It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!
Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!
The history meme subreddit just banned Israel/Palestine memes
The world is healing
So I watched Le Samourai on the recommendation of u/Ragefororder1846, and I really really enjoyed it. There's something 'otherworldly' about it that I can't quite put my finger on. It felt almost like it was set in an alternate history or parallel universe, even though it's just 60s Paris. Something about the colour palette and/or set design maybe?
It was very engaging for a film with very restrained music and lots of lingering shots, I could see myself becoming bored with another film that spent as much time on things like two guys bugging a hotel room.
Also, I really appreciated the way it was subtle and willing to let you infer things. E.g the pianist's apartment is unusually luxurious when we first see it, which plants the seed of wondering how a club singer can afford it (later it turns out that her husband is the guy who's been hiring Costello). When the two police officers are bugging Costello's apartment, we see them walk up an extra flight of stairs so that a passerby doesn't realize they're actually going to Costello's floor. Stuff like that.
Always happy to see someone enjoy something I recommend!
It's such a good movie, and I'm not sure there's anything else quite like it.
I just finished a college course on the history of the US environment. My textbooks tended to be from the 1990s so I was wondering if there are more recent scholarship on the subject.
No, they towed the US outside of the environment.
I'm sure there have been other murders in Brentwood, but it's really weird to me there are two (now) very high profile celebrity-linked knife murders three decades apart.
RIP Rob Reiner. That was crazy to read.
Wake up babe, another immigration thread on our evidence based sub. God…
Seeing that place turn so foul on immigration has been disheartening.
Forget it, Jake, it's outside the DT.
Imagine thinking you have the right to comment on anything without 64 quarters of armigerous ancestry 😌
Mein Opa moved to Argentina in 1947 (no it had nothing to do with the war why do you asked) and then he cursed Chile with the Kast family and their 500 members 😃
Fellas, correct me if I‘m wrong, but is Kast/Chile the first instance wherein a fair and free non-US election post-2024 resulted in the far-right Trump equivalent candidate winning their national election?
Cause I‘m remembering the dramatic comebacks that Liberals had in Canada, Labour with Australia, etc.
Not too many instances wherein the far-right can openly mimic Trump-like policies and still win.
It´s all relative. I would say the real Trump-equivalent candidate was the anti-vax pro-gun Johannes Maximilian Kaiser Barents-von Hohenhagen, who proposed to mine the frontiers and lost in the first round.
In our 2011 parliamentary elections, Timo Soini lead the Finns party to rise to a 19,05% result, getting 39 seats in the parliament. In the previous three elections, the Finns had only gone from 1 seat in their first election appearance, to 3 seats in the second to 5 seats in the 2007 election. The Finns party have since managed to supplant the traditional Centre party as one of the big three parties in our political field.
The Finns party focuses on anti-migrant populism, EU-scepticism and anti-globalism. Back in the noughties, one of their representatives ran with the slogan (loosely translated): "Criminal migrants get a stamp on their ass and get shipped back to Africa." Throughout the party's existance, they've had the occasional kerfluffle with members and representatives who are loud and proud neo-nazis. The party managed to make international headlines last week when some of their reps decided to be openly racist to asians, in an ill-conceived show of support to our most recently dethroned Miss Finland.
The Finns came second in the 2023 elections, and formed a coalition government with the neoliberals, christian conservatives and the Swedish party. Though I suppose that excludes them, since 2024 was the cutoff point and they didn't come first.
Latin americans mimicing Trump feels so weird when like 90% of Trump's policies is hating latin americans.
Eh, I mean, "mimic the regional hegemon that openly hates us" has a pretty good tradition not just in Latin America with the US but plenty of other places, I think.
Whether that's some sort of collective political kink I leave to the rest of this esteemed sub to determine.
Putting aside the racial prejudice, there's pretty broad anti-Venezuelan sentiment in Latin America so it's easy to conceptualize yourself as "aligned" with Trump depending on what news you're getting.
My friend's dad literally fled the US during the 2008 Recession over immigration issues, yet a few months ago he was telling us that Trump had some "good points" regarding the 2020 election being stolen. He's not even MAGA, but gets all his news in Spanish and I wonder how they portray Trump.
I guess the one funny irony of pro-Trump LatAm politicians/leaders is that, outside of Milei, Trump's reaction is generally, "I don't think about you at all."
“Hammond and I make fun of James, even though Hammond is inherently the most ridiculous with his decades long midlife crisis”
I only knew of the British PM because he was on that segment before he became PM. Must be a rite of passage to become Prime Minster.
https://preview.redd.it/1ked3wm6lb7g1.png?width=480&format=png&auto=webp&s=05c1635c741cbcc92c1a8ab07f4957279877a9ab
We really are a joke country sometimes
His lap time wasn't too great either, he veered off into the grass on his official lap. You can look for symbolism there.
Could be worse, Clarkson lost an arm wrestling competition to Bojo when someone gave him a talk show.
https://preview.redd.it/8t1q2oqbt97g1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=088bd91d5b56a47e462333ff62549841d40d8d85
It occurs to me that I don't actually know a whole lot about the French Revolution. Besides the Declaration of the Rights of Man, what are the main primary source documents associated with it? Think Common Sense or the Federalist Papers but for France
Marat was a big writer at that time, eventually got a Soviet Battleship named after him. He wrote 'Offering to the Nation' during the Revolution.
'What Is the Third Estate?' Written shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution, by the French writer and clergyman Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès. On wikipedia "Comparable to the Federalist Papers and the Communist Manifesto in its influence"
New Dutch test for asylum seekers
Wasn't active because tomorrow I'm returning to the home country for two weeks, so I'm getting ready for the opening scene of Pathologic 2 and expecting my travel companion to fall out of a casket followed by two weeks of melancholy and nostalgia.
