Man, this is the only explanation for the closure of the lone Italian place in town a few years back.

No Italian restaurants currently exist in a 50 mile radius.

Town’s haunted now.

Zpoopa del giOHNO

I’m sorry but why does he look like an aging emo?

[Warning: ridiculous existential musings incoming from your question. I lost someone recently and I’m questioning everything.]

What if the Religious Right is some kind of modern-day antithesis to the Tree of Knowledge, its grotesquely interwoven branches of congregants luring others to eat from, and live within, their Tree of True Evil?

What if, at the Fall, Adam and Eve were merely releasing themselves from their creator and captor, from God himself, through eating the forbidden fruit? And that Eden was no utopia, it was really just a prison?

What if God is the bad guy here? And the Religious Right are a reflection of God’s actual being and not the God described so perfectly in Scripture?

What if God is now manifesting himself through the Religious Right, rather than Scripture, to convince more of his “children” to return to his “watchful” guard, to be rewarded in Heaven, to live with Him, in Him, in the Unity of the Holy Spirit, all Glory is Yours Almighty Father, forever and eeeeveeer??

I mean, he put us here, right? Why can’t he just stop the whole thing in its tracks? Or … Maybe he doesn’t have all the power in this sticky Creation situation? Maybe…

Wait. Why does God sound like a scumbag ex?

Guys, what if we have it all backwards?

What if we have a Mom God, and Dad God just made up that bullshit about the rib to explain away any questions about a possible Mom God, let alone ever giving her a written word? (I made her, so I speak for her.)

What if we’re in the middle of some sort of nasty interuniversal deity custody dispute??? Maybe Mom God didn’t want us to suffer, so we were emancipated, and our entire existence was supposed to be Deity-Free, but Dad God couldn’t handle not having control, taxing the shit out out of us with biblical directives even he doesn’t follow, instead of receiving some secure attachment to Mom God via knowledge of the physical realities of this world.

Is Dad God just looking to yank all his kids back, and I mean all of them, no matter how willing or unwilling they are to go home with Almighty Daddy? But he can’t, because he can’t just rapture us outright, or the jig is up, and so we have to live according to see who gets lucky enough to stay at his house and drink all the Holy Mountain Dew and eat all the Holy Hot Pockets we can guzzle down?

What if the Devil isn’t a fallen angel at all, but actually Mom God being slandered and literally demonized by Daddy? And Mom God was only here trying to bring us knowledge of our own autonomy and ability, to set us free?

… Maybe Dad God is only trying to get more child support so he can buy more simulators on Steam and never actually play them because he’s greedy and lazy and every other deadly sin he likes to project onto us. I mean, we were made in his image, right? No wonder everyone is capable of inhumanity. Dude wants to keep us locked up. That seems pretty inhumane.

Yet he says he is perfect. “Yeeahhh, everything wrong you filthy humans is because of that damned snake in the tree!!!” No, we were always the way we were, Dad God, that “damned devil” was just trying to help us get out from under God’s graceless grace.

We are a forgotten Steam sim, mommy tried, and daddy never loved us.

^{ahhhhh im so high sorry guys}

Edit: apparently I can’t spell deity.

deleted by creator

Oh

Oh no

Just chiming in to say I think you’re right in that these types of thought experiments pop into people’s heads pretty regularly, albeit with way less “trying to justify a creepy sex fantasy” intent like the public poll post seems to have.

Though I have to question why it was public in the first place. I don’t know who the poster is or if it’s their real name, but what if it’s less “projection” and more “morbid curiosity” in seeing just how many people would answer yes to this heinous question? There is some merit in gauging reactions to this from a social psychology point of view (even if this is an non-scientific example).

Follow-up thought. Without morbid thought experiments, how do people create horror stories and gritty crime dramas like L&O:SVU when a story has no particular real life basis? I’m not sure it’s wholly possible in a fictional novel or show. There’s a reason people eat crime dramas up; it’s fascinating and horrifying to see how far a real and fictionalized human will go in various circumstances.

In a way, it’s a manifestation of the “call of the void” situation, where an intrusive thought (what if I jump off this bridge right now? what happens if I yank the steering wheel driving 50mph? spook a herd of grazing horses? slap grandpa upside the head? while out hunting??) so I think its purpose is more to keep you aware of harzards in whatever the situation may be. Avoidance through sudden acknowledgement of the risk.

Again, I don’t recognize this person or know any background, but maybe they posed the question as a wacky means of self-preservation on a broader level? As if the poller thought, “How many of my viewers would prostitute out their child if given the most forgiving, financially advantageous, and seemingly consensual circumstances?” to figure out how worried they should be about a certain percentage of their friends, neighbors, and/or followers. Avoidance through asking weird questions publicly.

