But the whole premise is flawed. Having to “blame” someone for your own decisions is always a sign of not exactly being in control of yourself and your life. It’s always a sign of not being exactly mentally fit. Because this action in itself is a sign that you don’t take responsibility for your own actions, but instead look for someone else to blame your decision on.

I would argue that children and teenagers are generally susceptible to this while being perfectly developmentally healthy (though of course, not fully mature). It’s great that you weren’t susceptible to those pressures, but many others are at those ages, and that’s not indicative of any mental weakness. Susceptibility to peer pressure is a helpfully adaptive trait in many ways (it goes a long way towards making people generally more hygienic and friendly, for example), it’s just value neutral for people who aren’t yet good at predicting the long-term consequences of their decisions.

I don’t see OOP doing that in the cartoon. She takes responsibility for her own actions. “I peer pressured myself”. She realized the mechanism at play (she wanted to fit in, and thus did something she actually didn’t want to do) and took responsibility for it. She’s not looking for blame anywhere at all.

In the cartoon, no, but the OP of this thread phrased it a little more actively. I don’t have a problem with it and think it was chosen for comic effect (successfully, imo), but I think that’s what your parent commenter was responding to.

Nah, go traditional. Get him an exploding cigar.

It reads to me like you’re saying the above commenter has moved the goalposts, but they were answering their parent commenter directly. I didn’t downvote you, fwiw

Tbh, uber incentivizes that afaik, because there’s no time differential. If I take a taxi driver on a slower or longer route, they get paid for both mileage and time, so it’s actually to their benefit. Of course, there’s a risk that they’re intentionally drawing it out, so you need to pay attention, but I tend to use buses/trains over livery in areas I’m unfamiliar with.

It’s worth separating the fate of the Pledge from the fate of philanthropy more broadly. Some of the wealthiest people in tech are still giving; they’re just doing it on their own terms, through their own vehicles, toward their own chosen ends. At the start of 2026, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) cut about 70 jobs — 8% of its workforce — as part of a move away from education and social justice causes toward its Biohub network, a group of nonprofit, biology-focused research institutes operating across several cities. “Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.

They’re just trying to extend their own lifespans

It’s wild to say but I feel like the literally criminally insane men I was working with taught me better people skills than my parents did.

That actually sounds pretty reasonable to me (not to excuse your parents, if applicable). It’s not the same thing at all, but I learned much better people skills from living with a boyfriend who had abandoned his treatment for and didn’t tell me about his paranoid schizophrenia than from anyone else. He read so much into everything I said, that I learned to speak very deliberately.

When you are working with people with a very different perspective on the world that you can’t change, and neither party feels entitled to acceptance because of family, you need to learn how to treat others respectfully and with dignity to succeed.

They’re responding to the last sentence, which literally says that humans aren’t wired to be good people.

There’s absolutely actively torture, I’m sorry to tell you. Even if there’s nothing worse than what we already know about (unlikely, given that we know about worse from the camps in the US), we know that prisoners are beaten and sexually abused.

Oof. In that case, the Wikipedia should be rewritten, because she was jailed for raping her mother, not for having sex with her.

Edit: did not intend to misgender her

No one wants to, but if it’s that or kill other innocent people…

I won’t claim that I’d make the same decision after a couple of years in the torture prison, but from the untortured side of things, my choice is clear.

I love playing Slavoj Žižek or Dan Harmon

On 1 August 2021, Chris was arrested for having sexual relations with her own mother and spent the next few months in jail […] On 27 March 2023, Chris was released from jail.

I’m certainly not in favor of parent-child incest, but nearly 20 months of jail for the child doesn’t seem like a fitting punishment. Either the mother consented and should be considered the more responsible party or she didn’t and the crime is rape.

Watermelon wine sounds like something I’d drink a lot of once.

The last time I rode an Uber, my driver did that and we got stuck in traffic as I advised we would. It was really awkward to sit there in silence for 25 minutes until we could get off the highway.

I’m calling it as a smooth sharks situation

If they fully understood it, they probably wouldn’t keep running experiments on it. That doesn’t mean it’s a complete unknown though.

Are you thinking of dark matter?

Edit: I can’t believe I fell for it. A) the username is hector, a synonym for “annoy” or ”pester.” B) going through their recent comments, they keep misspelling words in quotation marks and dropping one different, very obvious spelling or grammar mistake in each comment. C) they go a little further off the deep end and a little more obstinate every time.

And what about the meteorites on the moon that would have had to travel through the tarp first?

I just showed my husband 🥰

Oculonanism

At least it’s clean. I’ve definitely lived in worse places