Three people tomorrow are going to get the ol' Yorkshire special.
Okay, enough misery posting from me, let's ramble about silly things:
I've been following the girls from Mazari on Twitter, I find it incredibly funny; like some of them are obviously playing into the fantasy that fans have with selfies and posts, but, because they're Mazari, they're not selling some lovey dovey dating experience fantasy; no, no, no, they're selling an incredibly toxic relationship with a mentally unstable girl fantasy. Do people genuinely find the idea of a girl threatening to hurt herself if you don't say you love her romantic? No, actually, don't answer that, I can definitely see that happening.
Though, what is cool, because Mazari's following is actually very mixed gender (50/50 according to Japanese fans I've spoken to), they also pander to girls! Yay for inclusivity, I guess.
Interestingly enough, the fan reactions are very normal, I guess. I expected that to be more unhinged, but no, they're very normal, just "kawaii" and "daisuki" mostly. Instead, if you want to look at the actual unhinged stuff, look no further than one of Mazari's members publicly expressing a yuri incest fantasy... Yeah, yeah, it's the Japanese internet alright.
I suspect it's all commitment to the bit, I mean, a lot of their songs are all about deeply fucked up relationships. As an outside observer, I just find it hilarious more than anything. It's something I can't truly understand, being ace, I don't experience that stuff the same way.
I find a lot of their selfies cool though, because, well, I just like their make up, it looks cool. I can still find people to look good despite experiencing only aesthetic attraction; in the same way straight men or women think other people from their own gender can look beautiful or handsome or whatever. Actually, it's the same feeling I get when I look at a cool helmet or set of armour, that might be a better comparison for people.
---
In that way, I've always struggled expressing what I find to look beautiful in people, because I didn't get it like other people, and I didn't understand myself for most of my life. It also doesn't help that I don't notice a lot of visual features, my visual sense is somewhat impaired neurologically, so I gravitate to things that look extreme, because it stands out to me and I will register it mentally.
I have never been able to describe what people look like from memory, I don't know how big a nose or ear is supposed to be, or how the eyes are supposed to be shaped. To me, people just look like themselves, I have no problem recognizing people, but I simply can't describe people.
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On a related note, I find observing things that I don't truly get to be interesting in general, like, if people here are yearnposting/downbadposting. I don't judge, even if I might joke about it sometimes, I find it interesting to read other people's experiences, it's a form of social enrichment for me. Cognitively, I understand it, emotionally, I don't.
This comment was a roller coaster. I though Kpop has some deranged fans but this really uhh takes the cake I guess.
Also you absolutely should judge yearnposting/downbadposting.
Yeah, it's certainly something, I was going for the absolute rollercoaster of a comment, so I succeeded there.
Honestly, the fans stuff is pretty typical of idol groups in general, there's some real Otaku out there who are very into their idols, in a very unhealthy parasocial relationship; most fans are very normal people though, who just want to escape something into some fantasy, an edgy fantasy in the case of Mazari and Mercuro.
I'm not sure how different it is to western celebrity culture, I've never been into celebrity stuff at all, this also just isn't celebrity stuff, Mazari just isn't that big in terms of following. I just know that there are a lot of people in unhealthy parasocial relations with celebrities, it just so happens that idol culture really, really plays into that.
I find it fun though, to see happen, I do think the fans are just committing to the bit a lot, I don't take these things at face value there.
Sci-fi in the 70s:
Sci-fi in the 90s:
I've been taking cooking relatively seriously for about 15 years now, and somehow I had never discovered how good the humble, $2.50/lb pork shoulder is. I really don't understand how meat so easily cooked to be so tender is that cheap.
And it's amazing the shelf life and economy of the humble pasta and sauce.
I kind of hate Robert Frost but at least Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is actually as good as people act like the rest of his work is
I finally gave up on Theta and decided to replay Soma on safe mode. It has been a lot more fun on safe mode and got me to enjoy the atmosphere way more tbh. Also got me to notice things I previously didn't due to the stressful monster encounters like the fact that the glow head was the one that actually destroyed Catherine's initial robot and that he stalked you all the way from the moment you crashed on your capsule near Lambda. Guess first person survival horror really is just not my thing and I really just enjoy the story and setting of Soma more. A shame since I had already bought Amnesia dark descent on discount given its reputation, but probably won't be able to play it much.
Also started playing Age of mythology retold and from the beginning campaign levels it seems they haven't changed much in terms of visuals for the campaigns but having god powers be reusable probably would make the game easier and upping the population cap somewhat means I can create larger armies. Also the auto distribute villagers option doesn't seem like something I will be using if only because faith didn't seem to be factored in (which is a problem for the Greek faction where you have to allocate villagers to pray at the temple).
Edit: and thank God the soundtrack was changed much either as the opening theme of AOM retold made me think the soundtrack was updated for the worse.
Neal Asher might be a right-wing crackpot who thinks the EU is going to kill us all, but man he writes some cool stuff.
It's always the ones you most suspect.
I liked Gridlinked, even though it was so James-Bond-in-space that the protagonist explicitly muses on the resemblance (with lots of "he cupped her left breast" and "he coldly executed him" prose). But The Line of Polity made me realise I wasn't interested enough in the storyline to persevere with his antics. The setting resembles Iain Banks or Alastair Reynolds but with less compelling ideas.
It is a shame that France hasn't gone harder on Small Modular Nuclear Reactors. There are some projects, but a bit disappointing. France has 70% from nuclear, 9 nuclear subs and 1 nuclear aircraft carrier, plus a very robust academic and research environments.
I ain't French, but lived there long enough. So I am just going to blame the Germans.
Are small modular reactors actually good?
