Yesterday, twenty elementary school children were killed in a school shooting. It involved automatic weapons, a mentally unstable 20-something’s family dynamics, and a billion broken hearts.
Following a tragedy, everyone wants to get on a soapbox and talk about their respective grievances: gun control, mental health care, media privacy violations, religion… I even heard a rant about cities being the root of all modern evil. I’m getting on a soapbox about soapboxes.
It always comes to blows after an emotionally stirring tragedy because people are electrically charged with their reactions. That’s the problem; it’s all reactionary. It’s grief. It’s sudden and painful and overblown. There are deaths, some people scream to ban the weapons, then others scream that it’s not fair to, and it swirls around and degrades into a slurry of sensationalist and apologist bullshit.
We have to dissociate the grieving town from the social issues. We can grieve quietly with their community for something we will hopefully never understand for ourselves. But for considering the future of our policies, we have to be calm, because no one will ever take you seriously when you’re contributing to a cacophony. There are important issues afoot, and they all bear discussion, but that discussion isn’t going to happen by lobbing from-the-hip arguments back and forth in the comments thread on your acquaintance’s wall post that they shared by three degrees of separation from a political Facebook page.
I’m tempted to give my two cents on each of these issues, but this is about the method, not the content. Instead, as an example, I’ll leave a link to a TED talk here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonas_eliasson_how_to_solve_traffic_jams.html
Watching this unrelated, neutral assessment of social policy and nudging mass behavior can help frame the question of gun control not in terms of banning and second amendment rights, but in terms of a reasonable and practical ways to influence it in the right direction.
Thinking and feeling, not just feeling; that’s what I’m asking for.
Dragonflies.
I learned something about them recently. We’re wrong about them. We named them wrong. We’re just biased, because we only see them when they’re buzzing about.They spend years in their larval state, little waterborne creatures, flitting around in the pond.
By the time we see them, they’re not their normal selves anymore. They’re this wicked, powerful, predatory creature designed to burn out the energy supply for its last few weeks. They emerge from the metamorphosis soup with this insane instinctual hunting prowess. They’re 99% muscle mass! They’re in Final Boss Mode! Their last days aren’t spent sick. Their last days are spent as an armored tank, tearing through the ecosystem, fighting, feeding, fucking.
So we’re only half right: they’re really not much of a fly, but they become the very definition of dragons.
“Dragonflies are arguably the most sophisticated hunting and flying machines ever produced by evolution.” - Anthony Leonardo, researcher at HHMI Janelia Farm’s dragonfly research facility
Autumn.
by fotomassimo
Unbelievable.
You see the weirdest things at parks in LA. This guy was bench-pressing this goose for ten minutes.
wat.
Abstract
To understand the complexity of human cognition, it is important to account for how the various cognitive functions play off of one another during a complex cognitive task. This “cognitive choreography” was previously investigated by Anderson and colleagues (2007), in an attempt to assassinate the president of Russia. They narrowly failed, and, as a result, were forced to flee the country. They were detained at the border, but ultimately retrieved by CIA operatives. Their full report is cited below. Neurological data are presented.
“Welcome to the internet” is such a bullshit argument for things like this. Just because this happens all the time doesn’t mean it should just be accepted. When someone gets upset that another person treated them terribly on the internet, the common response is “welcome to the internet.” Fuck that response. That just means you’re saying it’s okay to be a jerk because everyone’s a jerk. If you stop being such a jerk, then maybe someone else will stop being such a jerk, and then maybe there will eventually be fewer jerks. Seriously, grow up and wise up.
Acceptance of bullshit just means you like swimming in bullshit. You know where that stuff comes from? Bulls’ butts. Fucking gross, man.
When people say ‘welcome to the internet’, they mean that throwing a hissy fit on the internet is just as productive as shouting at a cardboard cut out of Rick Santorum because he’s a jerk. Will that make Rick Santorum less of a jerk? Fuck no. The internet is not real life. If someone on the internet is a jerk to you, and you really take it personal, then you’re not going to live a very rewarding life. When someone IRL is a jerk to you, then it’s an entirely different matter.
That’s why people should stop being butthurt on the internet. It’s not real life. There’s a completely different set of rules when it comes to social interactions because when you engage in a conversation or something, you’re just words. You’re not a person, or an individual. I could talk about this for hours, but let’s just stay with this: stop confusing the internet with real life. It’s not healthy.
