WoodScientist @ WoodScientist @sh.itjust.works

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6 mo. ago

And Ghandi was a fucking idiot.

It is an objectively good thing for the world when a violent bigot gets their head caved in.

Newsom doesn't have the balls. This is all just posturing.

There is no mechanism for California to simply "cut off" funds from California citizens to the federal government. The IRS collects tax money directly. How exactly are you going to "cut off" these flows?

Really, the only way to do it would be:

1. Newsom announces that Californians don't need to pay federal income taxes, and that the state of California will directly protect its citizens from the federal government.
2. Encourage and teach California citizens how to set their federal tax withholding to zero and encourage California businesses to do the same.
3. Order California troops and law enforcement to throw all federal law enforcement out of the state at gunpoint.

That's what this would actually take. The feds have way more guns than any citizen can resist. The only actual way for California to stop the feds from taxing their citizen would be to directly protect the citizens of California from tax prosecution by the IRS. And that would require physically expelling federal law enforcement agents from the state. And that would likely require shooting a fair number of them.

There's no way to do this without starting a civil war. And something tells me a moderate like Newsom can't even process the idea of having the state actually secede from the union. Is a Republican-lite like Newsom going to order California law enforcement to kill IRS and ICE agents? In what universe do you see that happening?

This is all just rhetorical masturbation.

Fuck it. Ask them. Just pick up the phone and call them right now to ask.

Pedantry is the last refuge of the ignorant.

Eh, it's the least populace US state. Plus, who doesn't like mountains?

Israel is an existential threat to its neighbors. The hate isn't irrational. It's perfectly reasonable.

On the other hand, Israel is an existential threat to every nation around it. If there was an aggressive theocratic ethnostate expansionist threatening your border, wouldn't you hate them?

Israel doesn't just want Palestine. They want the West Bank, Gaza, and all or large chunks of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Expelling the Gazans from Gaza won't solve this. The Israelis want to do the following:

1. Expel the Gazans just over the border into shanty towns in neighboring countries.
2. Some displaced people in those areas will inevitably sneak back over the border to carry out revenge attacks against the people that stole their homes.
3. When (2) happens, use that as a justification to invade neighboring countries and seize additional land.

Israel has been slowly expanding its borders this way for decades. They seize an area of land, declare it a military buffer zone, but then let their civilians move into the buffer zone. They use their own population as human shields, putting them in danger of attacks by displaced Arabs. Then when this happens, they use this as an excuse to expand their borders further.

If you had a psychopathic country for a neighbor, that intended to slowly gobble up your own nation bit by bit, wouldn't you want them all dead?

It ignores all the previous wars, all the tensions during the British mandate, the tensions during the Ottoman Empire, how the modern states came to be, how they developed their identities, the involvement of other countries in the region, the involvement of distant foreign powers, the insane amount of ethnic cleansing carried out not just in both of these states but also in the wider region as a consequence of that events that took place in this region.

And yet, for all your snowjob bullshit, there is one people in chains and another people putting them in chains. I don't give a shit what the history is. No one has the right to do that to someone else. The Nazis had a long list of historical grievances against their Jewish population. You would have been right there on the side of the Nazis, saying that while you don't support them necessarily, you fully understand what Hitler is trying to accomplish.

a trans state would be dope.

Can we just kick everyone out of Wyoming and make Wyoming the trans state?

Nah this is like if you are the parent of an adult child. They have a rough time. They get burned by a series of landlords who screw them over, take advantage of them, and seriously harm their well being. For whatever reason, they decide that instead of renting, their best option is to go squat in their childhood home. It was sold years ago and currently occupied, but they decided they're just going to force their way in at gunpoint, take over part of the house, and slowly take over more and more of it. You think this is a great idea, and you gladly provide them with weapons and ammo so they can occupy their childhood home.

It's still there!

Are we just turning into the bug aliens from Rick and Morty?

I went without shampoo for two months because of this. Not my preferred means of hair care. I thought I was buying a twopack of shampoo off of Amazon. I actually bought a combined shampoo+conditioner package. The brand labeling was so prominent I didn't even notice. So instead of applying shampoo+conditioner, I was doing conditioner+a different conditioner. And it wasn't soo bad that it was immediately obvious. But yeah, I've fallen victim to this.

Truthfully it's a design issue. If people keep coming up to a door and pulling on it, it's because the design of the door is instructing them to do so. Design imparts information. A door in a home can have simple knobs - anyone living there can just learn which doors to push/pull. A door in a public space instead needs to be designed to tell people how to operate it, even without any labeling.

A door is a simple device. It shouldn't require reading labels or a manual. It's operation should be abundantly obvious. After all, even those who don't speak the language or are illiterate need to be able to operate doors. A door that needs instructions is one that is poorly designed.

I don't myself mind sharing the bathroom with a <N-word.> I am not some Klan member! But when my kids are involved, I have to draw a line. Kids aren't old enough to understand black people and their culture. Black folks need to use the bathroom at home or use a black-only bathroom. I'll happily share a bathroom with a black man, but my wife or kids shouldn't have to. They're just not equipped to handle the complexities of the situation. Don't call me a racist, I just have concerns for the safety of children.

Human garbage never changes.

We also need people to start dressing up as ICE and disappearing prominent conservatives.

Mostly this is just an issue with the nature of science. There's fundamentally just a lot we don't know about what these creatures looked like. Thankfully, in the last 20-30 years, we've learned a lot more. We've become a lot better at finding evidence of feathers and other surface details. We may have gotten better at estimating the musculature? I'm not really sure what the current state of knowledge is here.

But the key thing to consider is that science, as a project, is incredibly conservative. Science is all about precisely defining your claims and clearly justifying them, ideally via quantitative analysis. The reason old renderings of dinosaurs look like this is that these represent the threshold of the known. They are scientific renders, containing only the details that we can be reasonably certain actually existed on these animals. You can of course go further and fill in missing details with imagination and reasonable speculation, but this will always be more an exercise in art than science, a speculative exercise. Yes, dinosaurs likely didn't have this "shrink wrapped" appearance. But what their real appearance was is a guessing game. Yes, it's plausible spinosaurus had big back muscles rather than a fan, but there are likely also other speculative models people could propose. Maybe the spine isn't a fan, but the base of some giant peacock-type tail? Maybe it wasn't a fan, but a series of spikes. Maybe it wasn't one vertical fan, but two horizontal sheets? Who knows?

Science is an inherently conservative exercise. We tend to forget this. Political conservatives hate science because they hate when reality disagrees with their dogma. But while political conservatives call science woke or liberal, the truth is, institutionally, science is conservative. Ideas move slowly. Major paradigm shifts only occur when overwhelming evidence forces them to. Ideas often take decades to slowly percolate through academia, sometimes only changing because the old generation retires or dies of old age.

Scientists as such are, generally, biased against making unfounded claims and speculation. A lot of scientific training focuses on precisely defining your claims, including the precise limits of those claims. And this bleeds over into scientific renderings. From a scientific perspective, it is often better to make a rendering that you know is almost certainly incorrect, rather than make a likely more correct rendering that you cannot support with evidence.

By setting them in fire, cyber trucks are recycled. They return to the Earth from whence they came!