Not fully automated luxury gay space enough

Mmmm, Naegleria fowleri 🤤

Insane drip ngl, you should be proud

Agreed

Runaway truck ramps are common in the Appalachians too, anywhere there is a long stretch of a steep grade. Some sections there will be a truck speed limit of 20mph while cars can go 55.

Requiring snow chains though, that’s hardcore.

Biden barely tolerates abortion, he personally doesn’t like it because of his Christianity and only supports it because it would be political suicide for him not to

The free market has spoken and found party balloons to maximize utility

If you buy whole bean, see if you can have a coffee shop grind it for you, they will have better grinders = less bitter cups out of the same beans

I think he’s trying to say that every man is capable of violence, so people take that into account more or less consciously when interacting with men. So violence already being given, the essential struggle is against improper or “dumb” violence and not violence per se.

Maybe I’m being too charitable

I completely agree that it’s not an accident that China in particular is the US State Dept’s chosen enemy. But that is only one half of it, the other half that I’m considering is why the public is receptive to it. There is a degree of information control in the US, but it is still easy to hear alternative viewpoints through the internet.

I don’t believe it is as simple as brainwashing, or Chomsky’s manufacturing consent, or Parenti’s inventing reality, or any other top-down approach on a totally passive population.

There’s a good article on RedSails about this topic, in which the author argues (convincingly IMO) in favor of licensing, rather than brainwashing. In summary it argues that people are not merely duped by propaganda, they often choose to believe it for whatever reasons corresponding to their real conditions of life.

Edit: Ok I’ve been re-reading this article and it turns out they talk about the Uiguhr-genocide narrative, so it’s even more fitting to this dicussion:

Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.

A Bug’s Life

That is kinda what I mean though. It is not necessarily a conscious guilt. There is a reason that people feel compelled to believe China is horrific. Fascists cannot allow nuance, therefore self-criticism is the highest of all sins. Demonization of enemies is the direct reflection of the fascist need to venerate one’s homeland.

In spite of itself, got this part right

But do you condemn Hamas?

“They banned me for amplifying propaganda that I’m too oblivious to realize makes me a hypocrite.”

Americans don’t give a shit about the problems of the Uighurs, or any minority really.

Instead of acknowledging their own hypocrisy they invent le secret Soviet tactic of wHaTaBoUtIsM as the ultimate defense against accusations of hypocrisy.

Pretending to care so much about the Uighurs is a projection of their own guilt for living on stolen indigenous land, ignoring the violence of their own country in an actual ongoing genocide in Palestine, and ignoring the everyday violence on their own turf against nonwhite, 🏳️‍🌈, 🏳️‍⚧️, etc.

People don’t want to be rich just to have nice things. It is an admission that capitalism is so fucking shit for 99% of people that it is worth grinding for half a lifetime just to claw your way to a respectable way of life.

All of this is the subconscious desire for a pre-capitalist society where everything wasn’t commodified

I have found, through discussing politics and world events with friends and family, that most people have a similar idea of what a fair and good world looks like.

Most people want their neighborhood to look like the Hallmark cards, not asphalt carbrain dystopias.

Most people think it is wrong to live off the work of others.

Most people want their work to have meaning, to be part of a greater purpose; to advance humanity in the abstract, as one species and not as individuals.

Ironically on this latter point, the military actually sort of offers this. If you join the military you won’t be rich, but you will be taken care of in a quasi-socialist fashion. You work toward a greater common purpose. Yet most in the military do not realize this, how the “real” economy is far more precarious for most workers.

Saturn Devouring His Son [NSFW]

Book recommendation: The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close. It won’t turn you into a theoretical physicist, but it is an interesting exploration of the history and personalities involved in the development of quantum field theory in the mid 20th century.

There is no reason to be skeptical of particle models if they are accurate for the domain you’re working in. Quantum mechanics is true at microscopic scales but you can still think in terms of classical physics for a lot of stuff.

Also, particles do exist in a real sense. The various forces are actually mediated by messenger particles, or “localized wave packets” or “field excitations” or whatever you want to call them.

As Feynman once explained: Quantum objects do not behave like particles or waves. They are novel and unfamiliar to our experience although this or that characteristic might have analogy to something we are familiar with, like a wave or a particle.

Physics is very complicated and every practical calculation involves simplifying assumptions to make it calculable. In my astro courses it was often acceptable to be within an order of magnitude or two, which is kind of hilarious, but points to the large effect of those simplifying assumptions.

All countries flags are on fire. Some more than others. The flags that get emojis are the ones whose flames rival that of our plucky Sun.