I learned the pledge of allegiance way before I had understanding of the words “pledge” or “allegiance” or half the words we needed to recite. It has no meaning to a six-year-old, and by the time I was capable of understanding meaning I had so deeply ingrained it as an annoying meaningless ritual that it never crossed my mind.

I’m now in my thirties and reading your comment is the first time it’s hit me that the words are intended to have more ideological significance than putting your socks on. When you say it out loud it’s obvious, but having to perform or hearing a mention of the pledge has consistently gotten the same amount of attention from me as one pant leg going on before the other one.

I believe veganism is ethical but have failed repeatedly in attempts to give up comfort foods. A lot of tastes nauseate me, so I don’t intend to give it another try until I can afford the costs (in time, finances, emotional health) of trial-and-error to find more meals that work for me.

intrinsic critical thinkers whose nature overcame their upbringing

I’m going to push back on this because I don’t think it’s true and also because I think it’s harmful.

There are not people who are naturally inclined not to think critically. Just as much as upbringing can shape someone’s worldview, environment can shape willingness and capacity for introspection. People don’t think critically when they’re naturally predisposed to do that, they think critically when they’re either adequately distanced from the disincentives for reflection they’ve known forever or when the incentives for reflection create enough desperation to overwhelm.

I say harmful because is there anyone who sincerely doesn’t picture themselves as an intrinsic critical thinker? Everyone is already there, so the “intrinsic critical thinker” worldview means assuming some people you meet will be worse at it. “I’m naturally better at critical thinking than this person” is a mindset that provides a shortcut to dismissing this person’s viewpoints without actually evaluating them.

I never went further right than voting democrat, but I used 4chan occasionally for a good decade and I’m convinced that support of Trump’s campaign on there was well-understood to be a running joke until people unaware it was a joke started joining to participate. I’ll admit I wasn’t using it much anymore at all by that time, but when I saw comments about Trump support start popping up the first couple months my thought was “this is hilarious”. The idea of actual Trump supporters existing was not something I was capable of imagining at that time.

Ace and Demi have sex, it’s just not a primary motivator.

I am totally ignorant here, is there a difference between a low sex drive and asexuality? My expectation was that sex is not a primary motivator for someone with a low sex drive while someone who is asexual is not sex-motivated at all (like having sex is entirely treated as caring for someone else’s needs).

I’m hoping this reads as sincere, I always worry about whether my phrasing will come across as rude whenever I’m this spectacularly out-of-touch.

I just mean that I can understand where it comes from when someone is already close to their breaking point, and I think most people are about there. They’re not consciously deciding to bury their heads, because making a decision requires too much inspection to actually ignore it. Often when I was beaten down it’s like my mind selectively blocked out information as a means of protecting me, but I remained in denial about that until I started really getting out of the hole. I’m not sure I’d equate them to Trump supporters in a broader scope, but I do think the lack of inquiry here is not too different from Trump supporters.

I also think that with more animosity towards regular citizens, the more the conversation shifts from the powerful to the powerless. The impact of one citizen changing their mind is wholely insignificant compared to what a politician changing course would do.

I see that there’s no apprehension of “Prevention is better than cure”. You cannot wave away problems because they’re only going to return worse than before.

I’m not smart enough to piece together what you’re saying here. Prevention or cure for what? What does prevention look like? Why should we be apprehensive, it sounds like a reasonable statement?

There’s also demeaning people who see the atrocities for what they are and want to create awareness so they can minimize it. But are shamed for it.

I do feel this point and I’ll admit I’ve had many infuriating interactions. Now I try to just ignore until I cool down, because once I do it’s like this asshole isn’t worth that much thought. I have a limited amount of time to be angry, that’s better spent on the people who actually could make a meaningful difference by taking a stand.

Gonna disagree with some of the crowd here and say I think those people typically aren’t bloodthirsty/supportive of war. They’ve never believed many examples of inhumanity have been direct consequences of democratic leadership, and some (I have the Gaza genocide in mind here) they’ve never believed existed at all. They’ll see an “expert” voice an opinion that they’re already inclined to believe at present. The “expert” authoritatively cites evidence that they’re not familiar with, so seems legit enough. They’re not going to trust you to have knowledge the “expert” doesn’t, but they’re not interested in holding the discussion with you because they don’t carry the mythical knowledge that would win them the argument. They concede the point ahead of time to avoid conceding after a debate that didn’t convince them. It’s not forgetting, it’s pretending that they agree with your assessment.

