Corvos
3mo ago
I admit that the English solution for foxes is less convenient ;-)
More seriously, I think in the UK we would usually use a shotgun. Even rural UK is much more dense than the US and people worry about a missed shot or ricochet killing someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Not that sticking to non-rifles keeps things safe… In a quite staggering display of insouciance both of my grandfathers managed to shoot a friend or significant other at some time in their lives, thankfully causing little damage in both cases.
Corvos
3mo ago
Drones as sold aren’t destructive, surely? They need a gun or explosive to be attached to them, both of which are banned for being destructive.
Corvos
3mo ago
You can do that of course. The big worry has always been people taking advantage - involuntary sending off to an asylum is a staple threat in Victorian literature for a reason.
Corvos
3mo ago
I might just be falling for toxoplasma, true.
I've personally used an AR-pattern rifle to shoot predators in defense of livestock.
Very cool, care to tell more? The closest I’ve got is a friend using a BB rifle to fend off monkeys, which can get very vicious.
Yes, certainly. But I don’t think that ‘some farmers have a rifle in the barn’ is what we’re talking about here. A Hassan wouldn’t be able to get a hunting rifle, and certainly wouldn’t be allowed to carry it into town or anything. There is essentially no probability that someone you meet is ‘packing’.
I made a post way back saying that lots of countries and England in particular are fine with sporting/hunting guns to some degree, but are absolutely rock-solid on forbidding personal weapons (with some unavoidable fuzziness in between).
My understanding of American gun rights supporters is that it’s the opposite: they feel it’s existentially important for their civilisation to allow people access to personal weapons specifically.
Not really, not to the same extent or of the same kind. Europe broadly doesn’t allow handguns or concealed carry, and makes getting a rifle difficult. The same is broadly true for Asia, Russia and a bit less so for India. Africa is unable to enforce this kind of thing.
The map of worldwide gun ownership per capita (which was made by the Swiss) is teal and blue globally, with a black blobs for America, Alaska and Yemen.
America doesn’t have handguns, ARs etc. because of its size and wild animals, it has them because it is (ironically) a very conservative country based on armed revolution.
Plus of course because you need them to protect yourself from all the people with guns. I’ve never seen posters here advocate for gun ownership to protect from wild animals, it’s always as a Schelling Point against government overreach or for self-defence.
Corvos
3mo ago
she promptly stops taking her meds, "because she doesn't need them,"
I know this is a big problem, but why does it happen? Is it that the meds don't really work, so patients are drugged and docile but still basically irrational? Is it that they work too well, so that patients think they're cured and therefore that they don't need the pills anymore? Or are the patients 'cured' but still basically too low-competency or erratic for their newfound sanity to make much difference?
I would have thought that after the first couple of rounds of 'didn't take my meds, got arrested', I would (being sober/sane because of the meds) spot the pattern and be very careful about taking the meds even when I'm feeling better.
That sounds like, ‘I don’t see Mormons as an outgroup’ rather than ‘I find it offensive to distinguish the outgroup’ though. The defining lines seem to be still be there for you (must love god, must treat sex as a lifetime commitment in principle) and indeed the latter potentially excludes not a few of the Christians I know who are broadly pro pre-marital sex as an inherently good thing.
If you are not personally interested in arcana about lines of apostolic succession then fair enough. I’m pretty lax about most theology - probably too much so. But clearly to many people it does matter.
Corvos
3mo ago
RSS doesn’t solve the right problem. The problem with the internet is with recommendations, not subscriptions.
It’s finding the stuff that I would like to know about but haven’t heard of yet.
Finding the latest episode/post of Thing I Already Like by Person I Already Like is easy.
Brilliant. I am now a professor of every Oxford and Cambridge college, holding a doctorate for every subject on Earth. I also have full security clearance for every military on Earth.
For practical purposes, you do sometimes have to distinguish between who is rightfully in a group and who is not. You do sometimes have to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘not us’, and even ‘thinks they are us but they aren’t’.
While I have no strong feelings about Mormonism in any particular direction, and generally approve of some fuzziness here, to say that it doesn’t matter who is a real Christian and who has the sacred right to perform important rituals seems basically to be equivalent to saying that these things are meaningless, weightless, to be picked up and put down by absolutely anybody without consequence.
Corvos
3mo ago
Plausible, but it’s also just a much better political move at this time. Saying ‘Mormons aren’t real Christians’ at this time makes you look petty and unkind. Talking about ‘people of faith’ makes you look all that and mealy-mouthed.
From a pure optics POV, better to support the victims full-throatedly now and walk any problems back later.
