now don’t get me wrong Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a VERY good man, but he’s not a good actor really
I understand he’s charismatic and such but why does Hollywood insist on adding him in almost every single thing they flush out??? He’s in like, everything that has a buff male protagonist lead
This has occurred to me independently several times, so I figure I might as well write it down.
Anytime there is a social rule, some people will try to find ways to exploit it – to do bad things in ways that are technically rule-compliant, or to wield the rules against the innocent by taking advantage of subtle flaws in the rule’s formulation.
The solution to this is not to make even better rules. Yes, certain rules are especially bad and ought to be replaced by less exploitable ones. But any rule you bind yourself to will be exploited.
What you always need, in addition to good rules, is a fail-safe button. You need to give yourself the right to say “hey, this looks like manipulative bullshit” or “that person sure is an asshole” – specifically, the right to do this “extra-legally,” without caring about the rules. You need a “no, that’s just wrong, even though some similar things are right” option.
Of course, this option can itself be abused, particularly if it is used freely and unthinkingly. If the rules hold only until the moment you don’t like their consequences, then the rules don’t really hold at all.
But if someone does that, you can take the same option yourself: “yeah, I said you should have this option, but using it like that is wrong.” Because the option does not have specific rules (by construction), no one can use rules lawyering to take it away from you. If someone uses “calling bullshit” for bad ends, you can just call bullshit on them.
This is not without downsides. It means nothing is certain. If you declare your right to press the failsafe button, no one can simply rely on you to follow the rules; they have to judge your character to know whether to trust you in any given case. But there isn’t any real alternative to this. Rules don’t save you from having to assess other people’s character; even if you know they will follow the letter of the law, you have to decide whether they will follow the spirit of it.
If everyone grokked everyone else perfectly, rules would not be necessary. Rules help you coexist with strangers, with people you don’t know will grok you. But don’t be afraid to insist that coexisting with you is more than just a matter of following the rules; that the latter are just a means for furthering the former. Don’t be afraid to remind people that they are interacting with you, not with the rules, and that your judgments are ultimately your own, for them to take or leave.
In 1852, Spear broke all ties with the Universalist church, and instead turned to Spiritualism. He claimed that he was in contact with ‘‘The Association of Electrizers’’, a group of spirits including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Benjamin Rush, as well as Spear’s namesake John Murray. Evidence indicates he occasionally faked signatures as a way to gain authority from a “guide from the past;” however, these signatures were dated beyond the lifetimes of the deceased.[3] Spear believed that the purpose of this group was to bring new technology to mankind, so that greater levels of personal and spiritual freedom could be achieved.[1] The following year, Spear and a handful of followers retreated to a wooden shed at the top of High Rock hill in Lynn, Massachusetts, where they set to work creating the ‘‘New Motive Power’’, a mechanical Messiah which was intended to herald a new era of Utopia. The New Motive Power was constructed of copper, zinc and magnets, all carefully machined, as well as a dining room table. At the end of nine months, Spear and the ‘‘New Mary’’, an unnamed woman, ritualistically birthed the contraption in an attempt to give it life. Unfortunately for Spear, this failed to have the desired effect, and the machine was later dismantled.
I call dibs on “The Association of Electrizers” and “New Motive Power” as band names.
salafis on facebook in the year 2100 getting into heated and doctrinaire arguments over whether al-qaeda or the islamic state had the more correct approach to revolution, the phrase ‘actually existing caliphate’ gets thrown around repeatedly, everyone makes jokes about the thousand different campus-based muslim brotherhood splinter groups even though everyone was in one of them at one point
Position I wish anyone cared enough about to be unpopular: John Dewey’s ideas weren’t actually that important in American public education and the notion that they were was mostly a way for America to put a native, democratic gloss on remodeling itself after the Prussian system just like everyone else
him: yo, you want to cosplay a painting?
her: can I show all our friends my tits?
him: sure, baby, it's sophisticated!
narrator: AND THAT WAS TABLEAU VIVANT
The first break within the organization occurred in 1957, when Montreal promoter Eddie Quinn walked out of the August NWA meeting in St. Louis. Quinn had fallen out with Muchnick over a number of issues. Quinn was a partner in the St. Louis territory and disagreed with how it was being run, and was also angry that Muchnick had business dealings with rogue promoter (and Quinn rival) Jack Pfefer. At the time Quinn walked out, a wrestler of his named Édouard Carpentier was involved in an angle where he and Lou Thesz were both being presented around the NWA as champion. This occurred after Carpentier had a disputed win over Thesz on June 14, 1957, and some of the NWA promoters considered it a legitimate title change, while others did not.[4] The original idea was to build the idea of the “disputed” NWA title into a high-profile rematch. When Quinn left the NWA, Muchnick announced that Carpentier had never been an official champion and had no claim on the title.
