Avast ye swabs: 5e.tools/

Something I’ve had to accept over the course of my life is that the vast majority of humans will passively accept anything as long as they feel like there’s something they can do to not be killed. Only when it feels out of control whether they might be killed will the majority of people feel the need to act and no sooner. There has never been any changing this. Fortunately the vast majority of people are not needed to affect positive change. People who care need to set the tone and followers will follow as they do. Your efforts would be better served among people actively resisting or building structures that benefit people.

This pen was decades ahead of its time. Made as cheaply as possible, just functional enough, disposable, and replaceable is the new standard for US commodities.

Next Week:

In an Apparent Homage to American Patriot Charles Manson, Elon Musk Tattoos Awkward Good Luck Symbol on his Forehead.

Week After:

Former Anglican Priest Imitates Elon Musk’s Awkward Forehead Tattoo to Support the Pro-Life Movement

Dynasty Warriors series. Some criticism is correct, in that they really did release the same game several times in a row with minor adjustments. The gameplay is much more strategic than it was given credit for, though. It’s true your warrior basically feels like a lawnmower demolishing hundreds to thousands of hapless footsoldiers at a time, but the trick is that you are the army’s only lawnmower. Almost everything your allies try will fail catastrophically unless you help them. You really have to time your presence on certain parts of the fight to be where you’re needed. It feels very heroic. Also, the cutscenes are without exception hilarious and drew me to the source material Romance of the Three Kingdoms which has greatly enriched my life.

I’ve been thinking about this article since you posted it. I think there’s one more category that’s necessary to include here. Along with the helpless, the bandit, the intelligent, and the stupid, we should also include the plutocrats. Unlike most people, plutocrats are privileged in such a way that they are never forced to develop past that stage most of us do in early childhood when we realized we are not personally entitled to own everything.

The plutocrats are similar to the stupid in that there is much they don’t know and don’t care to know. Unlike the stupid, they are immune from the short-term consequences of their stupidity. The consequences of the collection of power and wealth in very few hands don’t tend to come up for generations, so most plutocrats never have to consider the consequences of their behavior. In the short term, anything that increases their wealth is the only thing they ever have to consider.

When the bandit decides to present to the plutocrats that most of the workforce can be replaced by ChatGPT 4.0, it really doesn’t matter to them whether that’s actually true or not. The nature of finance means that if the people with the money believe that it’s true and put the weight of their valuation behind it, the value of their all their assets increases. They made sure over the course of decades that our economy is not based on production or productivity but financial value as perceived by completely ignorant and selfish plutocrats. They were able to invest in such a way in our government as to capture it from Buckley V Valeo in the 70’s and culminating in de jure oligarchy in 2010 with the Citizen’s United decision. Their investments, not the invisible hand, have guided the private and public US economy for decades.

Plutocrats are for anything that is against socialism. Anything at all. They are not affected by economics, as they are advantaged either way it goes. Either their current assets are increasing in value or an economic downturn causes assets to be readily available for cheap for anyone who wasn’t wiped out by the effects of the economy. Fascism means nothing to them because they are above the limits of nationality. They can live whatever lifestyle they wish anywhere in the world. Literally anything that is against social, political, and economic equity is in their fiduciary interests. This is stupid because they can’t solve their deep emotional problems from their inhuman upbringing through the accumulation of wealth however hard they try. They are so clearly sick and it’s truly stupid to let such sick people be in charge of so much.

This being an open-source application made me wonder about this exactly. Thanks for running it and publishing your results. This is fascinating.

For a little context, the “Tiktok Ban” is currently in full effect. The bill didn’t ban titktok. It banned US businesses from hosting the application unless it was sold. The app is off all the playstores as the law required. This article is about whether Trump might again allow US businesses to host the application under different circumstances than the law mandates.

Donald Trump made himself the first female president on day 1 by a sex-redefining executive order. He did the thing his supporters imagine Democrats would do.

We’ll be a few decades into the new dark ages and a few centuries away from restoring any kind of democracy anywhere on earth. For reasons beyond my understanding, the vast majority of people will be perfectly happy with whatever happens so it’s not worth worrying about.

ADHD. My mind is racing at all times for my entire life no matter what. Probably every person with ADHD ends up thinking more than a few things which are completely original because the sheer volume of involuntary thoughts which are so cognitively specific to that person and nonsense to everyone else.

Yes, it is a Tiktok meme. A few may actually remain on Xiaohongshu but probably most will migrate to whatever logical replacement pops up.

It is a protest. Some Americans may ultimately remain on “Little Red Book” but the main purpose of making it the #1 app in the US was to spite the government. It’s a much more restrictive app than Tiktok, but people are enjoying talking to foreign nationals both ways.

Because of the nature of the algorithm, it absolutely is this for plenty of people. It’s also not the case for plenty of people. I doubt there are many right-wingers going on to join a Chinese app called “Little Red Book” which has rules that require the promotion of Chinese socialism. It’s the most popular app in the US now because of this ban.

