Beaver [he/him]

Imagine if a nuclear exchange happened, but none of the warheads went off because of some unforseen flaw from the material degradation that arises after sitting in a silo for thirty years.

Correcting someone’s spelling is imperialist

Yum

The liberal fascination with private/public partnerships is so odd. There’s obviously some brainworm idea that a privatized version of a service will experience market pressures to improve efficiency… but even in their ideal world where that’s true why do they think that the profit margin wouldn’t swallow up that difference, especially when they never do competitive bidding for services? The Thatcherite vision at least had the consistency of the government completely exiting the field, but the Starmerite vision seems to be the Ultimate Centrist approach of just having the worst of all worlds.

It’s a tragedy that Marx was born too early to be history’s greatest poster.

Millenials are now experiencing the consequences of inventing gary’s mod machinima

Napster was a godsend, as I couldn’t afford to buy music. I installed it on the school computers, and I had a sneaky little hidden folder with my mp3s. I’d plug in my headphones and listen over lunchtime. I eventually figured out how to use multipart rar files to put them onto floppy disks, so that I could get them back home and listen on my parent’s computer. I was eventually able to buy a portable CD player that played mp3s on CD-RW, which really opened up the possibilities. Without piracy, I don’t think I would be into music in the same way - I simple never would have had the opportunity to listen to most stuff.

Let me guess: austerity is needed?

America’s 1,000 soldiers in Niger are being expelled, bolstering Russia’s influence in West Africa and trashing US counter-terrorism initiatives in the Sahel.

They buried the lede half-way through the article!

That’s me. I hate discord, but it’s literally the only way that I can communicate with some people, and do hobby stuff. So I just have it set up so that only @mentions will rouse me.

Challenge believers in meritocracy by asking them why the inheritance tax shouldn’t be 100%.

It really challenges the idea that nations ultimately are purely rational actors driven by resource competition. I have to remind myself sometimes that there are in fact some religious whackos tugging on the steering wheels. I don’t have a very good understanding of Iran, but I assume they have their share of that too (how could they not?)

One’s brutally cunning, the other’s cunningly brutal

The beetles experience a lot of unjust suffering too :(

If anything, the suffering that creatures in nature feel is even more damning, because it’s so widespread, and you can’t make this “oh, it’s all about free will” argument.

I was an atheist already as a pre-teen because I was never offered any satisfactory answer this very obvious question. I’ve chilled out about the militant atheism since then, but I still think people are being overly credulous when they invoke the idea that a benevolent force created this world. There’s just so much suffering that is up to pure chance.

Dems still doing triangulation, despite that strategy only being kinda effective in 1996, and never since then

We were so hung up on whether Zootopia was turning a generation into furries, that we didn’t consider whether it was turning a generation into cop loving fascists

That’s one way to hit your inflation target

Yeah, it’s one of the worst changes from the book - Stilgar is a believer from the beginning, and is even described by other Fremen as being kind of a religious fanatic who sees prophecy everywhere. It’s an unfortunate change, as this was one of the most important themes in the book, the way that fanaticism debases people.

It’s a bummer that Stilgar doesn’t go on that journey in thia film, especially consider how much it beats us on the head that the prophecy is a cynical manipulation.