I’d suggest going through a list of the best TNG episodes

A lot of nerds became doctors and aerospace scientists and stuff because of Star Trek

I think the implication is we’re addicted to a magical potion that transforms us into an evil alter ego who causes mischief in town

And then we get to hang out with Abbott and Costello

Yes I go into a phone booth as my normal commie antifa self and come out as Chudly Dugsfermpt local pool supply company owner and lover of Milton Friedman

I’m getting the impression from Lemmy that there’s an overrepresentation of the particular demographic of comfortable middle-aged bookish software engineers who live in the US or Canada.

Naval Facility Okinawa is one of the more controversial. There’s also Fort Magsaysay in the Philippines, along with others in the region. The US really does have China surrounded on multiple fronts.

The largest American overseas base is Camp Humphreys in South Korea, which comprises of over 500 individual buildings and cost $11 billion.

Can’t go wrong with looking around at the blogs and stuff at https://neocities.org/browse Lots of creative people with an interest in retro style website and blog design

I also like https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/

And of course gotta mention the GOAT zombo.com

I used to think all food for adults were called Sad Meals, as opposed to Happy Meals (like at McDonald’s).

I thought some wild stuff as a child that feels more fantastical than strictly dumb. Like I thought everyone was psychic except me and could hear my thoughts. I thought time worked differently depending on who I talked with. I thought the earth was both flat or round depending on where you were standing. I’d often get dreams and reality confused too. For some reason I thought dogs were people who had been cursed into becoming pets, probably because of me seeing the donkeys from Pinocchio. I thought half of people were robots fueled by pieces of the sun they’d pluck out of the sky.

This one is common, but I thought water simply phased through your body if you touched it. There was an episode of Bill Nye where he mentions that water “goes through your hand” and says it just like that. So I thought water simply phased through hands.

I think I was just abused as a kid and neglected

If Mexico or Canada had signed a defensive alliance with China and set up artillery pointing across the border the US would have nuked someone by now

Don’t worry, sometimes there will be freak years where ocean currents reverse or something and there are widespread cold snaps and crops die

There are only 24 episodes of the initial run of The Jetsons and only 25 of Scooby Doo. They got aired as reruns for decades before more episodes were made. There are only 15 episodes of Mr. Bean.

Planescape: Torment made me slow down and realize a game can be an entire world onto itself and I shouldn’t skim over stuff I read.

The Outer Wilds is probably the most recent game that changed how I approach stuff. It’s so good. Nothing is given to you, you have to figure out everything on your own. It’s good for developing patience and curiosity.

For twitchy gameplay type stuff, I recommend Radiant Silvergun. Makes every other shmup feel like they’re in slow motion. That game is why I was able to beat any of the Touhou games.

That depends, but it’s probably irrelevant in France. Some churches expect women to wear head coverings, like in the eastern Orthodox church. Mennonite women wear bonnets. Some very fundamentalist churches ban wearing mixed fabrics.

There are also mormons, who wear the “temple garment” underwear

An abaya isn’t religious, they’re just worn in places that are usually Muslim and often worn by Muslims. This is racist discrimination.

do you trust the state of France to do something that largely targets Muslims and there to be a positive outcome? Furthermore I should mention the abaya isn’t even religious, it’s just a dress worn by some people of northern African or middle eastern culture/ancestry. Nothing about Islam mandates wearing it and not all Muslims wear abayas.

listen, only about 50% of Cubans profess they’re part of a religion, compared to other places in the Caribbean like the Dominican Republic where the number is a much higher 97%. Cuba didn’t ban religion outright or wearing religious clothes, they banned religions from operating public services, charities, etc. The Cuban government gave people things that religions had previously given them, rather than taking away things like what kinds of clothes they could wear.

even if you’re an atheist and you believe in secularizing the entire world, changing beliefs, do you really think the way you do that is by first deciding what kids are allowed to wear to school? Do you think there are any positive ways to persecute a religious group, not even the leadership or whatever, but persecuting literal children and telling them which clothes to wear? If you’re some kind of atheist proselytizer then I’d expect you wanna go for methods that actually work.

I’m gonna quote an obscure guy named Marx you don’t seem to have read much of:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

if you wanna criticize religion, then criticize the thing that makes religion happen, namely human suffering. Don’t cause more suffering. Demand people’s real happiness.

Do you think a requirement of being atheist means you have to embarrass kids or be racist? Do you think atheists have a moral obligation to do genuine persecution against people for wearing a robe?

Secularism in education doesn’t mean you have to strictly control what clothes kids wear. Just don’t have private religious schools, it’s as easy as that. That’s what socialist governments do when they have a secular state ideology, they ban religious schools, shelters, hospitals, etc and replace them with secular, public ones. They don’t ban religion outright because that’s absurd, it’s a waste of time, and it’s needless cruelty.

Why does it matter if some people are Muslim? Do atheists have a moral obligation to control what Muslims wear or believe? Why?

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every time liberals accuse us of being aggressive against people who disagree with us

I ask them what kind of disagreements we have and that’s when they’ll start spewing the most rancid transphobia or racism or Holocaust trivialization. Every single time. They’re always vague about what kinds of disagreements they have with communists because they know they’ve got something putrid still rotting in them. They know they’re still a national chauvinist or a bigot or they wanna own their dad’s factory one day. They have to accuse us of being secretly bigoted because that’s what they are.

They’re also forever gonna be jealous that we had absolute kings on our side like Castro and Chavez. No liberal leader has come even close to how cool they were

I don’t think you could define this as strictly not racist, since “race” constitutes arbitrary characteristics decided upon largely by white hegemony. It’s how Africans became a singular black race despite being different cultures and language groups. It’s why Jews are sometimes white, sometimes not.

It’s absolutely why most Americans consider a native Spanish speaker a different race, no matter how white they are. We’re in a moment where being Muslim is a racial marker excluding a person from whiteness.

Here’s a trick I do. Go show an uniformed white American a picture of Bashar al-Assad. Every time I’ve done this, they’ll say he’s a white guy. Then tell them he’s the president of Syria and a Muslim. They instantly flip.

The show plays into several right wing fears, like widespread gun control (cops need permission over radio to unlock their guns), black people getting paid reparations, white people living in shantytowns (nixonville), cigarettes are illegal, religious people becoming a persecuted minority, stuff like that. The first few episodes play up an angle of “what if cops mainly profiled poor white people.” That’s because the premise is that there’s been an uninterrupted 30 year liberal hegemony under president Robert Redford, similar to how the 1980s Watchmen comic took place during an uninterrupted conservative domination with Nixon.

The glorifying cops part is because it dips into the idea there are some good cops who are struggling against an entrenched structure of bad cops. That’s the whole arc of the show, the main character Angela is a “good cop” who is routing out the “bad cops” in order to repair the structure. It’s the liberal nonsense idea that putting oppressed minorities into positions of power like wealth, the cops, politicians, etc will correct the structure, since the problem is presented as individuals within that structure rather than the thing itself. In the show’s attempts to subvert/criticize corporate liberal dystopia, it still presents the same conclusions.

Although another way of reading it is that it’s a criticism of how generic American liberals, even when granted full control over society, still manage to recreate the same conditions. That’s a better and more interesting reading honestly. But I’m stuck because I know that Damon Lindelof (the writer) is himself a generic rich Hollywood liberal type.

I actually like the show by the way. Jeremy Irons was good. The Trent Reznor soundtrack is beautiful too.