huge congratulations to drugs for continuing to win the war on drugs

From: The Workers of the World To: Capital

COPE

Slowly rebuilding my gut microbiome and reestablishing something that feels like real control over this body, but if I never see another slice of rye bread it'll be too soon.

“Rye bread” or “seed wall with rye bread mortar”?

Rye bread:

If you shove a slice of that in a plate carrier it legally becomes Level IIIA body armor

You're thinking of hardtack

damn, Danish rye bread is on a whole other level! the rye bread I'm used to looks like this:

and it's really tasty. Usually this is made with a mix of rye and wheat flour, and flavored with caraway seeds instead of those nut pieces that seem to be in @shieldfoss's 'signature bread'.

W@$%R@$%AWERE

Ok we joke a lot around here about how edible or inedible Danish rye bread may or may not be but those are grains of rye because it is rye bread. The ingredients, excluding water, are 90%+ rye.

Your picture appears to be "Wheat Bread (Feat. lil' Rye)"

those are rye grains? did they forget to mill it first?

ITT We Are Pretending To Be Unfamiliar With "Whole grain bread."

sorry man i can’t come hang out I gotta keep working on this OSR setting nobody will ever play

#valid

who is the person on here who said that the wages of posting are posts? I feel like some of my Twitter sphere needs to hear that, but I want to credit the person

So, TESCREAL

Is that what they call themself or is this yet another Republican exercise in putting all their enemies in 1 (one) box and putting a label on the box?

In my best alternate judgement of things yeah?

I have a lot of bad habits but one of the most important skills I've picked up is that when I start doing something in a way that is stupid or dangerous and I think "Man I'm doing this in a way that is stupid or dangerous" I catch myself, stop doing the thing, and do it a better way whenever possible. Sunk cost isn't real just walk out you can leave.

mathermatical notation explained

symbol        meaning

=                   equals

=/=                not equals

<                   left

>                   right

!                    LOUD NUMBER

~                   worm

π                  stonehenge

√                   right answer

x                   wrong answer

⋯                  soon…

∮                   what Exacrly the fuck

∝                   fish

∞                   fish with 2 heads

↯                    lightning

:⇔                 he Scream

∈ e (weird font)

∃ e (wrong fucking wqay round)

∄ yeah cross it out. its not right

∆ scary spike

∇ scary spike (ceiling)

∬ snakes

∭ snakes!?

⨌ SNAAAAAAAAAAKES!

⩨ railroad track

⩊ peter griffin’s chin

≈ approximately equals

≊ hey wait what are you doing

⩰ stop that

⪏ stop!!!!!

≟ confused equals sign

⨚ this snake has given up

⨂ tensor product

@wuggen

Slowly rebuilding my gut microbiome and reestablishing something that feels like real control over this body, but if I never see another slice of rye bread it'll be too soon.

“Rye bread” or “seed wall with rye bread mortar”?

Rye bread:

If you shove a slice of that in a plate carrier it legally becomes Level IIIA body armor

You're thinking of hardtack

damn, Danish rye bread is on a whole other level! the rye bread I'm used to looks like this:

and it's really tasty. Usually this is made with a mix of rye and wheat flour, and flavored with caraway seeds instead of those nut pieces that seem to be in @shieldfoss's 'signature bread'.

W@$%R@$%AWERE

Ok we joke a lot around here about how edible or inedible Danish rye bread may or may not be but those are grains of rye because it is rye bread. The ingredients, excluding water, are 90%+ rye.

Your picture appears to be "Wheat Bread (Feat. lil' Rye)"

I saw a post asking about GNU Terry Pratchett today and it occurred to me how wild it is that this man wrote fantasy, yes, but how he wrote about things that were real. He wrote about an act of love and grief, about keeping a man alive through his name and through what he loves, about rememberance, and how when he eventually passed himself we took that act and put it into the real world because that part of his writing was always real.

GNU, a message passed on, not logged, and turned around at the end. It might pass under your hands and be passed on once or a thousand times and each time is an act of love. He may have gone but his name still matters and it is still spoken because he is still loved. It will not be forgotten while that is still true.

