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Use! Spread! Teach the world!
The Egg has to go through a LOT of cyanobacteria. Of course it could just be that patient.
uriel238
joined 2 years ago
It was the petit bourgeoisie that started the French Revolution after the Estates General of 1789 and the commoners followed them. I was basing the Rebel Alliance after them, hinted at since among the promoted soldiers in Rebel Alliance command were not-just-a-few nobles.
ETA: Of course the people should, if they can on their own, seize the means of production and overthrow the ownership class. WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS! 💣
I think a given Christian, confronted with the directive with killing an innocent person directly (say by shooting them in the face with a pistol) would find it difficult, even if their minister told them God commanded them to do so.
Our ethics are mostly based on feelings and empathy, though we have a lot that are based on principle. The MAGA folk and the White Christian Nationalist movement try to favor loyalty (to Trump, to the church, to the movement) above all else.
A couple of points:
1) The Alliance formed after a good chunk of the Galactic Empire was feeling the pressure of being imperial rather than republic. Granted, the republic was corrupt like Chicago during Prohibition, but while it existed many of the public departments were still actively serving their role (more or less).
2) The Alliance was not formed from the proletariat, but the noble houses and companies pushed out (who fell out of favor) when the empire rose. Their plan was to restore the republic system that recognized their wealth and political power. And there might have been a period like this comic when Imperial interests were willfully lying to opposition parties and interests to prolong the time before they got serious and formed a military.
3) It was atrocities like Alderaan that really fueled recruitment into the Alliance. Every young person who had family lost in the Alderaan event at least considered joining up, and if they were sympathetic to the Alliance (or had no loyalty to the Empire) were inclined to do so even if their prior ambitions were apolitical, e.g. art or medicine or civil engineering or whatever. ALSO Alderaan was only the most recent atrocity committed by the Empire in the name of enforcing its political power. And (as per long-studied Counter Insurgency) every act of brutality by tyranny draws more of the population into the resistance. The Alliance was just the most popular and best supported movement.
4) NOTE: This is speculation based on circumstances, much like the Endor Holocaust (The EH is implied by the ROTJ events but was later rectconned out via additional canon): The final point of the Death Star is not merely to be a planet-destroying superweapon but a mining tool to crack open (lifeless or evacuated) planets to get to interior precious minerals. While its success as such a tool might be uncertain, had it not been destroyed, the hope by its crew, engineers and support staff was that the superlaser would not often be used as a military device (optimally never again!) but could still be used in the process of gathering necessary resources.
Recently Google decided to enforce its storage limits, which is how I discovered most of my Google cloud storage was backed up photos I never once asked Google to back up. It was... tedious getting them deleted, and I had to desync my phone lest it also delete my device's gallery as well.
It all seemed to be a ploy to force me to buy more cloud storage space. Thank you, no.
The Democratic Party needs to go hard into socialized services or just pack up. Right now it looks complicit in the GOP coup d'etat.
The same, incidentally is true for the Labor party in UK, and for the other neoliberal parties all throughout Europe. Serve the people for realsies this time, or pack up as the Neville Chamberlain party.
Our asses touched the same seat. We are brothers in revolution against the autocracy! ☭💣
Gave it a touch up.
Sadly, during DADT, the rate of discharges due to outing was at a higher rate than before DADT.
In the US military, DEI is not merely about readiness, but about recruitment and retention as well. Seriously, we counter-recruiters already have enough material to illustrate how joining up is a Really Bad Idea.™
On board with the mushroom kingdom
I'm making an executive decision and declaring this to be the slang for the position of seeking to end the current healthcare system for public healthcare. And to save Mangione from state ~~justice~~ law.
They did before in 1789, hence the immediate outcome of the Estates General of 1789.
And hence the response of the French public immediately following.
We quickly moved into the Joffrey Baratheon period of this regime, which is typically stopped when he pisses off the wrong powerful people.
As for us on the bottom, we suffer as the high lords play their games of thrones.
Text:
Musk's salute at Trump's Inauguration (sic) doesn't make him a Nazi
Musk's $250 Million donation to an autocratic usurper Makes (sic) him a Nazi-producing industrialist
Musk is to Nazis what the Hostess board of directors is to Twinkies
Sorry about the additional caps. I may also darken the background for legibility.
February 2017. Similar sentiments.
Another one of my old-man memes.
An early meme that did not pass muster when I showed it to family, but it makes me giggle.
I may just be an esoteric nerd.
Art by Erik Carnell one of the LGBT+ artists who was featured in Target during Pride and then removed thanks to white Christian nationalist pressure.
So here we are, and yeah, we need you all.
A semicolon after "youth" will help keep it clear.
Note: Most of the info here was ripped from the most recent You're Wrong About podcast ( On Buzzsprout ), Halloween History with Chelsey Weber-Smith Go! Listen! Enjoy! Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya!
Yesterday, I learned that the current American Halloween tradition of giving candy to costumed kids represents an uneasy truce between civilization and the trickster spirit.
There are a lot of traditions regarding Samhain, many of which include bonfires and naked dancing (because they all included bonfires and naked dancing. Who are we kidding?) But in the Irish farmlands, Samhain was mischief night, at least for adolescent and young adult boys (we assume they were boys.)
The idea was to haze the local grownups, particularly the crabby ones who yelled at clouds or didn't like young'uns much. There were plenty of old standby pranks: carving faces into produce or shepherding livestock to the rooftops to dressing up like ghosts and monsters and ambushing them at night to send them running.
It was a mostly accepted tradition. Teenagers got to go bananas for one day a year, and were (more or less) on ~~good~~ better behavior for the rest of the time. Skittish folk did the Purge thing of holing up in safety.
And then the Irish and their wily teenagers came to the United States.
