LillyPip

It’s heading for the screen in the upper right to google for soil.

Beholden by choice. They’re simps.

It’s infuriating that people are beholden to this fucking loser.

Their practices are so scummy, I’m surprised they’re still allowed to operate at all in Canada. Glad they can’t do their worst in Ontario, that’s a small win.

You’re right about their abhorrent manipulation – I still have binders in storage from my sales training; I should dig them up and post some of it. It’s still, 35 years later, the most disgusting emotional manipulation I’ve ever seen. After all these years, it’s only got worse in the US from what I hear.

You were supposed to ask them to relive their most recent familial death experience under the guise of polite conversation, then hone in on whatever detail was the most unpleasant, and hammer home how if they didn’t buy a package, their children would go through worse. Have they considered how much emotional and financial pain they would cause if, god forbid, they died tomorrow? Don’t take time to think about the money you don’t have, because every hour of delay raises the chances your kids will be left with a financial mess when they’re grieving you. You’re basically heartless for doing that to them.

The graveside pitch was even worse. It’s so sad you lost your baby last month, but what if your six-year-old died tomorrow? Are you prepared for that? Like jesus, I can’t imagine the paranoia a grieving family faces after losing one child, constantly afraid for their remaining child. Let’s rub salt in that wound and scare the shit out of them for a few thousand dollars. It should be illegal everywhere.

Mhm. Your anecdotal ‘feels’ outweigh actual data, sounds about right(wing).

How about you at least try to back up what you say with anything at all beyond ‘I believe it’s true’? Because nobody outside your bubble is going to take that seriously.

I’m from a city roughly the size and makeup of LA, so you can keep your ‘online life’ comment to yourself.

e-side note: real people are behind these usernames, you know. Not NPCs or drones, but actual people with lives sharing similarities to your own in varying degrees. People aren’t black and white caricatures, and treating them as though they’re hypothetical characters in fake worlds further detaches you from them and can lead to a distorted worldview.

It’s important keep remembering that, because bad actors have been working hard to take advantage of the tendency we all have towards this.

Not so fun story:

One of my first jobs when I was barely 18 was with one of the big funeral home/cemetery providers in the US. It was positively horrible, and not for the reasons most people think.

As a new hire, you’d start on the cold-calling phone banks, which was bad enough. Nobody wants a cold marketing call from a cemetery. But it got worse from there.

After a month on the phone bank, I’d done well enough to be promoted to field sales, which meant going to the most impoverished areas of town to follow up on the appointments the phone bank had made, basically trying to scare poor elderly people into handing over what little they had to ‘pre-plan’ for their deaths, with the pitch that if they didn’t, their family would suffer.

After a few appointments it was clear I didn’t have the stomach for that, so they moved me to on-site sales, which was somehow worse.

On-site sales included helping to host the Mother’s Day open house at the large main cemetery. They set up a greeting station at the entrance with refreshments and ‘in memorium’ wreaths that could be bought by bereaved family (on that day, mostly children of the deceased, but also mothers who had lost their children, some at a very young age). It sounds like a kind thing to do, because many young mothers/fathers coming to visit were so distraught, they hadn’t stopped for coffee or thought about flowers.

I was not stationed at the welcome station. I was a ‘roamer’, meaning I was one of several staff expected to meander through the graves and check on families graveside – to ask if they needed anything and to upsell them pre-planning packages for themselves or their other children. I am not kidding, we were expected to do that.

I had to be prodded to approach my first mark (a young couple ‘celebrating’ the woman’s first Mother’s Day at the grave of her several months old child, and I couldn’t stomach it. It felt barbaric, to even try to sell someone who could not stop crying at the grave of her young child. I couldn’t do the pitch, obviously, and backed out as soon as possible, then hid by the skips behind the main building until the end of the day when I quit.

I’ve done many jobs in my life, including cleaning bowling alley toilets, but I’ve never been asked to do anything as vile.

I’ll bet everyone in the funeral industry can guess which company I’m talking about.

We’re guessing. Everyone claims it’s all based on research and advanced modelling, but we really have no idea and and are bullshitting our way through presentations and press conferences.

We say whatever we can to keep our shareholders invested and the public buying. I’ll let you guess the industry, but you probably know.

Genius. Where’s your GoFundMe?

No u.

Here, I’ll give you a head start:

University of Maryland Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice

our analysis shows that right-wing actors are significantly more violent than left-wing actors
the probability of a violent act of extremism in the United States being committed by a left-wing extremist was found to be 0.33, 0.61 by a right-wing extremist, and 0.62 by an Islamist extremist.

You’ll notice that’s double the incidents from the right vs the left.

Military Times, which no one could reasonably claim has any liberal bias

But terrorism carried out by right-wing actors eclipsed that of leftist movements in the 1990s … Now, government agencies and scholars across the political spectrum agree that far-right movements have caused most of the political violence in the U.S. over the past few years – and present the most dangerous threat today.

West Point Combating Terrorism Center – and again, West Point can hardly be called liberal

Accelerationist ideology, conspiracy theories, disinformation, and far-right extremist narratives have played a key role in the prioritization of critical infrastructure as a target for the violent far-right. The intersections of these ideologies and narratives have led to complex attacks on power grids and the targeting of telecommunications systems by far-right extremists. The increased focus and attacks on critical infrastructure by far-right extremists has the potential to wreak extensive, multifaceted societal disruption and damage, impacting communications, the economy, mobility, and basic human necessities.

Can you provide legitimate, unbiased sources for your claims? Because all the data says you’re being lied to.

Well that’s stupid. I could infringe IP by carving a gloved mouse on a stone tablet. Are you gonna ban stone tablets? And hands? Jesus, Sheila, get a grip.

Yeah, the guy who exposed himself to coworkers and throws around slurs like confetti. That guy.