I had a ‘pastor’ try and witness to me yesterday, insisting that his spiritual experiences made him right, while the spiritual experiences of people that converted to Judaism or Islam meant they had been deceived by the devil.

Assuming that your backup isn’t also infected.

Doesn’t have to be in the bank either; if you’re traveling with your life savings in cash, then if you get pulled over cops are likely to seize that money. Just because fuck you, that’s why.

I opt for bitcoin because it has more utility value for me.

My bank makes it an enormous pain in my ass to buy things from overseas vendors; they won’t process any payments that are going outside of the US border. The rationale is ‘fraud’, even when you’re dealing with well-known and trusted vendors. Even when I try calling my banks and telling them to pre-authorize the charges, they won’t go through. The only way I can get around that within the established financial system is by using a 3rd party payment service; those 3rd party services make their money by lopping off a percentage of that purchase. E.g., if I’m buying something for $1000 from China (and we’re going to ignore tariffs, duties, taxes, and shipping costs for the moment), then I may have to pay $1040 for it, because of the fees that are taken out. On the other hand, if I’m buying from a trusted vendor, and I use bitcoin, I can just send it to them. Bitcoin doesn’t care where it’s going, and–assuming you don’t care about speed of confirmations–transaction fees can be quite a bit lower than using any other payment system. (And, BTW, transaction fees are built into all payment processing systems; it’s just not apparent to individuals on the purchasing end. That means that if something costs .001btc, then I have to send, say, .0010001btc to the vendor, but then the)

Speculation doesn’t play a role in it for me.

I have no direct use for gold; I can’t plate connectors.

Yes.

But many people–and I’m not saying you do this–but many people get gold, silver, and diamonds confused, and think that their intrinsic value is linked to their perceived value. does that make sense?

If that’s the case, then surely there’s nothing wrong with police have military weapons and using military tactics, right?

…Except that gold, like the dollar, and like bitcoin, has the value it does because people believe it does. Sure, gold’s a great semiconductor. But if that was all we used it for, the price of gold would be a tine fraction of what it is. Diamonds are great as abrasives and in certain cutting applications, but that’s all synthetic now. Natural diamonds only have high value because of artificial scarcity and advertising.

They are absolutely civilians, although they no longer believe they are. Technically the military is supposed to be under civilian control as well (e.g., the governor is supposed to have control of the national guard in their state, the president is supposed to control the six branches of the military).

Look at it this way: the military is not supposed to be used for civilian law enforcement. That very, very strongly implies that police are not military, and are hence civilian.

What, they’re enjoying the outdoors? And that’s somehow bad? If that offends you, maybe you should avert your eyes.

Then I came to my senses.

Except you didn’t. You rationalized, and thought that someone else would save you, instead of you and the people you care about saving yourself. The floodwaters are rising, and you’re on the roof; you either have to get your own ass to safety, or drown, because FEMA’s been defunded, and no one is coming.

I think that the left should absofuckinglylutely be getting strapped.

The good news is that leftists have been strapped for years. The bad news is that, 1) they’re mostly using Mosin-Nagants and Makarovs because they’re red fudds, and 2) most people that are politically left of center are not leftists. (I’m a leftist; I do have a Mosin-Nagant, but it was a gift, and I hate shooting it. I prefer my AR-15 and AR-10.)

US here.

I think that if the police are allowed to have it, everyone should be allowed to have it. Police are not the military; they’re civilians. So all other civilians should have the same access cops get, or cops should get the same access that everyone else does.

Have you tried just not exploding? Like, maybe turn your emotions off so that instead of exploding in rage you just feel a vague annoyance? It’s called alexythymia, and I highly recommend it; it makes shitty things much easier to deal with.

That’s so wonderfully tacky. I kind of love it. It needs to be in a room that has a circular bed that slowly rotates, and has mirrors on the ceiling. Oh, and a hot tub, right next to the bed.

IIRC, this hasn’t been debunked per se, but it was a very small, very limited study, and doesn’t really do a great job of explaining homophobia in a broader population. (I mean, you’re talking about 64 people in total; depending on your inclusion criteria, that could be a meaningless sample size.) Penile plethysmography is a proxy for sexual arousal; it’s useful in some instances–like predicting whether or not someone will commit more sexual offenses in the future–but isn’t even that great in those instances. If I remember correctly, there’s strong evidence that disgust is a trait strongly associated with conservatism, and homophobia is a an extreme disgust reaction.

FWIW, I was casually–but quite virulently–homophobic when I was younger. I’d been raised in a very conservative, evangelical religious group, and I believed all the bullshit that I’d heard about gay people. That changed once I lost religion, and actually met people that were gay. That, of course, is only anecdotal evidence, and does assume that I’m neither gay nor bisexual (and I don’t believe that I am), but it fits with what I’ve seen from conservative thought.

It depends on how you’re looking at homosexuality; are you looking at it as sexual attraction, or as behaviour? If you’re talking about behaviour, then a lot of that is certainly environmental, e.g., if you’re raise a non-permissive location, you’re much, much less likely to engage in homosexual behaviour. But if you’re talking about sexual attraction, then it seems very unlikely that it could be anything other than primarily genetic.

I think that the fact that there’s a difference between how people act, versus how people feel, is what confuses so many people about being straight, gay, bisexual, transgender, etc., and why conservatives feel like there’s a ‘gay agenda’ to make kids gay (or trans) when a permissive society allows more people to act freely on the way that they feel.

If you need to regularly scratch your anus, you probably have parasites. That’s one of the prime ways for some species of parasites (roundworms, I think?, probably tapeworms too?) to spread.

Finland first, New Zealand second. Both have gun rights. Finland has a lot of empty space in the north, and Finns are, in general, not super interested in being highly social, despite historically having pretty solid social safety nets (although I hear the right is rising there, and that may not last). The largest barrier is that Suomi is a very difficult language to learn.

Any sitcom or comedy.

By that ‘logic’ everyone needs a taste of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, Nazis, and so on.

Certain opinions aren’t worth giving any consideration to because they’re so stupidly, pig-headedly wrong. The street corner preacher frothing at the mouth over LGBTQ people is one, .ml and the former hexbear (world’s smallest violin plays a sad song for their passing) instances being prime examples.