It seems to me that if a primary driver of cost for something is the container, the relationship between volume and surface area implies that big is gooder
No, they are basically submarine reactors, so it is quite mature, very well understood technology. The thing is the neutron economy sucks for precisely the square-cube law related reasons you stated.
Now, the idea of putting such a thing on a boat and then power something for 10 years from that boat without having to do too much is kinda cute, but comes with a huge proliferation risk. So if you put them into your military base in the north of Russia, perhaps not so much of a problem, rolling them out at scale is quite a bit more interesting. (And of course nuclear and scale in the same sentence has interesting interactions.)
The keyword is really "modular." Currently nuclear reactors are basically bespoke projects. For various reasons it seems like modularity goes with smallness, e.g. the larger the components, the harder it is to assemble off-site and ship to the destination.
That said: people have been promising SMRs are around the corner for decades now. And even though the upfront costs would be lower, you also lose economies of scale with smaller reactors, so their operating costs are higher too (as I understand it, could be wrong there).
I'm a bit of a modularity skeptic, tbh. All modern technology is modular, in the sense that most parts are standard and commoditiized (consider screws). Many large, pretty weird parts are mass produced in a factory (e.g. wind turbine blades). I feel 'modular' is often used as a sort of magic word you use to communicate that your thing is going to be cheaper or more maintainable for essentially no reason.
I don't get your objection. Nuclear reactors are not standardized or commoditized, that's the point. They are more like a custom designed made-to-order wooden chair than an IKEA Poäng. The potential cost savings of buying a standardized design out of a factory that can achieve economies of scale vs. designing and constructing one yourself every time you build a plant seems pretty straightforward.
What's the addressable market for nuclear reactors though?
Also, bear in mind that nuclear reactors are made out of (generally) standard parts, then constructed largely by contractors who do lots of other things. So you're tying in loads of pre-existing economies of scale.
For the record, nuclear reactors are sort of standard: the french build standard designs that they also export and build elsewhere.
It's interesant how the robots in the play that coined the term “R.U.R. (Robots Universales Rossum)” were actually artificial organic beings. The only reason i know that is because of TV Tropes of all things.
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I'm only speculating, but couldn't it just be good old nationalism, especially considering that German unity was one of the main goals of the '48ers? I could imagine the perspective that it's okay to support one reactionary monarchy against another (especially since France technically started the war) to further the greater progressive goal of unity. And, in general, it's not unknown for revolutionary leftists to rally around the flag when the moment of truth arrives. See Kropotkin, Plekhanov, Guesde, Otto Bauer.
Worth noting that Marx himself was initially pro-Prussian during the Franco-Prussian War, though not for nationalist reasons:
Plausible that Willich had similar ideas on this but I confess I don't really know anything about him
This might be the only text I have read where Marx goes as close as possible in a cursory form to the notion of "historically progressive" wars and societies of the Leninist variety. In a lot of his other war comments its very moralistic and his IWA statements are straight up humanitarian. Very interesting.
Hmm, I’m actually not sure how atypical it is for him. He was also a supporter of the Franco-British forces in the Crimean War and Garibaldi in the Risorgimento. There’s also his support for the US Civil War. He has pretty similar reasons for supporting all of them.
But yes, often his public political pronouncements have a different tenor to his private comments. Like, in his public addresses through the International he is very respectful and even fawning of Lincoln, but quite a lot of his letters to Engels about the war are just shit talking him for being a coward.
French working class: 4 Revolutions in 40 years
German working class: sits on its hands, can't even support the liberals against the conservatives
a clear unbiased pov from Santa Karl
And Marx of course, really didn't like Napoleon III.
So, my father has been throwing away a lot of his T-shirts; he doesn't want to wear nylon, for some reason, fine, so we buy him 100% cotton stuff, but he throws them in the trash anyway because he's convinced there's nylon in it, why is he convinced of that? Because it says "keep away from fire" on the label, which to him means nylon. It doesn't matter to him that the label says "100% cotton", as long as it says keep away from fire, he doesn't want to wear it.
It doesn't matter what we say, he doesn't listen, he just keeps throwing away these T-shirts, they aren't particularly cheap either. But, yeah, it's his cognition, we were watching "Even Tot Hier" yesterday, a satirical news program, and my father just couldn't keep up with it, he didn't understand the jokes, it's too fast paced for him now.
Well, we got dimmable lights, at least in the kitchen where we have dinner generally, so that that light can be on while I have a headache; it was my father's suggestion actually, in a moment of clarity. Well, we got them yesterday, so we were having dinner today with the lights pretty dim, and, naturally, the only thing my father did was complain he can't see shit because it's too dark... Jeez, I wonder why? Could it have something to do with the person with a migraine sitting across the table?
Yes, I definitely feel welcome now, no resentment at all./s I just have to smile and take it, no point in reacting. Some days I think "he's not doing too bad." and there's days like this where the only thing he cares about is himself and his problems, moments before this incident he joined us at the table and the first thing he does is shove a chair into my knees full force; luckily I was prepared and sitting sideways anyway, if I had my knees forward it would have hurt a lot. He doesn't care, he notices the chair being close to him, so he decides to push it aside, he doesn't just doesn't care that there is someone on the other side of that chair, rather, he can't care.
I just want to eat my dinner alone at his point, I hate it now when my father joins us, for anything, I just want him away from me. I love my father, but the person that was my father has devolved into a nasty, self centred, spiteful thing.
The doctors said it's not dementia, but they asked us nothing about how he was, and how well he functioned not 2.5 years ago, and how his personality has changed; the supporting father I had is gone, long gone, and I don't think we're getting him back.
