Why Is This Simple Fact So Hard For People To Understand

Spotted Towhees (Pipilo maculatus) look like someone took an American Robin (Turdus migratorius) and tried to make it "edgy."

By Pranav Tadepalli, CC BY-SA 4.0

And they really are edgy little fuckers, too. They'll pull up every single shoot that pokes its head above ground in your garden, and are very clever at getting through barriers. They do not fear humans, not further than you could lightly toss one.

If you find a roadkill or mysteriously-dead towhee in Spring, it's worth its weight in gold, because they are deterred by a corpse of their own species. The next problem is putting it somewhere these ground-feeding birds will notice it, without making it a free snack for the first scavenger that comes along.

It's hard to study contemporary American cryptids, because they don't have unique names. Instead of fanciful names like "Jersey Devil" or "Sasquatch," most new cryptids don't have distinct names, people just use common words like "woman" or "criminal," even when they're referring to imaginary, non-human beings with supernatural powers.

rocket man is a better song than space oddity and i will fight you over this

Oh, right.

I watched this a couple weeks before I came up with the bit about a triple-A publisher launching a video game that "plays itself for you," because they're that out of touch.

Must have still been kicking around my skull when I watched that Oxbox video about disturbing trends in the video game industry. The cringey XBox reveal in it prompted several pointed, well-reasoned comments, that was the other seed.

GAMES NEED AN EASY MODE.

Or maybe they don't. Today we look into it.

What does the asker think "propaganda" means? That's the least weird explanation for this, is that they've never actually learned what propaganda means, but their childhood guess, that it means something like "antisemitism" or "Communism" or "dictatorship" slots in to what they hear people saying close enough that they never realize they're misunderstanding everything.

If the asker doesn't engage with politics or history or social justice much, there wouldn't even be much chance of anyone noticing, until they get confused enough to send this ask.

how are you people alive.

the Guardian

US farms are forcing workers to buy inedible, expensive meals: ‘It makes you feel enslaved’

Employers hiring migrant workers through a federal program must provide food or cooking facilities. But many of those picking our fresh food

On an August afternoon, Pablo stared down at a foam plate sloshing with flavorless pinto beans and a particularly bad version of huevos a la Mexicana. The simple, usually delicious scramble of eggs, tomatoes, onions and jalapeños is difficult to mess up. But if anyone can find a way to make it unpalatable, it’s the cook at his labor camp. Soupy eggs are the last thing the 42-year-old from western Mexico wants to eat. But after a 12-hour day harvesting tobacco in the brutal and sometimes deadly summer heat, he must eat – and this was far from the worst meal he’s been given. A few weeks ago, fellow farm workers got sick due to raw and moldy food they were forced to purchase. On days like this, Pablo can’t decide which is worse: that he’s forced to pay $80 a week for this slop, or that everything about what he eats, when he eats and how much he eats is tightly controlled by his employer. Pablo, who is using a pseudonym due to fear of retaliation, is one of more than 35,000 migrant workers in North Carolina this year as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program, a guest visa program overseen by the US Department of Labor (DoL). The program enables American employers to hire foreign workers to perform seasonal agricultural work. Employers in the program frequently exploit their migrant employees, and the structure of the program makes easy work of it. Visas are tied to a single employer who must also provide housing, transportation and access to food, creating a crushing power imbalance between American employers and migrant H-2A workers.

--Hey, didja hear what happened to Brett?

--No, tell me!

--Well, last night, some assholes came out to his dock and ripped off his Johnson.

--What?! Is he gonna be okay?

--Yeah, he was in bed, he slept through the whole thing.

--How can someone sleep through getting their Johnson ripped off?

--Yeah, he's a pretty heavy sleeper, I guess.

--That's... so weird. But is he gonna be okay?

--Oh, he's not hurt at all. They never even came in the house.

--Wait, what?!

--They didn't actually make much noise. But now he needs to borrow your truck.

--To go to the hospital?

--Huh? No, to pick up his spare.

--His spare what?

--His spare Johnson. It's in his shop.

--Okay, why are you messing with me like this?

--What! He's got his spare Johnson up at his shop. He just needs your truck to bring it down here.

--He needs my truck. To pick up his spare Johnson. And attach it, right? After getting his original Johnson ripped off, and he didn't even wake up... or bleed out! Look, what the...

--Well, they didn't actually rip it off, I meant he got ripped off. They had tools, and they unbolted it from the back of the transom.

--...Transom??

--Yeah, you know, the board at the back of the skiff? Where the motor sits?

<long pause>

--You're talking about an outboard motor. A fucking Johnson brand outboard fucking motor.

--Uh, yeah? What did you think I was talking about?

This has been a major frustration of mine since I noticed it a few months back. I'm so glad OSP Red @comicaurora found such a clear and concise way to express it.

Every time I watch a Miniminuteman video, the comments are full of people just dunking on some random conspiracy theorist or fringe believer, just to make themselves feel better. I don't even think most of them are genuinely concerned, they just want to feel superior.

And I'm also noticing, more and more, that people who clearly consider themselves progressive seem to have forgotten that calling something "stupid" or "crazy," or calling the person saying it those things, doesn't refute or disprove it. All too often I see someone set out to "debunk" something, and wind up descending into a rant about how foolish or demented they think it is, or how mentally ill they think the person saying it is.

Not a good look if you're trying to be an advocate of science, logic, and tolerance.

Red's way is far better. Just focus on the truth, detail it out, and don't even bring up the post-consensus hypotheses, or the conspiracy theories which people build around them.

This character is debonair and very attractive. Very sexily attractive, and has a sexy accent to top it off.

But their knowledge of the common language is worse than just having a shaky accent... they get idioms comically wrong, all the time, in their sexy accent, ruining the effect. They'll say "Boum, schockolat" instead of "boom, shakalaka," for example.

When other characters try to correct them, they just flip their hair sexily and say, "My vairsion is bettair."

Fellas is it romantic to survive being incinerated together