uriel238

uriel238, 11 days ago

“Haven’t you heard it’s a battle of words?”
The poster bearer cried
“Listen, son”, said the man with the gun
“There’s room for you inside”

…With, without
And who’ll deny
It’s what the fighting’s all about

– Old Pink, c/o The Funny Farm

uriel238, 11 days ago

If you do engage (by which I mean make a crabby phone call or send an angry letter to your elected representatives) statistically you won’t have any effect, as has been charted.

Our officials listen to money. Make the maximum campaign contribution, and they’ll consider your voice. Check out Larry Lesig’s TED talks if you want a deep dive on this.

uriel238, 11 days ago

Of course the accretion disc is like the most powerful chainsaw in the universe, so between that and spaghettification by tidal forces there won’t be much left to actually do observing.

uriel238, 11 days ago

Arden Arcade, Sacramento, California

I miss the Bay Area, but was pushed out via gentrification.

uriel238, 11 days ago

In the meantime, our far-right US Supreme Court is on the verge of allowing cities to criminalize homelessness.

uriel238, 12 days ago

This feels like trying to determine FTL travel is possible by looking for warp signatures. We don’t yet know megastructures are feasable.

uriel238, 11 days ago

True! Long-term travel within the heliosphere is still thwarted due to the radiation of CMEs which require 350cm of concrete for protection. (Our manned trips to the moon were timed during solar minimum, and still had some worrying moments). While a moon base would could be accomplished by putting it underground (or having shelters underground at minimum) it still keeps us from getting to Mars.

Then there’s the matter of creating a self-sustained ecology. All of our efforts so far have either died off or required infusions of elements to perpetrate. Also only a matter of time before we work out a configurable system.

But both of these are something like nuclear fusion, in that we know it can actually be done because we have natural examples (even if self-sustaining nuclear fusion only exists in the core of a star, we’re pretty sure it happens IRL). We don’t have signs of FTL or megastructures that don’t collapse into a giant ball of mass. To qualify for a megastructure, we’d simply have to create something that is millions of meters. Our current freestanding structures measure in the hundreds of meters, and we have at most a few kilostructures like the LHC (27KM) which depends a lot on its fixture to the earth.

So yeah, it’s a matter of developing the technology, but I suspect there are a lot fewer decades and great filters between when we figure out surviving CMEs in space versus building megastructures in space that don’t collapse.

uriel238, 12 days ago

It is my favorite RTS hands down.

It’s a reminder of how the mail anthrax attacks were so soon after the 9/11 attacks, we thought they were related.

uriel238, 12 days ago

I’d say you’re not south enough.

uriel238, 12 days ago

That doesn’t help.

I’m totally sick in the head and it’s still dystopian.

uriel238, 12 days ago

In 1935, with Germany’s birth rates dropping, Hitler’s right-hand man Heinrich Himmler designed a breeding program to promote an ‘Aryan future’. One element of the scheme involved members of the SS ‘mating’ with suitable German women. They also kidnapped blue-eyed, blonde-haired children to populate the Nazi ‘Third Reich’.

Zoomers aren’t having sex and are disinterested in parenting. Young Millennials are avoiding having kids, even if it means having no romantic life.

Just sayin’

uriel238, 12 days ago

The Log party and the Heron party.

Two-party systems were a problem even in ancient Greece.

uriel238, 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

Babbage as in the steam-driven mechanical game engine, version 2?

I remember the controllers being kinda clunky.

uriel238, 13 days ago

My last EA title was Red Alert III which they swaped for a version that required origin. I miss Westwood.

I do hope someone works out how to mod this to replace all ads with KPop.

uriel238, 13 days ago

It’s social media and how social media can be a useful utility without preying on its user base by selling info or advertising shoddy products or whatever.

The term social media is descriptive of an interactive web client like a chat forum. It’s not necessarily bad the way propaganda is not necessarily false or malicious.

uriel238, 13 days ago

I know you can get ID deets here, but I don’t know any service that turns it into a facsimile of a state ID card.

uriel238, 13 days ago

It works better if it’s glass (not acrylic) and properly lubed.

uriel238, 14 days ago

For most of the existence of human species (according to the scholarly consensus of anthropologists) we existed in bands of adults who would intermingle freely. Adolescent men would raid nearby tribes and kidnap their young women, which is the means by which genes were exchanged between tribes.

