reverendsteveii @ reverendsteveii @beehaw.org

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126

Joined

2 yr. ago

like every GOP accusation, saying that we wanted to murder babies turned out to be a confession

when I tried the impossible whopper I got a regular one too and couldn't tell the difference. it really is legit.

part of my larval stage as a software nerd just went to wherever it is we all go. thanks for helping me find the path, it's been rewarding.

subadubdub!

Heartbreaking: Worst Person You Know Makes Really Good Point

ok, but...

If you're of the forest you know that quiet means that Something Is Fucking Wrong

I'm an occult nerd and my reddit chat was moderately active with discussions about that. It wasn't extremely popular, and it never turned into a persistent thing with more than two people, but it seemed like reddit chat was a good way to break the discussion out into a 1 on 1 where appropriate.

Time played: 400 hours. Completion percentage: 15%

extremely intrinsically motivated. give me a world with stuff in it, not goals

I wonder how many hours our representatives spend working

ftfy. they have the cushiest jobs in the world, and even then a lot of representatives can't be bothered to show up for votes

I was beaten at school in the 80s and I know I can't speak for everyone who suffered from abuse but for a lot of us, in my experience a plurality if not an outright majority of us, the jokes are the only way we can take any power back. If we cry, they win.

Thank you for endeavoring to create a safe space for us, though. Doubly so for doing it through dialog rather than force. Beehaw is a pretty special place because, so far at least, we can assume everyone is trying to be decent and willing to talk about and modify behavior to that end where appropriate. I'm grateful to y'all every time I pop on here.

the same products. in an interesting inversion of the already well-documented pink tax, my father in law walks around with a packet of disposable wet wipes called "dude wipes" in his pocket. they're the exact same as the baby wipes that my partner uses, but they're in a black package with 'manly' lettering on it and they cost twice as much. he had never shown interest in this product, which has been available his entire life, before it validated his gender. after it validated his gender, he valued it at twice what the non-validating version sells for.

you've explained why borders exist at all, but their current configuration is still arbitrary and mutable and that's part of the point. we're watching right now in Ukraine proof that, with sufficient blood and treasure, anyone is capable of looking at the current configuration of borders and saying "nope!". We watched it happen in 2016 too, when Russia bit off Donetsk and most of the world acted like the new borders were actually the correct borders for all of history and that the theft by violence of huge chunks of land was us just helping transition to the natural state of things. When this war ends and the dust settles between Ukraine and Russia we will treat those borders as though they are ordained by god, too, even though we just watched them change.

I mean, in the US there's an entire movement of people whose sole driving ideology is objecting to everything that a different group of people is for in order to "own" them

the comments on this post right here is highlighting what I love about this community, and why I'm perfectly okay not going back to reddit. everyone is talking about risk as a percentage, the inherent risk of doing anything (or nothing), the way that dosage determines toxicity, and all sorts of other sane and reasonable things to say in the face of something like this. No calls to ban aspartame or jail the manufacturers, no one is trying to say that artificial sweeteners are a joint UN-alien collaborative effort to establish mind control, no tribalism, no name calling, no vague fear-mongering about "chemicals" in the generic case, just reasonable discussion acknowledging that we live in a world where we make constant risk-reward decisions and that everyone has to die of something eventually.

as I've grown older, one of the things I've realized is that the primary driving force behind a lot of people's beliefs is, as pratchett put it, 'the overwhelming desire that tomorrow should be pretty much like yesterday was'. It takes a lot, like a lot Lot LOT, to get people to be willing to risk the unknown. people have this weird ability to look back at all of history, see how much things have grown and changed, and think to themselves "thank god that I live here and now, where things operate in the only possible correct way that was ordained by god. the past is nothing but barbarians dying of infections and the future is a dystopia that no one could possibly want or understand, but the way I grew up with is comfortable and makes sense. it's the natural order." this isn't a terribly unique thought, but the ability to think it without realizing that every generation that came before you also believed that very same thing with as much conviction as you did is....let's say it's uniquely human.

Have you seen The Good Place? There is a part of this where they're investigating the "points" system that is used to determine who does and doesn't get into the eponymous Good Place. It's a dead simple system: you do a good thing and you get some points, you do a bad thing and you lose some points, the more gooder or more badder the more points get added onto or subtracted from your total, and anyone over a certain threshold gets into the Good Place. It makes perfect sense, and it's exactly the kind of system I think most people would design if they were the ones given the task. I know it was my first idea when I considered the problem, and it seems like that system worked well enough when it was first rolled out. On investigation, the characters find out that ::: spoiler spoiler no one has gotten into the good place for centuries because the nature of trying to survive in a system as complex and interdependent as the one humans live in means that everyone has to either choose to simply go without what they need to live or participate in some form of evil. There's even a character who understood the nature of the good place, and led every second of his life abiding by the principles that he know would allow him to gain entry. He dropped off the grid, became self-sufficient, and is self-sacrificing to the point of being personally miserable. He does everything he can to maximize the good he puts into the world, and he accumulated about half the points he would have needed under that system to get into the good place. :::

This is something that comes up in leftist circles from time to time as well, and a place where I break from doctrine. There's a common phrase that popped up as a reaction to what you said above, "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism". Everything involves exploitation of the environment, or of labor, or generating waste and other externalities that you're just not gonna deal with. You're gonna have to do something unethical in order to create more value than you invest in something. But, on the other hand, we need to live here. We don't have the luxury of designing a system from scratch with ethics at the forefront, our kids are hungry today. So you do your best, you keep your consumption to a comfortable minimum, you use the paper straws when you can, you try to shape policy toward decency with what little power you have and you don't hold yourself responsible for what's out of your hands. There are no ethical consumables, but their can be ethical people.

if they were concerned about popularity it would make sense to sponsor popular bills. and let's be honest, most anti-abortion advocates are in favor of abortion when they want one.

6 weeks is effectively a ban. That’s not even enough time to know you’re pregnant.

I know that's their intent, but I don't understand why they aren't just going for an all-out ban. That would really rile up their rabid idiot supporters, and their strategy is clearly to motivate the base rather than to reach across the aisle. Why not go whole hog? They just got clearance from SCotUS to do it.

Vote for me, ignore the fact that I'm funneling the whole budget to my campaign contributors and I'll let you hurt that guy that I convinced you to be afraid of