Nobody mentioned the smell? Holy shit, that sounds like the setup to an awful prank.

The smell is an intense sensory experience. We had ferrets for a few years, and at no point did I ever go nose-blind to them. They are the stinkiest things anyone otherwise sane has ever willingly let into their home. Cleaning their litter boxes practically requires a respirator. And that’s after their musk glands have been removed (which, at the time, was standard practice; you couldn’t hardly get ferrets from anywhere with their musk glands intact).

They’re fuckin’ adorable, and playful, and fun, but man, the smell. All the other problems with them being only-just-barely-domesticated wild animals aside, the smell is probably the most important thing to know about them.

My ex had two sun conures.

The thing I would like people to know is that they make the kind of noise that will literally drive you insane if your brain doesn’t adapt to tune it out. It’s loud, high-pitched, and constant.

It’s not about just making phone calls difficult or making it hard to hear what your friends are saying (especially if the parrots decided they hate your friend, which is a whole 'nother parrot problem). It’s so pervasive that it actively changes how your senses perceive your environment.

Years after they both died (at about 20 years old, the female died from getting eggbound and the male died of a broken heart soon after), my brain was still putting parrot noises into the background sounds of my house. I’d be doing my normal daily thing, then stop and be like “Wait, why have I been listening to parrots screeching for the past two hours? They’ve been dead for three years” and my brain would go “Oops, sorry,” and I’d stop hearing it for a while.

Most literate tankie

Like today, but worse. We’ll have five-sigma events occurring once a week, but we’ll still insist on calling them “five-sigma” instead of “new normal”, and the denialists will still be denying that it’s any different than it’s ever been, and utopianists will still be screeching about how the technology that will save us is just “a few years” away, and lots of people will die of prosiac, totally preventable things like famines and droughts while the super-rich will have retreated to the bunkers they started building back in 2012 exactly for this scenario.

Like Russia and Ukraine are working together, vatnik?

I frequently have to look up whether a term is a misspelling/mistranslation or an actual technical term (or a term in British English, or a British spelling for a technical word). For me, quotes do nothing. It will frequently refuse to look up the term I’m specifically hunting for, just the term it thinks I should be hunting for. Sometimes that means it’s a mistranslation… but not always.

Next time it comes up for me, I’ll keep a note of it and get back to you.

I have an even bigger problem trying to exclude terms from a search. The example I always use is try to look up “Dolphins -football”, and use any version of “-” you’d like (NOT, etc). The first results will always be the latest scores for the Miami Dolphins.

No, absolutely not. By Reddit standards, this was a tiff. Maybe a smaller tussle. Definitely not a kerfluffle.

Besides, part of this is a “me” problem. I’m still adjusting to not having to come out of the gate swinging the first time I sense hostility. Did I respond to an energy? Sure. Did I respond to an intentional energy? …eh, maybe, maybe not. Did I go from 0-100 too fast? Probably. What I’m saying is, I see how I could have handled that better. And the fact that you took the time to engage with me over it is a big positive for the platform.

To be clear I chose to state that because I want to acknowledge my own biases here and the fact that I’m often pressed for time

No, that’s totally fine, and I’m being completely serious. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that this community is much smaller and tighter than the ones I’m used to. It honestly never occurred to me that y’all would, like, actually know each other, which is my own bias.

This question should keep you up at night

I’m sorry. The question that keeps me up at night is “How are people able to just decide to believe something with no (or less than no) practical evidence?”. Just because a lot of people have managed it, even people who are very evidence-based in every other part of their life, doesn’t mean I can just do it. I’d literally have to think less about the implications of such a thing on the everyday world. I’d have to stop asking questions (like: “Does God help anyone? If so, how does he choose? If not, why pray?”, and no, “we just can’t understand him” is not an answer I can just choose to believe because I like it).

So yeah, this is obviously a “me” problem, since everyone else on this instance seems to intuitively grasp the idea that one can actually come to a valid, reality-based conclusion that God exists and I’m the “2010 New Atheist” for not being able to get on board.

. On a more practical level I am much more familiar with this mod and their judgement than I am with you, and I’m going to be generally siding with any moderator we have as they get vetted rather thoroughly

Well, I mean… ok, that’s fair. I can’t argue with that.

I apologize for being a little annoyed right now. I feel like I’m being moderated for defending myself against their escalation.

The top level comment from the mod was not aggressive or accusatory.

My response to that top level comment was measured and nuanced, with specific examples of real events and an analysis of the mindset behind those events.

Their reply to me included all caps, excessive punctuation, extremely bad-faith arguments (the actual religious views of every single one of the names they dropped are incredibly complicated, not just “was Christian”; again, one member of that esteemed list literally believed he could turn lead into gold with magic), and that’s assuming calling the question of critical thinking outdated and childish (“2010 New Atheist”) is not an aggressive escalation.

Furthermore, you told me to disengage, and then the mod continued to engage. I’d appreciate it if they received a similar request, because right now it feels like you’re holding my arms behind my back while they get to keep punching me.

you honestly believe EVERY SINGLE RELIGIOUS PERSON EVER has no critical thinking skills?

I honestly believe the ones that matter certainly don’t. The ones who are paying the church’s bills and showing up to their pep rallies every week are very clearly not spending any time thinking about it.

The LGBTQIA+ pastors that started a socialist christian church in Kentucky?

Who? Let me know when they start affecting actual government policy, or even just going on TV and saying “We condemn those other Christians who say gay people should be shot in the back of the head.” That’s what we’ve been demanding from Muslims since 2001, why are you special?

MLK? Malcom X? Johann Bernoulli, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,

Blah blah blah, fallacious appeal to authority, blah blah blah. Name-dropping is not “critical thinking”, and you really shouldn’t have included a literal, straight-up alchemist in that list if you were trying to use it to make a point.

all of whom are some of the most important mathematicians in history and were religious, all couldn’t think for themselves?

MLK and Malcom X were mathematicians? TIL.

Immanuel Kant, famous influential philosopher, no critical thinking.

So what I’m hearing you say here is: “If smart people believe in magic sky fairy, magic sky fairy must be logical to believe in,” which is about the level of discourse I’d expect from someone unfamiliar with the concept of critical thinking. Thanks for being an object lesson.

Can we please move beyond this 2010 New Atheism view that every religious leader/person is stupid and unable to critically think?

Why? They clearly choose not to apply that ability to a big part of their lives. In this specific case under discussion, their entire career requires not applying any critical thinking. Their paycheck depends on their ability to convince other people of things that are not and can never be supported by any actual evidence.

It’s the reason that crowd is so susceptible, as a trend, to con men, malicious misinformation, and developing entire belief systems off a Facebook meme that pairs one politician’s face with a fake quote or a quote from a totally different politician. They’re trained, often from birth, that evidence is not necessary in the process of deciding what you want to believe; in fact, that evidence is often the bad guy (in that it opposes “faith”).

So, no. We’ll drop the characterization if and only if it stops being relevant to our day-to-day lives in America. It’s not the atheists who are saying they think I should get the death penalty (DeSantis’s preacher), that I should be shot in the back of the head (Texas Baptist Church), that God should kill me slowly (Pure Words Baptist Church), and that I should be hunted with dogs (governor of SC).