I remember reading a long time ago that some terrorist orgs had a lot of success recruiting engineers of a certain personality type(who they wanted for obvious reasons), basically because assuming you're highly rational actually makes you really gullible and bad at non-technical reasoning.
I’m so tired.
Anyway, tech lords pivoting hard into authoritarian Christianity is the least surprising thing in the world.
When we talk about needing to get people to improve their critical thinking skills that almost always means:
1) formalize it as a process they’re aware of
2) apply it to the area we’re interested in
Because humans think critically. Full stop. We just don’t do it evenly or consistently.
Critical thinking is not an identity, it is merely an activity.
Everyone does it sometimes, no one does it all the time.
If you see being someone who thinks critically as part of your identity, chances are you are massively Dunning-Krugering it.
Yeah no, that’s exactly the reason/emotion dichotomy I’m calling out as a problem.
There was a study way back when about how people with college degrees were more likely to read and believe their horoscope, because they saw critical thinking not as an activity but as an identity, and believed it was part of theirs.
And therefore, whatever they believed must be rational.
So it’s not surprising that the cultiest group of people on earth (my kingdom for journalists to start really covering tech cults) are getting really into Christianity, and specifically Christianity’s ugliest aspects.
The tech industry is *rife* with people who will tell you how much more logical they are than everyone else while also explaining that they’re on the carnivore diet because their favorite podcaster, who has no medical/nutrition or history/anthropology training, said it’s what cavemen ate.
Actual rationality involves emotional *integration,* not severance from your own emotions.
Just because you are so emotionally stunted that you are *unaware of the emotions you are feeling* doesn’t mean you are more rational. Quite the contrary, in fact.
The emotional processing parts of our brain are fundamental to reasoning. When they get damaged, people can’t do basic logic.
Emotion is not counter to reason.
Like anything else—pain, multiple streams of information, noise—it can *distract* you, but that’s different.
It’s incredibly frustrating to me that in 2026 people are still holding to the idea that:
1) feeling emotion is antithetical to being able to reason
2) not showing emotion is the same as not being affected by emotion
People keep seeing techbros/STEM-only fanatics/Silocon Valley as rational because engineer types like to *think* they are the poster children for rationality and we have allowed our cultural archetype for high intelligence to be them, but
they’re HIGHLY irrational and now -> Christian nationalist.
20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite's intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
This bullet point from Alex Karp/Palantir’s latest diatribe strikes me as the best representation of the whole project.
“The elite’s intolerance of religious beliefs…”
Let me stop you right there, Alex. You just made that up. That isn’t a thing in 2026 America.
"In the future, there is such a thing as money. But there’s no such thing as your money. All the money is our money."
The Wexner Foundation's spent decades investing in Jewish leaders. What To Do since Julie K. Brown's reporting + now The Files has been a whole (no)thing.
So some of us from the grassroots created a fund for Wex alum + the J community + beyond to support survivors of sexual violence + trafficking:
a post from Innuendo Studios reading youtube has removed The Alt-Right Playbook: The Ship of Theseus for containing "graphic violent content," providing, as evidence: 1) an illustration of Charon, the ferryman who took souls across the River Styx, and 2) a screenshot from the music video for "California" by Wax featuring a stuntman running while on fire (said music video is currently hosted here on YouTube, unblocked). they have already rejected my appeal so I'm not sure how long it'll take to get this sorted. now would be a good time to watch it on Nebula
If not illegal bribery, why so bribery shaped?
It’s funny that I never seem to get blocked when I am being my rudest but when I am pointing out inconvenient information
We’re supposed to swallow the line “can’t expect people to be perfect” when they expected Kamala to be beyond perfect and refused to vote for her, leaving the country to end up in this state in the process. They’re racist misogynists and don’t gaf about anything but their garbage ideology.
The pope could have overruled the u.s. trans healthcare ban immediately. He did not. This lines up with his own extensive history of anti-queer/anti-trans bigotry.
Also: the bishops' ban vote was 206-7 in favor. Not some narrow conservative victory, but the consensus of the church hierarchy.
NGL, I've been looking at a walkman too. It's not really that I wanna be inconvenienced, but having physical ownership of something nowadays is just kinda sexy.
And the fact that no one will bust open your door to tell you that the tapes you own now gonna be costing 2 smackeroons more per month
you've probably heard lots of bad stuff about the "chamber of commerce," both locally and nationally. did you know it was literally founded to fight back against the growing power of labor unions?
this gives me a good idea: i'll try to keep a running thread of things that are union-busting that you might not know are union-busting.
ERGs are one to start.
another one: employee satisfaction surveys! corporations use them to see where agitation is that could potentially lead to a union
When Jews and other people from non-Christian cultures talk about Christian atheists, this is exhibit A.
Atheist, yet desperate to defend hatred of an entire real-world group of human beings because it is the result of fictional Christian stories, and the Christianity is more important than people.
I mean only as a sort of joke. German university students started using it as a derogatory term for townies.
I read your thread.
I don’t know how to explain to people that the use of “Pharisee” as a slur is a Christian thing full stop, not a specifically evangelical thing, and that it predates not just evangelicalism but Protestantism as a whole.
“BUT HATRED OF AND VIOLENCE TOWARD MARGINALIZED GROUPS IS TRADITIONAL IN MY CULTURE!”
“The government is repeating antisemitic canards that have historically preceded Jews getting targeted by violence.”
This asshole: doesn’t matter, religion is dumb, let them