"Hereâs a trick I learned during the Obama presidency for handling certain types of political labels.
Take, as an example, the Tea Party claim that Obama is a Communist. Donât take the word of the person making the claim (Tea Partiers). Donât rely on the rebuttal of the target (Obama), because that will just be dismissed. Go to the group itself (Communists) and ask them. Ask an actual Communist if Obama is a comrade and see how they answer. Watch as they laugh at you, then explain in great detail how they wish there was a Communist in the White House, but hereâs a long and exhaustive list of why that just isnât so.
Now apply this logic to the claim that Hillary is pretty much the same as a Republican. Ask an actual Republican if they think Hillary Clinton is one of them. Watch them laugh, and then explain in the same exhausting detail why that just isnât so. Some of them might concede that sheâs better than Trump, but thatâs not the same thing.
Finally, go ask a White Supremacist if Trump is one of them. As they excitedly explain how Trump is the guy theyâve been waiting for all these years, and how heâs really empowered their movement, use this to guide how you will be voting in November."
Source: a 2016 facebook posts by Craig Enan, since then deleted (OG link here)
Let the historical record show that Mr. Beast was entirely ignorable if you were just like doing literally anything else. I've been on youtube as long as it's been around and I've never been recommended a video by him. I see him in passing as a meme. I thought he was a made up joke, a caricature of bad youtuber content miners until someone I trust confirmed his existence to me in late 2025.
buzz aldrin and neil armstrong liked to do a thing where theyâd tell unfunny jokes at parties about being on the moon and when people were confused theyâd go âguess you had to have been thereâ
Everywhere I go I'm reminded how much the desire to punish homelessness and migration and other Undesirablenesses make society markedly worse for everyone
like why is the park locked after 5pm so I can't go and sit under a tree after work? to punish rough sleepers for the terrible crime of being homeless and alive
why do I have to buy a drink, beg for a code and fuck around with an awkward keypad for 5 minutes in order to take a piss? because fuck homeless people
why do I need to provide proof of address and photo ID to do everything? because we had to create a really hostile environment for migrants
why can't you sit anywhere? well because god forbid people sleep when they're pushed out of shelter. can't risk that.
every day governments, councils and businesses make your life worse as a side effect of making vulnerable people's lives WAY worse. if you're ok with that you're a fucking idiot and if you're in favour of it you're a vindictive cunt cause again literally the ONLY payoff for your life getting worse is other people's lives getting worser.
You⊠you told me once that you werenât a hero. Umm, there were times I didnât even think you were mouse, but let me tell you this: you were the best mouse, and the most mouse⊠mouse being that Iâve ever known, and no one will ever convince me that you told me a lie, and so⊠There. I was so alone, and I owe you so much. Please, thereâs just one more thing, one more thing, one more miracle, Basil, for me. Donât⊠be⊠dead. Would you, just for me, just stop it? Stop this.
The last survivors of the Mexican revolution, who fought alongside Emiliano Zapata. Some of them are convinced that their hero, who disappeared in 1919, is still alive. Although theyâre old and feeble, several of these âZapatistasâ never go out without a gun.
A really important thing to understand is that victims of witch hunting are not any neopagan or modern-day witchâs âancestorsâ.
They did nothing resembling what they were accused of. Despite older historical claims that they were probably mostly cunning-women/doing folk magic, or that they were midwives or abortionists or whatever else, the fact is that they usually they did nothing at all, and their worst âcrimeâ was some trait or past action which got them targeted for blame when something bad happened independently to another person or community (someone falls ill or starts behaving very strangely; your crops fail, especially because of bad weather/hail; your animals die; your wife miscarries or dies in childbirth, etcâŠ).
