As things stand, unfortunately, the far-right is significantly better armed and better prepared for a breakdown in government.

While I would prefer to peacefully reform the system, it’s increasingly clear that there’s validity to the saying, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” The fact that the right is better positioned for a breakdown in order allows them to push further and further without fear. Civil war or revolution isn’t going to be something the left chooses, rather, if current trends continue (and it seems like they will) we may end up in a situation where it’s forced upon us and we are left but no choice to defend ourselves.

It’s not necessarily an all-or-nothing deal. There are methods of fighting back that are more effective than relying on the Democrats but don’t constitute full-on revolution, such as strikes. While strikes are non-violent, history has shown that they have potential to become violent, for example, if a boss hires mercenaries to force people back to work at gunpoint.

Likewise, if masked gunmen started showing up to people’s workplaces, demanding some of the workers to be handed over to be taken as hostages, workers need to be prepared to deal with that emergency.

Practically speaking, even if you wanted a revolution, there’s now way that would even be viable while practical steps for community defense have not been made. I’m not sure it’s rhetorically necessary to go further than that, particularly on a public forum.

Or Uranus being pronounced not as your-anus but urine-us. The “alternate/kid-friendly” option is just plain worse. It also teaches kids certain words are bad, which is a bad idea for a multitude of resons I won’t get into.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with the word “anus” but if you’re actually in the field of astronomy that particular pun starts to get old after about the 10 millionth time. Some people just want to be able to talk about the seventh planet without the room erupting in giggles every time they say its name.

Spare a thought for the poor astronomy student doing thesis work on the volatile gases of Uranus. They know, they get it, they just want to be able to have one serious conversation about it.

I watched Alien for the first time last week, and I was blown away. The aesthetics, the camera-work showing massive scales, the way it reveals information (or doesn’t!). Obviously it’s impossible to go into it completely blind, I knew Ripley would be the last survivor, I knew about the chestburster, I knew about the evil corporation, but the twist with the science officer caught me off guard and was amazingly executed.

Somehow it still felt very distinctive and unique, even being so old and influential.

Because:

The point is to reveal the different frames of analysis people use to make the decision.

This thought process, “The decision’s already been made, either way it’s always a free $1000,” is one way of looking at it. But another way of looking at it is, “Those who choose one box tend to walk away with more money, so the evidence shows that taking one box is the better approach.” These approaches sort of “talk past each other,” because they’re looking at completely different parts of the problem in order to draw their conclusions, and those different parts indicate very opposing conclusions.

Some version of it could exist. Not with the big numbers and not with the high degree of certainty in the problem, but you could have, say, somebody who’s on average 70% accurate at reading people and the boxes are $1 and $10.

It is somewhat idealist in that it’s a contrived scenario, but it’s really just idle curiosity on my part. Maybe it could reflect something about people’s thought processes, or maybe it’s just people interpreting the question differently.

> Fires the guy whose job was assassinating heads of state

> Gets assassinated

> Guy who got fired gets on the investigative comittee which fucks up the investigation

Who could it be 🤔

Technically correct. It’s a valid comparison to Catholicism and Catholicism is, indeed, a bad faith.

This shouldn’t be misconstrued as women being less than a man it’s just that their roles are different.

Oh, I get it, they’re separate but equal!

What a load of horseshit.

Catholic and Orthodox have way less loonies comparatively than either evangelicals or the fedora wearing atheist crowd which is basically another form of protestantism.

I’ve never been religious by my little sister was. She loved helping out at Mass every Sunday, and volunteered to be an alter server. She was one of the most faithful and good-hearted Christians I’ve ever met. As long as you didn’t bring up abortion, anyway.

Then one day the priest said she wasn’t allowed to anymore, because she was a girl. He said that only boys should be allowed up in the front of church. His justification was that being an alter server was practice for being a priest, and only men were allowed to be priests.

Do you happen to know what the Catholic Church’s justification for only allowing male priests is, by the way? Well you see, God is male, obviously, and the Church is symbolically married to God, so that means that the Church must be symbolically female, and priests are symbolically married to the Church (the Church is poly?) meaning, of course, that priests have to be male.

If you get a Protestant or a fedora atheist, you’re basically rolling the dice, but if you get a Catholic, you know for a fact that they’re at minimum fine with being part of a deeply sexist, homophobic, and authoritarian institution.

Fucking Amazon would be a better moral authority than the Catholic Church because at least Amazon doesn’t explicitly descriminate based on sex. Always the last to be dragged into the future, kicking and screaming the whole time, since Galileo if not before.

WKUK - Pope Rap

The military industrial complex.

“People used to live to be 900 years old.”

They also used to be able to fly, according to my dad, who was not happy with me when I laughed it off because I thought he was joking.

This is a really dumb perspective, in general. By that logic I could say, “If Holocaust denialism is so baseless, then why does it get censored so much? If there’s no truth to it, wouldn’t you want people talking about it?” No, it’s censored because it is baseless, because we don’t want people spreading around long debunked misinformation. Just because something is untrue doesn’t mean that people repeating it can’t create confusion, doubt, etc.