Corvos
3mo ago
Sure, I'm just saying it's a real game-changer for me. I've been stuck at a reasonably advanced plateau for a long time now because a lot of literary Japanese structures are hard to look up, and having something that can reliably figure out what structure is being used and what the referents are is incredibly helpful.
Corvos
3mo ago
Not complaining, just appending! I want British food to be more generally known, I think there's a lot to offer. We just need to find a format that works.
A friend noted that English food would have been eaten much more communally in the old days, buffet / feast style - it was much easier to do portion control when you had a table full of pies and hams and cakes and things and you just took a little of each and the rest went back for the next day.
Also pies (pork / game / steak & ale etc.), bangers and mash, bubble and squeak, toad in the hole, Shepherd's / Cottage Pie (not a pie despite the name), Lancashire hot-pot, sticky toffee pudding, plum/Christmas pudding, Victoria sponge cake, Eton Mess, chutneys, marmalades, roast pheasant, the Full English, the Sunday Roast...
English food had a dip because of the wars and the temporary loss of food culture, but more than that it's suffered terribly from central heating & reduced global exercise resulting in a drive for low-calorie food.
Corvos
3mo ago
Clip the last generation to about 0:00-1:04 and it's a brilliant mindfuck. I love watching it just spiral out of control. Couldn't stop giggling.
Corvos
3mo ago
Depends on your definition of tutor? My go-to is:
[JAPANESE SENTENCE]
Can you pull this apart for me?
I'm at an intermediate level already but this can break pretty much everything down and explain the grammar points that I'm having trouble with.
Corvos
3mo ago
The first vendor sells traps that hang in midair, they're very good on flying enemies but I do resent having to keep refilling them.
Corvos
3mo ago
Imagine a world where we have a good public school system, but a teacher is refusing to teach or use effective methods to teach. Who will discipline or fire them?
Well...
DENNIS: We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting. By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--
ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
More seriously, lots of schools like Oxford and Cambridge seem to have been able to run themselves without a specialised professional administrator class until recently.
Corvos
3mo ago
I think it’s broadly the total lack of anything approaching softness or sensuality. Hades 1 Aphrodite I’m not super keen on either but she has a coquettish pose appropriate for the Goddess of Love and Lust. This one in holding a sword and shield and looks like she wants to beat you up. Aphrodite is always dangerous but not like that.
I’m reminded of a previous post saying that one reason people liked Sydney Sweeney was that she’s one of the only models to have doe eyes and look soft and approachable rather than glaring at the camera.
Corvos
3mo ago
Lol. Okay, sometimes it’s a fig leaf.
But from a purely descriptive perspective I would bet that, say, 99% of Madoka Magica slash writers are not paedophiles.
My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history
They are fortunate, indeed, to learn Actual History.
To be fair, if America is anything like the UK then history is just egregiously bad. I learned GCSE history under the auspices of the Blair government and it was basically a panegyric to the Welfare State and Women’s Suffrage (plus some stuff on the Weimar Republic and why they let Hitler take power). I don’t recall ever reading the arguments of any serious opponents of either of these movements, nor any attempt to analyse their consequences.
Instead I learned that it was hard to create the Welfare State because the rich didn’t want to pay for it, but once it became clear how badly off the poor were, noble left-wing politicians were able to convince the public that it was necessary and then Everything Was Fine. Likewise with women’s suffrage, it was very difficult because stupid bigots believed that women were hysterical and belonged in the home, but brave activists worked hard and then Everything Was Fine.
I learned a lot about how to dissect bigoted cartoons and the biographies of specific left-wing activists who had helped bring about victory, and almost nothing about what arguments were really had or how people really felt at the time.
When your history is a children’s morality play, almost anything is a step up. Even showing a different morality play is giving them much more info than they had before.
Anime is in a peculiar situation because it is a very detail-light art style. A petite woman of thirty and a girl of 14 can only be distinguished by context and accessories.
Combine that with a culture that sets a lot of stories between 14-18 and you get a lot of risqué works that technically feature underage characters but don’t trigger ‘hell naw’ reactions in non-paedophiles that way a photo of an actual child would. Their age isn’t really relevant except that it means they are in fun-school culture rather than boring-office culture where the story couldn’t happen because everybody is being worked to death.
Then fan of Doki Doki Mai Haruto writes a fanfic where their favourite characters make good on their romantic tension / crush and suddenly they are a CP writer depending on jurisdiction.
Certainly, but either of those raise the bar significantly from ‘here is your human-killing device, here is the stuff to put in it, press this button to make it go’. To my mind, this is beyond most psychotic murderers. Our Hassan treats daily life as a Herculean task, he’s not going to build improvised explosives.
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