Mantergeistmann
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User ID: 323
Mantergeistmann
11mo ago
I'm absolutely convinced that on a minor policy matter, something Trump has never really thought about or understood, anyone with a strong verbal IQ has at least a 50/50 shot at convincing Trump to take a stand on anything.
I'm convinced that if the Democratic Party was just willing to let Trump get the credit, they could have had their entire wishlist of infrastructure/green energy projects during his presidency on a scale unprecedented since the CCC.
Mantergeistmann
5mo ago
That nuclear baseload is a beautiful line.
Mantergeistmann
11mo ago
It's a weird thing to say, but the more I read him, the more I come to the conclusion that Kipling is remarkably underrated and underappreciated, and that's even taking into account the modern climate and improvements in cultural tolerance.
Mantergeistmann
6mo ago
These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.
I think you're the first person I've seen in the wild who seems to agree with me thay not all jobs need to pay a "living wage", and that that's okay! That some jobs should be just for the high school kid after school or during the summer, or someone who isnt trying to support a family on it ling term. I don't know how you deal with people getting stuck in a rut and eventually not being ready for retirement, though... I'm sure many will say that it isn't their problem to make sure others don't make poor life choices, but that doesn't help convince the general population when the news is publishing sob stories.
Mantergeistmann
5mo ago
there are 500,000 dead in Gaza
That looks like an order of magnitude greater than most estimates. Where are you getting that number from?
Mantergeistmann
6mo ago
And, as far as throwing fuel on the fire, JK Rowling has weighed in:
The literary crowd that had a hell of a lot to say about Harvey Weinstein before he was convicted has been strangely muted in its response to multiple accusations against Neil Gaiman from young women who’d never met, yet — as with Weinstein — tell remarkably similar stories
My understanding is that the venn diagram of "people who hate Rowling for her trans views" and "Neil Gaiman superfans" is very close to a circle, so I'm expecting there to be either a lot of cognitive dissonance, deliberate head-in-the-sand, or crazy explainers as to why they're on the same side.
Mantergeistmann
21d ago
AOC has concluded that a president ordering an airstrike without congressional approval is grounds for impeachment
I'm assuming there's no good analysis as to why this airstrike is grounds for impeachment whereas all the other airstrikes and drone attacks over the decades weren't?
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
You'd think the overfishing is something Conservatives could absolutely be brought on board with. I know a fair few in favour of protecting our environment (but not climate change initiatives, since they think those are all just an excuse for socialist economic transition), and given that China is one of the biggest overfishers, especially in other nations' waters... feels like a failure of messaging more than anything else.
Mantergeistmann
8mo ago
Similarly, young men on voicechat on videogames have been talking about fucking each others' moms in various depraved ways for decades, while lots of women experience this as traumatising aggression. It's clearly a gendered phenomenon, potentially even a biological one - it wouldn't surprise me if we found that isolated tribes in Papua New Guinea where men bond with "your momma" jokes.
There's an (unfortunately incomplete) cuneiform tablet dating back to 1500 B.C. that includes, among other jokes, "[...] of your mother is by the one who has intercourse with her. Who is it?"
Sadly, the fragmented tablet does not include the punchline, although given the other jokes/riddles, it presumably would have lost something in the translation.
Mantergeistmann
8mo ago
I feel like if the Trump campaign released such an ad, there'd be 18 dozen different articles up by now about how it's completely racist.
Mantergeistmann
2mo ago
I'm not sure if you're getting how big of a mania this is. People ended up bullied out of certain amateur forums for merely using AI illustrations.
I've seen the unironic take on some D&D forums that if you want an image of your character and can't afford to commission custom art, it is more moral to search Pinterest/Deviantart/whatever and download an image that looks kind of like what you imagine, rather than "use AI and steal from the artists it's trained on".
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
One of the most fascinating protest signs that I ever saw simply said LIBERALS GET THE BULLET TOO in all-caps sharpie. To this day, I'm not even sure they were protesting.
