classmates face out of a yearbook, taping it on, then sneaking THAT into the computer lab at school so that you can photocopy it and pass it around in home room, and then putting the skin-mag BACK under the mattress before your dad finds out.

Is that right…is THAT what you’re trying to say? Are those the two things that you’re trying say are equivalent?

When a stock price is all that matters, everything gets reduced to line items on a spreadsheet. That includes humanity.

This is unquestionably a good thing. But it’s also kind of weird that it’s Brasil of all places in on this, since the inequality there between the super wealthy and the folks living in the favelas is just an accepted part of life…kind of like the caste system in India.

I’m not saying that that’s a good thing. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t imagine the Brasilian authorities would actually give a shit considering the state of their own inequality and how it’s just kind of taken as a “reality of life” down there.

Yes. They are proud.

I hate to tell you, but they’re not covering their face out of a sense of shame; they’re covering them in order to prevent retaliation from people who disagree with them. They have no shame about what they’re doing.

If they are recognised and shunned, or refused service because of their actions, there’s no shame or self-reflection. it’s still the fault of the “damn libs”. THAT’S why they cover their faces; because they know they’re actions are unpopular and will get them retaliated against.

But knowing their actions are unpopular doesn’t mean for a second that they’re ashamed of those actions. On the contrary, the fuckers are proud to be doing Trumps dirty work.

The other side is already scouring obscure precedent to use to disqualify and deport him. So while this is great news, I won’t hold my breath for any sort of actual election victory past the primary.

Going through the motions of elections right now feels very much pointless since only someone incredibly naive would think that the right has any intention of allowing elections to matter any more.

The sooner Americans realise that it’s Let Them Eat Cake time the sooner they can move on with guillotine o’clock.

Peaceful protests, boycotts and sternly worded letters rely on the people you’re protesting having a sense of shame. Which the right (and most of the left) no longer have.

I just use Syncthing. No cloud, just keeps any folders I choose on any devices synced with one another. Never had a problem, and while the files yes accessible on the internet technically, they’re not stored anywhere except the devices that have access to them. Works like a charm.

And Hitler refused to believe until nearly the end that Operation Barbarossa was a failure.

Can we just skip to the part where Trump and Melania blow their fucking brains out in a bunker, please.

They don’t care. It’s not like those people are human to them, after all.

I usually move to Lineage once my two year warranty is up, just in case.

I know that by law hardware manufacturers can’t deny hardware warranty based on your software (at least where I’m from…I worked in for one of the big three telco’s up here in Canada)

But I’d rather not have that argument with the manufacturer, so I wait for it to run out. If my phone has a rom available I run that until the hardware dies and then I upgrade.

I feel like beyond the stupidity. Beyond the corruption. Beyond the narcissism and the self-aggrandising, the lying and the greed; it’s never really talked about enough about how he’s just a flat-out asshole he is.

Even if he were just some dude driving a pickup truck to a 9-5 job, his entire demeanour is just one of a mean-spirited shit-heel who would get his teeth kicked in at any bar in any “regular joe” town in the world.

In the absence of being able to switch to Graphene (Don’t own a pixel), I’ve done everything I can to replace Google Apps with FOSS alternatives, and disabled Google Assistant on my device entirely.

I know none of that will stop a determined Google eventually fucking with me, but at least I’m trying.

I’m so damned tired of the modern corporate world.