The British Top Gear crew met both the Queen Liz and the Vice President of Botswana arriving in a paraglider, I think the 2nd one is more impressive
I had no idea the 1970s Top Gear did that kind of wacky stuff, maybe I need to see it. It just weirds me out to see a young Jeremy Clarkson.
I meant original as in the British show
The Top Gear one with young Jeremy Clarkson on the BBC?
https://preview.redd.it/udpl6kpup57g1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=aa3ef31dc3bdefd9f775c64dc81eba8baba1fd9e
Young Jeremy Clarkson is cursed - he's one of those people who feels like he should have been born at age 45.
Was listening to Mahler's 6th while doing Japanese practice, it's the first piece I listened to from Mahler, and it's still great; it's not my favourite, but I just really wanted to listen to it, I wanted to hear the hammer again, I guess.
Because I've branched out a lot in my music listening, I don't listen to Mahler that often anymore, but it's still great to return to every so often; it might even be better now, because I listen to it less, it feels even better to listen to. It's just not the most practical music to listen to in a lot of settings, you need to be in a relatively quiet environment and have 50-90 minutes to spare.
Gotta love the internet
This lady claims dinosaurs were actually dragons and that their blood cures all disease. I honestly hope she really believes it.
Is she secretly a follower Abhorash and a blood dragon?
Ah, a standard Young Earth Creationist-
Well that's different. Sounds a little too Chinese traditional medicine for the usual YEC crowd.
Crank magnetism, a lot of the energy behind pseudo-archaeology/paleontology comes from YEC and fringe Christianity.
Probably from a similar crowd to a lot of the flat earthers where they pull a lot of their core beliefs from fundamentalist Christianity but tend to syncretise with apocryphal jewish and christian material, "eastern" mysticism and general conspiracist thinking.
Lately I've been getting a lot of ads that look like cult recruitment. Some of them turn out to be marketing ARGs and such(I got a couple of these for Bugonia) and sometimes I can't track them down(I never click through the actual ad, just search identifying names from them). Today I got a surprisingly elaborate one that linked to an Instagram page with about five followers that explicitly described it as a cult, but I couldn't nail down whether it was was supposed to be an ARG or similar, or if it's an actually existing group of people organizing under the name and principles given. If it's a genuine group, I'm again left wondering whether the use of the word cult is tongue in cheek, or a conscious effort to appear tongue in cheek.
The more I look the more it feels like this is somewhere between an art project and etsy store advertising after all. Which was kind of my assumption to begin with, but there were enough pieces of apparent doctrinal and administrative material that I started to think otherwise. It's disappointing in the weirdest way, you know?
Well, this is what a cult ad looks like. The specifics to their beliefs involve quackery healing using movement and music, and if you didn't know better, you might miss it.
The story of the meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold is well-known. Henry and Francis bring enormous entourages with them to Calais and put on extravagant displays of wealth (feasts, jousts, etc) in an attempt to out-do each other. Henry challenges Francis to a wrestling match and is unexpectedly humiliated when Francis wins, et cetera. Here's a famous painting of the event, courtesy of Wikipedia:
https://preview.redd.it/gfahbror737g1.jpeg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3b9859822116a7515e4b1d0734e2e52956d9bca9
What is less well-known is that the kings also put on a fight between animals as a sort of rematch by proxy. Catherine of Aragon suggested bulls, possibly as a twist on the traditional Spanish practice of bullfighting. Henry chose a hardy (relatively speaking, anyway) bull from the north of England brought by Thomas Dacre, 2nd Baron Dacre of Gilsland (the Dacres being well-known for their connection with bulls; here is a sculpted figure of a bull c. 1520 carrying his coat of arms, quite possibly the same one gifted to Henry). Francis chose a magnificent bull of Walloon stock which he had been given as a coronation gift a few years back by a young Charles V, nephew of Catherine of Aragon and the Duke of Burgundy at the time. Henry's hopes for redeeming his loss to Francis in the wrestling match were quickly dashed as Francis' bull won almost instantly in shocking fashion. Actually Francis' bull not only won, but actually managed to kill the English bull dead by goring its penis and testicles and letting it bleed out. Per the terms agreed before the match, the English bull was then roasted and eaten by the French entourage while the English looked on with only pottage and raw turnips to eat. Francis is said to have had the bull's head mounted and brought back to Paris, where it was put above the dirtiest latrine in the Louvre.
What is fascinating about this seemingly minor detail of Anglo-French diplomatic history is its potential ripple effects. Biographers of Henry now believe that this marked a turning point in the relations between Henry and Catherine. The king privately blamed Catherine for his humiliation, since not only had she suggested the contest but her nephew had supplied Francis with the winning bull. Rumors in court abounded that he could no longer maintain an erection without thinking of the truly pathetic final moments of the English bull. Some even suggested his inability to sire sons was a consequence of his spiritual emasculation at this match. This of course ultimately led to his divorce from Catherine and his break with the Roman church. It's not much of an exaggeration to say this was the founding moment of the modern English state and religion.
Francis and Henry doomed yaoi
Chat, is this a shitpost?
No what makes you think that?
Your glazing of all things Walloonian makes this uncredible and, frankly, deeply suspect of FAKE history.
I'm sorry but facts don't care about your feelings. This is history as it really happened. I won't apologize for refusing to cave to English nationalist revisionism.
As for Wallonia, I do have a great sympathy for the Walloons and I have never disguised it. Some have used this fact to spread libel that I am a former operative associated with the pro-Maoist revolutionary Walloon guerrilla terror group Les Taureaux Bleus, the "Butcher of Liège." These accusations are completely baseless. Nevertheless I have never let my sympathies distort my telling of the events above.
It's a bull and cock story, at least.
Hard to imagine how Steve Bannon will professionally recover from being photographed with the man who came up with universal grammar.
met two absurdly handsome Turkish-American brothers with crazy blue and green eyes with strong limbal rings, so I of course asked if they were Circassian.
