domain:epistle.us
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
4hr ago
I prefer Western Hestia over Japanese Hestia, at least the western version refers to her myth (the embers on her head referring to the hearth) and isn't just "generic large chested girl of ambiguous age".
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4hr ago
I'm not sure "prime steer" and "heterosexual dating market" belong in the same sentence, considering a steer is definitionally castrated.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4hr ago
having a loaded deer rifle on the seat of his parked car.
Not aware of the law here: what's the legal status of illegal immigrants possessing firearms? IIRC In theory it was at least an ITAR issue for dumb reasons ("export") until the first Trump term when regular ol' guns left that list.
It's decent, not amazing and none of those would pass muster for me as a Chopin fan unfortunately, not least the second to last one which somehow has English vocals (Chopin did actually write a small amount of songs with words but they were all in Polish and not published during his lifetime)...
Still I guess if you showed these to somebody back in 2015 they'd still be rightfully amazed. Still significant work to be done, at least in replicating Chopin properly.
I'm starting to get Gell-Mann Amnesia with Suno, it does really badly according to my ears for the genres where I sort of know what "good music" is supposed to sound like and it does really well according to my ears for the genres where I don't know much about them beyond vaguely knowing what they should sound like.
Also WTF is that last generation?
striker
4hr ago
Of course it’s a possibility, and I’m sure it happens. I don’t believe it to be pervasive (here, anyway) because that would require a degree of coordination that honestly I don’t give them the credit for. It’s a small country and “everyone knows everyone” is a cliche, but there is some truth to it. There are very few leaps from me to editorial team in state broadcaster newsroom. Comes to mind: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4hr ago
Yes, anti-draft pamphlets handed out by the Socialist Party of America (motto: "Workers of the World, Unite!").
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
5hr ago
The little ads and bits from that film are amazing! I love Conan the Librarian and Spatula City and when the little boy wins a drink from the fire hose after finding the marble in the oatmeal! I know Is have watched that every day if it had been a Saturday morning show.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5hr ago
Can't say I have.
SkoomaDentist
5hr ago
You have to be willing to dive beneath the surface, long enough to find the pockets of original and specifically high quality work that the indie scene is putting out.
So, how many hundreds or thousands of hours would you say is it acceptable to use to find more than a tiny handful of such gems? Please give a serious answer with actual numbers.
I've spent a lot of time looking for good music. When I do find some I haven't run into before, it's almost inevitably tracks made 30+ years ago, some new tracks from legacy artists (who may be rich enough to keep doing much the same thing they did 40 years ago, nevermind commercial viability) or some very occasional niche stuff. The last time I found an entire new album worth of good material was when Loreena McKennitt released Lost Souls in 2018 (and she was in her 60s by then, so not exactly a "modern" artist). Finding new indie releases on the level of say Depeche Mode's Violator, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 1 or Roxy Music's Avalon just isn't going to happen.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
5hr ago
How do you make the goddess of beauty look that ugly? She looks like someone drew a man and then added breasts. It's truly a remarkable feat of bad art.
Have you seen any women by Michelangelo?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
5hr ago
Basic weaving mass producing basic cloth isn't skilled labour. It's extremely simple and repetitive. You could be shown how to do it in 10 minutes. Furthermore, it's not physically strenuous (unlike the farmwork you describe) or dangerous and you can do it indoors.
I also this this is the reason. You can be too frail to work as a farmhand, or lame, or half-blind, but as long as you have two hands not destroyed by arthritis, you can still weave.
SkoomaDentist
5hr ago
Its like 10 second segments stitched together
I'm pretty sure it's more or less exactly that: short segments stiched together.
anti_dan
5hr ago
Same time period. Blue state. I would say at least my middle and high school history had much more discussion of pre-American history than yours seems to have had, and also a much greater emphasis on slavery, civil rights, and the vietnam war once we get into the post 1776 era.
anti_dan
5hr ago
As I understand it, the purpose of ICE is to make a big theatrical show of removing a few unfortunate illegals pour encourager les autres, and, even if that doesn't actually do anything on a large scale, at least make the administration look like they're taking a hard stance.
There are many purposes, but yes, the idea is to encourage self deportation, and discourage illegal crossings, by making the environment not feel overwhelmingly pro-illegal as it has for most of the past 30 years.
This is a good target for that, but it also just seems like an insanely flagrant violation that couldn't be ignored once anyone at ICE got a whiff of it. This is one of the highest paid public employees in a swing state.
astrolabia
6hr ago
Yeah this is my take too.