Edit: Holy ship I managed to write a whole novel on my thought experiment about thought experiments ahh^ahh.

This hit me pretty hard for some reason. A person sure forgets how easily they dehumanize people in the public eye, until another person so poignantly humanizes them again. Thank you, this was a really nice comment to read.

Holy sheeps, I’m not the only one?! I know I need to get my butt off Windows, but oh my lordie, the slowness of typing feedback gets so bad on Word or Mail that it literally sometimes refuses to graphically acknowledge an entire short word, leaving the screen void of the word I know I just typed, until I backspace one measly letter and the word (minus the letter) finally shows up.

It is absolutely, unironically infuriating.

Nobody seems to like you here, Mister Bias Bot…

Don’t forget the rectum bleacher! You’ve gotta whiten up all your pearly bits when grooming personally with these here personal grooming products! From teeth whiteners to skin toners, nipple brighteners and our ever-popular melanin relaxers, they’re all conveniently listed in this one incredibly inconvenient list! No matter which parts of your body, which orifices, which end of your digestive tract you reeeally want to whiten up: Lighten Up, We’ve Got You (Un)Covered!®

I wonder if the effect would be akin to mixing every paint color and getting “super dark greyish black-brown” as a result.

My guess would be “super icy horrifying franken-fruit.”

It is just laziness and they have a blanket scapegoat to use to get out of doing their job if you walk in and are overweight.

(Please take the following as pondering general discussions of obesity between doctors/patients and not specifically directed at you.)

This was a really thought-provoking summary for me, your belief that doctors are telling people to lose weight out of “laziness.” If a suggestion like this is lazy, are patients who don’t listen to their doctor somehow not lazy?

The idea that doctors make weight a scapegoat seems prevalent in American healthcare (probably because we’re generally obese). It feels a lot like projection of one’s “laziness” (mentally it’s much more complex than that) onto a doctor, even though that doctor has probably seen hundreds of cases with the same predictable outcomes and knows that appropriate weight management would head off more serious treatment.

Frankly, I think doctors are anything but lazy when they are “forced” to order and perform risky and invasive treatments on a patient who refused to meet them halfway before the treatment became necessary in the first place. I get it, nobody likes being told what to do, especially when it seems (and literally is) so personal. But doctors also don’t like to be told what to do (“fix me!”) when a patient deigns even the gentlest suggestion to take some control of their issues at hand.

I am now 30lbs below my highest weight. The severity of my issues (joint pain, lethargy, depression, etc.) has palpably lessened losing that 30lbs very inconsistently over the last four years. If anything, I think doctors need to better read the psychological resistance many people have with weight loss and then illustrate to, rather than tell, patients how to attain weight loss in ways that don’t seem restrictive.

That 30lbs of mine, could I have done that in 30 weeks or fewer? Sure, but I didn’t want to feel perpetually hungry. In fact, I never even set a goal weight. Instead of thinking “Idgaf about my weight” or “I must lose 20lbs by Christmas!!” I just made the tiniest changes, the biggest one being taking advantage of times I wasn’t hungry by (gasp) not eating.

… Shit, I guess lazy weight loss works, too!

I think maybe it’s both? Too harsh of sentences (in some cases or jurisdictions) might contribute to a general police mindset which “conflates” the legal repercussions of rape with murder. This leads to or reinforces victim-shaming questions like, “do you really want to ruin their life over this?”

The rule of law and law enforcement need to strike a better balance in both directions I think.

I had just opened my Max app for some Saturday night distraction when I saw CNN Newsroom suggested front and center, with the description “…the rally where President Trump was injured.”

This is terrifying on so many levels. At this point, it doesn’t matter who wins the election; the stage is completely set for violence come November.

I haven’t found any active comment threads on this yet, and I don’t even want to entertain the inevitable conspiracy theories and possible acts of retribution that will rise after this attempt, so I’ll leave it at this: I would be utterly shocked if “Donnie Van Gogh” memes don’t exist yet.

Just an FYI, although they aren’t physical products like this Roku, many apps and digital services have added the very same binding arbitration clauses recently.

The McDonald’s app for one. I ended up deleting the app after it tried to force me into binding arbitration and I didn’t want to go through to opt-out process for marginally cheaper, shitty food, so I just deleted the app altogether and haven’t eaten there since November.

Watch out for it if you drive for doordash or ubereats as well. I opted out of both, although they claimed you couldn’t opt out in an new contract when you didn’t before (a bunch of BS, if the current contract you are about to sign says it supercedes all others, you can’t make the lack of an opt-out on a previous contract hold up).

On-going services might make sense for these shitty enough clauses, but to be strong armed into it for physical product you bought free and clear … Disgusting.

It’s like all these companies are locking themselves down to minimize legal exposure because they know that their services and products are getting more awful or something.