For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
There was a time I actually thought that Elon Musk wanted to help save the planet by making electric cars mainstream to displace fossil fuel vehicles, and by helping humanity return to space simply for the science and exploration value.
Musk’s “some kind of pedo guy” comment about the diver that dismissed Musk’s efforts with the cave children was the first WTF moment, but I wrote that off has him just having a bad day as he apologized later. Musk fighting the COVID lockdown was also more evidence that concerned me. This was all before Elon’s embrace of trump and GOP Nazism, and long before Elon’s double Nazi salute on national television.
I tend to think at some point that was true, that Tesla was about saving the planet and SpaceX was about making humanity multiplanetary.
It could be he was always a wretched creep and just really good at hiding it, but it seems to me that the wealth and power just ruined him. He wouldn’t be the first person to fall in that trap.
I’ll append my confession here.
I supported Ron Paul once upon a time. The non-interventionism appealed to me in the context of the Iraq war in particular, and the rights-based libertarian philosophy seemed sound. I was young.
We must be twins!
Elon is a classic tale of surrounding oneself with sycophants and descending into the madness of their own bullshit. I think he started with pure-ish intentions.
I was a registered libertarian and a Ron Paul disciple. Easy trap to fall into as a relatively privileged white guy. Every self-described libertarian I meet now makes me ashamed of who I was then.
I always knew he was an arsehole, but I thought he was at least a like minded arsehole, when it came to saving the planet.
The trapped kids incident also the first proper crack I noticed in his image. Now, I wouldn’t touch anything of his with a 40’ pole.
You couldn’t tell he was a maniac grifter? The fact that his money comes from family mines in South Africa and he didn’t renounce it but built upon it didn’t let you know he was a villain? 😕
PS: Weird post to downdoot. Explain yourselves, you cowards, lol.
I downvoted you for complaining about downvotes.
PS: Weird post to downdoot. Explain yourselves, you cowards, lol.
You’re not wrong, you’re just being a dick about it in a thread that is literally about the time one drank the Kool Aid.
Criticising people that have reflected their previous choices/views and are acting different now is unnecessary.
Where’s the criticism? Stop having an emotional reaction to my actual bewilderment (“you couldn’t tell…”) and just explain it to me (or don’t!). 🙃
Had I said something like “lol you fucking incompetent moron, you smoothbrain fucks”, I’d get it, certainly. But I didn’t.
You asked people to explain. People explained that you’re coming across as a dick, in a thread explicitly about regrettable, gullible moments. I don’t know what you’re having a problem with here but it seems like you’re the one having an emotional reaction, calling people cowards and refusing to hear people’s explanations.
I think the reason your initial comment comes across hostile is because of the way it’s written (chaining questions), and the way you’re asking things that have an obvious answer.
However, you didn’t write anything explicitly hostile. It’s a question that could come across either way, and if you genuinely had no mocking or hostile intent I would have suggested rereading and rewording your comment to make that clearer, as it’s tough to interpret that kind of thing through text. I’ve totally left comments that read hostile when I didn’t intend it to, it just happens sometimes! 🤷♂️
Now this is a proper reply. Fair enough. I wasn’t being hostile, more like 🤔😔, certainly not too positive. It’s annoying that people can be this blind, it’s a big reason why the world is so shit and why the West cranks and exports villains who are loved locally… it’s triggering, for lack of a better word.
Just when you exhibited a moment of possible self-reflection, you just threw it all away and reinforced every negative connotation your prior statements have held.
I had no idea he came from SA with wealth from mining until after I figured out he was full of shit and and absolute dickhead, only after that did I realize where it all started.
So don’t blame people for not knowing what you knew at the time.
First of all, where’s the blame? Don’t get too emotional on me. Secondly, that’s like the easiest and quickest Google research you could’ve done, lol. Finally, does anyone who isn’t in the spectrum even have to Google anything related to him? The insanity and depravity was palpable, just like with Milei and Trump and the others. But if you are, then the little Google search would be absolutely necessary before you start praising him as if he’s some messiah and not just another selfish capitalist amoral prick. Haven’t y’all had enough experience with these folks to recognise it?!
Hang on, before I reply I have to research whether any people in this thread bought their computer with money earned through slavery.