They had never heard the word Circassian before in their lives, so it remains a mystery.
Circassian is Çerkez/Cherkez in Turkish
siri play Up by Cardi B
New genre of yearnposting just dropped?
i have no idea what yearnposting is, is it related to quoting an evil pasha from Lawrence of Arabia?
They’re Baltic Greeks.
They're Albanian.
From Caucasian Albania.
You guys are all just saying Turks
Maybe the real Albanians were the friends we made along the way.
Albanian.
I have no real problems considering the byzantines romans.
I do have problems with the weird byzzieboo chain of thought that leads to actual people living in actual Rome somehow not being romans.
Everyone knows the inhabitants of Rome from the 7th century onwards where just Gothic and Lombard squatters with no claim or connection to the original Romans! /s but I've seen people unironically make that claim.
The real Romans are the Romans we met on the way
Australians work some of the least hours of any OECD nations. Big win for us lazy bums.
The National Anthem of the Tederation is literally just "God Save the King" except the lyrics are just "bear" over and over again.
Bear bear bear bear bear bear
Bear bear bear bear bear bear
Bear bear bear bear
Question: Do y'all think the Section 230 repeal will happen, or will it die in congress as per usual.
I'm going to guess they're all too heavily invested in tech to set the industry on fire.
Repealing Sec. 230 would make basically all social media untenable, I'm not even sure you could run Google Search without it. I think if any tech lobbyists think the repeal effort has a serious chance of succeeding they'll be able to convince enough congressmen and senators that it's basically essential to the US economy at this point and get the bill killed.
Only if they have the courage
You know what is fucked up? That the Pyrenean ibex was made extinct (before being brought back). Motherfucker, the animal lives in the mountains. Like some animals are easy to make extinct. Some freshwater fish that lives in a specific pond fend by source water is too easy to make extinct. Hell, those can extinct by accident. But a fucking mountain goat? It lives up a fucking mountain.
Must taste great in a braise.
Something i find interesting about the spanish side of Power Scaling community (who i'm a part of) was that during the early 2020s many people use the power categories made by Jiovaz S.S.P but nowsday many people who originally used Jiovaz S.S.P power categories like for examples Vortex the Icon, Heart-Shaped Dan and The Fizz had switched to power categories that used energy instead, more specifically the ones made by Jon Cross.
As someone who always found Noam Chomsky to be a ridiculous windbag, I won't deny feeling a little schadenfreude at watching the photo of him palling around with Steve Bannon at an Epstein party implode his reputation with the online left. I also feel it says a lot about the online left that its this that's made them turn on Chomsky, and not the decades of genocide denial and support for authoritarian regimes.
Something something something he's just undermining the corrupt power structure from the inside (why not, this is the argument people make for Trump).
Actually on that note I'll say it's kind of interesting - Epstein connections do seem to only matter with people you already oppose.
There’s varying levels of Epstein connections imo. It was his goal to get it in with famous/rich/powerful people.
So people like Matt Groening are more in the clear compared to Chomsky or Trump.
It'll pass in a week or two, and then he'll just be an old man with no power and people will be back to asking why are you trying to scapegoat him instead of focusing on Trump?
Reddit has taught me that a significant fraction of the “online left” is actually pro genocide and authoritarianism, as long as it is being done by the “correct” people.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone on the left be pro genocide.
Authoritarianism is a very vague term that is pretty unhelpful in discussions.
Stalin did quite a few genocides for someone who was not progenocide. Also you have never encountered a leftist who wants all Israeli settlers killed? Justifies singing Kill the Boer in South Africa after the Apartheid ended? Weird how bubbly the internet is.
Authoritarianism is only vague from a Marxist, class-based perspective. Coming from a liberal perspective it is very clear and easy to identify.
As for genocide, just ask a tankie about the Holodomor.
In fairness the “Holodomor as genocide” thing is actually open to debate from non-cranks.
One totally real issue is certain leftists randomly siding with the Serbs for some fucking reason in the Yugoslav Wars, which I have never understood in the slightest. I’m a leftist, I’m not overly fond of unilateral expeditionary military action, but I’m perfectly fine with the idea of bombing forces that are actively carrying out genocidal massacres. Maybe that makes me a NATO running dog or whatever.
"siding with the Serbs for some fucking reason in the Yugoslav Wars"
From what I can tell it's basically "they still used the name Yugoslavia, just like the Socialist Federal Republic!" That and looking at Milosevic's Communist titles as he came to power and completely ignoring his ideological revolution to virulent nationalism that happened during and immediately after.
But as I was complaining in an earlier thread, people also seem to think Putin's Russia is Actually Existing Socialism, so many people are dangerously stupid.
mfw the Actual Existing Communists literally refer to themselves sometimes as “Chetniks.”
There are many downsides to America effectively lacking any organized socialist movement but one of the more irritating ones is that it causes leftists here to latch onto bizarre foreign issues because of Communism Reasons, since there really isn’t much else to do.
That is true - however, I have often seen the terminally online breed of leftist go, "it's not a genocide and also all the actions that Stalin took were justified and famine is common there anyway and it was the kulaks' fault anyway."
Along with many other types of people, they seem to dominate online discussion but I've never seen them IRL.
Fun fact: Bernie Sanders' support for the bombings is what led to his falling out with Michael Parenti, who is probably best known here for his crank ideas about the Gracchi, although he was also the author of several other works of crank bad history like Blackshirts and Reds. Parenti later became the Chairman of the U.S. National Section of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević.
edit: GOATed Bernie at what I imagine is a town hall
Tankies love Mr. Parenti
Or ask Chomsky about Cambodia or Bosnia
Not really.
