Exactly, the same mindset that takes you to “The entire geophysical establishment is wrong/lying about the shape of the Earth, so I’ll listen to this Youtube crank who says it’s a disc instead” will also lead you to things like “The entire medical establishment is wrong/lying about the effectiveness of masks & vaccines, so I’ll listen to this podcast crank hawking horse dewormer instead.”

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

Insulting someone via stereotype doesn’t show that they’re wrong. You’ve added less to the discussion than the person you’re attempting to mock.

No, a conspiracy is when people get together and conspire, i.e. they develop a secret plan of action for nefarious purposes. In the strictest sense, the term “conspiracy theory” just means that you’re theorizing that some people have secretly planned to do something. If you theorize that some wrongdoers have developed or enacted a secret plan, and it later turns out your suspicion was correct, then by definition you had a true conspiracy theory.

No shit Sherlock, that’s the whole point of Stochastic Terrorism—your adherents read between the lines and do your dirty work for you while your hands stay clean.

When your followers have a history of making violent threats against the people & organizations you point their attention towards, and you make no attempt to rein them in or change your own behavior, guess what? You’re complicit.

Nah, in two of the three Gospels that contain the story, the storm only calms after Jesus gets in the boat. One of them adds a bit where Peter walks out into the storm to meet him. In the third, the boat is just… instantly at its destination once Jesus boards, with no mention of the storm calming.

You might be confusing the separate instance of Jesus sleeping in a boat during a storm and commanding the waters to be still after the disciples wake him.

Geez, the Bible sure does say a lot of needlessly nasty and hateful things that are used by religious bigots as justification for their cruel actions—almost like it’s the flawed product of ancient human cultures and their outdated values, and not a timeless divinely-inspired message from a perfect, unchanging, infinitely-wise being who loves and cares deeply about every single human being.

No, because absolute size is not what makes a moon a moon. Our Moon is a moon because it directly orbits a planet, not a star. Charon is massive enough relative to Pluto that the former does not directly orbit the latter, but instead they both orbit a common barycenter located between them, making them a binary planetary system.

Did he specify one Earth year though? ‘Cause Mercury completes a trip around the Sun in less than three months. If we include exoplanets we could get it down to less than a day.

Glad you live and work in a place where biking is a viable option, but it’s the complete opposite for me. It takes me 20 minutes to drive to work on a route that would take three hours by bike just because of the sheer distance, and there simply are no bus routes out to where I live. Not saying we should stop advocating for better mass transit and bike-friendly urban planning, but just bear in mind your situation is not representative of everyone else’s.

The article says she has grandchildren, so her genes are still very much out there. Natural selection only works if it can get to you before you reproduce.

I just want the “hard-g because graphical” crowd to really commit to the bit and start insisting that JPEG be pronounced “jay-feg” because of “photographic.”