wow that rig's specs are aggressively mid.
Draegur
Your charges mean nothing; I've seen what you consider 'just'.
six hundred thousand dead orcs.
how many more must die before they stop throwing themselves into this meat grinder?
imagine being a russian soldier, receiving deployment orders for siberia, and then crying tears of joy and relief because thank GOD they're not sending you to ukraine.
not everyone actually KNOWS what they're imbibing though. There are discrete pipelines of rhetoric that drip-feed poison that oftentimes isn't even noticeable until it's too late. Little baby-steps of escalation. Getting roofied is not full consent!
each human being comprises a wide foundation of autonomous sensory and telemetry systems feeding data up into a stack of reactive animal impulses of competing interests which present options to a capstone observer process that has executive influence in deciding which options to embrace and cultivate vs which ones to ignore and atrophy and that capstone, your actual SELF, is a much smaller piece of you than you think it is, and it CAN be overwhelmed by junk info flooding the lower sections.
People. Get. Brainwashed. People absolutely CAN and DO become prisoners within their own bodies as their willpower is overwhelmed and swallowed by propaganda and rhetoric, becoming possessed by an ideology that replaces them and transforms their body into a shambling zombie whose only goal is to SPREAD THE INFECTION. You can see it take hold whenever you're trying to tell someone something that opposes their worldview, watching their eyes glaze over mid-sentence before they are swept under the thrall of canned responses that they neither actually believe nor even fundamentally understand.
Mostly it happened to our parents and grandparents who drank the tea party's kool aid and then promptly got swept up into the MAGA cult, or worse, Q-Anon. There might be a shred of the person they used to be in there somewhere, but make no mistake, that person is not in control anymore. That person who loved you as family once has been replaced by a ghoul that will sacrifice you to the false god of its ideology now.
No matter how much high-minded philosophizing we pile on top of ourselves, deep down these bodies are still animals beholden to flawed instincts and senses that can be manipulated, misled by illusions, or even driven to outright hallucination.
TL;DR: YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA.
(but i've upvoted you because 'brainfucked' is DEFINITELY a valid alternative way to describe this shit XD)
it's the whole republican party that does this.
GOP:
Gaslighting.
Obstruction.
Projection.
... honestly it is astonishing to me how much of a relief it is to hear someone actually agree ._. i feel like i'm in hostile territory all the damn time lately surrounded by people who are wildly hallucinating what they wish were true instead of facing the historically proven realities of the world we're stuck in. thank you.
i don't know who needs to hear this, but if someone you like tells you that they like people who possess traits that you don't appear to possess, it is NOT in fact an invitation for you to demonstrate that you might really have those traits, ACTUALLY.
It wasn't ever REALLY about that one thing; it was about dissuading you. Because they didn't like YOU. If you ever did manage to score that goal, you'll immediately discover that the goalposts have moved, because they'd immediately target something else to disqualify you.
Look, what it IS an opportunity for is to save some time: Move on.
Indeed the only thing the Democrat party learned on 2016 was that "Trump won so that is a winning strategy and I would do better if I were more like that".
Because NEWS FLASH, PEOPLE: Political Parties are not rational actors! They are FERAL. They CONSUME people, but the parties themselves are fundamentally not human. They do not have empathy, they do not have a conscience, and they BARELY even have object permanence!
People need to realize that as long as we're stuck in a First Past The Post model, what voting constitutes is NOT "supporting the lesser of two evils" but RATHER "punishing the greater of two evils".
The party that LOSES defines "what not to do".
Honestly for FUCKS sake the Republican party should have fucking DIED decades ago. The only reason Richard fucking Nixon won and got to deploy his cancerous Southern Strategy was because Wallace distracted the voters who SHOULD have been focused on KILLING THE GOP.
We were almost free of the fascist anti-civil-rights pro-slavery SCUM.
And you know what wouldn've happened? The Democrat party would have SPLIT. Because in First Past the Post there are always TWO viable parties. The split, as it always is, would have been along the pro-tradition/anti-authority line, and we would've had a centrist party and a progressive party instead of the centrist party and fucking dictator cult we have today. God fucking DAMMIT.
Well, unfortunately it is indeed an infectious agent that hijacks the infected to manufacturer more of itself and cannot metabolize or reproduce without directly utilizing the machinery of a host AND its medium of transmission, metabolism, and reproduction is the mind, so "mind virus" definitively fits the bill.
But so do most memetic constructs.
Or maybe he'll just have to sell Twitter.
Or maybe Twitter's debtors can place a lien and sell it right out from under him.
Kinda curious about what if Twitter were nationalized...? Like, make it a service of the USPS or something? Force it to become accountable to its users?
they laughed their way all the way out the top story window
but it is in fact a very funny joke.
I would congratulate OOP for this. this is how it's done. in fact, it's refreshingly normal. they were probably alarmed that it wasn't innuendo or an attempt to hit on them. a lot of their hesitancy might have been their metaphorical "threat radar"s proverbially "overheating" as they strove to detect SOME sign of impropriety, and feeling even more alarmed when they couldn't. Which is why one of them reciprocated socially, to test the waters. Whether OOP knew it or not, he made a disarming impression, which is good. Stay good, OOP!
Also, MAN, having assignments that pre-date the very first day of class is annoying >_< i've had that at least twice in my years of being a student as well, but it's usually just a way for the professor/instructor to get an idea of what their student group's level of understanding is for the material so they have a better idea of how to hit the ground running after they go over the usual First Day Stuff.