NielsBohron

His handlers are just using it as a distraction from the class war. Trump is too dumb and fried to think with that level of intention.

ISIS the American post-metal band, not ISIS “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”

100%. The only redeeming quality of boredom is that it encourages you to go out and gain other interests and skills in the absence of other entertainment, but that’s more in the “I’m done with my homework and have nothing to do for the next 2 hours until dinner” sense. And even before smartphones, TV, booze, and weed easily filled that niche if you weren’t careful.

It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.

I teach chemistry at a college and I don’t think it’s any different than the past; it’s just more obvious. When I was in middle school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I brought shitty fantasy novels to read under the desk. In high-school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I would just leave or draw band logos. In undergrad, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I doodled or wrote song lyrics in the margins of my notebook. Even in grad school, i would frequently just straight disassociate my way through lectures when I ran out of attention span (so every 5 minutes or so).

There’s tons of pedagogy and andragogy research that shows that humans in general only focus for 10-15 minutes at a time (and it’s even shorter for teens and males in their early 20’s), and that’s remarkably consistent across generations. I don’t think people actually have shorter attention spans; they just have an easy way to mindlessly fill that void that is harder to come back from without an interruption. Frankly, my students from Gen X all the way to Gen Alpha students do pretty good at paying attention, but even my best students still zone out every few minutes, and that’s fine. It’s just human nature and the limitations of the way our brains are structured.

or “water closet” in the UK

Keep in mind, these are almost certain to be the same people who complain about how political everything is these days. What they mean is that they don’t want to see leftist/progressive memes, but they’re fine shifting the Overton widow to the right.

Depends on how steep the hill is and how precise you need to be with your position. Parallel parking in San Francisco almost requires the handbrake.

I live in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and regularly drove my standard transmission in San Francisco (one of the hilliest cities in North America), and used my hand brake all the time to maintain my position while I engaged the transmission. I’m not really sure what you’re on about…

Like any decent Lovecraftian work, it looks like a big ol’ bag of NOPE.

I don’t know; during the Bush Jr. Era, I would have agreed with you, but I think the powers that be have figured out that religion is more useful for creating wedge issues than actually governing.

If the goal is simply controlling the population, then oligarch-controlled media and social media seems to be perfectly adequate with just a little bit of religion to give the conservatives bad-faith plausible deniability when it comes to the racism, misogyny, and homophobia (both the politicians and the voters).

If I’m being honest, I don’t expect to see a penny of social security. I’m making other arrangements wherever possible

And the people voted for him (or didn’t bother to vote) anyway. America as a whole deserves the shit that we’ve brought down on ourselves, which is really too bad considering how the people that are most actively anti-fascist are going to bear the brunt of the consequences.

NGL, you had me in the first half

What is this one from? It looks familiar, but I can’t place it

On the other hand, if you have the power to help people and you don’t use it, isn’t that immoral, too? Especially when the harm you might be doing is merely subverting the free-will of oligarchs and bigots to ensure the physical safety of marginalized groups?

It’s the trolley problem on a larger scale with hypothetical superpowers

wouldn’t you use that for evil if you could?

I wouldn’t, but I can see the temptation, even for people that aren’t sociopaths.

I’d like to think that even if I was using that power to go around official channels, it would be in the service of the greater good and I would strive to leave the lower and middle classes better off than when I took office (but of course that could very easily turn into a God Emperor of Dune-situation where I’m trying to keep everyone on the “Golden Path” that only I can see, which is of course the danger of any dictator, benevolent or otherwise)

Sure there is, just not a morally or ethically defensible way.

It’s all just because Americans edit: the majority of Americans have a pathological aversion to metric prefixes

The burden of good taste is always knowing that nobody you met will ever know what the fuck you’re talking about when it comes to music.

No worries! I don’t think the chain needs to be stiff, just tight. From what I can tell, these are called a chain wrench, and I found a demo video.

Hope that helps!