If you listen to the tapes (which, totally understandable to not) - there was a woman (iirc) who argued pretty vociferously against Jim Jones plan. They had killed a U.S. congressman at that point - the idea was that they were doomed anyway. But people did argue against him.

Another aspect is that they had started the suicide drills long before they had even moved to Guyana. They had church services in California where they were told to drink what they were taught was poison.

People who didn’t drink the Flavorade were shot. You don’t need everyone to go along with it - you just need a handful of the people who are willing to take quick, immediate action.

The recent Behind the Bastards episode about Kevin Smith (not the director of Dogma but a Jamaican Pentecostal preacher) makes this pretty clear - there’s these fucked up dynamics which make certain people more willing to act, and others less so.

How did you get into being St Nick?

I’ve probably got about 15-20 years before I start going grey I think. Got a lot of time to plan this out.

Everyone should watch this video instead. Actual archeologist.

Yeah, this video is poorly researched clickbait.

Yes, it is all about money. I have negative 100,000 dollars, because my dumbass thought supporting my trust fund husband through his schooling would mean something, and instead got tortured and shackled with hell credit card debt. I don’t get an oil changed because I am terrified when I do they will say something is even more fucked withi and it will be 10 billion dollars please. I am getting a second job. I need to be able to make it to the first job.

I fucking hate the car. I want to drive it into the surface of the sun. The ac has never worked.

At one point I knew how to do an oil change. I could do it on my Corolla, because that was designed in a way that a human being can interact with. The 2018 Honda Civic is designed in such a way to obstruct the fact that it is fundamentally a broken vehicle.

I wasn’t dead broke in 2019.

It was summer, didn’t have reason to expect that a new car would not have working AC and wasn’t Uber compelled to test it. Assumed Honda Civic = trust idk.

About $150.

I am picking up a second job. A third one will probably put me at the point where I’m suicidal again, and that gets expensive fast ❤️

If you can help me get to a place where it doesn’t matter that the science teacher is a trannyremoved, that’ll be less of a problem ❤️

I despise my car and would mutilate it, hammer it into pieces and repurpose the corpse as some kind of art exhibit, were it not for its necessity in keeping some form of employment.

So delightful that we have more people propping up the pseudo archeology “it was used for knitting! Despite knitting being not around until the Middle Ages, and spool knitting not being around until later!”

It’s a terrible French/spool knitter. The fact that someone made something on it does not mean that it was made for knitting, because you can do that with basically any set of pegs you want.

Knitting is medieval, and not attested to until 11th century CE Egypt.

As spool knitters go, the dodecahedron are terrible for that purpose. The extra faces are useless. This idea has been explored and rejected, because it does not match Roman textile practices.

Why is this poorly researched article upvoted?

Many scars have been founded around the knobs consistent with the process of knitting.

This is flatly incorrect.

This is a Honda Civic, which is a fucking lemon which didn’t even have working AC when I bought it new.

It’s usually “green” that I go for, sometimes red.

Just imagine a little hole in the wall place where the menu is in Thai, with your options being “red,” “green,” or “massuman” and the staff will respond well to the white guy asking for it to be “thai spicy.”

They were trying to interfere with Capital Pride, but gave up after pushback.

Regulatory boards can exist but only choose to meet a few times a year, refuse to investigate anything that happens to a certain class of people, and also just not want to do their jobs because social services and regulatory agencies are like weekend clubs here.

Things are not working to the point I am trying to whistleblow a decades long “industrially scamming the free school lunch funds” and no one gives a shit. No one gives a shit about anything, Jesus Christ it’s Oklahoma. There are no consequences for anything here.

Not in the south.

78. Compare knowing and saying:

how many feet high Mont Blanc is

how the word “game” is used

how a clarinet sounds.

If you are surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.

79. Consider this example. If one says “Moses did not exist”, this may mean various things. It may mean: the Israelites did not have a single leader when they withdrew from Egypt–Or: their leader was not called Moses -Or: there cannot have been anyone who accomplished all that the Bible relates of Moses-Or: etc. etc. We may say, following Russell: the name “Moses”-can be defined by means of various descriptions. For example, as “the man who led the Israelites through the wilderness” , "the man who lived at that time and place and was then called 'Moses " “the man who as a child was taken out of the Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter” and so on. And according as we assume one definition or another the proposition "Moses did not exist? acquires a different sense, and so does every other proposition about Moses. -And if we are told “N did not exist”, we do ask: “What do you mean? Do you want to say . . . … Or . . . … etc.?” But when I make a statement about Moses, am I always ready to substitute some one of these descriptions for “Moses”? I shall perhaps say: By “Moses” I understand the man who did what the Bible relates of Moses, or at any rate a good deal of it. But how much? Have I decided how much must be proved false for me to give up my proposition as false? Has the name “Moses” got a fixed and unequivocal use for me in all possible cases? Is it not the case that I have, so to speak, a whole series of props in readiness, and am ready to lean on one if another should be taken from under me and vice versa?

Consider another case. When I say “N is dead”, then something like the following may hold for the meaning of the name “N”: I believe that a human being has lived, whom I (1) have seen in such-and-such places, who (2) looked like this (pictures), (3) has done such-and-such things, and (4) bore the name “N” in social life. Asked what I understand by “N”, I should enumerate all or some of these points, and different ones on different occasions. So my definition of “N” would perhaps be “the man of whom all this is true”. But if some point now proves false?-Shall I be prepared to declare the proposition “N is dead” false- even if it is only something which strikes me as incidental that has turned out false? But where are the bounds of the incidental?-If I had given a definition of the name in such a case, I should now be ready to alter it.

And this can be expressed like this: I use the name “N” without a fixed meaning. But that detracts as little from its usefulness, as it detracts from that of a table that it stands on four legs instead of three and so sometimes wobbles.)

Should it be said that I am using a word whose meaning I don’t know, and so am talking nonsense? Say what you choose, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing the facts. (And when you see them there is a good deal that you will not say.)

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

The meme does get at an important point though -

Our classifications of things have no impact on the things themselves. They are descriptive, not prescriptive. We create the category “planet” as a useful tool for referring to certain categories of astronomical objects. These objects would exist whether we had words for them are not.

There are patterns in what the word “planet” describes that would also be shared, whether all of those things were called “planets” are not, but the words themselves are just useful shorthands depending on the context that we use them in. The map is not the territory; the referent is not the reference.

(This is also about sex/gender.)

Yeah! It’s why a lot of the times when I think about leaving the house, I just don’t! The stochastic terrorism has worked!

Don’t forget, there is basically no oversight on therapists, so if your therapist tells you you should quit your job to “submit” to your husband, then disappears after a week or so of torture, meaning that you navigate a divorce with zero access to domestic violence supports, your life is over and there is no consequences!