If I cancelled all of the friendships I have with radicalized people, I would almost certainly have to isolate my little family completely.

I do try to talk time back over the line, but I don’t think I have ever succeeded.

I bought some for my daughter to learn and you’re right, it’s not cheap.

It didn’t go the way she wanted it to go so she threw it away. I really wish I had been able to keep it so she can see her progress one day.

This about me and my kid ain’t it? :p

Me too. God bless the Appalachian mountains.

I’ve probably met more mouth breathing, lead paint eating morons (myself included. As a matter of fact, at one time I was a t-1000 Liquid Metal mercury from 50 thermometers in my hand moron) than most people will ever encounter in 10 lifetimes. I can count on one hand just how many of those people were truly bad people.

If I have a visibly heavy load at work, it can be annoying how many people wander up and say, “hey ‘ere buddy. Yew gawn need inny hep wittat? I’ze just checkin’.”

Open the hood of your car and you can summon an entire neighborhood. For real, need directions in the Appalachians, just stop somewhere with houses, open your hood and spend a few minutes staring at your engine.

AA got it right as far as that goes. Leadership revolves.

AA would be one of the biggest organized cults on the planet if the founders hadn’t thought of that.

Now, not everyone can be a leader, and those who can’t won’t generally volunteer. So, what you end up with in a small community is a handful of leaders who don’t agree on everything and therefore represent the needs of the people in the group a lot better.

Whether we like it or not, positions of leadership tend to happen naturally. As long as we hold sacred the fact that there is no truly central leadership, it shouldn’t devolve into a cult.

It might just be a part of our nature though. When you enter recovery they give you a list of places to avoid (they gave me one anyway) because the revolving leadership has fallen apart and a single personality has taken over.

My kid. Good lord.

I have her in therapy so that’s something I should bring up next visit.

That isn’t how cults work. They generally visit the leaders in jail and fight to get them freed.

I’m in that club. Woohoooo!

Because people are just people. People are hard to trust.

It doesn’t matter where you are on the planet, it’s people you gotta deal with.

I hope life is treating you good.

Would be cool if us humans didn’t do evil shit like pretend to treat syphilis just to watch each other die. We wouldn’t have such terrible distrust if dumb shit like, “We hired prostitutes to bring men into a room and drug them so we could learn if mind control is a thing.” didn’t happen.

I’m from Appalachia, I watched every man in my beautiful little town go from caring for their families to wandering around begging for drugs and then beating their wives overnight because some jackasses decided to go all, “Awww no, this isn’t just synthetic heroin. It isn’t addictive! Modern science saves the day!” so they could ride around in private jets and have museums named after them.

I understand the antivaxxer. There are people who fuck with the lives of their fellow humans. They do it for all sorts of reasons. Money, curiosity, sadism.

Of course some people are hesitant to trust people they don’t know and worry that it’s manipulation all the way down.

Are they dumb? Yeah, sometimes. Probably most of the time actually. So what?

I’m standing here watching my babies cuddle on the couch right now. I’m not smart enough to understand what modern vaccines are doing or how they work. I can get the gist. I have to just trust that people are better now and evil people are the exception to the rule. I definitely don’t want my kids to get illnesses that will make them suffer or kill them, so they get their vaccines. Sometimes from the same companies that doomed my childhood.

For idiots like me with no education, whose families were destroyed by big pharma, no shit people are skeptical.

Hopefully someone smarter than me comes up with a solution for that distrust by making everything transparent all the way down. It will have to be that way to fix it. Even then, some people are going to believe they’re being lied to.

When you’re poor, or a minority, there are a lot of people who believe that YOU DON’T MATTER. It makes navigating the world a little bit more difficult, that’s for sure. Sometimes that kills your kid with a preventable disease.

Bringing awareness to issues (even through memes) is a good way to get people who are capable of fighting in on the fight.

What also tends to happen though is that when an issue gets popular, some people jump on the bandwagon for the dopamine hit that comes from the attention they get when they make content about the issue. Hell, even when they don’t make it. I’ve seen stickied comments on clips of popular music videos (just one ridiculous example) posted by fans where they’re saying shit like, “Oh my god guys! Thank you so much for all the likes and comments! I didn’t expect this to be so big!” Ummm, it’s a Beatles clip my guy. You didn’t do anything but reupload a bit of it in short form. You out here acting like you just a member of the band caught off guard by how many people like you.

