There’s only so much harshness from the environment that can be insulated by the system instead of passed through to the individuals before the system itself starts taking damage, gradually reducing its ability to insulate harm from the environment.
I think more actors should just completely lie and fabricate things in interviews. It’s like, we literally pay them to lie professionally because they’re so good at it, but then sometimes we ask them to deliver us earnest insights about how to live well? Why would I have an electrician fix my plumbing? Also from a practical perspective there should be a baseline assumption that celebrities are shilling something in any given public appearance and therefore untrustworthy anyway.
marx has phenomenal staying power - you can read him and be amazed at how prescient many of his ideas were, and how far ahead of the curve he was historically, but a number of his conclusions (ie, socialist revolution will occur in the most developed countries) ended up being flat-out wrong. i think it’s a mistake to read him as modern theory (as opposed to interesting historical leftism)
I do believe in the value of toughing things out and perseverance, but I gotta say, If It Sucks, Hit Da Bricks is solid advice and has only enriched my life, I LOVE not doing things I don’t want to do.
gotta take an airfield in an entirely landlocked, mountainous country. let’s get the uh boat guys. yeah. the boat guys
anyhow every modern military is large enough that it has to be split in suborganizations to be even sort of manageable by humans, but from the moment they’re separated each branch of the organization is embroiled in a life or death struggle to consume the roles of the other branches
I wrote a blog post about the drum I’m banging all the time about heterosexual dating.
My suspicion is that the majority of my women friends who had bad relationships had partners who chose them, rather than the other way around. If you are 100% passive in the dating market, your partners will be drawn from the set of ‘the kind of people who wants to date you’. If you are 100% active, your partners will be drawn from the set of ‘the kind of person you want to date’.
…
So, while it would be great to be on a date with a guy who asked me out because I’m the most spectacular person he’s met this year and he thinks about me all the time and has been beating down thoughts of what to name our children… statistically the guys who ask me out will tend to be my acquaintance who thinks it’s worth a shot and tries it out after a cumulative hour of waffling.
A relationship with the first guy has a better chance of going well than a relationship with the second guy, although of course it’s nonzero for both. But I argue that your chances are even better if you date the guy you think is the most spectacular person you’ve met this year. US progressive culture is in a weird place right now where women are socially permitted to initiate but they don’t seem to quite believe it yet. As a consequence, the dating field for the minority of initiating women is highly rewarding.
the best genre of children’s lit is “kid survivalist novellas that make 8-year olds feel like they could also survive being stranded on an island or lost in the wilderness”
we dont have proof the moon ISNT heaven. like. weve only explored little parts of it. maybe most of it is heaven
we’ve only explored little parts of the ocean too
pretty sure we have better maps of the moon than of the ocean
yeah but obviously the ocean isn’t heaven, it’s *down*. the ocean MIGHT be hell
In medieval theology, the Moon was believed to be the highest part of the terrestrial sphere, because it was both marred and subject to change, unlike the unchanging featureless points of light which comprised the planets and stars. In Out of the Silent Planet, which borrows several medieval cosmological tropes and updates them for the present day, Lewis explicitly posits that the Moon is the prison of Satan.
Clearly, the Moon is Hell. Based on this fact, we can extrapolate another: having visited Hell to free the souls of the righteous during the Harrowing of Hell, Jesus was the first astronaut.
If we are curious about why the Moon appeared uninhabited when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed there, we can easily conclude that this is most likely because 1) universalism is true, therefore 2) the Harrowing of Hell emptied the Moon for good, and 3) Lucifer was redeemed just as foretold by the Yazidis and their allegedly heterodox understanding of Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel being obviously cognate to both the traditional Christian Satan, and to Thulcandra, the Oyarsa of Earth in Lewis’s cosmology.
I really like that you’re bringing in Yazidi theology.
The key to good speculative theology is to be completely arbitrary about the sources you use, and to refuse to justify your decisions.
in Melbourne we got stuck in a cycle of policy changes for police chases because hot pursuits would invariably result in the fleeing car crashing into a tree and killing everyone on board or worse crashing into another car and killing a whole family, so the public outcry led to a review of police procedures which of course made it common knowledge that police would now disengage if a fleeing car accelerated wildly and drove on the wrong side of the road, leading to an increase in dangerous driving and crashes which led to public outcry and a review of police procedures etc. etc.
this is a bit of a special case as there is a feedback loop, but in general it’s really difficult to stand up after a disaster and say actually we’re not going to make any changes to policy because we’re already at an optimal point, we cannot reduce casualties to zero, and any changes would just be window dressing in a vain attempt to believe that we can control an inherently uncontrollable situation.
now of course most policies aren’t optimal and can be improved, but eventually in the absence of feedback loops you’re going to end up with something that’s as good as you can currently make it… and yet still not perfect, and you need a way to deal with that.
