Seriously? Is that what's going on? Are they incapable of remembering that words have multiple meanings? Is it not possible for them to contemplate the possibility that both sides in a head-to-head conflict might be wrong?

Does meeting someone with more than one name simply...confuse them utterly? ("Normal" person stares blankly, blinking: "but what's your real name?")

The possibility that BOTH Trump and Biden might be unfit for office—I pause to stress here that I'm far more certain Trump is senile than I am about Biden, who looks okay to me—seems like a problem that the mainstream U.S. press and political commentators simply can't fathom. The very idea breaks their brains. They see two people in a contest, immediately assume there's a Good™ one and a Bad™ one, so the idea they might both be screwed up just...you can see their minds sliding right off it. "But...but...Biden's the senile one, right?"

FUckawsedfkljasd

~Chara

It's wrong to judge people by superficial appearances, so I try not to waste any thought on how politicians and other public figures look. Nevertheless I find myself thinking it anyway, from time to time. Why do right-wing folks tend to look so...weird? Off?

Our brain isn't good at all with imagining a gravitational singularity or "black hole" in three-dimensional space. Oh, we've seen diagrams and things and it's still opaque to us. 2D singularities are a lot easier to think about.

I'm put in mind with a neat toy that I know I've seen demonstrated somewhere, possibly at a "science museum" (I've been to a few, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco) as a tactile display. It's a hard plastic funnel that starts with a gentle slope and then falls off rapidly towards the center, much like the 2D singularity's profile, and you can toss small spheres or coins into it and watch them spin in faster and tighter circles, until they're really whizzing around:

Now imagine that went down infinitely deep, and you're in for an image I find slightly upsetting, the notion of someone on a trajectory like that, whizzing around really really fast in a circle and sinking, always sinking, and there's no bottom. (I'm not sure what special relativity does to this picture.) But invert the perspective, and it's someone who perceives themselves as spinning around an infinite pinnacle, always creeping upwards in tighter and tighter circles.

And I feel suddenly as if I'd imagined what "success" or "the rat race" might feel like.

Honestly a rat wheel is another pretty good way to imagine things. Everyone inside is lashed into running harder, always harder, because that makes the wheel go faster and faster and that's always good! Faster is always better.

~Chara

When I'm in pain I emit prose poems, that's what I do ~Chara