I'm reminded of the BLM flag that was the snake with "YES WE WILL TREAD" or something similar. Like, they were protesting oppressive police by... wanting to oppress libertarians? Constitutionalists? The US Navy post-9/11? I mean, I assume they simply interpreted the entire flag as "Outgroup Flag" and didn't think about it, but still.
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
Could have been worse. Could have started a "Reply all" chain. It took my company a surprisingly long amount if time to figure out how to stop those.
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
Originally it was supposed to be Snow White and Evil Queen going toe-to-toe, but now she just falls off a cliff or something?
I mean, that style of villain death is a Disney classic.
Mantergeistmann
11mo ago
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
Not really a new concern, though, is it?
Mantergeistmann
5mo ago
Instead, I felt the urge to police left wing people celebrating the shooting. But I soon noticed there weren't actually nearly as many of these as I expected.
You must hang out with a different crowd than I do. Some of the kindest people I know were still saying, "Well, wouldn't it be better if he had been assassinated?"
Mantergeistmann
9mo ago
I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before.
It's funny you say that, because I honestly really miss forums, and how they've been completely displaced by Reddit and Discord.
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
That info being publicly available if I went to courthouse, dug through a pile of books in the basement for hours; versus that information being publicly available via app on my phone.
Or, as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy put it,
"But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard."
I think theres something to be said for a concept of a "Friction Threshold", where everything above a certain level of difficulty/cost isn't considered "publically available" for certain purposes. Now, what exactly that threshold is depends very much on the information and medium, I'll grant. But it is very much one thing to be able to access the information, vs sharing/making it easier to find, vs publically broadcasting it. Or, to put it light-heartedly, my mother's age may have been easily findable/public record, but that doesn't mean she was happy when her nieces plastered the telephone poles up and down the block with "Happy 40th birthday!" messages.
Mantergeistmann
3mo ago
The Conservatives were on the verge of outright majority support in the polls, Liberal support was in the high teens, almost every ironclad safe Liberal seat was up for grabs, and it seemed possible - if not necessarily probable - that the Liberals might be reduced to a mere handful of seats nationwide
There was a period of time where the polling was showing that the Bloc Quebecois was going to be the second-largest party and therefore the Opposition, which would have been even funnier than this Liberal comeback.
Mantergeistmann
9mo ago
I'd just like to say that Vanderbilt University has just beaten the #1 team in American College Football. They are now 1-60 against Top 5 teams.
That is all.
Mantergeistmann
10mo ago
I've posted about this before. Watch police bodycam videos. The speed at which ho-hum traffic stops turns into "SHOTS FIRED! SHOTS FIRED!" is frightening. One of the things cops are doing is assessing how compliant you're being. If you're being compliant, they can make some assumptions about the next 15 - 30 seconds. If you're not, they're operating on the assumption of "this could go bad right now."
My father was in the Coast Guard. During training, he almost failed out because of a fatal mistake in one "shoot/no shoot exercise scenario". It was a routine check of yacht, where instead of complying with his request, an old grandmother went about her business getting food out of a picnic basket. Now, my father's not the sort to shoot an unarmed old lady just for not complying immediately - after all, perhaps she's just getting a sandwich or a drink to offer the nice young man? - so when she pulled a gun out of the picnic basket and shot him... well, exercise failed.
Mantergeistmann
10mo ago
After all, even if it's not true, the fact that I could believe it really says something about society.
I appreciate your sarcasm, so I'm just going to jump in to say that that's a line of argument I loathe. It's lazy, masturbatory, and ultimately boils down to "I wanted to be right, so that's just as valid as having been right!"
Of course, as is often the case, C.S. Lewis put it into far better words:
Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that”, or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
Mantergeistmann
6mo ago
That said, Pete releasing an album titled "Best of the Beatles" was absolute genius.
Mantergeistmann
2mo ago
At some point, I really need to do an effortpost on Admiral Rickover's infamous interviews of candidates for the US nuclear navy. He already knew their technical qualifications, so it was a matter of seeing what sort of person he was dealing with.
Thst point at least is rather weak. If the US military hasn't kept an up to date plan for military action to secure the Panama Canal for a very long time now, I'll eat several of my hats.
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