haroldbkny
9mo ago
I guess I propose that they might mean close to nothing, when there's still 10 to 30 million other species that remain that easily fill the gap left.
haroldbkny
9mo ago
Cool. I wasn't sure of the cause of the potato famine. But if it is a case of human-caused invasive species of disease, then I would definitely call it one example of a catastrophe.
haroldbkny
10mo ago
No black organized crime groups have ever managed to capture popular imagination.
Ever see Predator 2? That had some black organized crime groups, though it was like Jamaican vs Puerto Rican, or something
haroldbkny
10mo ago
I've heard it mentioned here that Democrats game the system by having Hispanic be a race, not an ethnicity, on demographic surveys. I have long felt it was stupid that Hispanic or not Hispanic is is own separate dimension, but I'm not sure I know how it concretely has an upside for the Democrats. Can anyone explain it?
haroldbkny
10mo ago
Well, I can't speak for everyone. But I can definitely say that I've seen more introspection from some, and many fewer spouting their opinions like they're the only logical ones. Three months ago, I don't remember nearly as many Dems doing that sort of behavior as, say in 2020, when it singled you out if you didn't act with no awareness that others might disagree
haroldbkny
11mo ago
You have a point. But there are many variables. Like @ControlsFreak says, I've never even considered pots of water as a weapon, or even throwing them. I have no clue what this particular woman could or could not do. And water can have a weird sloshing effect which fights you when you try to move it quickly.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
The fact that they need to state that he has their backing is strong evidence that he probably shouldn't have their backing
Ah, I see, thanks for the clarification! That makes sense.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
it's probably best to buy what you want today before they raise their prices even further beyond the normal election year rush
Is there a typical election year run on guns? Has that always been the case, or only in 2020? As I know nothing about guns, that's not something I ever knew, but even I considerd buying a hand gun in 2020 to prepare for if Trump won (because I was worried that the BLM riots that were already going nuts would soon reach my neighborhood and my home would be in danger if Trump won)
haroldbkny
20d ago
For almost a decade I have worked two days a week and I have never been happier or ironically more successful.
What do you do?
haroldbkny
4mo ago
That might be the case. That'd make me happy if my kids grew up in a high school where they didn't have to act like they don't care about anything.
But also, having lived in several different areas, even recently, I think the people in my particular area are more rude than in other places.
haroldbkny
6mo ago
Imagination is dead, for men anyway. I don't really know if imagination was ever a consistent way for men to get off, or if people kept records on that, but it probably is less used today than ever before.
Also https://youtube.com/watch?v=fQTOAWCpe44?si=eDG7ebQXX_kDQunV
For women, I think imagination is still alive and well. It's all about thinking up scenarios for them. Although I could imagine it's possible to get hooked on erotica to stimulate your mind's eye, I've never heard of any cases.
I don't necessarily think your inverse is fully analogous. We are not necessarily talking just about women who happen to like it during and afterwards, but women who specifically wanted to be raped because they really enjoy or believe they will enjoy that experience. My point is that if she actually does actively want it, then I'm not sure if it's definitionally rape, which I always was told meant forced and unwanted sex.
Furthermore, as another thought experiment that goes beyond just a definitional dispute, I believe someone who really wants to have an encounter like that will be acting differently and giving off different signals, so it's not entirely clear to me if a man who takes the bait is really a rapist, or someone who's on some level playing along with the game she is setting forth. Some of the dispute likely comes down to whether we believe that all consent is truly verbally communicated, or if there are levels of communication that go beyond that.
There's a large continuum between those two positions. I probably fall pretty much in the middle, myself. But environmentalists have been banging the "we are going to cause the extinction of the human race any day now" drum for 30 years, and quite frankly I'm sick of it and their dishonesty. I'd rather no manatees die, and I think we can try to save them, but that's a far cry from pod living.
haroldbkny
9mo ago
Edit: reading your other response you were looking for catastrophic impacts on humans, which isn’t the main point of what I wrote, but I’ll keep it up because I think it’s an interesting subject.
Makes sense. But, yeah, I guess the core of my hypothesis is that human ingenuity and the human drive for survival is what keeps industries afloat in the face of ecological adversity, due to humans' vested interests. So it needs to be an example where humans have a large vested interest.