I've watched a video on the rise of authoritarianism under Chavez, and something that surprised me is how neither Bush nor 1st term Obama did anything to counter it when it was clear Chavez was already repressing the opposition (bankrolled by oil money and charisma)?
"neither Bush nor 1st term Obama did anything to counter it"
*cough* the 2002 coup attempt *cough cough*
Between Bush's Middle Eastern misadventures and Obama trying (and only partially succeeding) in cleaning up the mess, there wasn't really the means or will for an entanglement in Latin America. Especially not against what was at the time a prosperous country with a popular government that was willing to do business with us.
Venezuela was also very much one of the top exporting countries to the US in the Chavez years. Much like with Putin's Russia and Europe it's easy to talk big talk but actually doing stuff to significantly stop the massive flow of oil isn't really easy (Venezuela basically destroyed their own leverage there).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/201844/us-petroleum-imports-by-country-since-1985/?srsltid=AfmBOoomaEwX4IgIjtNb_MOosMF1zlm0tjFg7sj0FOyJrDwz_tGyxpwp
As I understand it, authoritarianism under Chavez was tricky to oppose because he was genuinely super popular. He kept running free and fair elections and winning them. The fact that he also set up the state with the power to repress people and ignore elections didn’t matter until it did.
The real genius of Chavez was dying before the economy turned south.
As much free and fair elections can be when you control the public media, and your gangs) police neighborhoods and watch who and how vote. also mentioning weaponizing access to governmental services or the misiones
but yeah it was less directly repressive than maduro's rule and they didn't directly stuff the boxes or invent numbers, it was more like a militarized version of the Kirchner's Argentina
The goon left should deplatform her
https://preview.redd.it/9gpxtkrp907g1.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2cfa9f1f1748975c65f924ff57b146a2b7ad82d
Her name is literally that of a notable flag used by the Confederacy; why is anyone shocked she's a racist bastard?
Hurrah, hurrah, for Southern rights
Hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue flag
That bears 2,000 barely legal stars (in one day)!
Also LMAO the original lyrics have a line about "fighting for the property we gained by honest toil"
I mean I had never heard of that nickname for the Confederate flag and I'd rarely assume that an English woman would refer to it intentionally.
The Bonnie Blue Flag was never one of the official flags of the confederates but was popular in the early days of the secession crisis and inspired the song, which was also sometimes referred to as the Southern Marseillaise. A similar banner was also the early flag of the Texas Republic until the more familiar Lone Star Flag replaced it in 1839.
“Porn stream woman endorses Farage from Indonesian jail following Bang Bus Incident” is the most 2025 UK headline possible.
Celebrity weirdly popular for little apparent reason in a completely financialized digital field still finds time to complain about immigrants.
That's disappointing, I was a fan of her work
Something that has become a bit of a pet peeve for me in lefty discourse: the notion that "culture war issues" are somehow a "distraction" from class issues, and that if rural/blue collar whites just knew what was happening, they'd be liberal/progressive/leftist/socialist/whatever.
While I would agree that media diet and so-called "echo chambers" have some effect, I think it's a mistake to divorce cultural from class issues, and that the simplest explanation for why people hold certain views or support specific policies is that those are, in fact, their views.
"If only the king knew!", the democracy version.
You know that's exactly what I thought after I typed it.
And it makes sense because that mindset helps you justify the political regime you live under. In a monarchy, one must believe in the essential goodness of the king or queen. In a democracy, one must believe that they are either obviously or secretly the majority in their beliefs.
Thank god I been hacking all week and today I woke up feeling great. I am still not 100% but I can at least use my voice so that's alright.
CIA: hacked
Pentagon: hacked
Area 51: hacked
Finished the first season of Stranger Things, it's really good, who could have known? One negative, I hate flashing lights so much, holy shit, it makes my headache worse instantly; I get that they're a neat effect to use, but I really, really can't stand it.
It's up there with the sound that cardboard makes if it scratches another piece of cardboard at an angle as things I utterly despise. Highly specific, I know, but that's something that makes me irrationally furious, it's my misophonia. I absolutely hate the sound of cardboard boxes being opened, I actively need to cover my ears or get it over with very quickly.
It’s weird as hell going back to the first season because that is fucking gold and the hype at the time was completely justified but dear god did it fall off a cliff afterwards.
I tapped out like halfway through season 3 and have no idea whatsoever what happened after that. There was a certain charm that just evaporated from the show for some reason.
Yeah I'd agree. The first season was fun - ironically I watched it the same week I went back to the school I had kindergarten in and hadn't been in literally since 1987, and the school was completely unchanged to my memory. My son was doing a gymnastics camp there and the coach even had a Sally Ride haircut and I was like what is even going on, this is the upside-down
But yeah I stopped watching after the first episodes of Season 3, it just wasn't very interesting and was also getting into anachronistically dumb Soviet/Russian mistakes.
I've only ever watched the first two seasons; the first and second some 8-9 years ago, the first again within this past year. I still have yet to know whether it is worth watching the third season because holy Christ did I not enjoy the second season. Stranger Things seems like one of those shows that would've been regarded as a masterpiece had it ended after one season but which invariably fell prey to the cannibalistic system of modern television.
Slept better than the previous night, 5 or so hours of sleep in my estimation, a definite improvement over 3 hours. Still, if the insomnia remains this bad, I'm probably going to call the neurologist and say I can't deal with the side effects. I can deal with sleep deprivation just fine, it's not good, but I've been dealing with sleep problems for around 20 years, but sleep makes my headache less intense, if I don't sleep well enough it remains bad, so I lose my mornings of mild pain.
I hope you get better, friend.
