through thorough thought, yadda yadda.

What I don’t understand is that as soon as you start criticizing other languages for similar absurdities you’re gonna get a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork to defend it. People are fine to shit on english for being a horrible language, and I’m fine with that as well because that’s true, but as soon as you criticize spanish, i.e. another language that spread to everywhere because of colonialism, you’re gonna get dogpiled about how everything is getting forced from the outside by non-native spanish speakers and how it’s all so artificial and astroturfed. But then they also don’t acknowledge these calls whenever they have come from inside the house, which is something that’s always happening, and they also won’t do anything really to refute the core logic of the critique outside of what’s basically just prescriptivism.

I dunno, maybe it’s just because the british have sucked the fun out of everything and american imperialism has kind of given english generally a bad reputation among all of the south american countries which would generally speak spanish, and so that’s going to lead to a kind of resistance to anything seen as coming in from there, which is fair enough.

The bigger problem I have, though, which also applies to english, is how ineffective any of these more academic strategies for change are, even if they’re mostly well-intentioned. You see this outside of language, too. As long as we’re not making some institutional change, then no progress is gonna be made because people will see it all as artificial ivory tower bullshit, and won’t wanna use it. For english, it would have to be taught in school as part of a base level curriculum, and if you’re trying to grassroots it, then it’ll have to be explained every time you use it, with every new person, which impedes communication in literal terms and means it probably won’t get picked up.

What’s weird to me is that we can’t have that, and implicitly there can kind of be nothing that challenges the informal rules or structure of language, so no major shakeups are allowed, but still somehow we’ll see every kid on tiktok every two weeks start to accumulate some form of AAVE and then proceed to completely drive it into the ground. I guess that’s just because the internet is kind of a chaotic place and these things are primed to propagate pretty easily, but it’s kind of frustrating how totally undirected it all is, and how it all preys on our worst instincts. Means we get people that can only talk in buzzwords and call everything woke without having any formal definition for what that means really. I wonder how fast you could artificially change someone’s mind for the better if that’s what you actually wanted to do with social media. That maybe sounds villainous or manipulative, but I think we have to understand that this is something that exists and has always existed with these platforms, and by ignoring it, we just let the worst instincts and actors take over and fester instead.

That’s not really being rich, though. The guys on that list could theoretically buy whatever countries they wanted, hell, they could buy multiple, hell, they could just buy owning stock in every country by way of bribery. If you’re the leader of a single country, it’s as though your money is all invested for you already in that single country. You’re mostly locked down to wherever you are. But the Walton family, owning Walmart, last time I checked the third largest economy in the world, they can extract that money and pivot wherever they want, with basically no borders or limits.

I mean, do I have to say what you could just do to any senators which oppose you? It might be getting into coup territory, but eventually you’d probably reach a point where things just proceed as normal. Or you, as biden, could just take the L on it, make sure the newly stacked supreme court shuts it down, eat the, what, next 10 years of your life, if that, in federal prison or whatever it is, and blammo. Could probably even use the opportunity to step down but I imagine if he did some shit like that his approval rating might go through the glass dome protecting the flat earth aaaand post

the dems would never go for that, though, because then they’d actually be doing something. even if you took away oh no the two senators that somehow always conveniently oppose any action they take, you can be sure that they’d pull some other poor sap up out of the bowels in order to play the villain.

So, what happens if the president is charged? Is he automatically ousted? I mean, apparently a felon can run for president, so does them being a state criminal actually impede them at all, or no?

Here, I have a couple examples to kind of, illustrate why, despite the common sentiment, antinatalism, and malthusianism, inherently, like, just straight up, don’t make any sense. This is all based on back of the napkin math that I did a while ago, and I don’t want to redo the numbers, so take it with a grain of salt maybe, but, yeah.

Okay, so, not really taking into account consumption or supply chain, which are major factors, you could fit the entire population of earth in one city the size of about one and a quarter rhode islands, if you had the population density of kowloon. Now, kowloon has retroactively been shat on as having a low quality standard of living, which is partially true, there were leaks everywhere, it was run by the mob, yadda yadda, but there’s nothing inherently problematic with that level of density, there. You could easily expand that to, say, two rhode islands, or three, right, and that would cover an insanely small portion of the earth’s surface while also being more than enough for everyone to live.

On the other hand, if you divided up the earth based on only habitable zones and arable land, you’d get about 2.5 acres per person, which I think also accounts for the elderly and children. To me, that sounds like probably 2.5x more than I would ever need in a lifetime, especially once we kind of tally up all the savings that we can get at scale, at mass production, and then maybe take costs for transportation.