And that's not to say that there aren't problems which develop which make the agriculture harder or more expensive. It's just that I suspect people keep coming up with ways to overcome these problems, which results in much less impact to everyday people. Perhaps I'll edit that onto my post when I get a moment.
haroldbkny
10mo ago
Yeah, I have no clue myself, but I think it'd be interesting to know. I'm guessing based on OP's post that the diary sheds no light on it, though, or else it might have been a bigger deal.
haroldbkny
10mo ago
That's a tough question. The short answer is, nothing I can't handle, though I get irritated with feminism saying EVERYTHING is female oppression, so I'd be annoyed if my hypothesis is right.
haroldbkny
10mo ago
Alice, Bob and Carol live in the Soviet Union during Stalin's regime. Alice hates Stalin and wishes him dead. But Alice has never read a column or editorial which was even mildly critical of Stalin (Stalin controls Pravda), and also knows that everyone who criticises Stalin in any capacity immediately vanishes to the gulag, never to be heard from again. For fear of this happening to her, Alice never criticises Stalin in front of Bob and Carol. Unbeknownst to Alice, Bob and Carol also hate Stalin, but have performed exactly the same risk calculus and decided never to publicly criticise Stalin. Hence conversations between Alice, Bob and Carol consist of three people loudly, conspicuously praising Stalin and successfully deceiving the others that they sincerely admire Stalin and think he's the bee's knees - but all three of them hate him and erroneously believe that they're the only one of the three to think so.
This much makes sense to me, but beyond this it gets tough for me. This sounds like "everyone knows Stalin sucks, but everyone doesn't know that everyone knows Stalin sucks". But let's say everyone did know that everyone knows Stalin sucks. Why is that not common knowledge already? Why is it important that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows that Stalin sucks?
haroldbkny
11mo ago
While I don't know the history of "ask" vs "aks", I do also tend to find a lot of stuff like this in descriptive linguistic spaces, which is something that annoys me that I did not include in my original post.
Often when I see someone committing a prescriptive faux pas by questioning certain misuses of language, I see many people rush in to tell that person they're wrong.
Don't you know that use of the singular "they" in English is correct and ancient? Shakespeare used to use the singular "they". The same goes for use of "literally" as an emphasis. And we've always been at war with Eastasia.
I'm not personally equipped to argue back at these people, because I don't know enough of linguistic history, but something just feels like it could be wrong, like they may be misrepresenting history. But I have no way of knowing.
Maybe it was used, but was it "proper"? Must we defend any language simply because it was used at some point in history?
haroldbkny
11mo ago
That's good to know. I still may not risk it, though, I have pretty low threshold for stuff like this getting to me.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Also highly questionable. Would it have been a bad idea to shoot Hitler in 1933? Stalin in 1924?
This is an interesting line of questioning. Could the situation have been made worse by these actions? If someone shot Hitler dead, would a different Nazi have taken power? Would Nazi sympathy have increased, and the Jews been blamed for the event, resulting in even more pro Nazi sentiment? No one could possibly know what alternate histories would be like.
haroldbkny
8d ago
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton
How did this case come about to begin with? Is Texas just requiring the same sort of "age verification" that's existed since the 90s (the website says are you 18 and you click yes)? If so, how was it possibly worthwhile for FSC to sue over that?
Oh, I guess that makes sense. Do doctors work their asses off in the UK like they do in the US? Whenever I talk to my doctor friends, their lives sound miserable, almost like they're being hazed by a fraternity for years on end. I don't personally know anyone who became a doctor who wasn't pushed into it by strong family expectations.
haroldbkny
4mo ago
I don't think it's conclusive that nothing has passed the test before, because I don't think the test is necessarily set in stone. There are variations, and I think it's been romanticized enough that people have moved the goalposts for the test as we progress. I mean some people could be fooled while others are not. Eugene Goostman is another one from 2014 that is said to have passed the test.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
Yeah, I guess it was in his original post. I was thinking of the motte and bailey more being argument-based, for example “reality is socially constructed” or "God is just another name for the beauty and order in the Universe", and less about identifying with an ideology directly.
I believe that to some degree. But you have to stack rank. At the end of the day, not everyone can survive, and we're all dead in the end anyway. So I consider human life far above most else.
More options
Context Copy link