Our Halloween pumpkin-smashers were called guisers from those in disguise. Note that there were other guising traditions that exchanged DNA with our dark cabal of malicious tricksters. (One fond one was of drunkards who'd sing at your house until you gave them food, beer or money to leave), but for our antagonists, it was the black bloc of the time, a means to ensure that you weren't identified at the scene of a fresh crime.
Do an image search of "vintage halloween costumes" and you won't see people trying to look like Mario or Misty or Mickey or Megatron, but just people in spooky clothes and spookier masks clearly up to no good. You didn't buy your costume, rather you made it with whatever was on hand, and hence there were a lot of sheet ghosts.
In the early 20th century pranking in the States achieved an apogee (a nadir?). The great depression drove everyone to despair, and wanton destruction that once was meager and required a morning of repair might be the fire that broke the farm. Also some pranks went wrong, leading to a resonance cascade failure, starting a wildfire or other unnatural disaster.
And then WWII happened and we were not only trying to salvage what we can, but had real (alleged) monsters that might even be infiltrating the homefront as we speak. Pranksters then were losing the war for the Allies and serving the Axis, even if inadvertently.
Something had to be done, and even President Truman got involved regarding The Halloween Problem.
A couple of early attempts to trade Halloween for a nicer holiday failed drastically, and the pranking continued.
Eventually an armistice came when the neighborhood spooky pageant emerged. Creative neighbors would turn a part of their house into a spooky diorama and light the path with candles and jack-o-lanterns and other Halloween kitsch. Rather than hopping onto a war-wagon (that's a mischief team stuffed into a motor vehicle) they'd go visit the local spooktaculars. (This would in turn fuel the haunted house craze, assisted by Disney's Haunted Mansion opening in 1953)
Feeding the roaming guests kept the rotten eggs away. While there was candy, there were also cookies, apples, (toothbrushes, Chick tracts) and other treats. Sometimes there were activities, though I never could figure out bobbing for apples.
The transition from free-form snacks to packaged candy came due to The Candyman who was much less exciting than the movie version. Ronald Clark O'Bryan made custom Pixy Stix laced with potassium cyanide, one of which he fed to his son, Timothy on Halloween, 1974. He was far removed from a master criminal, and inconsistencies in his story kept the police interested until it all fell apart. He was also deep in debt and took out a beefy life-insurance policy on his son. The police didn't have to investigate too deeply.
O'Bryan was executed in 1984, but by then the damage he had done to Halloween had been done, and moral panics would persist about tampered Halloween treats. By then it was common for everyone to just give packaged candy.
Related was also the 1982 Tylenol poisonings. They had nothing to do with Halloween, but secured into the public conscience that people could tamper with products in order to cause mayhem to the general public. And at least by my recollection, this not only ended all Halloween offerings of home-made cookies by kitchen-minded families but also made sure safety seals were added to every food and hygiene product in the US.
By the aughts, everyone was familiar with the "fun-sized" candy which was totally not that fun.
(It's noted by some that Tylenol doesn't really need all that much assistance to poison you. As painkillers go, it's hard on the system, easy to overdose, and Tylenol poisoning incurs a yearly body count in the US. There's been an ongoing effort to convince the FDA to rethink its approval of Tylenol, for convincing cause. But big pharma really wants to keep selling you stuff. Anyway I digress.)
These days, we hear a lot of calls from the religious right for the end of celebrations of Halloween, a holiday too macabre for families who purport to have family values. Many churches tell their parishioners to skip the holiday for Jesus, while more clever churches simply hold a party there as an alternative to trick-or-treating. Some churches forbid witches, or even only allow approved costumes from the approved costume list. There's a lot of, as Dan McClellan would put it, costly identity signaling between members of right-wing religious ministries to show they're on team-purity.
But this is not a holiday we celebrate to honor benign gods and favored spirits. This is not an Apollonian holiday we keep up for the morale of the people, rather it's a Dionysian holiday, one we celebrate in respect for spirits who would wrong us if we don't acknowledge their presence and the unsteady peace they offer in exchange for our tribute.
Hallowe'en as it is celebrated in the US is a rite we engage in every year to keep away malevolent trickster monsters, who will return (and will start fires) if we don't placate them with yearly treats.
Another Qu'ils mangent de la brioche moment.
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I'm not an academically trained scholar regarding left-wing theory, but I'd assume that communists and social democrats are still part of the same group, with one naming themselves after a shorter-term goal-state, and the other naming themselves after a longer-term goal-state.
When we talk about state models such as republic, democracy, autocracy, we're either describing a current status, or a model we might want to follow or avoid. When we talk about ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, communism, feminism, etc.) they assert specific values and presumptions that might or might not be true or workable. For instance, in the communist ideal, every participant has exactly the same amount of political and material power; influence is perfectly distributed. But we have no idea how a state like that would look, or work, or if we could ever get there.
Every model and every ideology has problems and concessions we don't understand and have to correct for. The one-person = one-vote thing seems intuitive for democracy, but has terrible side effects, and we're still sorting out alternative election models that might work better.
All this is to say it's a really bad idea to treat any one of them as a racehorse or football team or a banner under which to rally and consolidate political power. None of the models or ideals we have are perfect or absolute, and we have to be prepared to adjust them on the fly, especially as we content with corruption and bad actors who exploit vulnerabilities.
I suspect everyone on the left ultimately seeks a society in which everyone is materially provided for, in which liberties are as extensive as possible while providing for protections and considering human biases towards certain abberant behavior (e.g. drunk driving) in which there are as few social strata as possible and power is as well distributed as possible. The models that accommodate all these, even to partial degrees, are still very fuzzy. (Western civilization has been working on them for only three hundred years or so.)
So we're at least in the same book, if not on the same page.