unable to open the doors and drowned

If you find yourself in a car sinking in water, conserve your energy because the doors will not open until your cabin is submerged. Take a deep breath at the last second that you can (you will need it) and wait until you are fully underwater to try to open the doors. This may not have been possible with the shallowness of the pool in the above news story. There are also specialized tools for breaking car windows that you can keep in your glove compartment for emergencies.

Let them eat cake

Baseless slur made up by corporate-pushed mainstream media to normalize giving time and money to the AI companies that paid for their airtime

“It’s a machine made to bullshit. It sounds confident and it’s right enough of the time that it tricks people into not questioning when it is completely wrong and has just wholly made something up to appease the querent.”

I knew that gold robot from Star Wars was up to no good

“critical thinking” genes

Uhhhhhh that’s like the entire basis and conclusion of the eugenics master race argument 😬

Much of the US is not dense, so many people have to drive to get places. In my experience, most areas don’t have the infrastructure for cars + pedestrians + cyclists, let alone just cars + pedestrians. The few places that do intermingle all three do so in a way which is very overwhelming for drivers. Cyclists also tend to travel either too slow for cars to maneuver around or too fast for cars to notice them coming. Like motorcycles, their small size also makes them hard to notice or keep track of while driving, and they don’t make the volume of noise that motorcycles do which helps with noticing them.

I heard on the radio that bacteria is what killed the Martians

I can’t do a thought police, but that is categorically what cults do. It’s not thought policing to advise people to be wary of thought policing or to promote scientific literacy and empathy.

Yeah, the situation got resolved when harm came in. You gotta commit an actual crime to be punished right?

I was meaning more so addressing the beliefs in absurdities before they result in committing atrocities, to paraphrase Voltaire.

How do you suggest we go about doing that?

What about in the case of the aforementioned Rajneeshpuram (prior to the mass food poisoning) where they politically overtook a town and armed themselves? They effectively seized the mechanisms you mentioned on a local level, and it wasn’t until people got directly and clearly hurt by them that a larger governing body interfered in a way which did eliminate their presence.

Probably the Enemy Boxer from Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. Canonically he is a mechanic but they don’t even give him the wrench ability which isn’t even that special of an ability, and then he dies like a wimp with his plastic still-alive head getting chopped off by the plane that he’s supposed to be repairing. An idiot who would punch an anvil three times in a row deserves that sort of graceless demise.

I guess I had initially interpreted “normal” meaning the percent of people who have once in their life held that job, rather than the percent of people holding the job at any given time.

I thought being a soldier stood a fair chance, at least at the time of original publication. Not sure if your data considers that position?

Most of those are less normal than what I was aiming for. Even being a reporter seemed too uncommon for what I wanted to list.

Ant-Man as a Baskin-Robbins cashier? Peter Parker as a pizza delivery boy? Captain America and many others as soldiers? Many X-Men are teachers, albeit for a specialized school. Robbie Reyes Ghost Rider is a mechanic. Can’t think of any DC characters that fit the bill apart from maybe Jay Garrick Flash as a college athlete.

…… you quote “it can’t happen here” without realizing that the phrase itself is satirical and that so so many people already saw the trajectory ages before now and that nationalistic propaganda is abundant in mass media. It’s no shock to anyone who has ever tried paying attention or thinking critically about the implications of common ideologies.