This is where you put the blame in your comment:
The fact that his money comes from family mines in South Africa and he didn’t renounce it but built upon it didn’t let you know he was a villain?
This isn’t even general knowledge these days, and has only started spreading in the last few years, you acted as if everyone knew it from day one.
Pretty normal expectation from a rich white guy in South Africa at the time, ngl.
It took me years to learn that he was from SA
I believed the USA was a liberal democracy full of concerned citizens. I also had faith in the financial system at one point!
If you work hard, are honest, and moral, you will get ahead in life.
It was embarrassingly late in life before I realized how much of a farce that was.
In college I fell pretty deep into the nopoo conspiracy, that shampoo manufacturers get you addicted to the cycle of stripping off your hair’s natural sebum and replacing it with conditioner that attracts dirt… literally rinse, repeat.
I think I was frustrated that I couldn’t figure out how to take care of my scalp and hair, and here was this social group with an explanation and a scapegoat.
I still think that shampooing every day is probably too much for me, and embraced mechanical cleaning, but I’ve relaxed the conspiracy thinking.
I don’t know about the conspiracy, and every body is different, so I don’t believe there’s a best solution for everyone.
But no shampoo works very well for me. Only wash my hair thoroughly with water and brush it afterwards.
It’s never looked and felt better. I used to have horrible dandruff which is now completely gone.
And if it smelled bad, there are enough people in my life who I know wouldn’t be too polite to tell me.deleted by creator
Almost sounds not like dandruff, but psoriasis. I have it on my scalp only. Tea Tree shampoos work for mine (head and shoulders type stuff is overly harsh). Sometimes it flares up badly and a medicated shampoo will clear it up.
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Divisive propaganda got me to vote for Jill Stein in 2016. I would still assert that Clinton was an awful candidate, but I should have voted for her.
What was the intent of your vote? To voice displeasure with both candidates?
Calories in, calories out.
For years I believed that the only reason people got fat was because they ate more than they burned and ended up with an excess of energy. It was also the view pushed by the medical profession, by health education at school, and by society in general. I spent years trying to get my weight under control by eating less and moving more.
After a particularly strict period of literally weighing the margarine container before and after buttering toast so I knew how many calories of margarine I used I had gained weight rather than losing even with a 500kcal deficit. I listened to a podcast (Skeptics with a K) in which they interviewed Gary Taubes about the non-caloric hormonal model of obesity. It basically said that if your insulin level was up you couldn’t access body fat, so all the thoughts of that fat being available were flawed and you couldn’t really lose weight in that state. What ended up happening was a reduction in calorie burn and loss of muscle. Fixing the insulin is the first step to managing weight and if you do that you can access your body fat for energy.
It took another year before I actually tried keto and I lost 20kg in the first two months and another 10kg over the next few. It was a massive change but I didn’t sustain it given the environment I was in and ended up gaining a fair bit of the weight back (though not all).
Years later (over a decade, oh no, so old) and I have a much more comfortable body fat percentage and lots more muscle. I carry only a little more than I want and honestly it is too much effort to get down that last little bit, but I feel better now in my late 30s than I did in my early 20s in terms of movement, energy, and cognition. When i get injured I recover quickly, and when I get sick it is usually very short and then over. I used to get sick for weeks at a time and many times per year, now I have only been sick twice this year and both times in December (filthy children, gross but fun).
If you had asked me in 2010 how to manage weight I would have told you, nose firmly in the air, to eat less and move more. So glad to have been wrong.
While it is more complex, regarding how brains and other metabolic systems signal and process desire to eat etc., it IS calories in / calories out, I believe. If one eats a 500 calorie deficit, they will lose weight. It borders on impossible for some for completely understandable and forgivable reasons, but I’m sorry to say, I suspect you accounting of either calories in or calories out was mistaken.
Yes, there are differences in bioavailability across foods and people but still carbon goes in, breaks off, and is mostly breathed out.
To anybody that downvotes this, I challenge you to suggest what chemical atoms are you adding to your weight when you gain even while eating at a calorie deficit. Don’t mistake me for saying insulin and such don’t play a huge role; they do. But the role they play is in the delicate balance of calories in and out. So, too, does one’s microbiome, which weighs more than one’s brain; so who is doing the thinking. Complex processes that all affect calories in and out.
For the record Jonestown didn’t use real Kool Aid