GNU Terry Pratchett

It's a matter of numbers on both sides.

Democrats are in a coalitional interest deadlock - as the party of, simultaneously, police-defunders, the administrative state, grass-for-brains environmentalists, YIMBYs, NIMBYs, mass immigration, and public-sector unions, they're pretty much unable to do anything to benefit society, since any positive from one of their coalition's interest groups (e.g. more housing from YIMBYs) is negated by one of their coalition's other interest groups (e.g. more crime from police-defunders).

The coalition desperately needs reforms, but that's a lot of work and would involve each interest group making concessions, including cutting down on reputation management. Thus the shouting about "white men" from 2014 onwards, both claiming that things that are actually the fault of the Democrats' coalitional deadlock (like excessive housing prices) are really the fault of an ethnic group, and acting as a distraction.

From the Left: With transgenderism, Democrats are willing to let a tiny minority group's activist vanguard get way out beyond what can be easily defended and let them soak up all the negativity, because it will take 10 years for that cycle to complete.

If Democrats collectively rein in the activists, then they'd have to actually fix their shit.

From the Right: Because transgender people are a tiny minority with high emotional salience to righties, and the activists are out beyond the defensible perimeter, it's much easier to attack the identity-based organizing of the left at the point of transgenderism, rather than going after their racial-organizing power, which is much better-defended, and where an attack that's not careful enough could blow up the legitimacy of the state.

The US founding mythology is liberal and most US right-wingers are liberal conservatives. They do not want to have a grand historical reckoning. (There wouldn't be much point to one right now anyway.)

So both groups are letting the tiny 'queer' minority soak up the public spotlight in order to avoid facing uncomfortable truths and doing actual work.

Ironically a DeSantis presidency might be the only thing that can break the Democrats' coalitional interest deadlock, by breaking their identity-organizing power, thereby forcing them to actually have the tough intracoalitional fight they need to have but have been avoiding, and drag them kicking and screaming into actually governing.

how?

Cut off all federal funding for teaching that the majority are evil (see Trump's last-minute executive order), then update civil rights law to clarify that it very much does also apply to the majority, put in Republican judges, collect a few big settlements, then sit back and watch most of the professional class and corporations suddenly change their tune as the balance of liability changes.

How do they coordinate these extremely galaxy-brained 4D chess strategies, in your model? How do they even decide upon them - like, is there a smoke-filled room somewhere, where the Deep Democratic Party comes together to decide who is going to be reined in and who will be given enough rope to lynch themselves? Or, this being the twenty-first century, possibly a Discord server?

Do you remember the #StopAsianHate campaign and groups of asian Americans marching against "White Supremacy" after the general rise in crime after the 2020 national riots?

How many people do you think were legitimately fooled into believing that attacks on Asians were actually due to "white supremacy," given that the org measuring "anti-Asian hate incidents" had to juice the stats with Donald Trump saying things like "China virus"?

Crime is not distributed equally by demographic. Because of this, "progressives" say that it's "racist" to be against crime. But naturally, very few people actually want to be victims of crime.

So how do you resolve this?

You can't march against "crime," but you can have a 10,000 (to make a up a number) asian American march against "white supremacy," and because everyone knows that the "white supremacy" explanation is a lie, what you are actually doing is establishing that you have 10,000 or more people. If the government doesn't correct things, they might not stick to the official story next time.

You can coordinate while lying due to the shared context combined with the shared interests.

Is a smoke-filled backroom necessary for any of this?

It's the same deal with people getting upset with Chapelle's comedy special a while back - it's a negotiation of the social consensus about the relative position of groups within the 'progressive stack' and thereby what benefits they are to receive.

Not every individual has the same position or influence within this system, of course. Some people are leaders and others are just followers. (Among the followers, some people experience these changes as moral revelations; others seem to forget that they ever believed otherwise in the past.)

People are also responding to local incentives. Doing work or fighting other coalition members is a pain, shouting one's own personal identitarian grievances is fun for some people, and kicking the can down the road is kinda the default, low-effort position.