Also, maybe I am dumb but I still don't understand why it helped the AI that there was a manual override.
Grant_us_eyes
6hr ago
My experience with school districts is that anything Principle-level(and sometimes Assistant-Principle) and above are pure political appointees.
Old-style politics, in the form of whom you know. And if you're lucky, they're somewhat competent at thier job. If not...
So it doesn't really surprise me that he got hired. He knew the right people, and they didn't care about his bona fides.
As I understand it, the purpose of ICE is to make a big theatrical show of removing a few unfortunate illegals pour encourager les autres, and, even if that doesn't actually do anything on a large scale, at least make the administration look like they're taking a hard stance.
With that in mind, what better target than this guy? To others overstaying their visas: if they can get him, they could get you too. To the voting base: "Look, this guy thought he could get away with blatantly flouting the rules for two decades, and in case you thought he was an upstanding citizen, pillar of the community, Olympian, etc. He had weapons charges and was fleeing the law"
Zephyr
7hr ago
I think the way that it works is that it provides an outlet for sexual frustration. Imagine that the old paradigm worked something like this:
- Be a teenaged boy; think of sex pretty much 100% of the time.
- Be sexually frustrated because you are single.
- Be unable to relieve this sexual frustration (because masturbation is a sin, and the best pornography you can get is like, a swimsuit magazine).
- Become more desperate and try harder to get a girlfriend, until it eventually succeeds.
Whereas the current framework is more like:
- Be a teenaged boy; think of sex pretty much 100% of the time.
- Be sexually frustrated because you are single.
- Look at pornography online; we have very hardcore pornography available now, so it satisfies the sexual frustration you are feeling.
- Repeat.
I think it's fairly easy for someone to be using a pornographic website to get their rocks off, and see something in the sidebar that is like, 90% of what they like, and something they don't know if they like or not; they 'try' it, and if it works, it starts featuring more and more in their sexual interests.
To take a (very) simple example; there are a large number of men who enjoy being dominant in bed; this is fairly normal. In a normal relationship, this looks like taking the lead, and a bit of dirty talk. In the world of internet pornography, this can involve things like semi-rape behaviour, inflicting pain, using bodily fluids to degrade, etc. The underlying desire is still the dominance; but the ways of seeking it are out of whack with what someone would do in real life. There's also a degree to which people aren't really that aware of their desires; they know they find it hot when the woman is in pain, but they don't necessarily get that the part they're fantasizing about is the woman submitting to their sexual desires.
You then run into the 'toaster fuckers' problem; whenever there is a large community online dedicated to a sexual fetish, it becomes easy to identify it as a legitimate orientation, which makes becoming involved in it much easier. If you aren't aware, the 'toaster fuckers' originated from an old meme (I want to say a 4chan greentext, but I'm actually not certain); the gist of it was that back in the day, if you wanted to fuck toasters, you were on your own; society would condemn it, and you'd never find another person who would admit to liking it. Nowadays, you can go online and find people who are telling you that it's okay and they're just another persecuted group. But say you're the person from my example: you go online and discover that there is a huge community dedicated specifically to inflicting pain as part of their sexual expression; and further, they actively want more members for their group. You now don't have to deal with lots of women rejecting you; you have a group that wants you, and your mind is already oriented towards the 'inflicting pain' as being the important part of the sexual experience. In that sense, it may matter less that you have a physical woman in front of you, as your brain is saying to you 'pain is sexual'.
So the reason that obtaining a girlfriend short circuits the whole process for a lot of people is that the original fetish is something that they can explore with a partner without getting all the weird extra stuff that the algorithm is pushing on them. Before I got a girlfriend, the above is actually super similar to what I went through; I didn't 'get' that my underlying desire was for a woman to submit to me, all I knew is that I found some of the more degrading pornography to be super hot. When I managed to get a girlfriend, what I realized was that I found her wanting me, and being willing to do whatever I wanted to be even hotter; it meant that paradoxically, all the things I thought were true about my sexuality were wrong, and what I really liked was just having someone who desired me.
If I'd been a bit less of an antisocial curmudgeon, I could easily have seen myself falling into this sort of community (probably the BDSM community instead of the furries, but I think it applies there). Sexual frustration can make you do weird things, because it's hard to be lonely.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7hr ago
Non-commandeering says otherwise, with respect to public officials.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7hr ago
communist pamphlets
IIRC they were anti-draft pamphlets.
its quite possible Des Moines Public Schools has an unofficial policy of not complying with immigration law. there is presumably a lot of this going on in the private sector i guess it should not be surprising if its happening in the public sector as well. also this seems to be a failure of the federal government. the federal government is able to coerce banks into acting as policeman for all their crazy money laundering laws. if the federal government were seriously interested in cracking down on immigration then they could just coerce private and public employers in a similar manner.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
7hr ago
The story here is: illegal immigrant given job as head of DMPS. Apparently the weapons charge he had was bad enough that he was given a deportation order by the Biden administration in 2024. Maybe that was a legit gun charge?
