ik this is a shitpost but that’s like the worst possible way to handle that situation

i’m like a third-generation none, my parents were both raised secular and their marriage was officiated by a guy from the a.h.a., but i had some christian classmates in like kindergarten or first grade (public school in california) and i sorta half remember asking my mom some question about something i’d heard them say at some point or another, and what she did was she explained to me (in 5yo detail, anyway) what christianity even was, which i didn’t really understand at that point, and that was enough to make it clear to me how silly it all was.

one of the easiest ways to figure out who to trust, imo, is looking for who can most accurately and fairly describe what their opponents’ argument is. trying to hide it away from a kid who’s looking for answers is just going to make it more intriguing. going over it in detail makes it clear what the problems are.

e: damn, who’d i piss off

I’d take that as inevitable period at this point.

i mean, having an extra pair of arms coming off your boobs could be useful

no, they’re just swords

you’re referring to the paradox of tolerance

there are so many people they could have chosen, and yet they managed to pick almost the worst possible example. they could have even said george washington carver instead if they just really had to type the words “george washington” that bad.

Oh, I did. I argued with him for months, and he just kept getting more and more toxic and more and more spiteful.

Guy was my best friend in middle school. We reconnected after I graduated from college, played and beat L4D and L4D2 together. Then he started sending me political memes, and they were all fascist.

I tried to reason with him, but then he refused to engage with anything that was longer than like a page, or any video/audio source longer than about five minutes, but didn’t seem to have any problem sending me stuff way longer than that.

I still wonder if there was more I could have done. But I just didn’t need that in my life. I’m not some hero, I’m a downwardly-mobile working-class schlub who’s pretty good at playing piano and riding a bike. I shouldn’t be responsible for dragging this dipshit back from the depths of fascism just because he sat next to me in seventh grade history class, and honestly, with some of the things he claimed to believe, I probably didn’t even want him on my side anymore.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

we’ve been saying kissinger can’t possibly have much time left for decades now

i don’t think so, they have different shaped faces and bodies and different hair colors

go to !fuckcars to learn more!

skubba

yeah it’s not “jraphics”

very little if any of what i said was subjective, and everything i said that was controversial has decades of data behind it. i don’t think you know what “subjective” means. maybe you would if you’d paid attention in public school

neither he nor anybody else here has called you a nazi, but if you’re so used to being called a nazi that you just assume anything you say is going to get you labeled as one, maybe you should have a think about why. if you met an asshole today, you met an asshole, but if you meet assholes all day every day, either you’re a proctologist or you’re the asshole.

anyway, to your point, the reason parents don’t get to decide how public school educates their kids is because kids need to learn about evolution in order to understand any of biology, they need to learn about american slavery in order to understand anything about why this country is the way it is, they need to learn about objectivity vs. subjectivity and how statistics work in order to detect when they’re being lied to, by, say, fox news, and they need to learn about how their own bodies work so that they don’t get and spread stds, don’t have unwanted pregnancies and drop out of college, don’t think they’re freaks if their gender or sexuality doesn’t fit neatly into one of the standard boxes, and do know what sexual abuse is and what to do if it happens to them. and parents claiming parents’ rights on education are always and only ever doing it because they want their kids to be ignorant on all of those subjects, with all the negative consequences that follow from that. and that was also something the nazis wanted, hence why they burned down and destroyed the work of the institute for sexual research, as well as a bunch of other stuff.

so yeah, i’m not going to call you a nazi, but i am going to say that the things you argue for align pretty closely with things the nazis argued for.

Very true. I was keeping my scope to just my personal experience, but if you expand how you look at the country to include things that have been done in its name, then we live in a country whose government has systematically oppressed people and aided in genocides, fascist coups, and so many other terrible things throughout the world, and all of that pushes me to be actively the opposite of proud of it. But that also raises the question of to what extent does being proud of your country entail being proud of its government, and that’s some political theory shit I don’t have the straws for right now.

This seems like a pretty nebulous concept with a lot of wiggle room for interpretation.

Like, am I proud of having been born in the specific place I was and having the parents that I do? I ain’t had shit to do with that. I’m American by accident. I’m no more proud of being American than I am of being 5’10": it’s just a box I fit into, honestly somewhat uncomfortably. I’m proud of the work I do and the achievements I’ve… achieved, but nothing I’ve done would be impossible anywhere else. If anything, there are parts of the world where what I’ve achieved would have been easier to do and where my preferred lifestyle is more widely accepted (for context, this refers to that I don’t like cars, don’t own or want to own one, and choose to get around by bike and transit instead) (a friend of my dad’s recently told him that I “need a European girlfriend” because “American women don’t understand guys like him:” for the record, I’ve never met this woman).

Anyway, pointless rambling aside, America is just one country out of hundreds in the world, and I don’t see why I should feel all nationalistic about having been born in it.

what the fuck is up denny’s

Bottom right is cool in a vacuum, but there’s like… a shade of swastika to it? I dunno, maybe that’s just extremely online of me, but I’d be a little hesitant on it for that reason as compared to middle bottom.

The one that strikes my fancy the most is middle right, maybe just because it reminds me a little bit of Strava. Maybe the Fediverse colors could be applied to that one in some way, maybe teal and blue on top, red and orange on bottom, and purple as a fill? Or blue and purple on top with teal as a fill. In my head that looks cool, but in practice it might look like total ass. Worth trying anyway imo.

if that was true then maybe the stingy fuckers would tip wait staff