You’ll notice one of these countries still has enough money to bribe a FIFA official.

Bum, Aktuly.

It wasn’t Edgar. It was wearing Edgar. Like an Edgar suit.

I believe they’re talking about the FPS games invasive anticheat, not windows itself.

I’m sure the Blizzard/Activision game portal is also trying to suck out all my client data like a depressurizing spaceship.

(Though technically there are ones from China, but those are made for games with a Chinese audience)

That’s even worse! Stop stealing our games, China!

Also bugs

Very tiny lobsters

Red Lobster had you one step closer to living in the pod. We needed to kill it.

Chinese Spyware

Yeah, uh, think again bucko. Spyware in Microsoft is 100% home grown American, like God intended.

That’s Sam Altman’s data, and he will pen a very weepy Op-Ed in the Washington Post if he thinks for a single second that the filthy yellow dragon of the East might be trivially bypassing his lowest bidder security setup to download a trillion petabytes of Esports fast-clicker metadata plus all your credit card info.

Bet Alice is coming into Wonderland for the welfare benefits, and so that she can give her filthy little hellspawn birthright citizenship.

I thought all the Corps dropped the Kabuki this year because Trump frowned at it

You should work on that

I have more reason to hate Utah Mormons than just they’re different right?

A rationalization, certainly.

If I could get away with just purging BYU, LDS HQ, and the Utahn government I’d be more than happy to settle for that

Downright Israeli of you.

I am far less forgiving towards Evangelical mega churches

It just sounds like you’re on the warpath.

Outliers disprove the trend, its true.

They define it’s limits and illustrate it’s flaws.

But what I see most commonly referred to as “intelligence” tends to be phrased as “common wisdom”. You cannot simultaneously be “smart” and “wrong”. Therefore, placidly regurgitating the correct answers somehow signify more intelligence than painstakingly carving out another view.

I’m glad I used absolute terms with no nuance

Well, that’s sort of the joke, isn’t it?

Your ability to contrive bullshit and keep buying that bullshit, your willingness to terminate thoughts, your curiosity, and your ability to see why things matter and do shit like extend the scale of the self or take differing perspectives are all directly functions of various cognitive and psychological factors often called ‘intelligence’.

But all of that can still end in a racist worldview, depending on what directions you take your train of thought and what conclusions you find most plausible. That’s the old “FBI Crime Statistics” and “Social Darwinism” / “Bell Curve” gambit. And it works on a large number of proven intellectuals. FFS, James Watson - one of the pioneers of modern genetics - is a frothing racist. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is a Christian Nationalist. Being “smart” isn’t a panacea for being gullible.

At some point, “intelligent” people are more vulnerable to misinformation than their “dumb” peers, because they have more experience absorbing and applying advanced theories and philosophies without fully grasping how they work. The more advanced you get in any scientific field, the more you’re forced to accept on faith because you recognize you simply don’t have the time or the energy to delve down every academic rabbit hole. The end result is a certain scholastic dogma that people cling to because they simply accept prior generations have done the leg-work.

Present information in the pastiche of academia and you can reliably delude academics and scholars up front. Argue convincingly with the right jargon, present walls of data with citations and graphics, and follow the superficial mannerisms of trustworthy peers. You’ll catch lots of people who have trained themselves to correlate the structure of the presentation as inherently trustworthy.

By contrast, folks who aren’t familiar or experienced with a certain scholarly formulation won’t be fooled simply because they don’t know how to absorb the information or recognize the display as a trustworthy format.

I don’t see intelligence inversely correlated with racism either.

Increasingly byzantine rationalizations for why you’re an asshole used to be the centerpiece of conservative intellectualism. You could get a PhD in racism if you worked hard enough. The SCOTUS and the appellate courts are packed with people who can tie an argument in knots to justify some new level of human misery. The Pentagon and its contracting affiliates are stuffed with top tier engineers and logistical savants and IT professionals fully inducted into the white supremacist worldview.

Some of the most impressive feats of social engineering have occurred in order to perpetuate social anxiety between ethnic groups.

I can be bigoted over culture and religion

I have yet to meet a Utah Mormon whomst I didn’t want to feed to the Joshua Trees.

I’m always thrown back to the Southpark guys when I think about lay Mormons. The whole “All About Mormons” episode (nevermind the Book of Mormon stage play) absolutely eviscerates the philosophy. But their attitude to actual religious practitioners is inevitably that they’re just nice, simple-minded people. And going after any individual Mormon for their faith is a bit like going up to Santa Claus exhibit at the mall and screaming “Fake! Fake! It’s all bullshit consumerism! Your parents are buying the presents!”

There’s definitely shit people who are Mormon (Mitt Romney being the ur-example). But then there’s shit people in every religious and philosophical niche. My cousin is married to a practicing Mormon and he’s an absolute marshmallow sweetheart. All smiles, great with kids, quick to help anyway he can. Soft spoken, non-judgemental, a shameless teatoddler who is always happy to be the designated driver. You can raz him for being a bit bland and he’ll laugh at your jokes, then maybe tease you about having had one too many coffees.

It’s the people who are easy to bully and scare and intimidate that can make for a very dangerous “Silent Majority”, because they’ll just kinda go along to get along. But they’re also fundamental to a peaceful, productive, and happy society when benevolent and visionary leaders are at the helm. If your society is all contrarian, belligerent, hard-drinking, fist-clenching, radical revolutionary/reactionary agitprop breathing soldiers of fortune, what you get is just endless fighting and misery and slaughter.

Sounds like civility simping to me

Bartender say, “Jimmy Fallon, you’re not welcome here!”

😘