Those things could be any combination of, or in addition to,
Being viewed as antisocial/against the community, mean-spirited, or âpower-hungryâ in some way
Being socially outcast
Being elderly (& a woman usually)
Being unmarried or widowed
Being an (accused or real) adulterer, divorcee, someone whoâd engaged in unmarried sex, or otherwise considered sexually âtaintedâ
Having had a lot of family members die (especially repeated miscarriages or dead babies)
Being disabled
Being a religious minority
Being a foreigner
Being an ethnic minority
Sometimes accusations were made up over personal vendettas; sometimes they were completely random because they originated from things like torture or pressuring children to come up with answers; and sometimes they were knowingly invented for profit or social clout by a professional âwitch hunterâ. Often they were led or further-fueled by secular or religious authorities figures who believed in conspiracy theories about witches being present as a secret, underground sect of devil worshippers trying to create as much chaos and suffering as possible before the Second Coming of Christ. The more powerful the person in charge who believed the accusations, the higher the death toll typically.
Accusations often resulted in collective paranoia and a cascading effect of attempting to locate multiple witches, particularly in areas where it was believed that witches always met and worked in groupsâtherefore if you have one witch you must have more in hiding nearby.
Admissions were almost invariably gathered through torture, coercion, and/or gaslighting people to the point where they questioned the severity and cause of their own âactionsâ. The fact that sleep deprivation was common for interrogation meant a LOT of people likely hallucinated what they admitted to, and at the time nobody knew that lack of sleep could make you see things that werenât real or considered it a form of torture.
Salem-specific details under the cut if anyoneâs interested. TL;DR the contributing factors in Salem included most of the things I mentioned.
In Salem ca. 1692 there were:
A degree of social unrest and fear generated by recent wars with indigenous people
Two influential preachers (Increase and Cotton Mather) having written about and preached against witchcraft in recent years, which disseminated and reinforced beliefs in the conspiracy theory
A bunch of pre-existing internal conflicts between residents of Salem (who were âsupposed toâ be living in an ideal Christian society where everyone got along, priming people to view conflict as un-Christian and sinful) which led to both vendetta-based accusations admissions of âguiltâ which came from people⊠basically attributing being pissed off at their neighbors to demonic influence, when under duress to confess
Several of the initial false accusations from children/teens attributing (real or fabricated, itâs not 100% clear) health issues to witchesâ curses (who later admitted the charges were faked)
One of these accusations was in part based on the initial accused (enslaved, indigenous) womanâs race/âforeignnessâ to the Puritan English culture, and a resultant lack of understanding of cultural practices she might have been witnessed engaging with (Tituba)
Tituba then accused a destitute, socially rejected woman (Sarah Good) and a woman met with scorn over a marriage viewed as inapproriate (Sarah Osborne)
Goodâs four year old daughter Dorothy was then accused because she gave four year old level answers to questions about her mom which were treated as credible (holy McMartin PreschoolâŠ)
After that the cascade effect I mentioned really startedâonce two upstanding, covenanted women were accused, pretty much anyone became fair gameâŠ
So yeah. None of these are things that could be reasonably treated as âwitchyâ in any way shape or form. Thereâs nothing scary here except the capacity of humans to be cruel to each other in conditions of suspicion, paranoia and fear.
someone at work told me 'oh, just ask chat' when i raised a casual question and i asked what she meant and she said 'you know, chatgpt' like im an idiot. and i should get an award for the fact that i did not start snarling and biting and killing
im glad this version of the post is making rounds now. the amount of casual ai use i see some teachers do these days is disgusting and they genuinly dont see the problem with making school assignments for children using chatgbt, and even encourage them to use it themselves. school is about teaching kids how to think and they're taking that away from them. this is a sickness and we should be calling it out more so people realize the damage they're doing
i subbed a 7th grade class a few months ago and i gave them a written assignment and they had to use their textbook to find answers and weren't allowed to copy the text, they had to rewrite the answers in their own words. a simple thing i was taught as a kid. i banned the use of ipads and phones for the duration of the class.
50% of the kids couldn't find the many of the answers, even though they only had one chapter to read. the other 45% didnt know how to rewrite the answers in their own words. only 5% finished the assignment properly. they asked me repeatedly if they could ask chatgbt. almost all of their handwriting was on 1-4th grade levels. i struggled to read most of it.
this isnt their fault. the school system is failing them. the adults are failing them. 'we're evolving with the times' we are losing our ability to think for ourselves, and its all thanks to the system being set up. we should all be angry. why aren't we more angry
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