The idea of being a loser or winner in life, and that there is an objective consensus that could accurately rank your value as a person, is fake. People as a whole don’t take the time to come to agreement on what matters, they don’t understand each other, and you don’t have a ranking, even theoretically. It’s only in your imagination, so make an effort to cut some slack and imagine yourself in a kinder way.

My main problem with it is the namespace ambiguity, especially with respect to plurality. For simple statements it’s fine, if you’re saying something about one person it’s going to be clear they are the one you refer to. If you’re talking about their relationship to a group though, unlike a singular pronoun it is no longer explicit that you refer to them but not them, for instance. You compensate for this by making sure your meaning is clear in other ways and it can be made to work, but the fact you have to put in extra effort to make up for “they”'s relative lack of structural utility is a serious problem with the word.

I still use it for lack of a better way to avoid implying knowledge/relevance of gender, but it would be nice if some overtly singular gender neutral pronoun like xe would catch on.

I suspect games tinker with the formula behind the scenes, to accurately place people faster if nothing else. The more players the longer it could take for the skill of any one to show up in the numbers, so I bet they factor in other game specific metrics at least at first. There would be some risk of this being abused, but that’s less if they keep it a secret and maybe the progress numbers shown to players aren’t quite the same as the real numbers used to decide who to match them against.

Personally I wish there was a way to filter out all the comments by people who haven’t read the article.

I had one in most of the apartments I lived in, but I was always having problems with them and needing to contact the landlord to fix it (some of this was my fault but still). Now that I have my own place I’m not going to install one, I don’t want to spend money if the result is mostly to get to maintain yet another thing, just to avoid shaking a drain trap over the trash every once in a while.

When I was a kid my father would always mute the ads, which was annoying to me because the images still demanded my attention and it was frustrating not knowing what they said. Now I don’t watch TV and know how to use adblockers so it’s a mute point.

I think a common conclusion in general, I dated a woman once whose mind went to that explanation constantly for all kinds of things and it was basically always a distorted picture of reality. I think people just don’t get needed validation due mostly to arbitrary bullshit and the world sucking and that makes it easy to buy into toxic self hating memes.

Well I guess he will find out based on whether or not she ever contacts him again.

Really though this does seem like the kind of thing where “it’s because you’re sexually repulsive” only seems like the obvious explanation because of insecurity brainworms.

But is chicken-ness actually defined by genetics? An important characteristic of a chicken is its domesticated status, if you consider the birds they descend from, they are remarkably similar, and it’s hard to imagine that any one mutation would have been what caused people to start calling them by their own name or considering them as a separate species. It’s possible that the first chicken became the first chicken when it was captured by humans, and so preceded the first chicken egg.

Arguments (especially political/ideological ones) framed as personal advice

I’m glad to see it at least, though maybe it would also make sense to be posted on !reddit@lemmy.world

I’m still on Reddit too, and I bet a lot of people who came here from there are. Lemmy just isn’t a fully viable replacement yet.

That’s the thing about that sort of censorship though, you can only guess what it might have been. Your guess seems plausible, but it’s just a guess, and when the guess that Reddit mods were acting in good faith turns out to have been wrong, they don’t want you to know about it.

It would be hard to say confidently that any given rhetoric hasn’t been captured by some purpose opposed to its overt intent. Words are more like Go than Checkers, and that’s part of the difficulty here. There’s a recursive pattern to this discussion: expressing a sentiment that the former statement has or may have been captured by malign intent. The urge to repeat that pattern is I would guess why there is writing here rather than none, and that isn’t bad even if it doesn’t exactly get anyone any closer to seeing the real big picture.

I assume it’s ultimately serious (they want to drop the pretense that it’s about the value of the life of a fetus) but a use of irony poisoning on some level. Some real zero self awareness assholes regardless.

Supposedly it was coined by some right wing influencer and went viral

I found a source that includes the second half which makes it more obvious:

Dr. Macho believes #42’s behavior is intentional and aimed specifically at him. “I caught him laughing at me once while I was trying to sort data he’d fucked up. I know what you’re thinking, ‘Can rats even laugh? And what would it look like?’ Trust me, when a rat laughs at you, you’ll know.”

When asked why he doesn’t simply exchange #42 for a less malicious rat, Dr. Macho explained, “You can’t just use an infinite number of lab rats. They start to think you’re a psycho if you keep asking for more.” Dr. Macho sighed. “I feel like I’m living in an annoying Pixar movie where I’m the bad guy – oh, wait….I’m the bad guy. I’m the evil scientist performing experiments on a sassy, smart rat. And my name is Dr. Stu Macho? Oof, yeah, I’m the wrong one here.”

Just behind Dr. Macho, #42 winked and walked directly into his food bowl.

The diet experiment is presented as present tense. The cat smell experiment is described with “I once ran an experiment”, part of the speaker’s “thesis”, which is in the past. They are clearly keeping #42 alive to be used in totally separate research, in this fictional The Onion esque scenario.

They do not take rats from say a maze solving study, then give them diabetes for a different study, then give them a brain tumor before putting them in the decapicone (a real product).

I figured, but in the meme story this is pretty explicitly what is happening.

In this story the researcher’s problem was that they let the rat live and used it across multiple experiments