in middle east i wish everyone involved regime change, situation is fucked with any of current people in power staying in power. Put Netanyahu, Assad, Erdogan, Khamenei and their cabinets and top people from Hezbollah in Hague then we can talk.

Great man theory doesn’t stop being great man theory if you add “and their cabinets” after.

At some point you need to engage with the problem of why things are the way they are, and the answer isn’t “The bad guy is in charge (and his cabinet)”

I appreciate your good humor since I think I came off as hostile

IMO the fact that fastfood jobs are considered temporary bootstrap jobs that you’re expected to be exploited to hell is bullshit and an indication of the absolutely broken moral compass of the corporate world. We could do without fast food, but that doesn’t mean we should pay them them minimum wage. Everyone deserves a livable wage no matter what they do.

I guess my perspective is that we’re talking about what OP wants to do in the present world, not what she could do in a hypothetical utopia (or just fairer society). So yeah, fast food jobs could be less terrible and should be, but at the moment they are absolutely not something to aspire to or even to recommend in many places because, again, they don’t even pay enough to live. Maybe OP is still living for free with a friend, in which case I guess it’s better than nothing, but in general it seems bad as a survival strategy.

Speaking for myself as someone who was dismissive, my best contribution to the answers here is that it’s reductionist to a seriously misleading extent. It seems like you have a couple of conditions contributing to your struggle, but it all gets reduced to “your number is too low.” As others have alluded to, how much of that is your adhd? How much is from some condition you may have that hasn’t been diagnosed because you have been unsupported throughout your life? I don’t think anyone is denying that you have real neurological conditions that hinder you, they just doubt low IQ as being a meaningful description of what you’re facing compared to something that gives a better causal explanation.

I’m sorry about how you were treated. That was fucked up and you didn’t deserve it.

I don’t think it’s over for you, it’ll just be difficult. You’re clearly able to overcome (presumably with effort and time) some of what you talk about since this is pretty well written.

Alcohol is pretty hazardous on all levels (I assume that’s what you cite as an addiction) but if you need pot to function, I see no problem with that besides it being another expense. It’s probably worth finding a support group in your area with respect to the alcoholism, though.

As far as I know, low IQ, insofar as we treat it as a credible concept at all, doesn’t correspond to not being able to do things, but it just taking longer to learn them. That’s probably not much of a consolation with respect to all that you’ve been through, but it’s relevant for looking forward because it means you don’t need to write things off as being something “for smarter people,” though there are definitely circumstances where the extra time it takes could make something not viable (like needing more time in college representing a significantly greater financial burden, possibly).

I think you can do it. Just remember that there is no shame in leaning on others; We’re a social, cooperative species.

If everyone was engineers and lawyers we’d have major problems keeping shops and fastfood open.

Alright, this is a little condescending. I think OP can aim a little higher than that and frankly probably will need to if she wants a living wage.

The fast food industry is basically a way for corporations to extract a pretty significant amount of labor value out of teenagers and the most desperate in society and all for the end result of contributing to society’s bad health. It’s not like society would collapse without it, unlike something like carpentry.

Lastly, insofar as IQ is a valid concept at all, studies say low IQ alone doesn’t prevent you from learning anything, it just makes it take longer to learn.

Edit: I apologize if it comes off like I’m going off on you, I just felt some things were worth noting. I like the rest of your comment.

I didn’t realize Mohammed bin Salman is part of KHamas.

Please call Tara Reade a Russian asset, just so we’re clear on everything

Among the most-viewed misleading claims where X failed to add accurate notes were posts spreading lies that “welfare offices in 49 states are handing out voter registration applications to illegal aliens,” the Democratic party is importing voters, most states don’t require ID to vote, and both electronic and mail-in voting are “too risky.”