I always have to be a dick and ask, “Oh, you made this?”

Ummmm, it’s like, sheepuuuuuuhl. Oh, and don’t ask people to be woke. Ewwwwuh!

Man, I haven’t got to the sci-fi cars yet. I’m still driving older tech (2003).

I can’t even glance at my phone to change a song on Spotify. I know I won’t do well with a screen. It’s too dangerous for me.

I like you, Maven. You’re alright.

It just proves to me that people are people.

How can we get to the root of our problems if we continue to group people from different regions as separate and distinct?

We’re all the same species. We’re humans dehumanizing humans to make killing humans easier under the leadership of a tiny fraction of our species fighting to go down in history. Same as it ever was.

Even when we do our absolute best to be good to each other, we still break ourselves into groups. “You can’t wear braids, that’s cultural appropriation!” The person who says that means well, but ultimately we have to stop treating each other as, well, other.

The only thing that makes us any different is actually something that we should strive to see as similarity. That is which individuals from which time influenced what area and how that don’t really matter and was just luck (or bad luck) of the draw.

So what if 3,000 years ago some dude thought it was cool to paint stripes on his face and wear a big hat which lead to millions painting stripes on their faces while wearing big hats over there in a distant land.

It’s the same damn thing as some dude over here thinking that a white wig and a big frilly shirt was rad and millions following in his footsteps.

It really is simple. Our cultures are built from people who came and went before us and folks following them and spreading the rad (or ugly) shit they did.

Our culture has to reach a point where it is considered a collective and shared human culture.

Who fucked who, where, and how much influence they left on their descendants and how much we give a shit about the where isn’t helping us. If an alien abducted 10 humans from different regions they wouldn’t even give a thought to how our history separates us. They’d just have 10 of a species from the planet earth.

I hope we get it together one day. It breaks my heart that those people are suffering so terribly right now. The malnourished kids in those photos remind me of the ones from the holocaust.

It would be nice if the people in power could relate their suffering to that of their grandparents. It really would.

Sorry I’m all over the place.

No I don’t think they know that.

And the fella who posted this didn’t know it was 50/50, he thought people were talking about the future year 5050 and not odds.

You know, because it’s so far away it could be good or bad and no 1 nos.

I’m sorry. :p

My little toddler is Beatles crazy. She don’t want to watch cartoons, just Beatles. When she wakes up in the morning she says, “Daddy, my Beatles.”

I’m gonna have to find that for her. She has the little book and she carries it around everywhere.

That scene in Hello, Goodbye where Ringo shakes his head, she imitates it every time she hears it in the song. It’s adorable.

It is so depressing how much I lost as a kid.

My backup method was almost entirely optical. Oh well. I’ve kept myself from feeling too bad by keeping in mind that I am waaaaay too lazy to ever go digging through it anyway.

If you get a bit of time, I recommend the behind the bastards episode about Lee. It’s a recent episode so you won’t have to dig.

In his own letters he made it clear that it wasn’t about Virginia. He wanted to be revered in the new country on the way George Washington was to the US.

He wasn’t living in Virginia, he didn’t care about Virginia.

I mean, I could be wrong, but Robert Evans (the host) generally researches his topics thoroughly and I trust him.

Man, we all just suck. We really do (humanity, that is). I sat here and tried to refute your point (the one about creating shrines for racists) and I just couldn’t do it.

I don’t want to see them destroyed. Whether we like it or not, the civil war was a huge part of our history. I just wish we could get to a point where we all agree that symbols are symbols of their time and no one hurts because of them. I wish we could solve the leftover systemic issues and move forward as a species.

Wish in one hand…

As for the museum thing, their whole point is the preservation of history.

I know that my little local museum would be more than happy to dedicate a corner to the statue and have a guy dressed in grey talking to visitors about Robert E. Lee. They offered to take it if the vote went the other way.

Also, it would look fine at the local confederate cemetery.

Racists are gonna racist. I wish they’d stop, but burning all the swastikas in the world wouldn’t stop them from making a new swastika and gathering over on Nazi hill to talk about racist things.