I'm not saying she'd look like the wicked witch of the West if you put her on a broomstick and gave her a pointy hat, but.... Actually that's exactly what I'm saying and she's got a personality to match.
"Imagine" is one of the most beautiful songs ever written, but it was written by a shortsighted idiot who died young and thus barely had to live with any of the consequences of his actions.
It's been a recurring theme for me, watching people I care about self-destruct because they chose living for the day over fighting for tomorrow. Often involving drugs, and often involving letting bad people have way too important a role in your life.
It isn't easy trying to live a good life, but you have to give it your best every day, and when you fail to live up to your own ideals you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try to do better tomorrow. You don't need to be ideal to be good or even to be great, but on the balance you need to get it right more often than you get it wrong. Many extraordinary results come from ordinary men choosing to do ordinary things every single day.
Many people talk about someday writing a book, I actually accomplished it. I didn't do anything so amazing, I just chose to write every weekend, and make it to the end, then push it over the finishing line with a few touches and now it's on sale and has sold more than the 12 copies many books apparently sell (not quitting my day job!)
I'm on my fifth chapter book with my toddler. That sounds insane, but one chapter a week is all it takes to finish multiple books a year.
Terry Fox is a Canadian hero who walked half way across the country on a prosthetic leg from Newfoundland to a city in northwestern Ontario. Even driving, that's a huge distance, but he walked, and he did it one step at a time.
In the same way that virtue stacks on itself, so does vice. People typically don't just wake up with cops battering down your door or living in a trap house or friendless and alone. It's a nation you walk through one step at a time.
It's been a recurring theme for me, watching people I care about self-destruct because they chose living for the day over fighting for tomorrow. Often involving drugs, and often involving letting bad people have way too important a role in your life.
It isn't easy trying to live a good life, but you have to give it your best every day, and when you fail to live up to your own ideals you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try to do better tomorrow. You don't need to be ideal to be good or even to be great, but on the balance you need to get it right more often than you get it wrong. Many extraordinary results come from ordinary men choosing to do ordinary things every single day.
Many people talk about someday writing a book, I actually accomplished it. I didn't do anything so amazing, I just chose to write every weekend, and make it to the end, then push it over the finishing line with a few touches and now it's on sale and has sold more than the 12 copies many books apparently sell (not quitting my day job!)
I'm on my fifth chapter book with my toddler. That sounds insane, but one chapter a week is all it takes to finish multiple books a year.
Terry Fox is a Canadian hero who walked half way across the country on a prosthetic leg from Newfoundland to a city in northwestern Ontario. Even driving, that's a huge distance, but he walked, and he did it one step at a time.
In the same way that virtue stacks on itself, so does vice. People typically don't just wake up with cops battering down your door or living in a trap house or friendless and alone. It's a nation you walk through one step at a time.
Just because I write a really long post doesn't mean I'm right, it just means I want to unwrap what I think. Maybe I end up wrong -- who knows?
https://youtu.be/rkyj1U0n2TA
I came across this video of a man calling customer support at Pepsi to complain that when he ate a 30-year-old bag of snacks he found in a locker at a store it wasn't very fresh.
I found the whole video just hilarious and hopefully someone else does too.
I came across this video of a man calling customer support at Pepsi to complain that when he ate a 30-year-old bag of snacks he found in a locker at a store it wasn't very fresh.
I found the whole video just hilarious and hopefully someone else does too.
Many, if not all, of these protests at universities that are the impetus for much of the discussion are astroturf campaigns paid for by NGOs, often established in the US to help reduce the amount of heat if funding is coming from places other than the US. Many protests and the like are similarly false grassroots.
This funding can take a few different forms. In some cases, it's paid professional protesters, or paying for logistics -- you ever been to college? When I was there I struggled to buy a box of macaroni and cheese for the week, forget about a bunch of camping supplies, flags, props and signs so I could camp out at school to protest for weeks about a geographical location I couldn't point on a map, while chanting about a river I can't name and a sea I can't name.
Unfortunately, a massive amount of this goes on and has for a long time. Not just on the left, but on the right as well, and stuff that has no inherent political connection -- protests have been purchased by ad companies to promote different media. Famously, Electronic Arts paid for protesters to attack a video game based on Dante's Inferno and was caught red handed.
Then the media ends up supporting narratives that they either want you to believe or that are presently useful for their masters agendas.
