You can catch more flies with honey than with duckstack
AHHH WHO IS DRIVING THIS THING. Left and right and all over, I daresay this Duckstack is going to crash! Look out! When Duckstacks crash, expect feathers and quacking. Expect destruction, expect anger. But it is necessary. Jousting like this is actually the fastest way to level Duckstacks up. There’s a lot of casualties, but the survivors toughen up lightning fast.
The Cult of Calling People To Repentance
I paid $5 membership fee for this and there aren’t even ritual sacrifices
A really fashionable libtard trend that lasted for about 3 months was “deradicalization” efforts. Leftist talking heads would make a big deal about “growing extremism” in “right wing communities”, and then they would trot out guest former-right-wingers to testify of how brainwashed they were by the GOP into supporting states rights or whatever. Obviously this was mostly a power trip and an excuse to launch certain people into celebrity and give minor stars a chance to work their way up the pole a little bit by riding on the fad’s coattails, but everything that catches on tends to have a kernel of truth. In fact, extremism actually is bad- and communities really do cause escalation loops. The problem is more in the diagnosis, the attempts at explaining “why” young men were getting into these “dangerous communities”. I’m not involved in many leftist echo chambers but my impression was their main conclusions were “these guys were lonely psychos and when they found a bunch of racists they suddenly felt like being racist was okay” and “these guys are just so naturally full of hate due to their evil male nature that they got into it to propagate hate”.
Well. Both of those explanations are laughable, but they helped the leftists feel better about themselves whilst simultaneously not ceding any ground or having to acknowledge anyone at any point had any legitimate grievances, which is usually the way these things go. If there’s anything people love, its feeling 100% justified.
With conservatives these sorts of party lines emerge for the same reasons over things like abortion and gender nonsense, and the same goes for religion, or fighting with your spouse. The basic tell is, if you can’t go “they have a point” you probably aren’t listening. That doesn’t mean they have a good point, but they are seeing a real, though likely out of context or poorly motivated, problem. No matter what ideology you see someone as monkey-jar trapped in, they aren’t going to let go until their real concern is addressed or they see something legitimately better presented. You don’t get to decide what’s important to others.
But some people really want to. There’s a certain type of person who just loves being in the driver seat. Some people will radicalize and deradicalize until the world freezes over. If they were actually good at solving problems, their whole ego market would dry up! This is where you see “no compromise” types come out, and those types of ideologue have had basically totalizing command of power in America since 2008 probably.
This is where you get “purity spirals” and mutually assured excommunication from, and I do believe this is more of a vice for conservatives than it is for liberals, because conservatives values (like most male dimorphisms) have a much wider spread, whether its two baptist pastors splitting off to form their own churches or two conservative movement subgroups becoming bitterly jaded (desantis fans and trump fans) enemies over minor idealisms. Everyone’s trying to “deradicalize” each other. As an excuse to boost their own egos.
Is extremism even bad? I don’t think so. I think its necessary because the untamed wilds are where you find new stuff. There was a joke growing up that went, “Everything in moderation. Except moderation.” What we see in society is a great decrease in ability to engage with extremism effectively. Kind of like the kid who won’t try broccoli because it looks weird, I think society provides few “acceptable extremisms” nowdays so we have become xenophobic, afraid of the unknown. Most extremism does not actually lead to terrible evil, but it does lead to making the mainstream uncomfortable, and with the anti-violent way things are structured, that effect is compounded. But since everything has a kernel of truth to it, shutting down extremism most often compounds it. Because if the extremists are seeing a real problem, refusing to deal with it is only going to make more and more people aware of it, and that’s how you get Hitler.
Trump was voted in on a platform of radical change. Not just deportations, but mass deportations. Not just a government audit, but a mass audit. Not just trade wars, but mass trade wars. Trump said he was going to do all these things on the campaign trail, none of this was secret at all. And he won the most popular vote in history. How? Because liberals were too busy self-righteously scolding everyone and praising themselves for how nonjudgemental they are that nobody’s concerns got addressed, and a critical mass of popular sentiment was reached where people virtuous lies stopped being cashable checks.
