I adored the Wii, it had all the charm of a new nintendo system, but was also basically a Gamecube, it was, for a short time, the perfect game system.

I only wish I wasn’t struggling with the destruction of my life and family when it was in its heyday.

I had both .22LR rifle and revolver and that revolver was louder than a 9mm (Uzi) so gun design makes a massive difference.

I think it’s possible that a recording on surround sound might get close to the noise of a smaller caliber gun, but I just doubt that it would be an easy mistake to make. Particularly if that person doesn’t play a lot of loud movies and games and it’s just a sudden burst or something.

I bet you had tinnitus for awhile.

That makes me think of something I never put together. I did everything I can in life to protect my hearing. Never shot without protection, never even operated heavy machinery or went to concerts without some kind of hearing protection, I was so infatuated with preserving my senses that I was made fun of for always having PPE. Now later in life I have constant tinnitus and no idea why. Come to think of it, maybe that one single shotgun blast at point-blank range is what knocked something loose in there and I’m only just now feeling the long-term effects.

When I was about 12 or so, my father, who was just really bad at like, everything, and was always inebriated… was checking something on the 12-gauge he kept in the house, he decided to sit next to me on my bed to fiddle with the thing and of course, he pulls the trigger and it goes off.

Fortunately it was pointed away from me, and fortunately there was nobody else in the house at the time, so it just took a large chunk out of the wall and not a family member, but it was startling on a level that shook me for life, and whether he meant to teach the lesson or not, I sure as shit learned the rules of firearms from that incident.

It also makes me call BS on at least the “saving private ryan” part of the 4chan post. There’s no way you will mistake an actual firearm going off for any kind of media or recording.

Paintball guns can easily remove an eyeball, yet the way people handle them at open games should make us all terrified for how unaware and and careless people are around dangerous devices. We need far more training and preparation on a nationalized, standardized level for preparing people for the real world.

As a species, we are wired by millions of years of adaptation to do just that… find new situations to adapt to. Complacency breeds discontent.

A lot of it is Kayfabe. Don’t get lulled by the performance and theater, they (the comedians, network execs and everyone else who appears on camera) are performers who have a role and they’re only there because they play that role well.

I’m not saying they’re all “in on it” but they get marching orders, they get back-room deals to do this and that, they’re instructed by the people who control whether or not we can see them. It’s normal.

If we were to understand just how much of our informational world (including network media) is completely scripted from the ground up to engage us in a narrative of Good Versus Evil, we would realize that we’re just in WWE theater meant to distract us from the wealthy who are consuming our world around us like locusts.

The greatest travels I’ve ever been on have been the disasters, when stranded, when forced to socialize and integrate, to learn about the actual world in which people live and work and play. I’ve lost luggage and had losses, but bathed in jungle waterfalls and helped locals prepare feasts and stayed with the kindest people on Earth for weeks or months and it absolutely reshapes your perspectives of the whole world.

The most boring have been trips to hotels. What’s the point of going around the world if you’re on a bed watching cable TV and there’s a 7-11 in the downstairs lobby.

What’s frustrating about talking about this is invariably I run into some well-off liberal American who talks about how they also promote “adventure” vacations where they stay in like, a Yurt in the woods and pay more money to get away from tourist locations, but really it’s just another instagram background for their timeline. Discomfort is what makes us grow, not views.

Also, the value of life was different then.

People didn’t always survive traveling to far away places. In fact, the mortality rate was quite high for things like long-distance travel, from things like bandits to wild animals, to sever weather, to traveling by sea and the hundreds of ways you can die on a multi-month journey even before counting storms and shipwrecks. Many people died from very simple things, infected foot blisters, malnutrition, getting sick along the way, it was all just considered part of life and it’s why people through history have put such great meaning on their actions and goals. Life has been very brief and fragile for the majority of human history and everyone knew someone who died on a journey or disappeared.

Traveling to somewhere far away was rarely done on a whim, it was usually for some greater purpose, either financial or religious or deeply personal as a way to seek out enlightenment or discover things about the world. (Assuming you had the choice at all.)

This “meaningfulness” is very much stripped from today’s world of wonders. Yes, you can fly over an entire goddamn ocean in less time than it takes to read a short book, but without meaning behind your travel, the time spent waiting for your luggage feels unbearable.