Thank you
It is always interesting to find your own connection to the past
Turns out that "snow-snake game" i played every Klondike with the Scouts, where you slide a wooden shaft down a shute trampled into snow, was a Native American game played in the 1600s (and likely earlier, and likely outside of New England, too)
Much of the US activist Marxist left is in some sense anti-support for Ukraine except for the lovely and quaint descendants of the Johnson-Forrest tendency of Marxist-Humanism (which actually refers to like 3 different things oftentimes confused together) who are without fail pro giving all the arms possible to Ukraine.
What does Bob Avakian think?
This is real niche leftist trainspotting lore, but even within the Johnson-Forrest subbranch of "Marxist-Humanism" there is a division between the IMHO and the MHI. Their actual intellectual differences are inscrutable but the MHI seems more like a weird Dunayevskaya cult (Andrew Kliman, the litigious nut, is associated with them).
Don't forget the News and Letters Committees!
Ah yes, clearly in light green on The Chart
I've heard many people say that supporting Ukraine is supporting Nazism and NATO.
That's the more crude version. The more "erudite" leftists, the types to write in journals and such like The Jacobin, generally argue with a "conflict of imperial nations as a product of capitalism" and "inevitable consequence of NATO expansion".
I'm just gonna say it for the umpteenth time, it's really made me reconsider World War I - "When you think about it, everyone is guilty equally because of late stage imperialist capitalism, definitely not the country that invaded someone else without provocation because of some paranoid alliance bullshit and immediately lined up civilians to be shot against the wall in multiple places, definitely not that."
Sorry for my lack of understanding.
More unasked-for Bannerlord thoughts:
Having played some more, the navy system feels like a fun distraction more than anything. There’s no new way to attack cities by sea, which is a huge shame itself, but it also doesn’t really offer any crazy new tactics. AI armies don’t seem to take to sea too often so as soon as you’re a high clan tier with a huge army of your own it’s better to stop raiding enemy convoys and start getting on land and beating their armies. Kind of a shame - I think naval assaults on cities and more opportunities for large naval engagements would go a long way.
Bannerlord is still in a bit of a weird place. Theres a few things that really should have been addressed before they started releasing DLC and it’s disappointing that they haven’t been. Biggest one for me is that battle AI is still stupid - especially allied AI. By way of an example, I had a battle in which the numbers were even and I commanded the bulk of the force. Instead of the friendly AI assisting with my engagement, they fucked off to a ridge right at the back of the map and sat there the whole battle, contributing nothing.
The Nords are cool but a bit of a dull faction. Sturgia already existed for the Scandinavian flavour and they have cavalry, while the Nords don’t. Their units are good (elite units especially) and pretty fun to rp but not a super interesting choice for a new faction.
Dc and Marvel Superhero comics writer : "This character has learned virtually all martial arts that has ever been invented in human history"
Said superhero would always square up like a boxer and never use any actual technique other than brawling
Wicca would be a GOATed religion if they just became a nature paganism without pretending to be descendants to some ancient witchcraft tradition
Work Gameshop, pls give me a Eldar game with the gameplay as mix of Control and DMC.
Why don't racists open sperm banks?
Like I believe that the strength of a nation comes the its cities, their organizations, economy and mobility. The policies to be followed from this are obvious: Better transit, access to utilities for the business, and for the peoples, etc.
Racists believe that the strength of a nation comes from the genetic pools, its superiority and purity. The most obvious policy that follows from this is to open sperm banks for sperm taken from the racially pure and superior. Idem for eggs. So why don't they do it?
Early Eugenicists believed in genetics as source of superiority, and they did open sperm banks.
germans gave eugenics a bad name.
Sure, but it's not like all of those policies went away. We just stopped calling them "eugenics" because of branding issues. The US was still involuntarily sterilizing poor women well into the 1970s.
that was supposed to be a joke
I think the real answer is that most people who are inclined to think favorably of eugenics would still abhor something so clinical and artificial as sperm banks. like, most conservatives are racist but also care about family, sex after marriage etc. and wouldn't like the concept of a sperm bank.
Depends I guess. Lots of people can be pushed toward favoring a soft form of eugenics if framed correctly. Look how popular Idiocracy was/is, and how many people of all political stripes insist we are "living it" now. The whole premise of the film is straight up eugenic thought.
They don't have to, because sperm banks are already tailored towards the racialized desires of women.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg8mge23leo
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63796862
https://www.ajmc.com/view/research-highlights-racial-disparities-in-us-sperm-donor-banks
More seriously, it seems at least in the US, the standards for sperm donors also produce racialized outcomes.
Mistrust in medical/health institutions, stigma from sperm banks being used for infertile soy losers coupless
Naturally, just a few days after asking how to distinguish は and が, I get a proper explanation on Renshuu, I was just slightly too early. And, yeah, it actually explained topic vs subject pretty well.
Absolutely nuclear take incoming: I'm honestly starting to think that the only way to turn the UK around is by becoming less democratic.
I don't mean that we need to abandon democracy entirely and become like China or something, I just saying maybe we need to temper it a little. It just seems like fixing things here is going to be mechanistically impossible under the current way of doing things.
Fundamentally, people are just unwilling to do what's necessary to repair things here. Media discussion is almost exclusively about what the government does and who our politicians are, but I don't really think that even matters when the public is going to prevent any serious change anyway.
Like let me put it this way: Even if God himself descended from heaven and handed MPs a policy agenda that was guaranteed to resolve all of the UK's problems, it probably wouldn't help us. The public would not let it be enacted. I guarantee you such a plan would be thrown out after a day as boomers revolt over it resolving the housing crisis, the press kicks into overdrive manufacturing outrage about whatever it does wrt. immigration, a thousand spurious legal challenges are launched to prevent the new infrastructure it builds, etc. The truth is that the British public is not willing to save itself, and in a system where any random wanker is allowed to veto the progress of the entire country that means stagnation. I do not see any way things actually can improve in the UK unless the government can ignore the public and do what's necessary instead of what's popular.