While previous protests were wholethroatedly supported by the media because they were so useful, today the astroturf is mostly useful insofar as if people are paying attention to protests about a country most people can't point to on a map, then there won't be as much oxygen in the room for the fact that record numbers of people are losing their homes, using food banks, or living in the tent cities that are showing up in virtually every large city.
I'll never forget one case of protests that weren't useful to the establishment. People forget that both political parties in the US voted to invade Iraq and it wasn't until later that things ended up different with the Democrats pretending they never supported it and the Republicans continuing to support what had become a deeply unpopular war. The eve of the war in Iraq saw some of the largest protests in human history, which were barely covered by establishment media sources, but when they were then they made sure to find spots where violence broke out so they could pooh pooh the anti-war protesters for violence.
Some of these NGOs may just be filled with useful idiots. As an example, some of the disruptive climate protests are funded by oil companies because disruptive protests and absurd genocidal demands will also help suck the oxygen out of the room for specific, achievable, relevant reforms that could be much more impactful than demanding things that just aren't going to happen such as the abolition of fossil fuels.
So a follow-up question might be "how do these NGOs get their money?", and that's a legitimate question. In part, NGOs are funded by the governments they're protesting. In some cases it's directly, but usually it's in a sort of darker web where big NGOs get money and pass that money on to smaller NGOs which eventually get a degree of plausible deniability. In other cases, it's other governments. Some of these protests are being funded by NGOs who got money from sources such as royalty in the middle east. In further cases, it's billionaires with certain agendas. I'd say it's quite rare for the actual data to come out such as what we saw with the canadian trucker convoy gofundme hack and for it to end up being many small donations from individuals who support the cause.
This funding can take a few different forms. In some cases, it's paid professional protesters, or paying for logistics -- you ever been to college? When I was there I struggled to buy a box of macaroni and cheese for the week, forget about a bunch of camping supplies, flags, props and signs so I could camp out at school to protest for weeks about a geographical location I couldn't point on a map, while chanting about a river I can't name and a sea I can't name.
Unfortunately, a massive amount of this goes on and has for a long time. Not just on the left, but on the right as well, and stuff that has no inherent political connection -- protests have been purchased by ad companies to promote different media. Famously, Electronic Arts paid for protesters to attack a video game based on Dante's Inferno and was caught red handed.
Then the media ends up supporting narratives that they either want you to believe or that are presently useful for their masters agendas.
While previous protests were wholethroatedly supported by the media because they were so useful, today the astroturf is mostly useful insofar as if people are paying attention to protests about a country most people can't point to on a map, then there won't be as much oxygen in the room for the fact that record numbers of people are losing their homes, using food banks, or living in the tent cities that are showing up in virtually every large city.
I'll never forget one case of protests that weren't useful to the establishment. People forget that both political parties in the US voted to invade Iraq and it wasn't until later that things ended up different with the Democrats pretending they never supported it and the Republicans continuing to support what had become a deeply unpopular war. The eve of the war in Iraq saw some of the largest protests in human history, which were barely covered by establishment media sources, but when they were then they made sure to find spots where violence broke out so they could pooh pooh the anti-war protesters for violence.
Some of these NGOs may just be filled with useful idiots. As an example, some of the disruptive climate protests are funded by oil companies because disruptive protests and absurd genocidal demands will also help suck the oxygen out of the room for specific, achievable, relevant reforms that could be much more impactful than demanding things that just aren't going to happen such as the abolition of fossil fuels.
So a follow-up question might be "how do these NGOs get their money?", and that's a legitimate question. In part, NGOs are funded by the governments they're protesting. In some cases it's directly, but usually it's in a sort of darker web where big NGOs get money and pass that money on to smaller NGOs which eventually get a degree of plausible deniability. In other cases, it's other governments. Some of these protests are being funded by NGOs who got money from sources such as royalty in the middle east. In further cases, it's billionaires with certain agendas. I'd say it's quite rare for the actual data to come out such as what we saw with the canadian trucker convoy gofundme hack and for it to end up being many small donations from individuals who support the cause.
Just imagine some marketing manager going "you brilliant son of a bitch! Ship it! We're all gonna be rich!"
Either going all-in and saying "We're taking over so you guys stop doing this shit" or going all-out and saying "We're not paying both of you to blow each other up anymore" would in my view be better than the half measures we see. Both would probably be cheaper, too.
