We have strayed so far from God

“I’m in this photo and I don’t like it”

Nice to know I can finally cancel Prime though. The entire value proposition has now gone. Free shipping is hugely conditional (and prices are artificially jacked to cover it in the first place), and now they want to put the worst thing on the internet (ads) into the only component of Prime I still sorta kinda use sometimes. I’d rather keep the $140 a year or whatever.

I’m gonna have kids just so I can make sure to raise them on the correct media diet. They’re getting all the classic video game consoles, in order of generation, so when they get to something like Elden Ring they have the context all the way back to Space Invaders to appreciate it. And we’re going to be a home of physical media, god damn it. We’re not streaming things. We’re putting CD’s and vinyls and blu rays in their respective players. No iPads. Only books, comics, coloring books and notebooks.

How the fuck did parents start giving their kids iPads, anyway? Nintendo Switches? My first Gameboy cost $90 and I bought it with my own birthday money. A children’s book from a young reader series cost $6 new in the 90s and is probably not much worse now. Less, if you buy it used, which is much easier now. And people are just like, “here, my 12 year old child, have an Xbox Series whatever, and an iPad, and a Galaxy phone. They’re all pre-connected to your YouTube account. Don’t let your other parent know that I told you that for Christmas we’re getting you a gaming PC, Logitech C920, condenser microphone, wireless headset, gaming chair, scissor arm, and LED lighting array so you can chase the completely impossible dream of being a professional streamer. Can I kiss your feet while I’m at it? Will that make this a good half-birthday for you?” Unfuckingthinkable. Knock it off.

Zillow, who had aBsOLuTeLy NoTHiNg tO Do WiTh ThEsE pRiCeS now has some thoughts on it huh

Because we’re taught to in school and everything we’re meant to learn about enlightenment ideals and free, critical thinking is contradicted by our nonstop exposure to ‘patriotic identity as a brand’. Our football games, our truck commercials, our news stations, everything is stamped with an American flag in the way a church might use iconography of crosses and saints. And since our education system is actually pretty bad at teaching nuance and critical thought, we latch onto it like “yeah, I like America, and I will glorify it because I’m being told to.” And then you get into this really lazy binary of ideology as a commodity where people crave the dopamine hit of feeling like they’re associated with a ‘side’, and a side which has all the most DeVaStAtInG hot takes to pwn the other side’s strawmen. And then you’re in “my country, do or die” territory because some wealthy person in the media is able to “rah rah” you into being a class traitor because of the trivial fandom associations they’ve taught you to make about culture war issues that actually have nothing to do with you or your day to day life.

lol that’s fair. But also, the there’s a cyclical relationship between suburbs and grocers. If you build suburbs, the grocers arrive. Where there are grocers, people might live and form suburbs. You really only have to “drive 40 minutes to get groceries” if you’re waaaaaaaaaaaaay out in the sticks. Or, and I’m sorry to say it, what’s more likely, is you live in a dense, urban area and are very near groceries, but can’t afford a vehicle to get there directly, and so you’ve got to walk to the bus stop and wait for the bus to come around. This could definitely total 40 minutes to go get some eggs and milk. It’s a fucking tragedy.

I’m not a pro, or especially familiar myself, but I know that because Vim is command-based, people like that they can accomplish significant edits with it using only a couple keep strokes. It’s like learning another language but if you take the time, I’m told, to do so, then you reap substantial efficiency rewards which make other text editors feel limited by comparison.

Sure. At that point I was so deep in a long internet comment I was bound to express myself poorly. I guess I just mean that context is important. A dominant group person telling a person from a non-dominant group they just need to get their act together has all sorts of baggage that is different from a person within that non-dominant group expressing a similar idea. Of course McWhorter and, say, Rand Paul, are different people with different ideas…I was just swinging wild for my shoddy example, I guess. All I mean, is, I’m more inclined to listen to a black man’s take on black culture than a white man’s take. And to loop all the way back to the point, I’m inclined to listen to Geimer’s take over, say, random internet commenters with no actual stake in the matter. But my hearing out how Geimer feels doesn’t just mean that she speaks for all sexual assault victims, or that I can’t value just as much another sexual assault victim’s opposing attitude on the subject of sexual assault, or even on Geimer’s own situation. I just mean bias and prejudice are inescapable, complicated components of discussions like these.

I don’t think I’m doing any better right now so I’m just going to knock it off, but I appreciate you giving my sloppy comments some consideration. It’s very gracious of you. And since this is the internet I must clarify I’m not being sarcastic.

Sure. Here’s one for example. Geimer’s take is 100% going to ruffle feathers; when she speaks about her angle on feminism, I mean. But the thing that makes this one philosophically very interesting to chew on, in a “what would Jesus do” kind of way, is that, again, she is the victim, and she was even ‘over it’ at the time it happened.

I think people are very quick to extrapolate out that understanding a position like Geimer’s is tantamount to a tacit endorsement of the kind of abuse she suffered, or of letting people off the hook willy-nilly. I find it the sort of idea-challenging wrinkle that makes existing as a human being so fascinating.