This is just normal Republican lies. There’s no particular reason to attribute it to foreign influence. In fact:

One false narrative—that Dems import voters—was amplified in a post from Elon Musk that got 51 million views. In the background, proposed notes sought to correct the disinformation by noting that “lawful permanent residents (green card holders)” cannot vote in US elections until they’re granted citizenship after living in the US for five years. But even these seemingly straightforward citations to government resources did not pass muster for users politically motivated to hide the note.

This appears to be a common pattern on X, the CCDH suggested, and Musk is seemingly a multiplier. In July, the CCDH reported that Musk’s misleading posts about the 2024 election in particular were viewed more than a billion times without any notes ever added.

It seems like some of it is nearly-openly lead by the platform owner, with judgements on veracity handed down from him to his fanboys.

The calls are coming from inside the house. You can’t pin everything on foreigners, least of all things where you have no specific information on them being to blame.

“But bots!”

Even setting aside that the article doesn’t attribute even most of what’s happening to bots (hence its title), that’s not an adequate counterclaim. Do you really, really think that among the mountain of Republican think tanks and other organizations, none of them are running a bot farm of even a few dozen accounts, like the 45 cited in the article? Granted, it could be Russia (logically, it probably isn’t China, which Republicans are usually harder on), but there have also been domestic operations, haven’t there?

Here’s an easy example that does not directly “prove” the above case is not foreign interference (again, it’s at an overlap point of the interest of different groups) but demonstrates that it clearly seems that there are domestic bot nets doing numbers and thus that such a possibility needs to be considered for other cases where a Republican bot net might have an interest.

Defensible sentence technically, but I think it’s actually plausible with three hads and the second past perfect makes the sentence unnatural.

I think there are multiple things one can complain about, I was simply objecting to your minimizing one of them. I think even within that modified statement there is malicious (or perhaps self-victimizing) mischaracterization, but I don’t feel like arguing about the other statements as others can probably do just as good a job and have more enthusiasm than I do for endlessly re-addressing the same complaints, which increasingly feels to me like the main dealing Hexbear has with liberal comms.

I have no interest in debating the broader issue, but your bolding here is silly:

Even without talking about possible links with CCP, Kremlin etc…

The idea of us being connected to either group is a harebrained conspiracy theory, so I think speaking of it as though it is credible while saying you won’t talk about it is classic apophasis, i.e. a rhetorical device for making insinuations about something you want to denigrate while dodging responsibility for doing so.

I’d more say that the military occupation was done for the sake of confrontation (this is similar to the official Chinese line). It was a really senseless invasion, as far as I can tell (and I disagree with the Vietnamese line that the war was expansionist).

Come on, you’re more well-read than this. You know that military occupation and annexation are not the same thing.

If I was just complaining about border skirmishes, then I’d mention India or something. The attack on Vietnam was more than just a “minor border skirmish”.

the map is far more accurate than it is not though

Come on, Yog, we can hold ourselves to a higher standard than this. It’d be so easy to just color in Vietnam and then you’d be set, but by posting it in its current form you are actively lying.

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The one is not the other

Arendt is one of the more overrated authors in America short of the founders, but she has a point about how, when you are removed from the brutal nature of the violence, you can just sort of shuffle it into your day-to-day activities. Sure, you can certify the paperwork, it’s just letters on a screen. Hell, you can even administer the needle, as it’s not your job to concern yourself with his innocence or guilt, it’s your job to use this specific set of injections to kill him in a visually benign way. Separating arbiters from brutalizing and brutalizers from arbitration makes the flagrant injustice much more palatable to both parties.

Frequently they blame ““communist”” politicians for letting the immigrants in

I see. I neglected an interpretation and it was important. So if someone says, for example and not necessarily making assertions about the OOP, that “I’m trans because I was born with a micropenis and that fuckin’ sucks,” your internal response would be “This person is trans, but doesn’t understand why they are trans.” [Or that it is likely that they don’t understand, and see what I said before about this implying it is true of some hypothetical people]

Is that a more fair representation of your view?

(I put this under the wrong comment at first somehow, but also I was partly using information from that one)