But then you wouldn't have a population of useful idiots, easily manipulated by distinct emotional triggers implanted from an early age.
I feel like a tinfoil hat person typing that, but I've been able to befriend a few former MAGAs and it has been insightful. They have no ideological consistency and no idea what they believe as an individual, just as a member of a group following a father figure. They're starting to learn, though.
What has been most surprising is how incredibly emotionally broken they are. Now that they're opening up, I've never met such sad, scared people before. The entire culture seems purpose built to produce people like these. The US has a lot of generational trauma to unpack if we ever want to improve.
Internal Family Systems teaches that we have multiple internal personas that have different roles in protecting the true self at the center. It has been useful for self discovery, though I don't know if I believe it's completely correct
I did learn that I have multiple sets of behaviors that l adopt based on need. It's like code switching, except it changes everything - speech cadence, word choice, body language, thought patterns, you name it. It's not multiple personalities or anything, just changing relative proportions of various traits for a given situation, like job switching in an RPG. It was initially really jarring for my partner. They are one of the few people I'm genuinely myself around, but if I'm in a very stressful situation or interacting with co-workers about work, they see me acting very differently. It's disconcerting but it makes me more flexible in social situations.
Edit: I also recently learned I'm what is known amongst the commoners as "autistic as fuck", so that may be a factor. Still learning!
I couldn't agree more. Way back when, I thought I was okay at discussing topics like public health, evolution, vaccines, and the like with the "low information voter" crowd. Then I went to university for the better part of a decade, became a Real Scientist™, then worked in research and public health.
The result? I am no better at discussing these topics with them. If anything I'm less effective as I'm now seen as part of the conspiracy or an overeducated blowhard, so they write me off even faster.
I can gently and politely correct the misinformation that comprises the core of their beliefs, complete with sources, but it doesn't matter one bit. Most of them aren't interested in truth so much as what makes them feel good about themselves and their place in the world. To be fair, I meet just as many liberals who similarly have many feelings-based opinions (Vaccines! Organic food! GMOs!), but much of the MAGA crowd actually makes ignorance as a core value a point of personal pride. It's fucking bizarre.
I'm there with you. I'm properly allergic to a few foods I really love, including almonds and (non-celiac) wheat. My wheat allergy is just mild and I can avoid some of the fallout if I pop a Benadryl first. It's likely an extension of my severe grass allergy, which also doesn't kill me.
Many people don't understand food allergies, thinking food allergy means instant anaphylaxis. That's when you see these "purity test" bullshit posts where the waiter refuses to serve the person "faking" an allergy for their own safety (and I'm sure everyone claps). I can eat about a pancake's worth of wheat once every week or two and just be a bit uncomfortable for awhile. If I ate like a whole pancake breakfast? It gets ugly and uncomfortable, sometimes for a few days.
So if I snag a bite of my partner's pancake, I'm not faking an allergy. My self-control just sucks sometimes.
Fuck, I haven't paid attention to her for the better part of two decades. Last time I saw her was on The Creep from Lonely Island...15 years ago. Girl has gone downhill.
As far as I understand, a certain level of data hygiene will do wonders for even a basic setup.
For example, on our server, we have a container that maintains a kill-switched connection to a subscription VPN. Several other containers, including one with a browser, can only route their traffic through that container, and we don't use any of them for anything personal or outside their intended purpose. We basically act as if there are completely different people on that connection, like we have a secret second family. Remote activity is done through a self-hosted VPN to the home network, then VNC to the containers.
If we want to use the subscription VPN on other devices, we connect to a different location and possibly use Tor browser for extra anonymity. No activity or information overlap, ever.
I miss the old days, when the opposite seemed true about every other major release, though the early bars were low so that was straight progress for 1.0 through 95.
I find the new interfaces to be less user friendly. I'm not a child: I don't want my BIOS to look like a fucking sports car. My bed, sure, but not BIOS.
I see the point being made; however, how the fuck else might I jam several clauses into one compound megasentence - overwrought and peppered with purple prose - if not with multiple types of punctuation? Should I summarize, streamline? Clearly not: all thoughts should be expressed in full, replete with all irrelevant details. Perhaps remove unneeded, intra-sentence explanations and asides (like this one, which I'm quite fond of) of details obvious to the reader?! Never!
No AI could write with matching convolution — especially when, unlike me, it cannot do so on the toilet.
That reminds me of a story. I used to do IT consulting, years ago. One client was running their 5 person real estate office off a low quality, consumer grade, box store HP desktop repurposed as a server. All collaboration was through their U drive, plus every profile had their desktop folder redirected there.
The complaint was the classic "everything is slow", which turned out to be "opening my spreadsheet takes 10 minutes then it's slow". Yeah, because that poor little "server" had a single 100 Mb jack and the owner had a 1.5 GB excel spreadsheet project where he was trying to build a relational database and property valuation tool. Six fucking heavily cross referenced tabs, some with thousands of entries. He was so proud when I asked him to explain what was going on there. He fired me when I couldn't fix his issue without massive changes to either his excel abomination or hardware.
I highly recommend solving the important ones and learning to let the rest go, speaking as someone whose marriage just exploded over exactly that.