Two things I need to ask:

• What inspired this question, exactly, and
• Can I have some, please?

Congratulations you just invented magenta

Mirrors can totally reverse top-to-bottom, you just have to bend over to see it. The left-right bias is based on the way we look behind us, not any property of the mirror.

This takes a little explaining.

A rotation is a reversal through two dimensions at once.

If you turn around to look behind you, you’re swapping front-and-back, AND left-and-right.

If you stand on your head, you’re swapping front-and-back AND top-and-bottom.

Stand facing the way the mirror does, then turn to look into it. You have to do some kind of rotation - a two-dimension reversal - to get there. If you’re a normal human, you’ll twist around, swapping left-and-right as you swap back-and-front. Your left and right ear swap places, your nose and the back of your head swap places too.

But your reflection doesn’t do that.

A mirror only reverses ONE dimension: front-and-back. It’s the equivalent of punching your face out the back of your head: its ears are still on their original sides. You have swapped left and right in order to face in the opposite direction, but your reflection hasn’t - so it’s ears are on opposite sides to yours.

But you can do it the other way.

Stand with your back to the mirror, and bend over and look under your arm (or between your legs) to see your reflection, instead of twisting around.

Hold something with writing on it, and you’ll see: the letters in the reflection are upside-down, but they face in the right direction.

The only reason you don’t see this very often is that it’s a fucking weird thing to do and nobody ever does it.

As for helping - I think that once they get far enough down the path, there’s probably not much you can do for them. But compassion is always a good thing no matter who you spend it on.

As is sparing a thought for the poorly-socialised, and for the lack of opportunities people have to just hang out in any kind of casual social setting, if you’re not already part of a friend group.

Someone works a shit job in a dingy office with three people they hate and no general public flowing through, they’re exhausted at the end of the day and even if they had a place to go they just want to go home. Weekends are for laundry and chores and recovering from the week - and besides, what are they going to do, head to some bar and spend all their money drinking alone, just getting aloner?

Most of the opportunities out there rely on having either a pre-existing set of people to hang out with, or enough acquired charisma that they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.

Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.

Nah, I’m just old - and I was the weird homeschooled kid; there but for sheer blind undeserved luck go I.

Cut bits of a girl baby’s genitals: jail.

Cut bits off a boy baby’s genitals: An occasion for a fucking party.

When you hollow out the middle class (in the US sense of the term), people go looking for a narrative to explain it, to give them a reason they don’t get (or can’t give their children) the lifestyle they were promised in the media.

One narrative that fits is corporate greed, late-stage capitalism, enshittification and staggering corruption.

Another narrative, however, is all this rampant social change going on, people changing the demographics, changing the rules, changing definitions, changing the comfortable rules of thumb they were used to - and now everything’s shit, the two must be connected, we need to slam the brakes and catch our breath, perhaps even go backwards, and maybe conditions will follow suit. Even if they don’t, change is a loss of control, and that’s scary. We need to pull our heads in, hunker down and take back what’s rightfully ours from those we’ve been forced to share it with.

Once people start looking through that lens, everything starts self-selecting to fit - and they start thinking yeah, maybe those guys had a point.

Yes, there’s horrible shitty filter bubbles on social media and 4chan and everything else, but this stuff doesn’t take root without the underlying socioeconomic issues driving it.

As for incels - I don’t think people realise just how much social privilege is involved in having a peer group during childhood and adolescence to develop the give and take of social skills necessary for actually courting a partner. Consider the weird kids, the fat kids, the (disproportionally) poor kids, the ones with a fucked up home life, who didn’t get to form stable relationships, who didn’t get the practice at human-wrangling, who maybe ended up in a socially-isolating job, who had no ‘third place’ to hang out with people, to socialise and to meet people they might be interested in.

And once people start out without social skills, it can be really hard to pick them up; the embarrassment and exclusion that can follow small fuckups get exponentially worse as time goes on. And you don’t have to be painfully awkward, you just have to… not have game. Just enough to kick you to the bottom of the rankings, so failure (or the likelihood thereof) stacks up and becomes progressively discouraging, so you don’t try and don’t get practice.

And then it’s the same situation: the world doesn’t work for them the way they were told it would; they do all the things that they’ve heard were supposed to work (but without any of the nuance needed to do it successfully), and it just doesn’t.

For some of them, they feel like they’re getting singled out to get ripped off, or that the whole damn system is rigged; it’s a big club and they aren’t in it, as it were. So they look for a narrative, they look for someone to blame, they look for the bad guy, they look for a coherent explanation of why they’re the victim here. And of course that spirals out of control and ends up in a very bad place.

I find that when food just isn’t working to abate hunger, what I actually need is salt.

Couple of fingers of jalapeno brine, the relief is incredible.

The issue is the coverups and deliberate efforts of the organisation to protect the people doing it and keep them in business.

