Perhaps because you can see mountains at the same scale that allows you to clearly see the object’s horizon/curvature. It would be like if Earth had mountains thousands of miles high. It’s a landscape that feels deeply unnatural.
Very, very short shelf life unfortunately.
Throw enough fat at a problem and you can solve it.
American police are only good at shooting unarmed people. When faced with an actual real threat, they’re cowards.
Turns out that the Secret Service really is one of the few truly competent branches of government still around these days. I guess it’s just always, regardless of party or doctrine, in the best interest of the president to have the service operate with extreme competence. Trump will happily fill government branches full of incompetent goons instructed to gum up the works. He’ll happily dismantle multiple Congress-mandated departments and programs. He’ll grift off every bit of government graft he can. But I bet the Secret Service is the one he actually lets be run competently. If there’s anything the man cares about, it’s himself.
Look, there’s got to be a rational explanation for this. Have you considered the old East Wing bunker might have just been haunted as all fuck? Who knows what horrible atrocities past presidents committed down in that dungeon! Who knows how many hookers Nixon tortured to death down there. How many old captured Nazis did Eisenhower personally flay alive in that basement? How many girls did Clinton simply have disappeared down there? That placed was probably cursed long before Trump got there. The only way to get the bad juju out was to completely tear it down to bare soil. It’s no good as a defense bunker if you get torn apart by ghosts when you try to seek shelter there!
Aww, come on. Amontillado is fine, I love the classic approach. But it’s just not appropriate for Trump. If you want to write Trump to have a poetic end, he needs to go out like Manius Aquillius. Maybe in a modern version, Trump in a bone-headed move decides to personally go to Tehran to pound his fist on the table and make his silly demands. The Iranians ultimately end up executing him by pouring molten gold down his throat to punish him for his greed.
We’ll have to demolish the rest of the White House just to get the stench out.
That is a possibility. Maybe it was something they had wanted to do, but it was a project mired in red tape and complexity? Like maybe they had planned to try to do it without demolishing the East Wing, trying to do it in place? Then Trump’s like “fuck it, we’ll do it live” and just orders the whole thing demolished to make it cheaper? IDK.
It’s really not so different than the Dems. Republican voters largely decided that he was a horrible human being, but that they should support him for reasons like SCOTUS positions. They’re just voting for their lesser evil.
That depends if they’re the “let’s keep our own names, fuck the patriarchy” type of lesbian, or the “let’s bond in a quirky way by both changing our last name to a hyphenated or portmanteau’d form of our names” type of lesbian. The former would be unaffected by the proposed voting restrictions, while the latter could both have a great deal of trouble voting. It’s the changing of the last name that’s the problem.
Are you a Boeing executive, by any chance?
Honestly, people behaving like Homo economicus is how you get MAGA.
Think about it. Isn’t Trump’s pitch to voters ultimately an argument in rational self-interest? It’s all “I’ll make an in group and an out group. You’ll be in the in group. I’ll pull up the in group while pushing down the out group.”
Racism and sexism are rational. Or at least they are rational from those that benefit from them. Think about a white male living in the Jim Crows South. Your life was made soooo much easier by racism and sexism. There were whole career fields where they were the only quarter of the population that were eligible for them. They were automatically in the top quarter of society, simply by their race and sex.
Anti-immigrant zealotry is rational. If you’re a native-born US citizen working in the construction industry? Every legal or illegal immigrant being deported would cause your standard of living to soar. Economists would tell you that on net it will harm the economy. But if suddenly the pool of construction workers is cut in half, any US citizen who knows how to swing a hammer is now rolling in dough. That’s the rational terror of fascism - every time another group in the “first they came for” poem is liquidated, someone ends up with their property, their jobs, their place in the social order, etc.
You NEED to have a respect for persons built into your ethical framework, or else you can end up justifying evils of all sorts, all in the name of the greater good. Hell, Dr. Mengele slept well every night, content in the knowledge that he was doing the greatest good for the greatest number.
Yes. Because what so many folks can’t seem to get is that different people are different. And they have different ethics.