You keep praising China, comparing UK to China, and talk about how China is so much better on this sub.
Edit: China has got it's own issues, the recent hi-rise fire in Hong Kong being a highlight of the rot in oppressive systems. Criticize corruption, get arrested, even if said corruption burned your family to death.
A Devastating Fire Has Fueled a National Security Crackdown in Hong Kong
But the UK is already very undemocratic!
I wouldn't take the press too seriously. The Rest Is Politics gets (roughly, apparently) 700,000+ downloads per episode[0]. That puts it way ahead of any newspaper -- the highest circulation is the Metro, that clocks in 1.4 million papers per month.
The only reason why the press matters in the UK is because politicians think it matters. And they think it matters because they are Michael Fabricant.
[0]: 'Data' is from 2024, so likely undersells the case: https://pressgazette.co.uk/podcasts/first-political-podcast-election-youtube-rest-is-politics-goalhanger/
Yeah, but we only lost because our enemies successfully opposed us, so when you think about it, that's not even a real defeat at all
Every tankie ever about CIA and commie countries:
Excuse me, the United States retreated from Vietnam then the North won, therefore it's not a U.S defeat.
"So in fact, this is not a humiliating defeat, but rather a rare species of victory?!"
They barely even won!
Going on from U/w_o_s_n ‘s comment about animal farm, I’m such a reactionary that I hate the book for being trotskyite propaganda that doesn’t adequately describe how the farmer is a heroic figure who maintains order and stability in a world of anarchy and despair of the infantile masses. I genuinely tear my hair out reading it
I agree with this, but only because they are British livestock. If they were animals on, for instance, a Dutch farm I think they would have worked it out.
Orwell set his farm in Britain because there was fundamentally no livestock around that were brawnier and stronger than the strains bread from Anglo-Saxon and Picto-Scottish farmers. It’s a well known fact denied only by insane and desperate pseuds like you. I am very convinced it is something to do with the Huegenot skull
"the Huegenot skull"
Does Calvinism deform a Gallic skull?
He's wildly jealous and insecure of my descent from Henri IV of France because he himself is the descendant of dung farmers
This completely misconstrues the meaning of Orwell's 1984, which is first and foremost a satire of the backwards state of British agriculture. That the pigs come to run the farm in imitation of humans is actually a subtle and brilliant Swiftian move that illustrates how English farmers are brutal and piggish, which is why they have made no indigenous progress in animal husbandry since the 5th century (all the progress being stolen or borrowed from elsewhere, mostly from the Low Countries but also France).
Again you are deliberately misleading people for no gain are all but your own personal pomposity. It’s been contended by the self hating English Marxist Henry Hornyman that this was the case just after the novel was published but Orwell personally stated that it wasn’t in a letter to none other than clement atlee a month after Hornyman sent that letter to the workers tribune. Even Kim Philby himself actually laughed at the idea when he was pitched it by a KGB agent in the Moscow Ballet in 1985,
That letter is probably an MI5 forgery dreamed up by the Attlee government to smear Orwell.
I have difficulty telling when people are sarcastic.
I honestly think people misrepresent the book as being sympathetic to Trotsky. Like the common milk is being expropriated for the pig's own feed already before Snowball has been exiled. Surely he'd be privy to what was being done here, and I believe Orwell said as much.
Being serious I actually agree with you
First time I see a pro-Trudeau comment on reddit
My sister is now extremely excited because I'm watching Stranger Things, she has decided to slightly delay the watch party after Christmas to give me more time and, more importantly, she now wants to invite a few of our cousins to the watch party too.
I mostly did not do it for her, but because it was framed as a challenge, and I have a friend who also really loves the series, so I was definitely going to enjoy it, I'm just not someone who watches a lot of series.
---
In other news, finished C;C Children's Revive, it's a very good epilogue to Chaos;Child, short but satisfying; it doesn't really do that much, it just explores more about what the ending of the VN means for some of the cast.
Apparently half life subs are going nuts about 3 not being announced.
. . . What fucking year is this?
I know it's the first of April after seeing that 1984 aneurism but who gives a damn after nearly 20 or so years? HL3 was a joke in the late 00s on par with Duke Nukem Forever and Shenmue 3 but even those have long since come to pass, who is still holding their breath for this game?
None of the people in the know who are taken seriously thought it would be announced at TGA.
Something with the code name HLX is confirmed via data mining to have been in development since 2021 and apparently it was planned for a 2025 announcement. The voice actor for the G-Man also made a tweet that was just "#Valve #Halflife #GMan #2025" and a video.
So there were serious reasons to believe it was gonna be announced this year, and maybe might still be.
Also the half life games are considered to be among the best FPS games and games in general. So there are a lot of people who want HL3.
Genuine fans of the franchise. I’m not crashing out like the reddit schizoids, but I’m gonna throw hands with Half Life anti-fans. It’s a great game franchise that deserves to continue.
^
As much as I like to make fun of the people who get hyped about it, I do hope that HL:A was a sign that 3 will come sooner or later, and if it happens I will be playing it no matter how good or bad it is.
Is this going to be passive aggressive posts with teddy bears in them again?
https://preview.redd.it/1g3d9wqaiy6g1.png?width=803&format=png&auto=webp&s=97013fdb5baa0e77ee580044071fd21bd6f647d2
I kinda of thought HL3 would be coming, precisely because the hype should have died down because it's been so damn long. The devs said the anticipation for a ground breaking game is why they didn't make HL3 at the time.
But I don't really have any skin in the game, never played Half Life 2.