Ghostc1212

What am i not comprehending? You implied that researching Thailand would "update my worldview", when I merely mentioned cultural preferences and better amenities. Researching Thai culture would not make one like it any better than Japanese culture nor would it eliminate the fact that Thailand is a poor country with poor amenities, especially if you're moving to a rural village.

Also if you can't handle the word "fuck", then you might consider getting off the Internet.

I believe that something resembling religion will reappear in society (American society, I mean) in the future, maybe even the near future. Political substitutes for religion have given meaning to people's lives, i.e made them feel apart of something greater, but they have not provided them with physical community, a path toward self-improvement, a guide for how to manage interpersonal relations (Apart from "don't offend people", in the case of progressivism, I guess?), or any compelling reason not to be afraid of death.

Traditional religion's staying power came not from oppressive power structures or whatever people think these days, but because of all of that. Just having an oppressive power structure and none of the other stuff has generally led to religions/philosophies dying out within a few generations, like Nazism or communism. Both of those had their time to shine, completely ruined the societies they took over, and are now viewed as jokes by most people today. Meanwhile Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, which offer way more than ideology ever has, have been around for millennia and are on track to stay around for millennia more.

Homo Evolutis

I think using a political philosophy or a common enemy to unite a society is more harmful than it is good, since those things will inevitably be held sacred, and it becomes impossible to think rationally about them. Religious people are able to disagree on things like economics because the things that they hold sacred are supernatural sky gods, instead of things which are of this world (Americans are an exception due to the polarization of the two-party system and the compelling force of American Civil Religion, which makes freedom, democracy, and the Constitution into sacred things), but people who hold a political ideology like Marxism or Liberalism to be sacred (Tons of people, many of them on this very website) cannot tolerate disagreement and will ignore facts that might disprove their ideology. This is manageable when it involves nothing more than a sky god, but when it involves the very basics of how society should operate, it gets bad, quickly, which is how you get thousands of dead dissenters and a permanently stagnant society. Using a common enemy is even worse since it leads to an irrational hatred of said enemy that drives people to do horrible things to eachother, with the most infamous example being the Holocaust. The Nazis also held their political ideals to be more sacred than their religious beliefs, coincidentally.

Why the fuck would researching Thailand suddenly make me like their culture and amenities any better than Japan's

Some dude thinking his pet snail is dead, only to throw it in the trash and forget about it, and then wake up to a snailpocalypse a week later is pretty funny to think about

what if you like Japanese culture and first world amenities

I'm in and out and I always say thank you when I'm done, since I personally like it when customers get out of my store as soon as possible.

If I'm being real, my only knowledge of trans fats comes from that one American Dad episode where Stan tries to smuggle them across state lines to make his food taste good again after they're banned. Would you mind educating me on what the commotion was about them?

I'm not at the point in life where I can really avoid plastic, but I aspire to get there eventually.

I like excessive sweetness in all of my beverages since I've been drinking excessively sweet beverages all my life. I got the taste buds of a toddler. Still, give me aspartame over sugar, even on the off chance that the meager amount I consume gives me cancer some day that's probably better than what too much sugar would do to me.

Microplastics are the new lead, and screens are the new tobacco, in my opinion. Overuse of sugar in processed foods is the new version of how they'd cut food with inedible stuff like sawdust back in the day.