When we think about crime and punishment, morals and ethics, abuse and victimhood, we really, very often, just do not know how to handle something like a person saying, “no, this is my problem, not yours, and I’m saying this has been overblown”, or whatever the case may be. Or like, to put it another way, when a family of a murder victim don’t believe, for religious or whatever other reasons, in the death penalty, and they advocate against the death penalty for the person who murdered their loved one.

I think it’s really important that we sit with those challenging thoughts rather than gloss over them. Glossing things over is really easy, and it’s a kind of intellectual shortcutting that often gets us into more and more difficult positions where we find it impossible to see eye to eye…in cases like this, even with the people who we’re trying to stick up for. Somebody can can definitely think Geimer is wrong, but they can’t deny that it’s at least her right to feel how she feels, because she’s the one we’re all arguing about.

That said, there were a few other accusations about Polanski at that time, and I don’t know much about them because Geimer’s was, as I understand it, the one for which he was going to court. Unsure if there was ever litigation on those others.

I can’t remember where I saw it, but there’s some interesting video footage of her talking about this stuff as well. More on those notes about how she feels to watch other people get riled up in her defense even while she’s sitting here telling them they don’t have a right to. It’s certainly all a lot of food for thought.

*Edit: this reminded me of another one I like to sit back and fascinate over. There’s a fellow called John McWhorter who is, I believe, a libertarian, and he is a linguist, and he is black. He has written some very interesting stuff about language, which I really love, but I also find his attitudes to be really endearing as well. But what I must point out is I’m a big leftie. Bernie Sanders leftie. “In this house we believe…” sign out front Leftie. So I don’t see eye to eye with McWhorter and his bootstraps attitudes about everything.

So one thing he brings up a lot is what would help the African American lower class. Pretty much anyone with eyes to see in this country understands African Americans are, for historical reasons, systemically disadvantaged; but where a progressive fellow like myself is very quick to say, “we need to understand, and accommodate, and effect this, that and the other kind of change to make things more equitable,” John McWhorter will refer to those suggestions as ineffectual and coddling. His attitude about how to help Black America is more rooted in holding people to higher standards rather than lowering the standards to which they’re asked to rise. His ideas for helping black folks economically are more of a “rising tide lifts all boats” sort that suggest that rather than targeting black folks with economic stimulus policies, we just target the poor class to which so many black folks belong, and perhaps, in the process, reduce the ‘us vs them’ mentality that so many poor whites harbor toward blacks.

Now, again, if those ideas were coming out of a white person’s mouth–a Rand Paul, let’s say–someone like me might find them problematic and disagreeable. But McWhorter is a black person, he’s of the afflicted caste here, and isn’t it unsavory of me, well-meaning white person, to suggest that his ideas are wrong? Like, what do I even know about it? And I’m not saying that makes him right by default. Goodness knows you have your Larries Elder and your Candaces Owens out there who are black but also sewing the ideology of white supremacy to make their personal fortunes being the white-appeasing token political pundits. I’m only saying that it gives me cause to think a little harder about what McWhorterhas to say, politically. It gives me that little ‘check’ that I don’t know everything about the world, and my ideology is not fully informed, and that just because I think I have heard out the situation and attitudes of a class of people, that is not necessarily so, and so on and so forth.*

Not endorsing, just reporting. The reason is likely that the man apologized and made peace with the victim decades ago, and they (like the victim) are also of the opinion that Polanski was set up by a crooked judge who was going to exploit the situation and really ruin Polanski’s life with a last minute extreme punishment for a bit of fame; that Polanski left the country not to evade the accusation, but rather the life-ending punishment he heard the judge had in store for him, and that spending half his life in exile is a kind of ‘time served’ for a guy who, again, has since made amends for his crime with the person who was the victim of that crime. Essentially, these Hollywood people are saying, he’s one of our greatest artists, and the matter has been settled everywhere but in the American justice system for long enough that the matter ought to be dropped.

Only an aspiring Trekkie over here. Can you explain this line? I don’t follow.

Very cool. Thank you!

I’m more interested in which accounts have already moved, so I can follow them.

I think you know very well I would never engage with this possibility as a means of self preservation. Good day sir!

Yeah but if anything doesn’t work correctly it’s specifically because of the Chromium monopoly on the direction of web development. It’s almost a reason unto itself to move to Firefox. It’s like saying “what’s the point in shopping at a mom and pop store when Amazon basically won the future of capitalism anyway?” As an argument it’s just “let’s give up and let Google win.”

Forgive me, sire; I hadn’t $80,000 to spend on a luxury truck.

You fuck.

But if white widow earlier. But of strawberry cough also earlier but less earlier.

Until someone found a way to exploit it. And / or it became popular to pre roll advertisements before revealing the link preview.

Then I mean a later year because my girlfriend and I each own X1s from around that time which we bought on eBay. Mine, I believe, was listed as a 2018. Hers is a year newer. So those figures might need budged but I do not mean a T480.

Unless you’re just recommending a T480 over an X1, in which case, I apologize for stepping all over your punchline.