By just reading the title I can say that you grew up in hell. Now let me read your description to see if it was normal hell or super hell.

Edit: So it looks like you grew up in normal hell. Which doesn’t diminish the impact it has on you. I personally grew up in normal hell but had friends that grew up in super hell.

There’s probably a lot you have yet to process. I still randomly have shit come up two and half decades later and realize how abnormal it was. Also fuck your dad and your brother. Both them are assholes that are probably repressed dipshits. I hope you can get past it and not let it fuck with your life too much.

Mark and Sarah King are the web admins and claim to have been designated to stay behind on the away mission to continue to spread their message. Although there’s still some contention around them from ex members that left before they all put on the white suits, laced up their Nikes, and drank the kool aid.

I vaguely remember a documentary where they were interviewed but can’t recall many specifics. There was also a sub reddit that (supposed) ex-members used to post in and many of them had a bone to pick with Mark and Sarah King about some of their claims.

I’m genuinely curious what you thought the joke was when you thought they were all physicists. Also I’d be way more afraid to get on a plane that a bunch of physicists came to a consensus that it was unsafe rather than a bunch of whacky scam artists that thought was unsafe because magic beans or whatever.

It’s kind of hard for me to tell on this one. Maybe the boomer lead is seeping into my brain.

Look some people keep sourdough starter for generations. Just because they don’t necessarily make sourdough for 37 years with it is no reason to shame people for their hobbies. /s

Fun fact there’s an ancient sourdough yeast that is thought to be several thousands of years old. It’s not a virgin though and gets around quite a lot!

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220711-the-worlds-oldest-sourdough

Any % cancer speedrun

Yeah certainly not the fucking Mormon church though. Literally would rather it go to a crackhead at peak addiction so they can throw a $450,000 crack party then those fucks.

You don’t get to vote but also you might need to see a doctor. I think you might have ingested way too much colloidal silver. Like this guy

Here’s a more straightforward test. Please share the RGB value from the site below that most closely matches your skin tone and I’ll let you know if you pass or fail.

https://rgbcolorpicker.com/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_of_the_United_States

Well huh… I guess you mgiht be a bit wrong.

Edit: To further clarify, everyone in the actual region calls the coastal states the east coast. That includes New England and the Southern states that touch the Atlantic Ocean. I say this as someone who has lived in every coastal state except for Maine and Florida. So if you try to use “the east coast” to refer to New England, at least in the region you’re talking about, people are going to think you mean the states on the coast…

I regret to inform you that Nintendo is suing you for using their copyrighted trademark “Nintendo” without express written consent. That will be an additional $80/per minute to exist. Failure to pay will result in no longer existing.

Is faggart like a new slur? Or do you just have questionable rhyming skills?

At least you chose a fantastic game to go out on. RDR2 is like one of the most amazing games ever produced! I still go back to it when I run out of stuff to play despite beating the ever living hell out of it.

Felt the same way about GTA. I don’t think the story is supposed to be serious though, but it certainly is disjointed and not very compelling.

Have you ever play the Mafia games? Those games felt like a much better story with the right mix of city destroying chaos. Not quite as open as GTA, but I don’t really think that’s a bad thing. I really enjoyed 3 despite the missions being fairly repetitive. There’s just something about running around killing the Klan that just doesn’t get old to me.

I was the opposite. I could absolutely destroy the ball at bat, but I would literally sit in left field and pick grass.

I think we’re probably in more alignment than either of us realize. You hit the nail on the head in a lot of ways especially calling out differences in what we were taught. Down to brass tacks, we have much different life experiences so we’re coming at it from different angles. I’m filling in the gaps that weren’t taught to me and I had to discover for myself. On the other hand, you’re filling in the gaps that weren’t taught to you and you had to fill in for yourself.