I mean, look at all the bullshit propaganda the right puts out, and because they have so much money backing it, strengthening their signal, it’s all some people ever hear, and if some spends thousands of hours watching Fox News, and the other side gets like 20 minutes once a year at Thanksgiving, which narrative they go with is going to have very little to do with what’s actually true.

That same far-right media sphere has spread out from the US to all sorts of small countries around the world. If you look at them, you’ll often find right-wingers in those countries screaming about shit that doesn’t even apply to their country, because it’s what this propaganda network told them to be mad about. I mean, fucking anti-mask protests in Japan, for example.

Regardless of your perspective on Tienanmen Square, this logic of, “If it’s not true then there’s no reason to censor it” doesn’t really hold up.

Kiseido Go Server (KGS)

If KGS’s UI looks like it hasn’t been updated in 20 years, that’s because it’s already perfect. There’s no ads, it’s purely functional, it does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. If you click on “KGS Plus” you have the option to spend money on lectures given by human pros. Otherwise it’s completely free, and it’s still an active go server that’s been around forever.

For all intents and purposes, I’m opposed to death penalty. I am, in practice, less prone to violence than the vast majority of people. But I’m also honest and transparent about my beliefs.

The working class is so far from power that it’s virtually impossible to achieve victory while pulling punches. Either we roll over and accept things, or we go all out and use whatever means and tactics are most useful to secure power. If you go halfway and present an actual threat to power (even through nonviolence) they will use any means available to neutralize that threat. Failure means death, and it could be generations, centuries even, until there’s another opportunity for change. If you’re not prepared to use every method at your disposal to win, then you simply shouldn’t pick up the fight in the first place.

Of course, nonviolent tactics can be useful and pragmatic, in many cases, they are more effective than violent tactics. However, the choice of tactic should be driven by an honest and pragmatic assessment of the actual circumstances, and not by preconceived ideological notions about morality. And that goes both ways, it is also unacceptable to prioritize violent tactics just because someone finds them more appealing or exciting. And for the record, I’m not saying that violent tactics are the most suitable for the present circumstances. I’m just not willing to write them off for all circumstances.

For example: Suppose a resistance cell in France captures a group of SS soldiers as prisoners, but the Nazis are on their trail and preparing an attack. If the cell doesn’t execute the prisoners, there’s a chance they will be rescued and will end up contributing to the German war effort. On the other hand, perhaps those prisoners could provide valuable intel that outweighs the risk. The decision on whether to execute them should, ideally, be based on these tactical considerations, rather than either an emotional aversion to violence or an emotional desire for revenge (no matter how deserved it may be).

If you don’t have your head in the game and your eye on the prize, and the other side does, then you’re probably going to lose. And fighting and losing is worse than not fighting at all. It’s better to give up and roll over than to go out and get a bunch of people killed over a hopeless cause.

Naturally, all of this is very unrelated to the reality of how the death penalty is used in the present day, which I oppose unequivocally.

Source on what? That the founders owned slaves?

Trump doesn’t give a shit about you or America. It’s just a slogan to dupe people as he persues his own personal interests. He’s corrupt, and the rest of the politicians don’t want to get rid of him because they’re just as corrupt and serving the same corporate interests. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.

He might hurt the people you dislike because it doesn’t cost him anything but he’s not going to actually improve your life or anybody else’s.

I definitely think there was more honor back in those days. I mean, thieves have always existed

The thieves and criminals that existed back then were truly vile though. These days, someone might break a window and carry off your TV. In those days, the thieves would take everything you owned and then press you into lifelong servitude, beating you if you ever disobeyed, they would even steal your children away from you and do the same to them.

And nobody did shit about it. Why? Because these thieves were “honorable” because there were “gentlemen’s agreements” and “decorum” and “civility” meant that they were allowed to do whatever the hell they wanted to those who were considered “racially inferior.”

If that’s what honor means, then fuck honor. Fuck this civility fetishism, this nostalgia for a time of greater injustice and oppression. Half the problems we have today is because of these evil and idiotic founders setting up a stupid dysfunctional system, in some ways designed to be dysfunctional because they were afraid of “the masses” voting according to their own interests and freeing the slaves the elites relied on for their lavish lifestyles.

Yes, revolutions do tend to be bloody. That doesn’t mean that I have to choose between endorsing every act of violence or condemning every act of violence.

The reality is, in any conflict, innocent people usually end up getting hurt. It’s unfortunate, but if that conflict means preventing or ending other conflicts, then it’s potentially justifiable in my eyes.

If the government is, for example, drafting people en masse and forcing them to kill and die for no good reason, then overthrowing that government is justifiable, because innocent people were getting hurt anyway.

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

-Mark Twain

I didn’t say that. I’m not giving some kind of blanket endorsement about “axing anyone involved in ownership.” It’s not an all or nothing deal.