VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
Given that Arabic lacks the hard 'P' sound, while the Romans called the area Palestine (and the people have adopted that name in English), in Arabic it comes out sounding a lot like 'Philistine' (which is probably where Rome got the name), a reference to the tribe that frequently warred with the Israelites of the Bible (mostly post-Torah).
I'm not qualified to speak to the the actual ethnic histories on the ground, but "the Israelites and Philistines are going at it again" is a tale as old as David and Samson, which is probably closer to 3000 years. Arguably, modern peoples have decided to adopt the mantle of such an ancient conflict, but they clearly aren't doing it ironically.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
to ogle up the pages of the high-class magazine with the naked women, AND to be a full-on gooner who consumes hours of porn
I think this betrays that the line you're trying to draw isn't really sharp. There is, IMO a slope (maybe even a frequently slippery one, not intending to claim otherwise here) between nudity in "high art" (enjoys fine wine and Rubenesque paintings), moderate-but-titilating scenes in Hollywood cinema, something like Playboy, and whatever depth of depravity you want to stop at. The debate on the appropriateness of nudity in art goes back literally centuries --- fig leaves are not a modern invention.
I'm not sure I would judge "modeled for the figure drawing course in college, maybe even for reasonable payment" in isolation harshly in general. But that's just my opinion.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Wasn't there a (state? California?) legislator who was found to have had an OnlyFans? I'm not going to search for it at the moment, but I remember this happening within the last few years.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
But just generally, the US doesn't need carriers to "win" a Taiwan Strait engagement.
Achieving merely what Ukraine has in the Black Sea would be a victory for Taiwan: area denial to naval and air assets would be a victory, with the potential of blocking significant chunks of commercial traffic to all of China's ports.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
It's not an infrequent observation that nearly any diet is better than no diet just because you have to start paying attention.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
HFCS is IIRC pretty darn similar to honey in terms of sugar composition. And if you think fructose is the enemy specifically, there are "healthy, natural" options advertised with higher fructose content.
I ran into this a couple years back reading up on DIY endurance nutrition: the quick, cheap recommendation is usually a mix of maltodextrin (long-chain glucose polymers, used in home brewing fairly often) and something high in fructose (typically agave nectar) because the two metabolic pathways are largely orthogonal. That said, those results are largely applicable to specific circumstances resembling "how many calories can I usefully consume while running in warm weather", not general nutrition advice.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Civ dates back to the early 90s
It frustrates me occasionally that the first and second installments in the franchise have never been (legally) available digitally that I can tell. I played them as a kid but the CDs got lost over the years. I wouldn't mind trying the first one again.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
No, but police officers do demonstrably lie and frame people sometimes.
In this case it's also relevant that all of this was publicized while BLM was protesting, but largely this case was ignored. There is probably a good effort post on the (lack of) interactions between civil libertarians and "defund the police" types.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
One of the HPD officers that had arrested Floyd is serving a 60 year sentence for felony murder for the 2019 Harding Street raid, a "drug bust" on fabricated evidence that killed two white homeowners with no major criminal history.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
It's not uncommon to only indirectly hear about a place, or maybe even visit briefly (as a tourist) and see only the positive side of things. Negatives tend to be more stochastic and harder to evaluate on short time scales. I think plenty of folks have visited the Japan of high-speed public transit and anime, but not seen, say, the sky-high conviction rates of those that raise the ire of prosecutors, or the controversial shrines to WWII troops that committed war crimes. Or the UK, visiting all the Royal tourist spots, never getting harassed by police at odd hours over edgy Twitter posts. Or China, where they advertise clean, modern urban centers, just don't ask about what happened in 1989, or about Tibet or Xinjiang. Or Singapore, as long as you don't bring gum or spray paint.
I think at some level most places have skepticism of public servants. My typical interaction with (American) police is polite and professional, but I'll believe accounts that they're sometimes not.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
The US recently changed those policies, and monogamous MSM are allowed to donate blood. If it helps, they shortly afterward also allowed "residents of Europe in the 1990s" as well, because maybe they don't have Mad Cow.
But yes, lots of people died of HIV from tainted blood transfusions in the 80-90s. Isaac Asimov is the famous example that comes to mind, although maybe in some of those cases it was used as a cover story.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts
I wonder if this is a universal human narrative: "Our enemies are simultaneously too strong and too weak" is frequently described as a common trademark of fascism, but honestly I see everyone in politics playing it these days, like your observation here.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I've seen a few YouTube folks commenting that the required budget to make a "real quality" film these days is surprisingly small. Technology has shrunk lots of things -- good cameras are affordable, decent CG and editing is doable on commodity machines, LED lighting is lighter and doesn't require huge generators and added cooling. Good screenwriting can't have changed in difficulty, can it?