We have everything, we’re basically gods of our world, and we’re miserable because we don’t know what the point is.

Literally if you’re nice to me I’ll be attracted to you eventually.

This isn’t a unique, debilitating flaw. This is most people. Five decades navigating human interaction has shown me over and over that most of us are so desperate for connection that we will rapidly bond with all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. Men and women alike, all day long.

The thing about those pickup art grifters and redpill bullshit sites, is that they’re framing this like some kind of jedi trick, but it’s fantastically easy to make people like you, your challenge though to be better than those scumbags is to not do it for false pretenses. Just literally make people feel good and you will have more options in your life for intimacy.

If more people understood that almost everyone actually does work like the vending machine we would understand how broken we each are and be able to stop treating ourselves like vending machines.

It’s not on you if someone tricks and victimizes you, but it is on you to recognize and practice some form of value system and self-respect so that you don’t build a story in your head to explain why you’re in love with your coworker who treats you nice.

This is absolutely about critical thinking and I wish we could all be so lucky to have a teacher like you did.

But I realized in typing this out that I have stopped saying the term “critical thinking” years and years ago, because like other terms it has basically lost all meaning, like “gaslighting.” People just say it without any idea what it means, so I stopped saying it. Instead I try to explain it to people without naming it, because people on both sides of every issue think they know what it means.

We need some kind of new order with a nationalized Mr Rogers type system for teaching people the most basic shit all over again. Literally, I am astonished how people missed even the most basic lessons from Saturday morning cartoons, I feel like a huge segment of the population were watching G.I. Joe as kids and routing for Cobra or booing the public service messages at the end.

And as someone who struggled with depression, I also wanted to offer the counterpoint that when you are experiencing a depressive episode, you aren’t necessarily going to be receptive to people coming around your bedside and giving flowers and support. It’s a mental state that rejects happiness or even comfort, so while I get the idea behind the comic, it’s over-simplified and not really prescribing anything. We don’t treat physical and mental illness the same, nor should we.

We should understand that they’re both equally real conditions that people suffer from, and need help in treating, but we need to stop giving this ammunition to unwell brains that their depression is part of a narrative where people aren’t going to help you or support you.

People broadly are bad at supporting and helping with mental OR physical conditions, as you outlined. Every time I’ve ever been ill, physical or mental, I’ve had to spend all my time reassuring others and taking care of the emotional states of those worried. This is how it usually goes, when we get sick or injured, we are not going to get helped by others, and managing the way others feel on top of being unwell is just part of the course, we don’t get a relief or break. We won’t get satisfaction no matter what happens, we have to just hunker down and get through it without expectation in others.

how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?

Speaking as someone literally brought up in a cult like environment, it’s just one of the many nonsense word-salad doctrines that people live by when those people were never able to separate their feelings from their world. IE: there is a segment of the population who do not have a distinction between an outside world, separate from their feelings about it.

This is a reflection of how the brain works at a most basic level. It’s not a logic tool for reasoning out problems, not by default at least. It’s default instruction state is to assemble experiences and associations to write a story to explain how you feel, and it doesn’t actually have objective understanding about the world, so those stories do not need to make sense.

When you really, truly internalize and digest this fact, you will understand so much about yourself and others. You can overcome some depressive episodes and know how to make people like you, how to manage addiction and unhealthy behavior and how to avoid being manipulated by others, and so much more. It’s vastly important we understand this about our brains.

You have to actually train your brain to actually analyze and understand the world around you in a way that shows you how you and the world relate to each other. Most people don’t do this work, but brains are good enough at taking advantage of your environment that they can still get through life… but it leaves a lot of room for huge errors in reasoning. In fact, it’s not conscious reasoning at all, it’s story-building followed by total acceptance of this story without question because you think it’s you reasoning, but it’s just how your brain weaves narratives in your mind.

So for the people who never learned this distinction, they just feel a thing, and then either let their brains assemble a story to explain it, or they latch onto someone else’s supplied story. This is how people are manipulated on mass scales.

“Jesus died for your sins” makes no logical sense, but it’s not meant to, it’s meant to make you feel like something is being done about the thing you worry most about, if you’re going to see your loved ones again in heaven. That’s a paralyzing fear for almost every human who’s ever lived. Our awareness of death has opened a huge vulnerability in our reasoning skills and caused us more death and harm than if we didn’t worry about it so much.