All the monogamy and licensing happened after agriculture and the great leap forward once tribes became big enough that infectious diseases were no longer contained through pure isolation. We see the misogynistic trends rise in late Hellenic periods and then Christianity cranked it up to eleven, so now we imagine even our migrant hunter-gatherer ancestors paired off.

As a note, during the middle ages, it was super important among aristocracy to assure ladies-in-waiting were virginal before they were wed, and then used purely as heir machines, but the serf class routinely banged like bunnies in springtime. And while frowned upon by the more piety-minded clergy, it was generally ignored because a) Child mortality was something awful and every kid that ever reached majority was to be celebrated, and b) The labor shortage was extreme everywhere. There was always way too much stuff to be done, and so every pair of hands was welcome, even when they were attacked to an idiot, a malformed hunchback, a ne’er-do-well or the bastard progeny of a mixed coupling.

Curiously, as we see in the birth of Mordred, pre-Christian European traditions included suspending adultery limitations during holidays, which happened at least once a season, sometimes twice. So even in societies where monogamy was the norm, there was a defined space for getting a bit on the side. (Useful when your partner was infertile.)

So yeah. Right in one.

uriel238, 13 days ago

You’re welcome to what I know, though I’m just someone who’s read more than a little pop-science. I’m not accredited or anything.

uriel238, 13 days ago

Yeah, adolescence is weird, and some of this is guessing based on other primates. Gorillas, for example, evict familiar adolescent females shortly after puberty while welcoming strange adolescent females, which informs how we model the behavior of pre-agriculture migratory human tribes.

(I should add we don’t presume that it was the same everywhere either, so it’s quite possible that some prehistorical humans had different means of managing their teens than sending the boys off to wage war and letting the girls get kidnapped in kind by raiders. Once we go that far back, we have to rely on archeological data, which is very selective in the tales it tells.)

So then, there are some powerful goddesses in early Hellenism, for instance, Aphrodite (commonly a goddess of love and beauty), evolved from Astarte (Lover, Healer, Hunter, Warrior) who developed from Ishtar. In fact, when Aphrodite emerged from the sea foam on Kytherian beaches, Phoenician traders were coming to the Kytherian harbors, not only bringing goods and their own goddess, Astarte but also the modern Greek alphabet (before which the locals were using Linear B). So we have a path from Ishtar and this major poly-faceted goddess being reduced to a love goddess, who is then married to Hephaestus (the crippled forge) to put her in her place.

Also curious to me is Dread Persephone who ruled the dead and the underworld long before Hades appears on scene. (Poseidon was the Olympian in Chief, and we see part of his gig in creating biodiversity, not just all the creatures of the sea, but also those of the land). Zeus and Hades were added late in the game, and the stories we have of Persephone, specifically of the abduction of Persephone from Demeter and the thing with the six pomegranate seeds comes from a single poem. Even then, winter comes not because Persephone is gone, but because Demeter is sad about it, and stops doing her job. So Persephone’s role is to be mom’s co-dependent emotional-support assistant during springtime, and go back to attending the dead.

So here we have two examples of powerful goddesses that influenced the Hellenic people and culture who are then shoved backstage with the addition of Zeus and Hades.

There’s a similar event that I remember from Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson regarding Asherah, the consort to Adonai / Elohim / Yahweh. Asherah was always the ambitious one between the two, and the Canaanite temples to her were bigger and more numerous than the ones to Adonai. Eventually an ideological rift developed and the Hebrews raided all the Asheran temples, massacring the acolytes and burning them to the ground. The whole don’t boil a calf in the milk of its mother thing (which informs the separation of meat products and milk products in kosher diet) is a specific reference to an Asheran ritual meal, I think for weddings, but I’m not sure.

While I can’t speak to whether misogyny is innate, I can say we’ve had periods in which goddesses were accepted alongside gods and in some cases were on top of the pantheon. We don’t talk much about Gaea anymore even though in Hellenism she created everything on earth long before Poseidon was tinkering with horses. I think there’s a division between Dionysian culture and Apollonian culture which parallels the shift from chthonic religion to celestial religion. (Chthonic gods are not to be confused with Cthonian gods, who are 20th century, and definitely celestial).