In the 80s and early 90s there was a sort of veneration of the founding fathers where I grew up. There was also a ton of propaganda about how the, “The evil north just wanted to destroy the south.” The cotton gin, as you correctly pointed out increased the demand for slaves, was reframed as a tool that would end slavery because you somehow magically wouldn’t need slaves to to pick cotton anymore. Reconstruction was reframed as the North needlessly trying to punish the south. The founders were enlightened individuals that just didn’t know that slavery was wrong. It feels kind of shit to go out into the world and have completely re-learn the history of the place you grew up because people didn’t want to admit that your own country has flaws.

With that being said, I see how a swing in the other direction could be damaging. It sucks no matter which way to be taught just one side of history. It doubly sucks for it to be the history of the piece of land you’re standing on.

I do find it interesting that it somehow swung that far back in the other direction, or that it was taught so much differently regionally (not sure if it’s an age difference or a regional difference between our experiences). I think perhaps the best way to make sure we all stay on the same page is to have conversations like this though!

I get where you’re coming from and why you typed up 4 paragraphs condemning his horrible actions before we are allowed to acknowledge that he did one or two okay things.

I think it’s important to me personally for this specific figure. I grew up a leftist atheist in the deep south. When I learned about TJ, he was a very appealing figure to me. He was largely anti-establishment, anti-institutional, and at least mildly anti-religion. He was also, on the surface level, pro-science and pro-scientific method. He went as far as to re-write the Bible with all the miracles removed.

I say all this because when I was a teenager I pointed to him a lot as a bastion of progressiveness in America’s founding, and often used him to argue that the US was not founded as a Christian state because he clearly wasn’t Christian. The stuff I learned about him in textbooks and in school conveniently left out the much darker shit he did. It wasn’t until I started reading his own writings and finding non-history textbook recounts of his life that I saw the complete picture. He was sort of my first experience with a hero that falls short of expectations, and he fell extremely short.

It’s just frustrating that we still live in a such a racist society that you felt like you had to type that up before you could approach the nuance.

I don’t quite follow. I don’t think those were my motivations and I don’t quite understand the logic. I thought I did approach the nuance in my comment, but there’s way more that’s left out about the man. He was incredibly complex for sure!

I wish we could talk plainly to each other without this underlying paranoid one of us might accidentally come across pro the thing we are obviously very anti.

I don’t quite follow, but I personally don’t assume anything about you. I do agree that lemmy, and the internet at large, has become a weird obstacle course. I honestly can’t quite figure out the new purity test on the left that seem to be everywhere. I feel like you need to find your allies where ever you can (within reason). I do think paranoia of being infiltrated by right wing activist, and the long history of that happening, plays a big part in that paranoia. I agree, though, it’s more than mildly frustrating.

[My quote that you quoted for context] "I for sure agree that it is nuanced, but it’s also rather reductive to just leave it at, “he signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves.” [

I specifically said “While there’s no shortage of slave related evils to blame him for this is also the man who ended the trans atlantic slave trade.”

… down through …

I didn’t reduce anything, I specifically acknowledged his evils before giving him credit for ending the slave trade.

My apologies! I see how that comes off as directed at you specifically. Should have phrased that better for sure! I meant that more in the more esoteric, “when people at large do this.” Poor wording on my part! Didn’t mean to accuse specifically with that.

While that is exactly what ended up historically happening, especially due to the invention of the cotton gin, I would appreciate a source that this was Jefferson’s stated intentions.

I don’t think he ever outwardly states that was intentions because that would be far less self aware than he was about slavery. Here’s the source for his “breeding woman is worth more than a man”. I’m not sure if I can find the orginal source for it without really digging, but it’s widely accepted that he was in massive debt and perpetuating slavery was his only way out. He planned on ending the slave trade, but his actions and many of his writings seem to indicate that he planned on maintaining the system of slavery for his own gain.

I think there’s a few things in the quote you linked that seem to support that my position though.

… by bettering (Jefferson used the term “ameliorating”) living conditions and moderating physical punishment.

Is an example of a good thing within context. Which is kind of the equivalent of turning down the orphan crushing machine to a slower pace. Not even turning it off, just making it slower. Like yeah sure you aren’t as bad as those other guys but holy shit that’s still really bad. Which doesn’t really indicate to me that he was trying to stop it as much as make it more palatable.