A huge factor is how detached we are from atrocities that don’t touch us. I really believe that if one of these people had a friend or family that were affected by this, they would think a lot more deeply on culpability. I lived in Dearborn during the last election and I didn’t get the sense that muslims there were more likely to abstain from voting (or vote third-party) than non-muslims. I know this is partially a function of who I was talking with (mostly academia), but I’m convinced that a big factor was that all of us knew someone in our personal lives that had been emotionally injured by losing family.

There’s a good argument that ignoring atrocities is a moral failure, but I think most of us can relate. There are so many evils in the world today that if I actually spent time to think on even a fraction of them I think I’d be in a mental institution. That recent exposé on the dogs that were trained to rape prisoners, I can acknowledge it’s almost certainly real and that saying otherwise would be an injustice to the victims, but in my heart I don’t actually believe it happened because I don’t feel capable of managing the emotions that would come with accepting it. If you’re already overwhelmed by other aspects of the hellscape you live in, at some point reacting to horrifying headlines by throwing up your hands and booting up a video game becomes a survival strategy.

There are one or two examples where they weren’t. I remember reading from Watterson that he tried to make it work at first, but the newspapers needed the sunday prints much earlier in advance than they needed the weekdays and he quickly decided it was too much of a headache for him.

There was a camping (fishing?) story that included a sunday, I can’t remember if that was the only one. Either way we’re well past that era by this point.

What does it even mean for one person to be 50% more intelligent than another person?

how much are you paid?

I don’t remember exactly, but I remember feeling insulted by the stipend because I spent more on parking in downtown Detroit and had no means of transportation into the city other than driving myself. I had such a hard time finding cheap parking spots within reasonable walking distance of the court.

Growing up we only got the sunday paper, so the big sunday strips were the only ones I’d get to see at publish time, and I only caught the last couple years of those before he retired. This is my first time really experiencing them this way.

I honestly really love getting these posted daily. There’s something special in actually going through these one-a-day. I binged all the books as a kid, but I only remember bits and pieces. When I saw the break-in reveal I remembered the ‘we’re all “someone else” to someone else’ line/panel was upcoming and I think there’s a strip soon of Calvin sitting down staring at the wall that the tv used to be in front of, but I don’t remember any of the other parts of this storyline.

The past few days I’ve been looking forward to hearing Hobbes’ explanation for letting the burglars off the hook. It’s gotta be coming in the next strip or two. My best guess just off knowing the personalities is that he reframes it as scaring them away and all they got was the television.

The juxtaposition of the two polar contrasts works so well because both are relatable.

A friend once texted me that she really liked my writing and said “It sounds like you”, with “sounds” italicized. It was like she was just focusing on my writing and hadn’t even thought through that using “like you” as unambiguously complimentary is a bigger compliment towards me than towards my writing.

I was really passionate about math for years, and I spent most of my free time on it. When I got to grad school and I had to do it to survive my passion dried up. I think it became harder to have fun when I knew I wouldn’t be free to put a project down if I wanted to, and when math stopped being fun I stopped being good at it.

I passed all my coursework and exams but I burned out before finishing my dissertation and dropped out seven years into my phd program. It’s six years later and I still barely touch it. I passed qualifying exams in algebraic topology and today if you asked me to compute a homology group I’d be clueless.

I’m not going to discount that monetizing your passions works for some people, but the experience of finding out you’re not one of those people is soul-crushing.

Removed by mod

I really love this one, especially the first panel.

Before I lost my sense of smell I was absurdly sensitive to ranch. If my ex opened a ranch dip in the apartment I would be dry-heaving very quickly. When I was a kid I would sometimes move seats eating lunch at school because other kids had ranch doritos. Not having to deal with that anymore was a rare positive to come out of my awful experience with covid.

I can enjoy coldcuts and cheeses, but they’ll make me sick if they’re not extremely fresh. In some cases they already smell and taste like they’ve gone rancid fresh off the slicer.

Pancreatitic sepsis fucked my tastebuds, my hospital stay was extended a full week because I couldn’t keep down foods other than sweets. They actually restarted me on the feeding tube because of that. When I went off the NPO and got to eat again for the first time I asked for a spicy sandwich from Chick-Fil-A, I’m pretty sure it was just an ordinary spicy sandwich but in that moment it tasted like the spiciest thing I had ever eaten in my entire life. I don’t like the taste of water anymore, which is miserable.

Ever since I had pancreatitic sepsis I hate the taste of water, it’s so frustrating. I mostly drink a few specific zero-sugar sodas now, I wish the prebiotic sodas weren’t so expensive because they would be the best solution.

I think it’s increasingly easier to feel empathy for a killer the more steps there are between them and the trigger. I personally find it much more jarring when someone can just fully turn off empathy when given context. A lot of the time what you’re talking about goes hand-in-hand with dehumanizing the impoverished, that’s the one I can’t fathom.