I can say that in the middle ages and the domination of Christianity, women were completely unpersoned and regarded as chattel beasts (despite their capacity to think and talk, both of which was discouraged). Even Mary, mother of Jesus was not even given due recognition until the 12th century.

uriel238, 14 days ago

Essentially this implies you have to be mark material for Nigerian princes in order to not vote for Biden (id est vote against Trump).

It also implies that enough of US voters are, indeed, that naïve.

uriel238, 14 days ago

For those choosing not to vote for Biden, voting for a genocidist in a US federal election doesn’t put blood on your hands.

This isn’t fabricated consent (I mean it is in that lumpins are told to believe they chose the government when they didn’t).

Here’s the thing: The office seat will be filled whether or not you vote. And you get one non-transferable vote.

This means you get to vote against the worse popular guy by voting for his most likely contender.

It’s the trolley problem, only millions are voting on the position of the lever. What we cannot do is move the lever out of position.

It’s still up to you. Taking action is harder than not taking action, but we are staring down Project 2025, the neutering of elections in the US and one-party autocracy (the Republican party), which will also speed up the dismantling of civil rights in the US. If you don’t want that to happen, please consider voting against Trump and any other Republicans down ballot.

Yes, it sucks the US is reduced to this sorry state.

uriel238, 13 days ago

We haven’t had a functioning democracy since the 19th century.

There’s argument to be made we didn’t have a functioning democracy when the Constitution was ratified in 1789, since segments of it were clearly written in bad faith (like the electoral college, the 3/5s of all non-free persons clause, and arguably, the failure to offer suffrage to all persons including women), but Boss Tweed in 1852 already understood how to game the elections so that only approved candidates might make it to primaries (of New York State elections and Federal elections).

In the aughts (the 2000s), Oxford University did a study regarding elections, public interests and elite interests, and determined the US behaved more like an oligarchy than a democratic republic, so yeah, we’re a plutocracy with some democratic features. However those democratic features, while meager, keep the US from turning into a single-party autocracy like the German Reich or the late-stage USSR.

And we’re moving towards that autocracy, propped up by fascist ideology (with enemy within rhetoric, and purge actions to follow) with every year. The next time the Republican takes control of all three federal branches of government, the game is very likely up.

The US is also on the brink of civil war, and it may be sparked by Trump losing, depending on how large and coordinated the coup d’etat effort is at the time, or if Trump wins, by an attack against those resisting draconian policies.

uriel238, 13 days ago

I’ve lost faith in the US voters after 2016. We held our nose knowing Clinton was a neoconservative recognizing that Trump would be much much worse (and was pretty terrible!). Trump lost the majority but won the EC, and the EC failed to do what it was supposed to do (conspire to elect someone other than the obvious tyrant) so, well, we got Trump in his pajamas obeying Leonard Leo and Steve Miller while Mattis kept him from nuking North Korea.

It reminded me of George W. Bush, who also lost the popular vote to Gore, but won the EC with a little help from friends in SCOTUS (and Leonard Leo), which was far worse than we imagined it would be after Bush’s compassionate conservative thing. I believed Republicans couldn’t actually get a president elected again, because there was no way we were going to forget the $3 trillion price-tag of Iraq, the torture, the open-ended war on terror, Halliburton’s war profiteering and so on. It was such a shit show I expected it to be seared into the minds of Americans. Heck, Bush crawled away as the subprime mortgage crisis hit, so we were all feeling bummed.

The world gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize just for not being Bush.

Nope, it turns out eight years later (with, granted, the War on Terror and mass surveillance getting worse) we forgot the ones who got us into it in the first place. And as much as Trump looked like a rabid monster, having freshly stolen the GOP from all the other cookie-cutter prospects, ready to bring fascism on like The Producers, Clinton was so hated that they just couldn’t see Trump for what he was. (To be fair, millions of Protestant Evangelist Christians were being told from the pulpit Jesus wanted them to vote for Trump – something they’re not supposed to do while remaining a tax-free church. White Evangelists voted for him at a rate around 80%)

So now we’re here, and I’m reminded of LBJ’s lowest white man comment (attributed), If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. Apparently some Americans really do go all in for that kind of ideology, even as the nation world burns down around them.

There’s also the imminent possibility of civil war. Trump will try to organize a coup d’etat if he loses the election, and it is a matter if it can be adequately detected and repelled (or squelched before it gets started).

uriel238, 14 days ago

I assume why? is part of the prompt.