Third, all born into slavery after a certain date would be declared free, followed by total abolition.

That date was conveniently far into the future where he would be able to keep slaves to pay off his debt. That seems… dishonest at best. It’s what several politicians do still. It just seems to indicate that he was attempting to keep slaves while also virtue signaling that he didn’t like slavery. Which again seems to support my position.

Jefferson’s belief in the necessity of abolition was intertwined with his racial beliefs… [to the end]

This seems to also point to him be hugely racist and believing that he could use black people like cattle to get out of debt cause they were “inferior.” I feel like what you quoted mostly supports what I’m saying. The dude perpetuated slavery for his own personal gain while denouncing it publicly to appear more liberal. I do agree he did several good things, and I like a lot of his more progressive writings. It’s just really hard to overlook some the absolutely fucked up shit he was doing to other people. All in the name of greed and to pay off his debts.

Fair enough! I think it’s a bit more complex hence the tangent that I didn’t want to get into. The man had 600 slaves during his life and he is often credited as freeing his slaves. He freed two. Which is a fair bit short of the 600 he owned. He denounced the slave trade as a “human right violation” but continued to own slaves himself. So he knew it was wrong and did it anyway.

He built Monitcello to basically run on slavery. He had dumb waiters and hidden compartments in the walls so his slaves could serve him and not be seen. He didn’t want his foreign visitors to know about them when they visited, because most other nations had denounced slavery as barbaric, hence the hiding them in the walls and behind pully systems. Which seems extra diabolical to make sure no foreign dignitaries brought back stories about how awful slavery was to their home country. Hiding his slaves like that really points to the fact that he knew it was wrong but did it anyway.

Yes he did end the US’s participation in the slave trade. His reaction to which was to have his slaves breed more, “…woman who brings a child every two years is more profitable than the best man on the farm.” Is a quote from his Letters on the state of Virginia (I believe that is the corrct source although it could be from one of his almanacs and I’m misremembering). He spent a lot effort trying to reduce infant mortality (which is a good thing) so that slavery could be more profitable (which is a fucked up psychotic thing). So he was outwardly trying to end the slave trade because he had a plan to perpetuate slavery by breeding. I don’t know if needs to be said again, but that seems to point to the fact that he knew it was wrong but figured out a way to do it anway.

He often had “relationships” (read raped) with his slaves, which seems to be more like prolific raping of black women than a “relationship” when held up to the light. He raped so many black women that there’s a absolute ton of his ancestry in the black American population still today. During his lifetime, and even for a while after, he hid the fact that he was doing this. In fact, it’s theorized that some of the children that worked on Montecello were in fact his own mixed race children. The fact that he hid his prolific raping and own children seems to point to the fact that he knew it was wrong and did it, to an unconscionable level, anyway.

I for sure agree that it is nuanced, but it’s also rather reductive to just leave it at, “he signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves.” He was outwardly antislavery, because he was trying to portray himself as progressive at the time while running an extremely regressive slave farm. His life and his views are just brimming with these sorts of contradicting actions too. So, you are absolutely correct in that it’s reductive on both sides of the discussion! I for sure think he was a monster and kind of think of him as a modern day “limousine liberal.” He ran around saying how slavery was bad while owning and perpetuating slavery. Much like limousine liberals run around saying the rich are destroying the country while riding around in their limo.

I feel like that’s incredibly reductive and it just kind of bothers me every time I see it. The Constitution was almost not ratified because there was a contingent of founders that opposed slavery. What’s important about that is that it completely destroys the moral relativism argument for the rest of them. Founders that supported slavery knew it was wrong and did it anyway cause they were greedy.

Well, except for Jefferson. His reasons are more rooted in being an incredibly lazy psychopathic rapist who had created a slavery powered life of luxury for himself. But that’s going off on a completely different tangent.

Just ruined 35 years of me avoiding spoilers. Thanks a lot.