Hegar

Jokes on you - I’m quick to smile, non-judgemental and a patient conversationalist! 😊 The last time someone have you a compliment in public it might’ve been me and you’d never know! 😘

I wasn’t trying to comment specifically on you or your teeth, it’s just one of those weird things that people notice about our culture, but people from here don’t realize is not the same in other cultures.

normal oral hygiene

Cranial deformation is just normal infant care in groups where it’s practiced.

Many western cultures practice dental hygiene in a way that doesn’t produce the “bleached wall” look that so many in US culture deem high-status. Teeth slowly change color and natural misalignments develop with less need to artificially modify that.

Teeth in the US are just a way more important site of identity than elsewhere. When people make fun of the US, teeth are often part of it because it’s something we’re way more intense about than other people are.

I use an unsweetened charcoal toothpaste, it’s definitely the least unappealing one I’ve found.

a great feeling when your teeth are … clean.

Yeah I’ve had people describe such a feeling but I’ve never experienced it. Closest I’ve experienced is a pleasant feeling of knowing it’s the maximum time before I have to endure that again.

white

I was not raised in the US so that artificial wall of unnaturally blinding white teeth has no value to me. TBH it seems like foot binding, neck-extension or cranial deformation - an extreme status marker that’s fascinating from an anthropological perspective.

I fucking hate brushing my teeth. I cannot understand how so many people seem to just willingly do it like multiple times a day. How do they deal with the feeling of open revolt that washes over every cell in your body when thinking of teeth brushing?

Oh, that’s it? Thank you! I never would’ve gotten this. I think it was the whole of sponge bob used as a metaphor for a single body part that was throwing me off.

I’ll wear whatever you like 😘

Last week for me.

I still do not get it.

Are his eyes and nose supposed to look like testicles and a penis? They’re upside down if so.

Is it his eyes and the line extending from his head? There’s the square of his head in the way so it just doesn’t look like a penis to me.

I gather it’s somehow penis related, yeah?

How does that relate to the image though?

Belief in the divine likely comes from our brains’ hyperactive agency detection system: our brains err on the side of seeing agency where there is none in order to keep us alive.

If a branch snaps behind you and you react as if someone did it but it was really nothing, you’re fine. But if it was a human or other animal and you react as if it was nothing, you might be food.

Property crime is largely a factor of poverty, but also social inequality. If you lack a need you will try to fulfill that need. If you feel like you’re unfairly “less-than”, you’re much more likely to engage in prohibited behavior to correct that. But also if you have power or wealth, your brain becomes less capable of empathy making it much easier for you to criminally hurt others - the rich do most crimes.

Religion is just using this evolutionarily beneficial flaw in our brains to justify the unjust social hierarchies which drive crime. So in a roundabout way, religion puts upward pressure on crime.

That’s one of the cleverest pronunciation guides I’ve ever seen.

At my previous job their was a role where you just called insurance companies and asked them incredibly basic questions about what they planned to do for a patient with diagnosis X and plan Y. This information should be searchable in a document with a single correct answer, but insurance companies are too scummy for that to be reliable.

In 2021 we started using a robot that sounded like a human to call instead. It could handle the ~80%+ of calls that don’t use any critical thinking. At a guess, that’s maybe 5-10% of our division’s workforce that wasn’t needed anymore.

With the amount of jobs like this that are 100% bullshit, I’m sure there are plenty of other cases where businesses can save money by buying an automated bullshit generator, instead of hiring a breathing bullshit generator.

Nazis in the 1940s were actually socialists

No, they were not. Not at all, not even a little.

You can’t eat urinal cake and great danes don’t get a vote in the national elections in Denmark.

Sometimes a name is misleading.

Don’t Do What Donny Don’t Does!

This is objectively within the bounds of “normal” human experience. It’s seen in primates and other mammals too.

Sleeping in the same bed as your family was the norm for a long while, across many cultures. It was also perfectly normal for say a noble to sleep in the same bed as some of their staff, or for merchants or other traveller to share a bed while on the road.

Most people in many western cultures would probably find it weird, but they’re the weird ones for needlessly sexualizing the act of sleeping.

A vast patchwork of incredibly different lifeways that you can flee to whenever then taxman and his goons come round.

nothing gets out of your brain on its own, except heat.

I heard a recording of a song made by reading a brain that was thinking that song. It was far from perfect, but you could tell which song it was. I’m no neuroscientist, but if that information can already be plucked from a brain, surely that’s proof that reconstructing thoughts is possible to some degree?

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/neuroscientist-pink-floyd-music-brain-activity

Free will.

It’s hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It’s like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it’s true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn’t suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.

I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.