Mantergeistmann
No bio...
User ID: 323
Mantergeistmann
21hr ago
The admin building wouldnt be the same as your username, would it?
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
I am tremendously salty about the lack of PC port.
Mantergeistmann
4d ago
It's not quite pigeon, but correspondence chess by naval courier was a plot point in one of the Honor Harrington books, if I recall.
Mantergeistmann
6d ago
The problem is that we can not build them in the USA. Out of the last 4 units we tried, two of them ran up construction costs approaching $30 billion before they threw in the towel and got canceled. The other two at least got built, but again, with a cost of some $30 billion. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5x as expensive as wind or solar.
We can’t talk about nuclear without acknowledging that the USA, as a country, can’t build nuclear anymore. Anyone who who even tries goes bankrupt. I don’t mean there is a lack of political will, though there is that. I mean we don’t have the manufacturers, contractors, designers, or financial sponsors that know how to do it. It’s really sad.
If I recall, the MIT study on the matter even straight up said that it's not the cost of the nuclear portion that drives up the price, it's the general construction and horrible project management of the rest of the site.
Mantergeistmann
18d ago
Joe could have not banned religious themes from Easter egg contests for military families at the same time.
The Egg Board says this had nothing to do with Biden, though?
"The American Egg Board has been a supporter of the White House Easter Egg Roll for over 45 years and the guideline language referenced in recent news reports has consistently applied to the board since its founding, across administrations."
Mantergeistmann
18d ago
some of the people I see holding firmly to the view that a six year old can know their gender and be rock-solid on they're a girl not a boy
I mean, I would imagine there'd be no problem with a six year old girl assigned female at birth who's adamant that she's a girl and not a boy (and that it'd be horrible parenting to insist that no, she really is a boy, she just needs to wait until she grows up and she'll understand that she's been a boy all along), and same for a boy assigned male who's sure that he's a boy, for instance.
Mantergeistmann
19d ago
It isnt even that they weren't allowed access to restrooms... the building was closed (at least partially) due to construction, and the students had to shove past a security guard to get in. So it's more "You're not allowed to use the restrooms in the building you broke into (same as everyone else isn't allowed to enter and use them), but you can feel free to leave and use any other building on campus (like everyone else)."
Campus police also prohibited the people delivering Panera from entering the building to deliver it to the protestors (which, again, this building was in a somewhat-closed status unrelated to the protests).
It's also a bit ironic given that Vandy came out with a Free Expression Initiative a little while back, which I was heartily in favor of. I think overall, the admin has done a pretty good job of handling this, the overall Israel/Hamas conflict, and also the upcoming election.
Mantergeistmann
20d ago
My 5e group is between games at the moment, and I'm hoping to find/run a group with a different system. 3.5, Pathfinder, Numenera, Traveller, Wolves of God... you name it, just something different from 5e.
Mantergeistmann
20d ago
I'm finding it very interesting how the Democratic party usual suspects are getting hit by their own supporters
Is that a Yemen flag there underneath the Palestinian flag, with a Trans flag in between? I guess they're... supporting the government over the Houthis?
Mantergeistmann
22d ago
Saying 'From the river to the sea' doesn't neccessarily require violence
In the same way that "blood and soil" could just be a call to recognize the efforts of hard-working small farmers. But if its used by protestors in the immediate aftermath of a horrible attack by a group of white supremacists who are known to have used it as their own slogan... at that point, I feel like using it and claiming innocence is ignorance at best.
Mantergeistmann
26d ago
The underlying assumption by Pro-Israeli voices is that it is impossible for Pro-Israeli content to simply be unpopular. It is impossible that the Israelis are simply bad at memes. There is no actual evidence of bias produced, no evidence of suppression of Israeli creators or boosting of Hamas hashtags, the assumption is that this bias must exist in order for consumers to make the choices they made.
