Before I close this tab, I will forever be cynically amused that they showed us all the deranged spider webs made under *illegal* drugs but not the caffeine one. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of…
Anti-drug propaganda in the US is so ridiculous. I mean, a spider has eight legs, no brain to speak of, will die if you cover it in dish soap... but, sure, it's super-relevant to talk about what LSD does to a spider.
Note: this was inspired by a zoom meeting where a co-worker had a spider drop from the ceiling straight toward his coffee cup, like it wanted some.
He's WAY younger than me, but apparently when he was in school they were still showing those wacky spider webs as part of anti-drug-abuse education.
We agreed that anti-drug propaganda almost always ends up making drugs look kind of cool, same with guns.
I think if you want to turn kids OFF guns, these guys are a good start:
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The FIRST time I saw it in my feed, I wanted to make an obvious Simpsons-type joke: serve beer and put a sportsgame on, of course, why is that even a question?
But also, Mark Driscoll, the first person I’m aware of to popularize the theobro approach, was doing this specific thing, “trying to appeal to men” more than 10 years ago… is it working yet? Why or why not?
Something just occurred to me, as we're dealing with aging parents family stuff, is that the evangelical Church is terrible for families.
One of the reasons my family isn't closer right now is because those of us who stopped believing in church ended up drawing away from the family, and the church sets everything up so it's kind of inevitable.
I don't observe a similar dynamic in my spouse's Catholic family, but it seems really common among white evangelical Protestants, for the kids who stop believing to pull away very strongly from the family as young adults.
There are people in the replies acting like this is some kind of wacko fringe theory and I really don't understand it. Like... it's very basic market theory that companies charge the MOST they think they can get away with, right?
The only thing that ever held prices down was "nobody will buy this for that price" and also some kind of pressure to sell.
I mention "pressure to sell" because apparently real estate can just sit there, overpriced, for years on end, with nobody buying it.
I'm an ex-evangelical who frequently critiques Christianity, and I hate what the Christian fascist movement is doing in places like Texas more than I can express in words.
But I would never call "religion" (broadly speaking) evil and usually push back on such sentiments. Why?
When I was in the process of what we currently call "deconstructing" (it was the 80s & 90s) I did a lot of research and hard thinking about religion itself -- where did it come from, why did it exist, what were the different kinds?
I still remember the "mind blown" sensation when I took my first comparative religion class and realized that other religions didn't necessarily work in the same fashion as Christianity at all --
Science fiction did help me imagine potential futures in real life, I'm not going to deny that. But even the canonical classic "all time greats" of SF include plenty of dystopias, such as 1984, Brave New World, A Canticle for Liebowitz...
The whole idea of humanity as "spacefaring" depends not only on technology that doesn't even REMOTELY exist yet, it ALSO depends on the idea of what you might call a life-hospitable universe.