But at the same time, it doesn't feel like we're in the promised golden age of DIY cinematic content. And there are plenty of folks making other sorts of videos, even really well produced ones. So I'm not quite sure what's missing.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
When I visited NZ, I was pretty surprised by the fact that they just aerially drop broad-spectrum mammal poison in large areas of the country. With (almost) no native mammals (a few bats), I guess it makes sense ecologically, but from my continental (from-a-continent-not-an-island) perspective it's a choice.
EDIT: This is intended as an interesting tangential anecdote, not an allegory.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
That seems quite possible, I'll admit. But I have wondered if this (and several similar brouhahas) could happen because the government has other reasons to not reveal the files that are known to the higher-ups on both sides of the aisle (classified, for example), but it's politically useful to hammer the party in power because it looks suspicious and there is little they can do about it.
For example, if the public were instead clamoring about child sexual abuse at Area 51, it'd be politically convenient to always blame those in power while neither side wants to "reveal the files" to prove that it's actually aliens whatever they do there, not child abuse.
In this case I don't doubt that Epstein was molesting children, but the supposed intelligence connections could be embarrassing for rather unrelated reasons ("reveals methods").
But the direct involvement of powerful figures sure is a juicy idea. Maybe it's even true.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
True, but the idea of low-cost accurate cruise missiles was too much to ask for a couple decades ago. I don't see a reason the counter technologies (and current FPV drones seem weak to hard counters) can't see a similar volume production tradeoff.
LPI radar exists, but if drones are the specific concern you could just listen acoustically (or IR) to only turn it on when it's actually necessary to emit. Drones are loud.
Lidar (leveraging self-driving car sensors) might also be worth considering, but could still be prone to detection.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I'm somewhat surprised I haven't seen anyone develop a miniature-CIWS to counter drones yet. Something like a small phased array radar paired with a 22LR (lol) minigun (you don't want to have to manually cycle it when it misfires) at a price point that allows "slap one on every vehicle larger than a pickup truck". Nothing about the small quadcopter drones has enough redundancy to take much of a hit, it seems (and I doubt drone-dropped explosives do either), so I doubt it would take much firepower. Speed, precision, accuracy, and attentiveness are all problems that can be solved mechanically (see the CIWS). An effective range of even 100m would at least protect a moderate-value mobile asset pretty well.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I feel like we've heard more from Vance in the last six months than we heard from Harris for her entire term. Maybe some of that is at the President's discretion (giving speeches to NATO and such), but I think Harris could have been more visible if she wanted. Vance is posting that-which-Trump-is-probably-contractually-bound-not-to to X, and had that notable incident on Bluesky recently.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election
Trump nominally ran in the primary for the Reform Party in 2000 and lost to Pat Buchanan.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
The closest I'm aware of is the nominal academic license of Facebook's llama models that seems to have been largely ignored once they were out in the wild. At the time, Meta was trailing a bit, and it probably helped their mindshare overall, but they didn't bring any court cases that I'm aware of either.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
The Anthropic case there is focused on "Is it a copyright violation to train models on copyrighted data without licensed distribution?", which is an interesting question, but my comment is more on the separate "Is the resulting model I've trained something I can claim copyright over?" question.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions.
There are also benefits to calling your system a religion: "I want to smoke peyote" makes the DEA show up, but "I want to smoke peyote because of my religion", despite losing in court in Employment Division v. Smith spurned the passing of lots of RFRA laws, not to mention other religious carveouts like the Amish with Social Security, beards in the military, and such.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
but the bigger flaw would mostly fall for technical reasons due to clouds or nighttime imagery
Synthetic Aperture Radar can do some of these conditions, but isn't exactly equivalent to visible imagery. The technology exists and there are commercial providers operating satellites that acknowledge working with the US government.
If you exclude civilian ship crews, the total number of US civilian deaths in WWII is around 100, and single-digits if you only count state territories at the time (not Alaska or Hawaii). British civilian deaths, despite the Blitz, were still pretty small compared to Germany and Japan. Civilian casualty ratios are a terrible metric unless you want to be an Axis (or Soviet) apologist.
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