SwingingTheLamp

There is no "people of Afghanistan" to rise up to fight for their country. Reading the actual history is quite informative. There's a region that's been demarcated by outside powers as Afghanistan in order to fit into the Westphalian nation-state system, but which has only ever been unified for a few decades here and there in its history, and only by force. The people who live there are a collection of ethnic groups, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and others. From their point of view, the British Empire came along and drew lines around where they lived and called it a nation. That doesn't create a national identity in them, though, and another empire coming along and murdering them with drones doesn't do it, either. It takes a special kind of imperialist stupidity (Bush-like, one might say) to think that it would.

Similar story in Iraq. The British Empire drew some arbitrary lines on the map to divide up the area of the fallen Ottoman Empire, and mashed together disparate, rivalrous groups. It's stunning that Iraq is as functional a nation today as it is. (Although in a quick perusal of the news, I see articles about Iraqi nationalism fading.)

In short, from their point of view, the United States now is the problem, and the instigator of much of the violence, so why would they fight for a nation-building project that the US tried to impose at gunpoint?

And a trivial one to verify, since a 2024 poll found 62% of Americans support a single-payer health care system. And, recall that same-sex marriage achieved majority public support before Democratic leaders, like Obama and Clinton, shifted their stances to support it.

No, you understand DEI perfectly. But, to make a long story short, a fundamental principle of fascism is that the in-group is axiomatically superior to the out-group.

It might have something to do with the IDF doing things that'd make the OG Nazis say, "damn, dude!"

This headline makes me think that Bolivia takes its banknotes super seriously, if they kill 11 people over losing some in a plane crash.

There's some good evidence that Sanders would've won. And Mamdani did. The population can be progressive when progressive candidates are allowed to run.

Does the book posit new laws of physics, or even call into question the current set? That's what Gallileo did, but the promotional copy for the book doesn't suggest that it does.

It depends. We Americans have been propagandized against "socialism" and "communism" for over a century, so in media discourse, this might be the political spectrum. But when polled on issues, apart from party identity, Americans support policies far to the left of any politician. Universal health care is perhaps the canonical example.

Cyclists should protest by getting together, getting in cars (one each, natch), and driving around the neighborhood. Give 'em the traffic congestion they crave.

Note to self: Send unsolicited duck pix...

If a book claims something that's fundamentally impossible by the laws of physics, I don't need to read it to dismiss it.

With all due respect, you've latched onto 1. my introductory literary device for framing the argument, and 2. where I dismiss the book based on my argument, but missed my argument, which I would succinctly state as: By definition, we don't know anything about the supernatural, but we know the natural world extremely well, and we can explain the way that it behaves fully and completely without supernatural influence. Not only do we lack evidence of the supernatural, the evidence that we do have rules it out.

That's essentially a "god of the gaps" argument, i.e. if we cannot demonstrate it scientifically, therefore it must be God, or ghosts, or the Great Bacterial Collective Intelligence. But, in any case, turn that question around: do we have good reason to scientifically exclude the possibility of ghosts? And the answer there is a very strong 'yes'.

Ryan North has a lot of Dinosaur Comics exploring concepts around ghosts, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one in which T-Rex muses about finding out what makes a poltergeist angry, triggering its ire constantly, and connecting the object(s) it manipulates to a generator in order to get infinite free energy.

Because, the physical world that we know and inhabit works on energy. For a ghost to interact with our world, it would simply have to inject energy into it. Sound, light, heat, et cetera, it's energy. There's no way around it. And we have laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which we very, very, very thoroughly tested at the scale, energy level, and relativistic velocities (that is, our human environment) at which ghosts would interact. In our natural world, we'd have to see macroscopic effects without causes, and energy entering or leaving the system. We'd be able to measure it, but we have not. E = mv², and the two sides of the equation balance, always.

More prosaically, another Dinosaur Comics strip posits that ghosts must be blind because they're invisible. Invisibility means that all light passes through them, but if it doesn't strike whatever ghosts use for photoreceptors, they'd by needs be blind. If their eyes did intercept light so that they were able to see, then if a ghost was watching you in a bright room, you'd at least see the faint shadows of its retinas. (Creepy!) In short, we don't have to make any claims about the supernatural to say that if ghosts, or other supernatural phenomenon, interact with our natural world, we'd have to be able to see and measure the effect beyond subjective reports. However, we don't, and there really just aren't any gaps in the physics for ghosts to reside in.