“Contrary to popular belief…”

I had a really good dialogue about this a while ago. Here’s a transcription, if you’re interested in a detailed answer to this:

Factory farming is terrible. I completely respect anyone who is vegan because they oppose the abuse or exploitation of animals.

The issue with stuff like this is that it indicates some equivalency of human women and animals. I remember when PETA did a “holocaust on your plate” campaign which was fairly critisized for indicating that the murder of millions of men, women, and children was the same as eating meat.

I don’t think the meat industry is ok and I agree that what it now considered normal in that industry is morally wrong. I also think it’s a separate issue from human social trends. Minorities being compared to animals is never a good thing.

Two points on that.

1. There were multiple holocaust survivors that went vegan, citing the similarities between the their experiences and that of animal agriculture;

2. This is because what the holocaust was, in essence, was treating people like animals. Jewish people were loaded onto cattle cars on trains, sent to what were effectively slaughterhouses, and gassed in chambers - where I live (UK) almost all pigs are killed in gas chambers.

You can make the argument that animals deserve no moral consideration if you want, but a lot of the worst things that humans have ever done to other humans is what humans do to animals all the time.

It isn’t the act of eating meat that is compared by animals rights groups to the holocaust, its all the stuff that came before it. Because it was essentially the same process.

I actually stated multiple times that I do believe animals deserve moral consideration. Once again, I think the norms of the meat industry are clearly immoral. Where we disagree I think is that I believe human considerations are fundamentally different from considerations of other animals, and putting people on the same level as animals in argumentation is more harmful than productive for a variety of factors.

I’m not saying that humans should have the same considerations as non-human animals, I’m saying that the holocaus analogy isn’t innacurate, as the same acts were/are committed. Do you disagree?

As far as the animals are concerned, what they go through is the holocaust (obviously they aren’t sapient, but you get my point).

Before saying anything else, I want to be clear that I would like to see a future free of animal meat from the practice of slaughter. I strongly disagree that these two things are comparable in any way other than they both involve the act of killing at high rates.

I’m not going to argue that our ancestral nature is morally correct, because in many ways we understand that many our instinctive impulses and wants are morally wrong. This being the case, the most available source of sufficient protein necessary to power our brains and bodies has come from meat, and this has been the case until very recently with advancement in our understanding of nutrition. Humans and our ancestors have killed other animals to eat them since before we even assumed our present taxonomy. There is an almost universal instinctual and cultural reason that people kill animals to eat them. I think we agree that it would be best to progress past this draconian practice, but there is no malice or de-humanizing campaign of extermination here whatsoever.

Compare this to the Holocaust. There is no way whatsoever that it could ever possibly be justified in any way. It was the result of reactionary politics coming into power and leading an entire society through the use of propaganda and terror to despise a group of sapient people for reasons that were entirely and demonstrably untrue. Sapience is a major factor. Although livestock can definitely understand when they’re being abused, they can’t comprehend the scope of what is happening beyond their immediate experience. The people in the camps lived every day with a full understanding that they were being tortured and murdered en masse as a political scapegoat at best and pure sadism at worst. They suffered their abuse and suffered the understanding of why it was happening and how little they could do about it. They weren’t being harvested, they were being murdered in a premeditated fashion in massive numbers exclusively for reasons of prejudice and intentional malice. The motives and suffering caused from this evil I think are significantly greater.

Complicating it further, there is a social imperative to de-humanize a person before they can be abused, exploited, or murdered. There is a common understanding that some creatures exist to be beasts of burden, some are dangerous predators to repelled, and some are invasive pests to be exterminated. There are life-forms such as actual cockroaches in which this understanding is completely justified. De-humanizing is taking a person who has agency and cognition and framing them as if they are an unthinking creature to be managed in some way for the “good” of the perpetrator.

Like I said above, the only similarity between these two evils is superficial. I believe they are fundamentally different.

I have to admit I had very low hopes for Lower Decks after that first teaser featuring a drunk Mariner being reckless with a bat’leth. It looked like it was going to be just another “adult cartoon” cash-in like the dozens on Netflix. Very happy that my initial impression was totally wrong.

Lower Decks was an effective Star Trek show as well as an effective comedy. While I also wouldn’t trust this idea with just anyone, as long as there are people working on it who understand why Star Trek is important and how the themes are more important than being dismissive, I welcome another comfy optimistic comedy about a better world.

Classic empire strategy. Go to places where there are no possible consequences for inflicting any kind of terror onto innocent people, record what is the most effective to keep people in line there, import those strategies back home to keep the working class in line.

Great Depression Core

Superman rules. He’s all the way relevant again. He was introduced in an era when people understood very well the oppressive nature of their establishment, so the idea that a Superman could stand up to the bullies and save honest people from being victimized by their greed and selfishness made him very popular very quickly. Lex Luthor is essentially an abstraction of all the evils of capitalism although he’s typically framed as a corruptive influence rather than a product of his environment. Despite this framing, these days the audience might interpret the conflict between Lex and Superman a little differently than they would have twenty years ago. Timely reintroduction of a beloved character to mainstream audiences.