The same thing has happened with gender relationships, with more and more men turning to extreme misogyny because nobody told them that just a little bit of misogyny was enough. A couple generations ago you had trite sexisms like “women are crazy”, and this basically helped men get past their egos in making concessions to the women they date. Now, the most framework the majority of children are equipped with for navigating dating and relationships is “men and women are identical and interchangeable”. And it causes a lot of problems. Anything is better than that. Believing psychotic things like “women do not have agency” would be a more useful model for navigating decisions than that- but we can do much, much better. We can provide a much better model for people to get along, by just being honest about the differences in motivations, perspectives, and development. But because people are not given anything better to understand the world, they build models of relationships from scratch, and not every boy and girl is built to be a psychology mechanical engineer. Girls raised feminist quickly come to believe men are full of “toxic masculinity” and that all sorts of standard things are evil, and boys raised egalitarian quickly find themselves in floundering marriages without the respect of their wives. The girls were told boys are like them, and construct a worldview based off their disappointing experiences, and the boys were told girls are like boys, and reconstruct sometimes decades late how to be a man. And thus everyone goes on to “extremism”, because nobody could humble themselves enough to stop telling noble lies. Whatever remains of the next generation, it will not have this problem- for better, or most likely, for worse. Because it will be too late.
Duckstack Health: Lockjaw
Caused by an overdose of iron (tetanus)
Children are born with invisible zippers on their lips, but its impolite to go around feeling for it, so when kids get out of hand adults will often just tell them to “zip your lips”, telling them to zip their own lips. But lip zippers are temporary- kids grow out of them, and the nature of being an adult is to command a degree of respect. Telling another adult to zip their lips is considered rude, even though they don’t have zippers anymore! I am not lying to you. Try it. I’ll wait.
With adults, you have something far more advanced: Lockjaw. Every adult has an invisible hole for an entire padlock to be used to keep their mouth shut when they’re being too loud. Of course, humans no longer have the strict hierarchies they did back in medieval times where lockjaws were actually used, but the structure remains. Nowdays, adults mostly use their lockjaw as a form of meditation, an excuse not to talk or interact. If you go to a buddhist temple don’t be surprised if all the monks are wearing locks around their jaws. Don’t talk to them, it isn’t polite- if you see a lockjaw, odds are it is an entirely voluntary process, and the key is readily at hand, and you do not need to help them look for it or scheme their way to breaking out. Leave them be, and perhaps you will find use for getting lockjaw of your own some day.
History
count your many blessings scream them 1 by 1
The toddler put a hat on a water bottle. “Hat water.”
The toddler fell and got a bit of a road rash on his hands. Holding up his bleeding hand he said: “This is a beautiful red color.”
We didn’t have any bandaids on hand so we drove him home. We heard him talking from the backseat: “How many fingers do I have. 10!” and then: “How many bloods do I have? 1, 2, 3. I have 3 bloods. We don’t want three eyeballs.” He’s right, on all counts.1
Wife asked me if I'm turning our son into a philosopher. “Huh?” and then I walk into the room and our son looks at me and says “an owie is a bandaid itself.”
My brother came over and the toddler was fascinated by his beard. “You’ve got hair on your chin. You gotta use papas hair come off thing.”
The baby has taken to walking up to you, handing you an applesauce, and then sitting down at your feet expectantly.
Animal Facts: Slug
“Slime monsters.”
Slugs are sentient (?) piles (?) of goo (?). Slugs slide (?) across surfaces to get to their food (?). Slugs do not like (?) salt. Slugs walk (?) on zero legs. Birds (?) like to eat slugs. Slugs carry (?) parasites and germs, which slugs may be very large germs themselves. Slugs favorite (?) game is wrestling. Lets give slugs a hand! (?)
Ducksnax
stargazing
counts. Heh.
From reading the Road Less Traveled, I came up with the following:
HEALTHY PEOPLE: constantly challenge their beliefs to verify what they believe is true. If they find their beliefs to be at odds with reality, they do the hard work of modifying their beliefs. LOVE TRUTH.
SICK PEOPLE: avoid anything that would cause them to challenge their beliefs. They avoid the hard work. AVOID TRUTH.
EVIL PEOPLE: seek to destroy all ideas that challenge their beliefs so they never can be challenged. HATE TRUTH.