If you don't go to church already for other reasons, this is going to fail so hard it's going to feel like the multiverse collapsing, as they see right through you.

For real. This is actually good advice. "Just be yourself, bro" sounds like a cliché but it's true. Back when I used the apps, I went with something like "Swipe left if you want normal, because I'm not normal. Here's what makes me a weirdo. If you're still reading by the end of it, maybe we won't waste each other's time." It produced a way better experience than not doing that. I remember doing stuff like: writing part of the profile in iambic pentameter, and another part in Latin, going on about how interesting Persian poetry is, and listing stuff like "Arabian epigraphy" under "interests."

Not everyone who extracts usable iron metal from ore is an iron wholesaler. In other words, not all those who smelt it have dealt it.

Orwell already had the correct take here: "Marx's famous saying that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is habitually wrenched out of its context and given a meaning subtly but appreciably different from the one he gave it. Marx did not say, at any rate in that place, that religion is merely a dope handed out from above; he said that it is something the people create for themselves to supply a need that he recognized to be a real one. ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people.’ What is he saying except that man does not live by bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on ‘realism’ and machine-guns? If he had foreseen how great his intellectual influence would be, perhaps he would have said it more often and more loudly."

We do not share the full truth with the uninitiated so I can’t tell you specifically but I can say it involves a rope, a golfball, latex gloves, a crotchless chicken suit and three to four consenting adult Fetlife users.

I will never forgive Tucker Carlson for making me root for Jacob Rees-Mogg This should be a war crime

I regret to inform you that Rule 34 remains in effect, and there is in fact Pinky-and-the-Brain porn out there. And if I have to know this then so do all of you. Goddamn my idle curiosity and my retinas.

Man I nailed this one.

"The fantasy that a woman would be enthusiastic about sex." I have never in my life seen a man tell on himself so hard.

A great deal can be explained by the idea that the social media age has made people way more neurotic.

Pretty much. I could do without all the people who went on about how they wanted Derek Chauvin or Kyle Rittenhouse to get the death penalty when a keyword search could easily reveal their "anti-death penalty" tweets.

Yeah, most criminals who get caught are stupid or don't think about what they're doing. Especially first time offenders or one-time offenders. There are only a few crimes like bank robbery where you have a reasonably high likelihood of being caught even if you do the smartest thing possible at every juncture. If you have any brains and actually apply them, a great many crimes including murder are not hard to get away with as a one-off. Repeat offenders are the exception, and keep giving themselves new opportunities to screw up. I'm pretty convinced that reasonably intelligent murderers who are smart about how they do the deed, and don't keep doing murder after murder as they go through life, are rarely caught. But I'm also convinced that there isn't a ginormous number of them walking around and escaping justice, because only a small minority of people are ever faced with a situation where murder was actually the smartest thing to do in the first place.

I really don't see the big "debate on Arab twitter." This is one post by one insecure dude. Most of the replies and QTs are people either confused by the tweet or outright making fun of him. You have women saying things like "yeah well I have a whole apartment to myself, better get away from me" and others being like "yeah, best she sleeps with another woman" and the like. But almost nobody is agreeing with him.

Common misconception. The Koreans did not really do so "centuries ago." Mixed hanja/hangul writing has only recently disappeared from common use. If you picked up a South Korean newspaper or academic text from 1965, you’d see han characters literally everywhere. Popular Korean literature aimed at a mass readership had a strong Hangul-only tradition much earlier and Hangul-only editions of novels for cheap mass markets existed by the 1900s-1920s, but the full abandonment of Chinese characters across the board is super recent. Like a millennial or zoomer Korean today may have a lot of trouble reading ordinary journalistic prose from the 1960s because of this. A newspaper line might read "政府는 經濟開發計劃의 推進을 爲해 새로운 政策을 發表했다" ("The government announced a new policy to promote the economic development plan") and a korean my age might only get "정부는 ...의 ...을 ...해 새로운 ...을...했다" and need a fullblown hangul transcription "정부는 경제개발계획의 추진을 위해 새로운 정책을 발표했다" in order to understand it.

Les pires personnes au monde avec qui prendre un avion: les israéliens. Les meilleures personnes avec qui prendre un avion: also les israéliens. If you know, you know. #peupledefous

R.D. Fulk on bias in scholarship: "The scholar's obligation [...] is to set aside as much bias as human nature will permit, and if this is responsibly done it will merit the respect of reasonable observers." "Yet biased reasoning is never defeated by exposure of the bias, but by demonstration of the improbabilities that it produces." "Charges of bias thus serve no rational purpose. Rather, they carry only emotional weight, and so however they are intended, they are in substance personal attacks, and thus have no place in scholarship." From a History of Old English Meter, pp. 18-24. Important to remember!

Horseshoe theory is increasingly vindicated. I literally could not tell you, from this tweet alone, whether this person is on the left or the right. Antisemitism is the anvil on which the horseshoe is forged.