What’s wild is that my dad is a democrat, “union man”, who is himself otherwise liberal. He agrees that there’s a class war, but that the rich are organized specifically by a few secret unimaginably rich jewish families for unclear purposes.

I was eating dinner with my dad a year ago when he told me about how he believes jews secretly run the world and that there’s something fishy about the Rothschilds. I burst out laughing thinking my dad had suddenly developed a very modern online sense of humor, but unfortunately no.

I’ve never known my dad to be antisemitic, and he even explained that regular jews are a different group from the ones in control.

I straight up told him it’s ridiculous and that he needs to get off the internet, but he never agreed with me. I still don’t know how to handle the situation really.

Oh and my mom went borderline sovereign citizen a few years ago, but I don’t remember what insane thing she said first.

Something I rarely see brought up is specifically the edgelord to right wing pipeline. When I was a kid, it was essentially standard for any boy online to try to be super edgy. Adolescents and teens just have a natural urge for rebellion.

The problem comes when kids think edgy and shock value humor is their favorite thing, but more mature online users reject that behavior and exclude these kids. These kids feel misunderstood and are drawn to figures and role models that accept what they like.

I’ve met a bunch of younger, “conservative”, incel types recently and they’ve all been edgelords who found their own little community instead of growing up. They largely have no ideology in the beginning but slowly absorb manosphere bullshit and over time they become less “ironic”.

The thing that got me to stop being edgy was joining the swim team and having my friend group go from edgelords to gay swimmers. I developed a ton of respect for them and they were my teammates; it completely changed my mind without me having to “conform” to the things I wanted to rebel against. I don’t really know how to get that across to some many kids that get sucked up into this madness though.

Ah, yeah I got my sense of smell knocked outta me when I was a kid. I’ve read about some kind of treatment to help people train their sense of smell. It came up a lot in some anosmic groups I was during the pandemic. I never looked too much into it because there’s no point, but it might be worth a trip to an ENT in your case.

I’m anosmic too and I had the same experience in college. I never had to deal with “fresh” milk ever being not so fresh though. Although after reading your post, I think I’ll get a pitcher for milk so i can pour out the bottle when I get it to double check for chunks. You could try that too, but I can’t say how well it works.

I don’t think I can taste if milk is sour, but I’ve developed a tolerance to food that’s gone a bit bad anyway.

The tag I played melee under was “frenchfrymaster” which was stupid. So I changed over to my in-game nickname “FRYD” which was supposed to be “fried”, but a few years later I found out it’s the norwegian and danish word for joy and I started using a bastardization of their pronunciation.

USPS is unionized. No cameras, Way less micro-management, and you can pee when you want to.