Once you have a McGuffin that makes you feel protected from this thing you fear most, you are more likely to reinforce and build further narratives around this idea to protect it. To not protect it, to dismantle it and try to figure it out is literally painful to many people, because it invites in the question… What if you’re wrong?" and even approaching that question makes people who have never processed these emotions absolutely fall apart.

edit: I want to add one thing, that the more you think about the really hard thing, your inevitable end, it becomes easier to accept and make peace with. Especially as you get older and more aware of your own limitations and realize you’re kinda stuck on rails in this life. There is no bigger story or experience you will miss out on.

No you’re right, it’s a horrible term that was spawned by the very people who wanted to sabotage our better world. The people who introduced the idea that there were “sides” in a “gender war” are particularly likely to be written about in our granddroid’s textbooks as the scourge of our world.

We are wired to be social, to bond with others and mate and raise families and babies and love our little communities. It’s not that hard it’s just that we’ve allowed it to become so toxic and complicated because we also have over-developed internal simulators that constantly run simulations of the worst outcomes, and it makes us nervous about how others view us. Bad people have leveraged this fact to make us all hate each other and ourselves.

Forgive me but I do have some difficulty with your English, but if this is the point you are making:

Some could says we want reforms police, and use a different word. We do not. Institution reproduce themselves through the people in it. Even the most social advance organization for “law enforcement” with former cops in it will go wrong.

Then I will say, just because we are likely to make the same mistakes over and over is not an excuse to stop doing a thing if it helps, and I cannot subscribe to the belief that just because a thing CAN go wrong that it necessarily MUST go wrong. We can manage our world better with better policies and social structures, to abandon something just because it’s been misused is like not using dinner knives anymore because they’re used for stabbings.

Either we abandon modernity or we overhaul our system for maintaining and preserving it. I would respect the anarchist position more if it said that we need to return to a more primitive lifestyle. I would still think it’s dumb, but I would respect it more.

We hate our police, but we would hate the alternative more. Those two facts can exist side-by-side without conflict, it’s called nuance. I want a shining, gleaming future where people leave their doors unlocked, but we don’t get there with police, and we also don’t get there without police. We need new structures for dealing with evil, and we need to do a lot better in admitting and recognizing that evil is real and it WILL take advantage of whatever utopian visions you have. It just will.

I used to find these kinds of comics funny until they started getting leveraged by our dumbest segment of the population to continually rage-bait the very worst conversations from both sides, until everyone became so horrified by what they think the opposite sex thinks and feel about each other, that we all just stopped trying to get along and date and make friends.

This lack of community and dead hope for basic things like family and healthy relationships and love and all the struggle and reward that comes from making families is what’s broadly harming our society across the world.

There is a long history of Anarchism, and because of this history, nobody is going to latch onto the idea broadly. Both because it originated in a group of people who literally just wanted to destroy all existing systems with violence and killed a lot of people, and because it’s kinda dumb, and because if you want a more just and comfortable society just go with socialism.

There’s a ven diagram of “libertarians” and “anarchists” and the huge overlap zone is people who have really, really weird issues with authority and think themselves too special to be part of a bigger system, but want all the benefits of living in an ordered society.

Sorry guys, you’re gonna have to learn to deal with your parental issues.

If you thing that currently, cops are protecting people being abused, you are misinforms.

If you think we don’t need cops, you’ve never needed cops.

Our problem isn’t law enforcement as a concept, it’s how we manage (or don’t manage) the people who are supposed to work for us. The whole institution needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, but we need societal guardrails. I’m sure there are many ways you can effectively work on reducing domestic abuse but we need people who can enforce the laws of the people by force, who are also bound by the governing body that the people control.

Get the chip off your shoulder when talking to adults, I hope the country I live in but don’t represent manages to get its shit together and they don’t do the bad things they want to do to you. You need to understand who your friends and enemies are here. I won’t see a reply, take a walk and blow off some steam.

If you take that kind of persecution complex away from this conversation instead of realizing that we need to rethink our approach and work on finding actual political power, you do deserve all the blame.

I fully agree, but that US imperialism is powered by tens of millions of people who listen to Rogan and Musk every day and think the US military are like the badass heroes in the Transformers movies. We don’t make traction telling them “ARMY BAD” we make traction telling them to stop believing what they see. Carts and horses.