I think this is why politicians say “we’re appointing a commission to study the problem”.
That means “we’re not going to do anything about it because we believe our current policy is already optimal, and this will take long enough for most of you to calm down and forget about it, and the only people who still care are small enough in numbers to be easily ignored”.
yes, and sometimes that’s reasonable! “we have reviewed our policies and decided not to make any changes at this time” can be an ass covering move but it can also be the correct move in some situations.
I think if they want to keep making Star Trek shows they need to quit it with the lore shit and go back to the spirit of TOS where it was a borderline anthology series slash way to farm work out to the best working SF/pulp writers. Down with thematic consistency, up with letting someone who wrote a few short stories you liked go hog wild on a script
Honestly pretty frightening that a 21 year old adult right now is someone who has no memories from the late 80′s to roughly 2001 because there’s basically nothing in the world right now, no media, no jokes, no fashion, no political horror, that isn’t visibly a direct end product of the culture and events I witnessed during that period.
So watching a lot of you interact with and discuss the world is a lot like watching someone come in halfway through a movie and not even realize it. You missed half the story that I watched develop and unlike I movie I can’t rewind it and show you how it all makes sense and what it all means.
Then there’s the horror of realizing the same thing applied to me and the entire world I know is just the aftermath of the 60′s and 70′s in ways I’m never going to be able to appreciate.
shoutout to the entomology grad students who worked at the insectorium in Costa Rica who abandoned all sense of liability and responsibility said “yeah, sure, go for it” when a teenage me asked if they’d help me get stung by a scorpion
in their defense, my parents were present and permitted it with a shrug, and this was before you could just queue up Brave Wilderness on your phone whenever you wanted to see some dumbass get envenomated
still though… if I allowed this at my nature center I’d absolutely get fired and possibly charged with something
what did it feel like though? i’ve long been curious about scorpion stings, but there are none in the area that i can go out and get stung by for research :(
Electric. An instant of shallow pinprick pain followed by a surge of dark, pulsating heat that traveled from the swell of my thumb all the way up my arm. My blood felt like it was simmering quietly under my skin and my whole hand quickly stiffened with mild muscle contractions, as though I had been gloveless in the bitter cold. My skin was very hot to the touch, pink and noticeably swollen, and remained so for about twenty minutes. I felt the dark internal heat inside my hand and wrist for another few hours, but it quickly stopped being painful and just felt heavy and strange. It was much less localized than a bee or a wasp sting–from the sensation alone, I couldn’t have pinpointed the exact location of the puncture; although I was stung at the base of my thumbnail and on my palm, it felt like a big wash of sensation all through my hand and wrist. The sharp brunt of the pain was over in under a minute and gave way to a deep throbbing soreness that gradually faded to neutral weirdness.
It was more intense than a paper wasp sting, but less annoying. Paper wasp stings feel very sharp and biting and more like injuries, but the scorpion sting was a much more full-bodied flavor profile.
Note: this was a harmless species, and done under the supervision of experts who could have gotten me an EpiPen if I had a bad reaction.
This sounds a lot like you did it because you wanted to write a character being stung by a scorpion and had to know how to depict it just right
I did it because I was 16 and had read about Justin Schmidt and because I’ve always been a freak for as long as I’ve existed.
The broader our base of experience is, the deeper our understanding of ourselves and the world, the greater our ability to discern and affect the outcomes we truly desire.
I’m sure it sounds Quixotic to draw a line between being stung by a scorpion and making the world a better place, but really, there’s nothing like novelty and extreme anchoring points to give us some real perspective.
You know a good cultural analysis could be done of Home Alone vis a vis societal anxieties about latchkey kids in the 80s-90s, and how big a hit that movie was perhaps due to how reassuring the message was to guilty parents that an 8-year old abandoned for upwards of a week will not only survive and not burn down the house but do grocery shopping, feed himself well, and defend the house from danger when presented with the suburban parent nightmare scenario of scary criminals breaking into the home when you aren’t there to defend the children.
That particular fantasy wasn’t for the kids - kids will just fast forward to the end with the burglars getting beat up, a comparatively small section of the movie compared to “Kevin goes grocery shopping” and “Kevin goes to church” and “mom heroically breaks all laws and land speed records to get home to her son who misses her”
it took me a minute to realize this wasn’t a @kontextmaschine post