We also, never, never ever take into account the amount of land management which was being done by the various natives of all their lands before colonialism kind of came in and fucked everything up. We have this conception of nature as being some kind of like, inherent good entity that humans can only ever destroy with their presence. A kind of untouched garden of eden that we should basically never touch. As being like, inherently sacred, or having some inherent value, even, to the point where we anthropomorphize it. “Mother nature”. We have this view of humans as also being completely separate from nature, as being an aberration, rather than being a part of it. I think these are both mistakes. We have to view humans as being a part of nature, and we have to start viewing nature as existing everywhere, rather than just being something that you minorly interface with when you go for a hike. Our built environment is part of nature, our decision to plant exclusively male trees that will give off a shit ton of pollen which covers all the windows and makes everything super shitty all spring so we don’t have fruit, that’s a part of nature. So are the raccoons and possums and stray cats and dogs and pigeons and weeds and other things which we see as being invasive but also simultaneously as having no real habitat anymore.

The real solution, I think, is only going to come about when humans collectively start to conceptualize and take accountability for what they go around and do, rather than just sort of, pawning off all responsibility for everything, and cooking up some apocalyptic reality where it’d just be better off if we didn’t exist at all. The genie is out of the bottle. Even to conceptualize of us as being “the problem”, as though there is a singular kind of problem, is a kind of anthropocentrism, and a kind of anthropomorphizing of nature.

I also assume I don’t need to really discuss how like, the idea that we’re currently doing everything in the most efficient way, is a little bit overconfident, and takes everything at a kind of, unchanging face value. As though we exist in the long arc of history with a kind of inevitability, rather than a random happenstance.

Nah fuck that shit. MMA integrated weight classes and that’s sucked. Sumo is the only true martial art, straight up, not even pulling your leg right now

Edit: Yeah, I mean, men are “stronger” pound for pound or whatever, but, we kind of, are idiots when it comes to thinking of sports, if we just suddenly think all sports are about explosive type 1 muscles, or muscular structure, or whatever. That’s dumb, that’s a brainlet comparison and a brainlet appeal, I would say. If you gain leverage in one direction, you lose it in another. If you gain a bunch of type one muscle fibers, you become a chimpanzee, but also, you gas really, really quickly, and humans are endurance predators that maximize that endurance with fine motor control even in what might be considered gross motor action. Everyone has this conception of sports as being these kinds of, oh, instant action gratification machines, where you just watch some guy get hit in the face really hard, or get tackled, and your monkey brain goes coco mode, and so obviously explosive strength is gonna be good for these displays, so, men are better at sports.

This is not the case. Or at least, not entirely. Sports is more like a long-form storytelling vehicle with many different characters and mindless teams to it. Women can fulfill that role just as easily as men can, in many of the same contexts. If we have sports that are bad for co-ed play, then I would say, we have sports that perhaps need refining.

Which everyone thinks is somehow like, a horrible thing to do, oh no, the sports, they’re too sacred, we gotta find the best of the best, but sports have always been and remain subject to change and a ton of different shitty rulesets that everyone always hates. Basketball now, apparently, rewards a bunch of aggressive highlight-reel kinds of play, and apparently the older game used to be more defensive, I say apparently because I dunno. I know nascar has had the opposite trending for quite some time with limiter plates meant to protect drivers and the audience more at the cost of more spectacular crashes and pileups for which the sport might gain more casual viewership. And also not be boring as fuck driving in a circle for like three hours. That’s not a sport getting better or worse, that’s just some arbitrary cultural shift, a decision made, realistically, because of internal cost-benefit analysis at the behest of a corporation which runs the major league.

We might have the same capacity to integrate sports into a co-ed kind of a deal, if we had the will to do so, but I think the truth of the matter is just that nobody really gives a shit about equality, except for when you bring it up.

Me, I’m a fan of sumo, because fuck weight classes. I wanna see david beat goliath. To me, that’s a more compelling casual narrative that can easily be built into a sport. Fairness is highly overrrated, and also doesn’t exist, or else every match might as well just be random chance, or end in a draw. Michael phelps is some genetic freak or whatever. Go cry me a river, and then he can swim across it and back. Give me an abstract goal like “get ball through hope” or “throw guy out of ring” and then I don’t need any more to it, I’m right there with you.

Sony also made their bottom button the default “confirm/execute” button and the side right button the “cancel/backout” button. It just feels more intuitive to me.