The earlier weapons charge anyone has been able to find is a penny-ante summary offense about having a loaded deer rifle on the seat of his parked car. It's not clear whether that charge had anything to do with his deportation order, nor whether that is the February 5, 2020 weapons charge that ICE is claiming exists. ICE is implying he last entered the US in 1999 on a student visa, but this clearly isn't the case since he competed in the Sydney, Australia Olympics in 2000. It does seem clear that either ICE has screwed up big time, or Des Moines Public Schools has.
NullHypothesis
7hr ago
So your evidence that the "Anti-ICE" shooter feeling like a school shooter and having no apparent motive is an interview with old friends of his that haven't had contact with him for likely at least 5-6 years? If anything, considering he withdrew from social life and got seeped more and more into the dark trenches of the internet, this story to me provides some evidence that he likely became more and more political and radical. Combine this with other evidence that had come out, and it paints the picture of someone radicalized by far left and anti-trump ideology.
It's easy to conveniently ignore evidence to the contrary and put zero effort into even explaining why that evidence might be flawed or invalid, but not even attempting that will do nothing to convince people on the other side that you may have a point, and makes you come off as intellectually dishonest.
as someone who moves through leftist circles, which are mostly extremely disorganized and very dedicated to specific issues (climate change, homelessness, worker empowerment)
You know, your experiences of moving through leftist circles could something really interesting to read about if you actually provided some details.
That being said, you're attacking a straw man. Who's claiming every leftwing organization/group is actively encouraging violence? Have you gone through a randomly selected sample of leftists groups (hint, you haven't) to be able to determine they are all in fact, actively disavowing political violence and banning people who do show any support for political violence?
How do you reconcile your personal experiences with the data indicating that 24% of very liberal individuals that say it's okay to be happy with the death of a public figure they oppose, or 25% of very liberal individuals that thing political violence can be justified? When prompted specifically with figures like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, that number rises to over 50% of people left of center. Is it possible that you are in fact, not really engaging with this segment of the population?
How about you provide some examples of people here "foaming at the mouth of some grand leftist move towards violence" instead of attacking an uncharitable strawman? If you are unable to summarize your opponent's position in a manner they find charitable, I don't think you actually understand what their argument or reasoning is. Or you're being intellectual dishonest.
Edit: Reviewing this thread and FoxNews over the past few days has made me realize that the red tribe has gone full retard and will believe anything the retards and losers in the White House say. Guess I'm just going to become a normie and hypernormalize like the rest of the people in my life. Been nice commenting here. Your boos have always meant nothing to me, because I've seen what makes you cheer.
This is a statement that says nothing. Here, let me replace some words
Edit: Reviewing Reddit, BlueSky, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, (Insert your whatever social media/political space you want here) and MSNBC, CNN, (Insert your whatever news media you want here) over the past few days has made me realize that the blue tribe has gone full retard and will believe anything the retards and losers opposing those in the White House say. Guess I'm just going to become a normie and hypernormalize like the rest of the people in my life. Been nice commenting here. Your boos have always meant nothing to me, because I've seen what makes you cheer.
See how this did nothing to move your thoughts and position?
Stellula
8hr ago
a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash.
Iowa is a constitutional carry state.
What percentage of men have hunting knives in their car? 100%? I've had some sort of knife on my person at all times where it was legal and practical since I was like 12 years old. A pocket knife is as much a part of my pants as my wallet is.
$3000 cash? Who cares?
If you pulled me over and tried to write this story about me it would be like: "man found with a loaded handgun (normal where I live), multiple tactical knives (a leatherman in my pocket, and the one that fell between the seats and I never found), spotting equipment (binoculars I keep in the glovebox for monitoring the situation), and hundreds of thousands of dollars of untraceable cryptocurrency (my coinbase account viewer on my phone).
I hate that this is highlighted on these stories.
The story here is: illegal immigrant given job as head of DMPS. Apparently the weapons charge he had was bad enough that he was given a deportation order by the Biden administration in 2024. Maybe that was a legit gun charge?
"Had gun in car" is a pointless non-fact.
Bisexual men are far more common than fully-gay men, so there is a substitution effect.
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