First of all, “hissy fit” and “butthurt” are words used by people on the internet to illegitimize the valid points or concerns of others. A “hissy fit” implies that we overreacted to someone stealing from us. We didn’t overreact. All we did was use some swear words. Naughty, naughty swear words. Being “butthurt” implies that we’re oh so very mad about it. As we said, stuff like this happens all the time. That doesn’t mean we can’t point it out when it happens. Point to the hissy fit and we’ll apologize for overreacting and skulk off in embarrassed internet user fashion. Hissy fit and overreaction below…
Calling the internet not real life illigitimizes the internet in a way that does not hold water. It’s not real life? What does that even mean? Is it not happening? When you interact with someone on Facebook, do you not actually interact with them? Chatting with someone on the internet makes it not real life because you can’t see the other person? They’re “just words”? If you get into a fight with your significant other on gchat, does that mean you didn’t actually fight? If you break up, should you not be upset about it because it happened on the internet and it’s not real life? Did you, Aelur, not just type out your real life thoughts and post them for others to read in their real lives? Are there not internet campaigns that make change in real life? Are there not hundreds of thousands of things and feelings that occur on and because of the internet every day, but they just didn’t happen because it was on the internet? You don’t have to be out in the sun for things to have an impact on “real life”. Yeah, go out in the sun and interact with people in person, but “real life” also happens in computers and on the internet because…
It’s fucking 2012. More than ever, people rely on the internet for communication, entertainment, education, dating, and the list goes on. Things happen on the internet, people feel on the internet, and these things are happening and being felt more and more every day. The internet is so intertwined with “real life” now that when you say the internet doesn’t count, you sound like a ten-year-old from 1994. Yes, social rules are different on the internet than if you talk to a stranger on a bus. But that doesn’t mean that’s a good thing. The line between internet and “real life” is already blurring and eventually we’ll have internet chips in our brains and we’ll have internet in our glasses. Those internet social rules that allow people to be pricks to each other and steal from each other will more and more bleed into every day life because the internet is bleeding more and more into everyday life. It is important to try to maintain kindness and fairness on the internet, because soon the internet will affect how we interact with each other in person. It’s already happening like that, which is why bullying is becoming such a problem in schools. Kids are now growing up with and on the internet, and it’s okay to be a prick on the internet, so now these kids are being pricks to each other more and more in real life, and then kids are killing themselves. Be kind and fair here now, or else in 2025, your internet brain will make you go up to real people in real life and tell them to stop being so butthurt about real things in their real life, and you’ll look like a real life piece of shit.
All of that being said, our real point wasn’t about any of that. We didn’t mean to go on about all of this. Our main beef was that someone took time from their real life to go out of their way to strip credit from the work someone spent their real life time on. Credit where credit is due, etc. Stop stealing other people’s work, you fucks. Also, be kind and fair on the internet before your shitty internet rules and lingo command “real life”. Also? The word “butthurt” immediately makes anyone sound like a total wang, so try to use it less.
End transmission.
That’ll do, Cracked. That’ll do.
These daily-compilation style videos are all interesting to me, but this one really captures a lot of life in one second out of every day.
It’s not jaw dropping, but it’s worthwhile. Watch it.
In Corona, California there once was a road known by most locals as the Never Ending Road. Specifically, the road’s true name was Lester Road. Now, over twenty years later, the landscape of Corona has changed, and the Never Ending Road is no more. However, years ago, Lester Road was an unlit road that people claimed became a never ending road when driven at night. The people who made such a drive were never seen or heard from again.
The legend became so well-known that people refused to even drive Lester Road during the day. One night, like many teens my age, I drove up Lester Road, but only a short distance, and in my headlights it did look like it went on forever. Frightened, I quickly turned around, because if I continued up the road, I thought I might never return again.
Perpetuation of the legend convinced local law enforcement to investigate. Lester Road took a sharp left turn at its end, and there were no guard rails. Beyond the curve lay a canyon, and on the other side of the canyon was another road that lined up so well with Lester Road that when viewed from the correct angle, especially at night, the canyon vanished from sight, and the road seemed to continue on up and over the hill on the other side of the canyon. Upon investigation of the canyon, dozens of cars were found, fallen to their doom, with the decomposing bodies of the victims still strapped to their seats.
Unsettling storytime!