Here to note that this wasn’t the way it was meant to be, on their controller, hence the common confusion you tend to get with a lot of games. I think it comes about as a result of them maybe trying to tread more of a line between the two, as, though we forget, there were more in the race than just nintendo, sega, and later, sony, back in the day, and nobody had really “settled” the layout. Sega, obviously, went for a layout that is basically opposite to nintendo. I don’t know if it’s purely a region locked thing, or if it’s a game-by-game sort of thing (which seems like a stupid move but whatever), but the button layout in america, for playstation, has tended to conform more to nintendo’s layout, than to sega’s. I dunno why, maybe it has to do something with the popularity of certain consoles to certain regions, or something along those lines.

In any case, O is originally meant to be confirm, the X is meant to be cancel, which I think makes slightly more intuitive sense, pictorially. The O is the positive, the X is the negative. Obviously, over time, this sort of became swapped based on region, and actually, the PS5 is the one in which it’s actually become universal that the O is the cancel button and X is the confirm button, for the japanese. Which is probably fucking infuriating, for them, I’d imagine.

I think I find myself wanting a little bit of a tactile dot or something on the button, so as to more easily intuit which one to press. You could even retain the switch’s ability to flip around the controllers, if you just put all the tactile dots on the outer radius of all the buttons. Like, put a little bump on the top of the top button, put a little bump on the bottom of the bottom button, etc. The only thing I can’t really figure out is how you might refer to that in a game, or refer to that visually in a way that makes sense, other than maybe just building that association over time. But yeah, having them be distinguishable tactily is, I think, a good idea.

Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores, eaten alongside things like bananas, which sucks, because bananas are some plant grown like a thousand miles away and I can go outside and go gather my own huckleberries if I wanted. It should be really easy, I live in an area where they grow.

So, that, but also just more broadly I kind of think that after learning enough about different regional botany, we’ve both crippled basically every ecosystem with a bunch of invasive species, we’ve crushed the human experience into a very narrow square set of experiences which includes the biodiversity that you can see around wherever you are, and we’ve made food worse. Because we’re not using local plants for our food, you see, we’re just using a bunch of generic ingredients that are sort of unnaturally made out to be universal across entire hemispheres, maybe even across the globe. No regional variation outside of specialty goods, only Mcdonald’s.

The thread’s gonna be against this opinion broadly, I think, but there’s not like, it’s not just the huckleberry, you understand, there’s a lot more out there that you don’t know about, both edible and not.

You know it’s kind of funny but at the same time I do think it’s somewhat dystopian to see like, a natural phenomenon, right, a creature, and a creature that we need a name for, named after a brand of toys. Whenever I see this stuff it’s funny but it’s also sad and kind of dystopian, and kind of undignified. It’s like, I dunno. Imagine a kid points to a picture of a spider in a little book and asks their parents what the name of the spider is and instead of being like “that’s a tarantula” they gotta be like “yeah, that’s the hot wheels spider”. It’s a shitpost, it’s funny, it’s existentially hilarious, but it’s also so fucking depressing.

this guy clearly has arms

Fucking awesome, exactly the comment I was looking for in this thread

One of those little steel k-cup filters. I don’t get locked into their dumbass ecosystem and I can still make a good single person cup of shitass costco joe instead of a whole pot or doing a whole pour over maneuver.

that’s so based hoo lee I must’ve missed that one gotta do a rewatch

we’d do it cause it’d be funny even if they weren’t tortured or nothing. can you imagine a little asshole running around the utopia being like “no, no, I’m supposed to own things, where are my stocks, where are my numbers, no!”. probably it’d suck that all their friends are deade though. I’m sure you thaw a couple cause the have rare diseases or certain kinds of DNA though.

I mean I’d probably change my answer depending on the phrasing of the question here.

If you mean like, classical liberalism, which includes both laissez-faire capitalism and interventionism, you’d probably find quite a lot of conservatives at this point who would define their economic ideology (if they even have any) as belonging to that kind of realm of thought, at least with laissez-faire. That shit’s pretty old, we’ve been through like multiple cycles of that, both globally, and domestically in america, and calling for a regression to a period when your specific breed of liberalism was in place is pretty possible. Which would be kind of lumped under conservative thought, despite the window dressing of like, wanting to just kind of, hedge your bets, maintain the status quo, and “conserve” things, and even the branding of “this is the way things really are, so we need to conserve the real reality”, it’s mostly actively regressive horseshit.

So, that’s to say, you could both be a liberal and a conservative at the same time, if you’re going based on the like, actual political definitions of things. I get the sense you’re more trying to use the term “liberal” to mean “progressive”, or probably more accurately “socially progressive”. If you want a reason why I’m making this kind of stupid semantic distinction, it’s because I think it’s important to distinguish liberalism, and neoliberalism, right, which refer to economic freedom, from other more actually socially progressive ideologies. I’ll get to that later. In any case, it’s pretty much part of the intrinsic nature of the ideology that, being okay with gay people, at the least, is going to be more chill than not wanting gay people to exist. The same for trans people, the homeless, racial minorities, neurodivergent people, whatever.