I suppose the evidence would be that we have strong evidence that TikTok is willing to censor/promote/bury certain topics, as that's far more plausible than TikTokkers just not caring about Hong Kong compared to other platforms and causes. We also know that TikTokkers are more antisemitic than other platforms. Correlation does not equal causation (it's possible that anti-semites just prefer TikTok over Instagram for other reasons), hence why I said weak evidence.
To quote Nate Silver,
TikTok’s users are young, and young people are comparatively more sympathetic to Palestine than older ones — but not by the roughly 80:1 ratio that you see in the hashtag distribution. I would not treat this data as dispositive — expression on social media can be contagious and overstate the degree of consensus. But this matches a pattern in other TikTok content that is sensitive to China, such as tags critiquing its policy toward Hong Kong.
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
It's going to be interesting to see which way the culture war swings on this one. On the one hand, I've seen a lot of rumblings because Tiktok is (generally) pro-Palestine. On the other hand, Trump.
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
The "I can't be trusted alone in a room with a woman that isn't my wife" mike pence?
Wasn't that about avoiding spurious accusations?
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
I dunno, I'm a big fan of "hide nuclear secrets in a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich to sell to the Brazilians, then tell the FBI agent that if he's willing to pay you more, that'll prove that he's not from the notoriously stingy FBI."
Also his wife then tried to pass him a secret message asking him to lie about her involvement while they were both in jail, which was equally entertaining.
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
I would laugh my head off if it was an autocorrect of Isildur.
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
I mean, you had pro-Palestinian protests all over the place immediately after Israel was attacked. I don't think there'd have been much appetite for "collective punishment" by cutting aid money.
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
she's anti-Semitic, the goblin bankers* are Jewish caricatures!
I think that argument has been quietly dropped since Oct 7. Its very difficult to argue that *she's * dog-whistling by setting the goblin uprising during a year when something bad happened to a Jewish community elsewhere in Europe, but that chanting a slogan used by an openly genocidal group isn't an anti-semitic dogwhistle.
It will, of course, still be vaguely remembered on the internet that of course she's been proven to be anti-semitic and that the details don't matter, but that's just the way things always work. (And, as an aside, that sort of thing really pisses me off in a general way - that the accusations are bunk, but get forgotten and stick regardless)
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
Weirdly enough, the Barsoom covers are probably the only Frazetta cover (or any other) art where he drew the characters with more clothing than the source material described.
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
Ithaca: Eternal shithole, long has been, long will be. Those who must live there deserve nothing but pity. I’ve heard it’s even worse now, but how that’s possible is beyond me. 100.
I assume this is the part where you're taking the piss. Ithaca's always struck me as a very nice place, whenever I've gone there to visit family. Or is there a different Ithaca, one that doesn't host Cornell?
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
I thought Peter Pan had a unique exemption?
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
Hiding behind one to advance another, however, is deceitful.
How so? Isn't it just tailoring your argument for your audience? Does it matter how or why or for what reasons someone agrees to your end goal, so long as they do? If your goal is prohibition, of course you're not going to use the same argument on the baptists as you are on the bootleggers.
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
Israel has dropped white phosphorus on Gaza. Yes, but it's not unique. White phosphorous is too useful to not drop; everybody be dropping white phosphorous. If it lands on you you will die one of the worst deaths imaginable; but armies generally don't directly try to land it on people.
My understanding of WP is that the "warcrimeness" is based entirely on if its being used (nominally) for smokescreens/illumination/whatnot, or if its being used as an offensive burning weapon against enemy forces in a civilian area - the latter being Bad and the former being Eh, Fine Enough.
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
Man, the confederate flag has really taken a nosedive in terms of cultural... something.... over the past decade or two, hasn't it?
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
The only exception is when the argument for legality is frivolous, which this one was not, given that the final vote in the Supreme Court was 6-3.
The obvious counter-argument there is a claim that partisan justices gonna' partisan, and the breakdown has no bearing on frivolity as opposed to politics.
I would love to see an effortpost on that sometime, if you're up for it.
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