Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The movements of people since time immemorial does not adhere to the arbitrary political lines we’ve drawn between nations today. Both France and England have seen large scale immigration by the Romans, various old Germanic people, then the Vikings. All these people have killed and fucked each other. Attributing DNA to an area is partially a statistical likelihood, so there’s a margin for error. Except in geographically and/or historically isolated areas, we’re all more blended than anything else. That makes the race theory of the late 19th century seem so utterly ludicrous today but we can’t quite completely get it out of our heads either.



  • There is a tendency to walk on the left in Japan as well. I wouldn’t call it a rule but a vibe. For a society that is rigidly built on rules and conventions, they are remarkably flexible when it comes to tolerating people who swim against the stream. Not wanting to cause a fuss overrides a New Yorker outburst of the “Hey, I’m walking here!” variety. IMO they also insist less on the right of way or other car traffic rules when behind the wheel.






  • As a general vibe in life, I try not to punch down. Antivax kids through no fault of their own are at a disadvantage in life (and make life for immunocompromised folks harder). Wondering if they’d be okay with a cootie shot as a question seems snarky and punching down to me.

    You could not answer this question categorically anyway. It would depend on the age, how much autonomy they already have over their body, and to how much RFK junioring they’ve been subjected. So the answer is care and individual attention for each kid, not a generalization.

    I don’t know where you get the idea I suggested we hunt them down from. But I think you’ve correctly picked up on my critical opinion on this question.




  • How does confidence factor into this? I’ve been confident in stuff before and it turned out that confidence was misplaced. Pride cometh before the fall shit. Confidence alone risks cockiness. Cockiness may lead to somebody testing your Golden Shield. Didn’t work. You now don’t have a country any more.

    If the Golden Shield really worked it’s a question of capacity. If you had enough juice in it to repel all nuclear weapons you could throw at this country in a worst-case scenario, you’d have a powerful defense against the most powerful weapon on Earth that’s ready to deploy this minute. It may not save you from conventional attacks. It may not shield you from chemical or biological weapons so gruesome they aren’t currently shelf-ready. But development of those would suddenly become a viable prospect. I fear it just turns the spiral of development of more destructive weaponry one more rotation. Extrapolating from the last 6000 years of history, we’ve gone from sticks and stones to vaporizing people into thin mist by harnessing the power of the atom. We’re already in the narrow bit of the spiral. Paradoxically, developing a Golden Shield against nuclear attacks may lead to wiping our species out for good.





  • I think this USSR quote is a good answer:

    We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.

    (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

    In any authoritarian system where indoctrination starts young you’ll probably have a fifth of the population that’s high on the coolaid or never questioned anything due to ideology or intelligence (or both). The rest know they’re lying, etc. And keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to go to Siberia or El Salvador.