Socially progressive values are also kind of default, I think, in a vacuum (which hardly anything is), whereas nutter conservative ideology is something you have to be more actively radicalized into. If you don’t give a shit about gay people, you’re probably also fine with them just like, going about life and existing. You might also be fine with their oppression, but you’re not actively hindering things, necessarily. You have to be actively radicalized and convinced they’re bad, though, in order to call for them to be like, killed, or barred from marriage, or whatever.

You would have to more actively want gay people to have rights, to care about them more in a positive way, and actively oppose their oppression more, in order to like, actually push for things. It’s a more active position, basically, to be actually socially progressive, or actually progressive. It necessitates caring. I think despite it just being on the surface more nice as in ideology, which helps prevent people from being like, actively hateful, I think it’s probably also sadly the case that a lot of people who would otherwise pretend to be socially progressive don’t actually give two shits about what happens or doesn’t happen, and are just mindlessly occupying what they see as kind of a default position at the time.

If you go back to like the 2000’s, lots of people who are otherwise pretty “progressive” nowadays would’ve been pretty turbo homophobic and transphobic. That’s not really a slight against their character, right, we’re all products of our environment, but they’re just occupying kind of whatever position they think is acceptable to the mainstream.

Put even more simply, they kind of, understand that one side is right and one is wrong, but since they don’t really understand the underlying reasoning behind either side, they’re just jumping onto whatever they get better vibes from. That used to be some more reactionary stuff, because we were kind of in both a more apathetic and callous cultural era where “not caring” was seen as cool and offering a better vibe, and we were seen as being kind of in a “post-history”, “post-racial” world, where if you were offended by racism, that was your fault, because we ended racism, and now the only real racism is you thinking racism is real, man hits bong. Just sort of like, the idea of racism as existing in a purely cultural state, just as a remnant, a cultural artifact relic which we need to move past culturally, but doesn’t affect the “real world” in any way. Those ideologies were kind of appealing to a mostly white mainstream cultural population, who could pretty easily just walk around, and make edgy jokes, and pretend still that everything’s gonna be okay because they haven’t encountered a housing market crash and the consolidation of all of the wealth in a fraction of the population and a once in a century pandemic partially accelerated by huge misinformation campaigns. Basically, because the mainstream cultural consciousness, mostly controlled by white people, was still insulated from the worst of the worst consequences, and because they were still getting treats.

We still had a white suburban middle class, basically. We still do, but we used to, too.

Now though, people see being socially progressive as having a better vibe. Probably this is because we’re on the long end of the economy being shit, and everyone having realized that collectively burning your children’s futures in order to further white supremacy isn’t a sustainable thing long term and just fucks you over, probably it’s also because the internet has made it easier for marginalized voices to occupy more space in the cultural consciousness, whereas before they would’ve been screened by industry gatekeepers. Probably it’s also because conservative nutters collectively lost their fucking minds and kind of went mask off with trump and gamergate shit, partially as a reaction to obama just being like, black, but also those other factors I’ve named.

Probably it’s because the middle class that you used to see in all those 90’s movies, like fight club and office space, got automated away, outsourced, or otherwise traded for a bunch of IT and internet developers, which can mostly take their place as part of the managerial class. We go from cubicles in high rises, to open floor plan offices in mid-rises, to work-share rental spaces in low-rises, to work-from-home setups, and the amount of people allowed treats from their overlords narrows in total population because you simply don’t need as many. The amount of people who are actively fooled by corporate propaganda and bootstraps mentalities also narrows with the proliferation of the internet and with the lack of people who are now “in” on this middle class lifestyle, so your immediate social group is more likely to have people who you know are chilling but are also struggling a lot financially.

yeah I think that’s all I got as far as this one goes.

I dunno I’m just gonna drop a 50 minute video link on this one and bounce, 'cause if I chronically post my dogshit opinions every time one of these boomer ass articles gets posted here and gets upvoted a million times by the masturbatory elder millennial ex-redditor linux userbase, then I’m gonna be here for a fuckin eternity

All of em, really. I don’t see much of a reason why the vast majority of platforms wouldn’t benefit from it, except for maybe an argument around it allowing the creation of larger and larger echo chambers, but that’s probably fine as long as it’s managed to only be to a certain degree.

I mean, those neighbors sound awesome, for one. For two, they also keep rent low, which is pretty good.

But in any case, if you want them to move out, probably I would [redacted]. As a bonus, you won’t have new neighbors for maybe a year, unless they just throw in a manufactured home or a prebuilt or something. On the downside, you might have to deal with construction noises next door.