This is literally the entire point of the trolley problem. Yes, you can stick your fingers in your ears and say, “always pull the lever for the track with fewer people on it.” But that’s just not how ethics works. Utilitarian ethics is one way to live life, but utilitarians have this incredibly annoying habit of assuming that theirs is the only valid ethical system, and that you’re a complete moron if you follow any other school of thought.
You’re demonstrating a utilitarian sense of ethics. One who follows a respect-for-persons belief system would say that the ends don’t justify the means. That it’s not fine to pull the trolley lever, even if that would result in a net saving of lives. That it’s fine to vote to hold people accountable, even if that will objectively result in net material harm. It’s not always about the greatest good for the greatest number. Otherwise, for example, we would never put any research dollars into studying cures for rare diseases. Those dollars could always objectively do more good elsewhere.
Hell, even our criminal laws don’t follow a utilitarian sense of ethics. You can’t legally get out of consequences from killing someone by saying, “this on net saved lives.” Even if you can objectively prove it, you’re not legally allowed to kill people. It doesn’t matter if your murder on net saves lives, you’re still a murderer. If a gang kidnaps your two children and tells you, “you must go kill this other one person if you want them to live.” If you do that, if you go and kill that stranger to save your own kids? You will be charged and convicted of murder. You’re not allowed to kill one innocent person to save two innocent people.
Many people voted against or refused to vote for Kamala because they were trying to punish her and the Democratic Party. Voting is the only way we have of holding politicians and parties accountable. Millions of voters saw the horrific haughtiness and barbarity of how the Democrats acted around Gaza, and they wanted to punish them for it. It was about holding them accountable. It was about justice. Many voted against Kamala to punish her for supporting genocide. And if the likely thing came to pass, if Trump supported genocide as well? Well those voters would vote against him for the same reason. They vote to hold people accountable for past actions, not to speculate on future ones. Maybe not how you vote, but again, people are different and can use whatever ethical system they want in choosing their vote.
Again, you can argue greatest good for greatest number, but that isn’t the only system of ethics out there, and it’s not even the system that defines the foundation of our legal codes.
Exactly. And frankly, any person who blames the voters rather than the politician is a deplorable. You have to be the biggest dumbass on Earth to think that trying to shame voters is a good electoral strategy. Kamala lost because she was a terrible candidate. Her loss is her fault. Not the voters.
Have you seen the polls on the popularity of the Democratic Party?
The Republicans are a third party.
Look, I get not being Euro centric, but you’re just looking for grievances. Performative wokism taken to the point of farce.
The scientific revolution was a new invention. There was philosophy and rationalism before, but it’s incredibly reductive to just collapse the entire scientific method to be no different than the methods of inquiry that came before. It clearly had vastly different and more dramatic real-world consequences than the eras that came before. The Islamic Golden Age did not produce a self-reinforcing series of technological advancements that completely altered the lives of every living human being. The life of a peasant living in an Islamic country was virtually unchanged from before the Islamic Golden Age to after the Islamic Golden Age. I get rejecting imperialism. But you’re being so performatively anti-imperialist that it’s clouding your judgment.
The scientific method was something that was invented in its modern form in a particular place and time. Yes, it had precursors, but so what? Humans evolved from creatures that are a fundamentally different species to ourselves. Every invention and discovery has precursors, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. You have such an anti-West axe to grind that you can’t recognize a truly remarkable discovery, simply because it happened to be invented by Europeans.
It was not normal for a tiny peninsula on the edge of the Eurasian landmass to, in a few centuries, go from being a global backwater to dominating the world. It’s a historical aberration. To explain it, you have two choices;
Be a racist and conclude that there is something particularly different about European genetics that makes Europeans either particularly intelligent (positive racism) or particularly evil (negative racism) that allowed them to achieve this feat.
Recognize that it was an accident of history and that a uniquely powerful discovery/invention, the modern scientific method, happened to be invented in Europe.
Personally, I don’t like Eugenics-based explanations. Maybe you do. But I reject racism, even for the sake of anti-imperialism. Maybe you think Europeans are just genetically evil geniuses. But my default assumption is that everyone is the same, and Europe just happened to roll a natural 20 when it came to where the scientific revolution would happen.
Sure, you can pretend that it was no different from other methods of rational inquiry that came before. But then you have to explain why the modern scientific method produced a knowledge explosion while previous methods didn’t.
A computer.