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Cake day: February 22nd, 2026

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  • This meme was posted pretty recently.

    Dating apps are pretty bad. They’re not optimized for your happiness. They want your money. But they can get you dates, and some of those dates can be good. I’m a pretty average guy who doesn’t date men, and I could get a few dates a month by writing real messages and honestly engaging with people. Some of them were really good.

    But no matter what your strategy is, it’s going to have a big “garbage in -> garbage out” factor. I’ve had friends who half-ass the apps, and then wonder why they don’t have good outcomes. I don’t mean paying- never pay for this shit. I mean actually reading the profile and, if there’s something you can engage with, actually write something. Yeah, it’s work, and most of the time it goes into the void. But just looking at it for 20 minutes and writing nothing deeper than “lol” and “hey” is counter productive. It’s like going to the gym and just looking at your phone. You’re not going to get fit like that. You’re just going to feel bad about yourself.

    It’s fine to be like “i don’t have the energy for this” and spend your time doing something else. And it’s fine to take it seriously, write good messages, be present, be genuine. But half-assing it is the worst. Half-assing it sucks for you, and everyone you engage with.












  • There are two main things that change people’s minds: Peer pressure, and trauma.

    We’re social creatures and we take cues from people we trust. The right wing has done an excellent (and horrifying) job of creating unified in-groups for their followers. They have fox news. They have talk radio. They have churches. They have also demonized their opposition - “ivory tower elites”, “coastal elites”, queers, commies, etc. Many people will struggle to change their mind when everyone around them hasn’t.

    There was a thing I was reading about a while ago, about flat-earthers. A bunch of them got shown a lot of evidence to contradict their beliefs. They all stuck to their flat-earth nonsense, except one of them. The guy who’d started dating someone sane, and hanging out with her friends. He changed his mind. In large part because he no longer saw the flat-earth community as such a vital part of his in-group. Or so the author argued.

    The other way is trauma. If something really horrific happens to someone, they might reevaluate. But if they’re still in the same social groups, they’re likely to fall back into their old ways.

    In the book “Dying of Whiteness”, the author interviewed a variety of people. Among them were gun violence survivors. There was one passage where a woman said something like, yeah, easy access to guns is why her son died. Maybe he shouldn’t have been able to just go get a gun and shoot himself. But, she said, she would never say that to her peers.

    So, in short: No, not really. The social groups carrying maga identity are self-reinforcing. They’re all looking at their peers, who are all still maga.

    https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe is a good comic about some of the same ideas, too.