5% of the general populace with the tendency isn’t nearly the same kind of problem as 5% of a group that has extended access to children, the power to blackmail both the victims and the parents, and the knowledge that they’ll get safely moved on to pastures greener if their stomping ground starts getting risky.

Weird guy on the corner is a risk.

Person you’re forced to spend entire days with unsupervised, and who claims the ability to have your entire family tortured forever if there’s any trouble, and has an entire global organisation watching his back, rather a lot more of one.

Give people power, and they will seek transgression as proof of that power. What’s the point of being supreme earthly authority over people if you have to just sit there and follow the rules? Rules are for little people, are you calling me a little person? Watch me prove my status by committing abominations and not getting punished!

This is especially the case when you load up the stakes with anxieties and resentments and jockeying for power with others and cognitive dissonance and all that jazz. Now they don’t just want to prove their made-man status, they need to. And that’s not even including malignant narcissism in the mix.

And the thing is, there’s a whole category of people who are legitimately impressed by this, who see rule-following as a hallmark of losers, and rule-flouting as a hallmark of winners.

See also: trump voters, cart narcs, anti-maskers, karens etc etc.

The priesthood is an absolute magnet for these kinds of people - and also a magnet for people struggling with shame, hoping to overcome it by being all holy-like, for instance, existing pedophiles.

And on top of that, corrupt power structures like this very often have a culture of mutually-assured destruction: people end up required to do something horribly incriminating themselves so they can’t blow the whistle on others - and once they start down that road, the justifications start piling up. See also David Cameron and the pig, and police in general.

Layer on a teaching that the reputation of the organisation must be protected even at the cost of people’s own children, and yeah, perfect storm.

No way in hell has this only been happening for the last few decades; it’s only in that timeframe that the church’s power has diminished enough for word to get out.

I am all about keeping it sustainable; nobody has willpower longterm. Any fool can come up with a diet of rabbit food and have amazing results for a month before their brain goes postal on them and they start inhaling cheeseburgers nonstop. Trust me, I totally get that. We always attribute vast reserves of motivation and discipline to ourselves that we just don’t have, and the results aren’t pretty.

But on the other side of the coin, your brain can get stuck in a short-term reward loop, and it howls blue murder when you first try to break out of it.

I’m an stress-eater and a boredom-eater, and if the loop gets out of control, not constantly snacking becomes stressful in and of itself, and yeah that’s a complete trainwreck.

But what I’ve found is that after a surprisingly short time of acclimating yourself to controlled amounts of hunger, you can break that loop. Your brain re-learns the difference between not-full and actually-need-calories, and only sees the latter as a problem.

What started out feeling like a catastrophe that you had to white-knuckle through just turns into a boring fact that takes little to no willpower at all to put up with at all.

It’s a really good investment of effort, and makes the whole process a lot easier.

Better: just learn to live with not feeling satiated all the time.

Not that you shouldn’t make vegies a significant part of your diet, just that a big part of the lifestyle change is learning to be hungry between meals as a normal and non-distressing thing.

Pretty sure I’ve been the only thebananaking since like 2009…

Trilogy started out meaning three works, but in common usage it generally doesn’t any more.

like I say, they definitely weren’t their best songs. But the way they slowly lead up to Soldier Side was fucking genius.

SOAD albums Mezmerize and Hypnotize.

Not all their best songs on those two albums, and some of them kind of sucked tbh.

However. How the fuck ever.

Listen to the entire pair, all the way through, in order, longhand. I don’t care, just do it.

When you get to the last track, Soldier side, it pulls together all the themes that have been foreshadowed and hinted at across two entire albums, and oh holy fucking shit. When it breaks, your jaw will drop.

Everyone you don’t like is a tankie.

Confabulation.

Look at split-brain patients: divide the corpus callosum down the middle, and you effectively have two separate brains that don’t communicate. Tell the half without the speech centre to perform some random task, then ask the other one why they did that - and they will flat-out make up some plausible sounding reason.

And the thing is, they haven’t the slightest idea that it isn’t true. To them, it feels exactly like freely choosing to do it, for those made up reasons.

Bits of our brains make us do stuff for their own reasons, and we just make shit up to explain it after the fact. We invent the memory of choosing, about a quarter of a second after we’ve primed our muscles to carry out the choice.

I think a chunk of this comes down to our need to model the thoughts of others (incredibly useful for social animals) - we make everyone out to be these monolithic executive units so that we can predict their actions, and we make ourselves out to be the same so we can slot ourselves into that same reasoning.

Also it would be a bit fucking terrifying to just constantly get surprised by your own actions, blown around like a leaf on the wind without a clue what’s going on, so I think another chunk of it is just larping this “I” person who has a coherent narrative behind it all, to protect your own sanity.

Counting the days until this is hacked and everyone on it gets doxxed.

The artist is just playing with foreground vs background; his body carries on from the open space under the chair, and the 3d nose becomes a curled wire when removed from its normal context.

There’s no ‘joke’ to get, except for your brain getting confused.