As for the book, well, we all live inside these meat-based processors that are not exactly reliable in interpreting sensory input, or making narrative sense of it, and are well-known to just fabricate experiences and memories out of the ether when the sensory input is absent, scrambled, or just not interesting enough. It seems to me that the strongest likelihood is that brains did what brains habitually do (i.e. come up with fantastical stories), and that our theory of physics is pretty decent, since it has enabled us to create all sorts of technology.

Holy heck. The Voyager app autoplays video with the sound muted, but his facial expresssions and body language are slimy and supercilious.

We don't have to debate to what extent civic planners intended to divide people by color. In his book, The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein just straight-up quoted them. They weren't shy, and they wrote it down in memos, meeting minutes, and even speeches.

That's why I say that the suburbs are a product of racism... because the people who created them intended them that way, and said so.

For the economic analysis from the class perspective, look at why suburbs became entrenched, which has a lot to do with the auto industry.

There may be an argument about how the two are linked, but the -ism on display in the second photo is racism. The US built the suburbs quite explicitly to keep black people out by using poverty as a proxy, after the SCOTUS blocked housing segregation.

The meme is fine, it's the comments. If a business is following the law, the business must pass along the full amount of donated money, and does not get a tax deduction. I tried to look up some numbers, and found that many companies do not even report the amounts they collect, so they're not doing it for media coverage. Agree with me or not, those are the facts.

No, it's likely moreso that people disagreeing with you politically was all it took to turn you into an enthusiastic fan of mass murder of children.

Oh, for Pete's sake! If you don't want to donate, don't donate, but at least get the facts, please. There's plenty of stuff in the world to get angry about right now that's real. In reality:

The store has to book your donation as "unearned revenue," that is, money it collected, but is not theirs. Charitable donations collected through the registers do not count as the store's income. Giving the lump sum to the charity does not count as a store expense. The store is merely a custodian of the money until transferring it to the charity.
YOU get the tax deduction, not the store. If you itemize your tax deductions (and do not take the standard deduction), you can submit the register receipt as proof of a donation, and get the tax benefit.
The media coverage of these donations for PR benefit is basically nil. Off the top of your head, name the last 3 feel-good stories about grocery store charity donations that you saw in the news. (Can you name even one? I can't.)
Stores often do add some of their own money to the donation, but charitable donations are an "above the line" adjustment to income, not a "below the line" refundable credit. That is, the value of the write-off is the amount of tax the store avoided, which is always less then the amount of money it gave.

Last time I was at a grocery, and the payment terminal asked my to round up, I did. I see it as a win-win-win. I win because I can feel good about donating, even if it was only 14 cents. The store wins by some of my good feelings transferring to it; as well, the people who run the store are human, and also want to feel good about themselves by helping a charity. The charity itself wins by getting a couple thousand dollars that it wouldn't have received otherwise. Despite my best intentions, I wouldn't have gone out of my way to donate to that organization, and absolutely would not have bothered to give a tiny amount like 14 cents. But every little bit helps, and a few cents each from hundreds people adds up. I see this as a frictionless way to do some good.

Source: Used to work at a family-owned grocery store.

Seahawks QB Matt Hasselbeck, that's who.

SwingingTheLamp

@ SwingingTheLamp @piefed.zip

Posts

6
Comments

245
Joined

2 mo. ago

SwingingTheLamp

You know who we hate more

US Democrats are not leftists

Scouts Will Abandon D.E.I. Policies Under Agreement With Pentagon, Hegseth Says

Israelis No Longer Ahead in Americans' Middle East Sympathies

At least 11 killed after military plane carrying banknotes crashes in Bolivia

US Democrats are not leftists

Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

US Democrats are not leftists

There is a WAR happening right now in Chicago 💥🩸🔪. Pro-car residents in the 12th district are trying to remove bike-lanes. Cyclists are protesting.

a little palate cleanser from my other posts🫶

Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

[Video] Gavin Newsom blames progressive language for Democrats losses

that's weird

that's weird

Don't we all hate this

Scoop: Dems working on secret report found Gaza cost Harris votes

Don't we all hate this

Scoop: Dems working on secret report found Gaza cost Harris votes

YSK: Extreme wealth inequality is baked in to the system

Congestion Pricing: Will We Finally Learn?

Confidence in a romantic context is like salt on food: It can improve the flavor of good food, but can't be substituted for flavor, and too much spoils any dish.

Everyone is a terrorist when you're terrified of everything.

TV and soundbar with local integration