I believe that something resembling religion will reappear in society (American society, I mean) in the future, maybe even the near future. Political substitutes for religion have given meaning to people’s lives, i.e made them feel apart of something greater, but they have not provided them with physical community, a path toward self-improvement, a guide for how to manage interpersonal relations (Apart from “don’t offend people”, in the case of progressivism, I guess?), or any compelling reason not to be afraid of death.

Traditional religion’s staying power came not from oppressive power structures or whatever people think these days, but because of all of that. Just having an oppressive power structure and none of the other stuff has generally led to religions/philosophies dying out within a few generations, like Nazism or communism. Both of those had their time to shine, completely ruined the societies they took over, and are now viewed as jokes by most people today. Meanwhile Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, which offer way more than ideology ever has, have been around for millennia and are on track to stay around for millennia more.

Homo Evolutis

I think using a political philosophy or a common enemy to unite a society is more harmful than it is good, since those things will inevitably be held sacred, and it becomes impossible to think rationally about them. Religious people are able to disagree on things like economics because the things that they hold sacred are supernatural sky gods, instead of things which are of this world (Americans are an exception due to the polarization of the two-party system and the compelling force of American Civil Religion, which makes freedom, democracy, and the Constitution into sacred things), but people who hold a political ideology like Marxism or Liberalism to be sacred (Tons of people, many of them on this very website) cannot tolerate disagreement and will ignore facts that might disprove their ideology. This is manageable when it involves nothing more than a sky god, but when it involves the very basics of how society should operate, it gets bad, quickly, which is how you get thousands of dead dissenters and a permanently stagnant society. Using a common enemy is even worse since it leads to an irrational hatred of said enemy that drives people to do horrible things to eachother, with the most infamous example being the Holocaust. The Nazis also held their political ideals to be more sacred than their religious beliefs, coincidentally.

keyboard warriors when someone talks about how their lives were threatened by organized crime

The people he’s snitching on and being ostracized by are a bunch of degenerates anyway. I understand why he’s scared but I think the right thing to do would be for him to come forward with it. Why worry about the opinions of methheads? Of course, I’m not gonna hold it against him if he keeps quiet. It takes an abnormal amount of courage to stand up to the masses, and I don’t think most people in this comment section would have that courage in his situation.

What are you trying to achieve with this pointless aggression?

Some people in the tech community just seem to have this weird superiority complex for some reason. They think they’re smarter than everyone else and look down on the normies, meaning they come off… Like this guy. It’s like they put all of their skill points into INT and none of them into WIS.

Some dude thinking his pet snail is dead, only to throw it in the trash and forget about it, and then wake up to a snailpocalypse a week later is pretty funny to think about

“Then who’s vice-president, Jerry Lewis?”

I’m in and out and I always say thank you when I’m done, since I personally like it when customers get out of my store as soon as possible.

If I’m being real, my only knowledge of trans fats comes from that one American Dad episode where Stan tries to smuggle them across state lines to make his food taste good again after they’re banned. Would you mind educating me on what the commotion was about them?

I’m not at the point in life where I can really avoid plastic, but I aspire to get there eventually.

I like excessive sweetness in all of my beverages since I’ve been drinking excessively sweet beverages all my life. I got the taste buds of a toddler. Still, give me aspartame over sugar, even on the off chance that the meager amount I consume gives me cancer some day that’s probably better than what too much sugar would do to me.

Microplastics are the new lead, and screens are the new tobacco, in my opinion. Overuse of sugar in processed foods is the new version of how they’d cut food with inedible stuff like sawdust back in the day.

The only time when willful ignorance is bad, in my book, is

A: They’re being willfully ignorant about an essential skill that they need in order to make everyone’s day go smoother

B: They’re willfully ignorant about something but somehow still give as much of a shit about it as experts on the topic. These people are the worst.

While this dude didn’t earn his money I am jealous that I didn’t think of this first.

Abusing service / customer-facing staff fits in to this as well and is at once particularly revealing and particularly damning.

Whenever a customer is rude to me I just remember that they’re probably compensating for how terrible their own lives are. If it was actually an issue on my part then one of my coworkers would’ve told me by now. Makes it way easier to move on with my day.

It depends on what the subject is. Learning things requires energy, which we don’t have an unlimited supply of. If you ask me a question about, say, Hotwheels toys, I’m gonna tell you I don’t know the answer, and I do not care nearly enough about Hotwheels to put time and effort into researching anything other than surface-level facts about them. This type of ignorance is fine by me, I’d rather deal with a person who knows they don’t know anything about a subject and doesn’t care about it than someone who knows little yet cares deeply about it.

One can’t let themselves be defined by what’s done to them, only what they’ve done in response. Those who act like toddlers in response to life’s obstacles should be treated as such, while those who react calmly and constructively are exhibiting virtue, and will probably get further as well.

It’s not just a numbers game. In the 1800s around farming communities it was not uncommon for a man to marry and have children with a woman due solely to the size of her father. Because stronger kids meant better workers. Very similar to how we bred cattle dogs to be better workers.

This is true, and it is true that the standards change depending on what type of society you’re in. For example, in pastoralist societies women went after men who were strong and displayed risk-taking behavior because that kind of behavior is what got you ahead in a pastoralist society, while in parts of Asia, some genes which are known to correlate with ADHD (commonly known to cause greater impulsivity and risk taking behavior) are exceedingly rare because rice cultivating societies do not mesh well with impulsive risk-takers, so those people just never got laid.

That being said, I don’t believe the rate of biological adaptation as a result of sexual selection was ever really fast enough for modern humans to qualify as truly adapted for the societies they lived in. All the stuff we just talked about above is barely just the beginning of the adaptations we’d need to be suited for an agricultural society, let alone an industrial or digital one. The main adaptations were in the form of social constructs like etiquette and religion, as well as technologies designed to make things more comfortable, and of course, drugs, all of which made people more easily capable of coping with their unnatural habitats.

short snouts are dumb

we in agreement here

Also I’m glad we can joke and actually have a conversation about this without things getting angry. It’s a world of difference from Reddit.

Depends on which community, the politics community on whichever instance it was is just as not worth using as it was on Reddit

Can’t you think of examples of views that were fringe but became the moral baseline?

Yes, I can, but I can’t think of any that were extreme despite being the most widely held views in a given society, because that’s an oxymoron. Once something becomes a widely held view it is no longer extreme.