It's only a few steps away from "The Lawnmower Man", which actually took a Stephen King title and put it on an unrelated film.

Basically the whole second half of the book is missing aside from the very end. The book is missing the whole thing about double-versions of the characters existing, and the shadow people (important to the sequel) never appear.

I believe there are studies that actually show that. Having a lot of money makes people more callous and feel more like they have authority over those that serve them, while poverty is more likely to encourage empathy and the feeling that you are being done a favor by an equal.

At the same time I presume having too little money would also lead to irrational behavior due to the opposite problem: that you need sufficient resources to have rational options open (or to have your rational decisions count for something). That would be backed up by the effects of poverty on superstition and…

I think the thing is the process makes most of us unhappy, and the reward for such shopping is rarely anything but disappointing... and since we put more work into it, buyer's remorse is worse for the flaws of the product we get.

I was only half-joking.

I was about to say I liked the show... but I cannot deny the logic of Rob's argument.

Great... So now in addition to the other problems of global warming, we have a rise of authoritarian religion to look forward to.

You are unfamiliar with Satanism and the Satanic Bible obviously.

And its cousin: Smart People Have Superpowers.

What an amazingly stupid comment. You obviously have Internet access and can look up examples.

Not really. A supernatural being can break from the religious and superstitious beliefs surrounding it in order to disprove both skeptics and faith.

It's writing genius. Let me qualify:

Keyword:BASED

A merchant is not the government, but in principle discounts generally exist as a way for stores to overall rip us off while making it look like they're doing us a favor... so it is an interesting example.

Okay... I think I might, just once, pay to see someone use a manic-pixie-dream-girl-in-the-refrigerator gimmick.

MY guess is that Satanists have changed from LaVay's original positions, adapting to church membership the way any other religion does.

Economic interests are a bigger driver of right-wing anti-environmentalism than religion, and a great number of libertarians (who I'd expert Satanists to most overlap with) join them in that philosophy. Anti-environmentalism is attached heavily to being anti-regulation and anti-tax.

When you think of it the woman-in-refrigerator trope and the manic-pixie-dream-girl trope are offensive for the exact same reason.

They have a psychotic obsession with revenge that separates them from all other agnostic/atheist/humanist/unitarian philosophies I'm aware of. In Satanism, revenge isn't just allowable— it's considered necessary.