As the de facto leader of the party, the President actually could alter the situation both through choice of words and through policy, including what kind of talk gets materially rewarded, but either is too old and withered to do so, or has chosen not to.

What would you say that the "material cause" of the identitarian focus from 2014-onwards was that shifted the party away from their much more clear-headed 2010 beliefs?

I would say it was caused by there being nobody in charge and nobody to coordinate with and nobody listening to or sending the sort of backchannel messages you're proposing, and thus the loudest yellers get their slogans heard. You are way overestimating the intelligence and sophistication of the average human, even the average politically active human. We don't do subtextual messaging in this manner outside of fiction. The identitarians are the loudest hooters in the Democratic party so the incentive gradient is to visibly signal your allegiance to them, and from there everything follows.

Though to argue against myself for a moment, this model is rather lacking in any explanation of what changed around 2012 or so. How did volume become the decisive factor (or how did the identitarians grab the biggest megaphone), or alternatively, how did whatever was the decisive factor previously, cease to function? Volume seems like a kind of default - if you don't have anything else going on, you get loudness contests. So what was happening before? Was there a smoke-filled room that came under new management and hung up 'No Smoking' signs?

Brazen's theory is that volume technology became better such that volume* now dominates everything else and will forever.

*not the word he uses, this isn't exactly his theory word by word

A quarter of the way into Anathem and I've decided it's better read as fantasy than science fiction.

In a fantasy story, it's quite common for the author to invent a world inhabited by humans that is entirely fictional. You can just posit a world for Earthsea or A Song of Ice and Fire or The Wheel of Time and put humans in it, and if someone asks how a species native to Eastern Africa got to this world that has nothing in common with Earth and Earth's history, they're missing the point. Humans aren't there because it's scientifically plausible that they would appear, but because it's narratively interesting, and that's all the justification you need.

Science fiction, on the other hand, almost never does this. Unless you're George Lucas, if you put humans on a planet, then the planet has to be the Earth that we know, or far future Earth, or remote past Earth, or alternate history Earth, or a place that was colonized form Earth, or in some other way connected to the real history of Earth, however remote. Okay, sure, if you go back to the forties you can have Earthlings traveling to distant planets and meeting aliens who just happen to look and act exactly like humans, but nowadays nobody does this. If you put humans on your planet, you somehow have to connect their history to the real history of Earth.

But then there's Anathem, seemingly a science fiction novel. It's got humans in it, clearly, so -- is it set on Earth? At first it seems like it might be future Earth thousands of years after some great cataclysm. The book's many neologisms seem like they might be descended from English, and some of the social institutions seem like they might come from real Earth institutions. But you read a little farther, and no. The history just isn't compatible. Nor is it a colony of Earth that lost contact with the mother world. The characters in the book are human, they're indigenous to the planet in the story, and that planet isn't Earth, and that just doesn't seem compatible with how science fiction is written these days.

So a quarter of the way into Anathem, I've decided it's better to approach it as a fantasy, where asking how the humans got there is just a wrong question. It's a very long book, there's a lot of ground yet to cover, and Stephenson is a clever guy, so maybe later he drops some clues that explains the situation in a more science fictiony way. But for now I'm just going to think of this book's world as a fantasy setting, and go along with the ride.

Finished it, and it turns out I was right. Despite a veneer of science fiction tropes, underneath that it's totally a fantasy story. It's got wizards and wuxia-style monks and everything.

And yeah, he does put in a supposed explanation for why these very human-like characters are found on this planet that is very much not Earth, but it was nonsense and clearly not meant to be taken seriously. It's just bafflegab that one of the wizards spouts as a means of casting a mind control spell.

The real tip-off is that he sets up this big conflict between Platonism and nominalism, with the Platonists as the good guys. And obviously that's fake. Clearly a fantasy.

"it's me" is a sentence where almost everyone is comfortable referring to themselves with it/its pronouns.

No? They are referring to the situation as 'it'. They are referring to themselves as 'me'.

Granddaughter sitting on grandpa's knees, looking at photos:

"Who's that?"

"it's me!"

...

No "it" definitely refers to the grandpa.

this place sucks im gonna drink six beers and jack off