Afterward, Quinn saw the financial possibilities in the Carpentier situation and began to negotiate with factions within the NWA, as some territories such as Boston (AAC/Big Time Wrestling), Nebraska, and Los Angeles (NAWA/WWA) continued to recognize Carpentier as champion. He offered to have Carpentier lose a title match to their prospective champion thus giving them, if they decided to break away, a legitimate claim on the world title. The AAC recognized Killer Kowalski as world champion when he defeated Carpentier in Boston, and Nebraska recognized Verne Gagne as champion when he defeated Carpentier in Omaha (after winning the belt, Gagne tried for two years to work things out with the NWA, but finally left the organization in 1960 forming the American Wrestling Association.[4] Gagne’s win over Carpentier was used to legitimize the world championship status of the AWA title). The NAWA/WWA recognized Freddie Blassie as world champion when he defeated Carpentier in 1961. The promotion then left the NWA officially and became Worldwide Wrestling Associates (WWA) until it returned to the NWA in 1968.
professional wrestling history literally indistinguishable from church history
we kind of take lack of state involvement in religion for granted since the american government has historically taken the first amendment pretty seriously, but once a state does decide to tamper with religion it can do pretty much anything it fucking wants. china’s already declared their intention to appoint the next dalai lama, which given that the next dalai lama will be an infant baby is beyond bonkers
in response the tibetan church (or at least the parts of it under the current dalai lama’s control) are making preparations for the dalai lama to just not be reincarnated. like on his deathbed he can just say ‘see ya suckers, i’m outie’ and then the other monks get to declare the baby a pretender and usurper and the whole administrative structure of tibetan buddhism gets permanently changed
Nothing quite demonstrates the generation divide like how both me and my dad are/were MMORPG players, both of us play lizardfolk monks, but in his case in Everquest the Iksar were legit humanoid lizards whereas mine is an Au Ra kawaii uguu anime girl with a few patches of scales and horns
To add to this, back in his day you had to join a guild to do content and his was a bunch of well-paid engineers and lawyers, who he knew and worked with IRL, whereas I just queue up the roulette and do stuff with randoms and never talk to anybody
Got the old login credentials so I could make the comparison
In which I mumble about wanting to smush more people I like closer together.
yes! let’s make a little rationalist community where families can live and everyone’s not all crammed into the same single house! let’s buy out an apartment building and move everyone in!
Things I Think Would Be Nice To Have:
basic units of 3ish bedrooms clustered around smallish living areas w/ basic kitchen + bathroom
larger communal area for hosting Events
larger fancy communal kitchen for cooking large group meals
communal outdoor area w/ firepit and garden (particularly an edible garden with herbs, veggies, fruit trees, etc)
dedicated co-working area (with a library!)
guest rooms or units where visitors can stay
bike/carshares
It would be cool to do it as a co-op situation and maybe rent out the guest units/event space (on AirBnb?) for extra income, to help bolster those who can’t afford as much rent?
This is basically my ideal living situation that you’re describing. I would like to add exercise equipment to the list of things it would be nice to have. (Only slightly related: if we got some kind of big building I doubt anyone would stop you from riding a bike in the halls)
Also, my mom suggests coming to Utah and buying an old mormon church. Of course that plan would require moving to Utah, so…
hey yo please read up on the history of communal living before you do this, there are best practices and known failure modes and subtle differences in founding design can matter a lot
American communalism comes in waves, the 1960s was the last, there was a big one in the 1840s. Tend to be thinky types into human perfectibility and complex sexual geometry, you guys fit in
It was the priest as an idler and destroyer of the household, who gained ascendancy over women through the confessional, that the soldiers and leaders attacked more than the priest as magician or upholder of the old order. The revolutionaire was no theologian. even if he talked of superstition, and the real reason for his prejudice against the confessional was the power he felt it gave the priest over his womenfolk. Such prejudices at times came near to misogyny and there are many examples of this in the expressions of the san-culottes, the commissairs and the representants en mission. This anti-feminism was fortified by the frequently furious opposition from the village women which they encountered on their iconoclastic missions-more than one revolutionaire had to take to their legs to escape their fury. But most of all the soldiers held a grudge against women because of the way they let themselves be seduced by the lying and lazy priests. At Bec du Tarn, Huegny, a Toulouse commissaire civil ‘thundered against fanaticism, and in particular against women, who were more easily seduced by it; he said that the Revolution had been made by men, and women should not be allowed to make it backtrack…” Dartigoeyte, representant en mission in the Gers, gave vent to similar feelings in his tirade against the devotes of Mirande: “And you, you bloody bitches, you are their whores [the priests’], particularly those who attend their bloody masses and listen to their mumbo jumbo,’ but he also had a word for the “jean-foutres of husbands who are naive enough to accompany them [and who] simply show what cuckolds they are by doing so.’