In this video singing 5 monkeys bouncing on the bed, my friend and I immediately thought the doctor looked just a little like Hitler due to a tiny moustache, and as the song goes on he gets angrier and angrier and by the end we couldn't stop just screaming fake German and falling over laughing.
There are up to 2 million Muslims in Israel (about 20% of their population), many of whom are Israeli citizens with full rights under the law. In Gaza, barring illegal settlers from Israel the population is 99% sunni Muslim and on the west bank the population is 94% sunni Muslim with the balance being various Christians. In most countries in the middle east, there are total populations of millions, but relatively trivial Jewish populations counting in perhaps the thousands, and in many of those countries the Jewish population has been falling precipitously under the rule of local governments.
The nature of government in Middle Eastern countries is simply different than in Western countries. Western governments have a long history of liberalism, and so that is the basis from which Western law is derived. By contrast, Middle Eastern governments, even nations with a democratic basis (and many of Israel's neighbors do have Democratic elements to their government) are not liberal democracies. Moreover, many of those governments are facing major domestic problems and have been using various external forces including the Jews and America as a scapegoat for why things are so difficult. We know from Germany in 1930s (or even from the vaccinations this discussion came from) and when the government tells people to hate, there are more than happy to oblige.
While it can be argued that there is definitely a strong power of religious lobbies in Israel, relatively speaking it is a liberal democracy that happens to have a strong majority of Jews for obvious reasons, but is tolerant of people from other faiths, and there's lots of people from around the world working there.
Therefore it does follow that if "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free [from the state of Israel]", it will be free of Jews, since that's already the situation in palestine, as well as most of the Middle East.
Islam was founded by a warlord, meaning that it has a stronger link to the state directly than Christianity which is why Islamic regions tended towards forming caliphates (though there are no generally recognized caliphates today, the fact that Islam has many prescriptions about the form of law and government is important)
Another important thing to keep in mind when it comes to Islam is that they do consider people who aren't Muslims to be lesser, and sometimes to a major degree. The strongest slave trade was in the Islamic world and the only reason that there isn't a legacy of slavery today is that they castrated their slaves. As late as the Ottoman empire however, slavery was still prevalent in the Muslim world. They do consider Jews and Christians to be part of a separate class from others, as "people of the book", but even they are still part of a different, lesser class.
The end of the Islamic golden age including the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate by the Mongolians was so traumatic to the civilization that they have preferred the relative stability of homogeneity and fundamentalism for much of the aftermath.
All that being said, historically speaking Islamic civilization isn't totally averse to cultural pluralism. In fact, as I recall, in the first caliphate they didn't want conquered people to convert to Islam because it was supposed to be a religion for the national leadership rather than the masses (and Muslims could charge a special tax on non-muslims). Another example of pluralism was in the Iberian peninsula where Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisted under a caliphate.
Unlike many people who will claim that genocide is built into Islamic doctrine, I don't believe that that's the case and it's simply a long-standing effect of the end of the Golden age end the crisis that followed. During the era of the first caliphate, it looked like Islam was going to end up overtaking Christianity and Judaism as primary religions in Europe and so when the Mongolians came over and demolished the Abbasid Caliphate, it fundamentally changed the way Muslims viewed outsiders.
In spite of that, the combination of demographic reality, government policy in the region, ideological realities and the history of the region, calling for an end to the Israeli state almost certainly would result in a partial or full genocide, and so supporting the Palestinian people does require much more nuance than authoritarian sheep chanting "from the river to the sea" because that's the latest marching orders. It isn't accurate to consider the destruction of the Israeli state as just the destruction of some buildings and a few leaders, since it's also implied that a similar state wouldn't replace it. They intend for a friendly government to replace it, and we know what that looks like in the middle east.
The nature of government in Middle Eastern countries is simply different than in Western countries. Western governments have a long history of liberalism, and so that is the basis from which Western law is derived. By contrast, Middle Eastern governments, even nations with a democratic basis (and many of Israel's neighbors do have Democratic elements to their government) are not liberal democracies. Moreover, many of those governments are facing major domestic problems and have been using various external forces including the Jews and America as a scapegoat for why things are so difficult. We know from Germany in 1930s (or even from the vaccinations this discussion came from) and when the government tells people to hate, there are more than happy to oblige.
While it can be argued that there is definitely a strong power of religious lobbies in Israel, relatively speaking it is a liberal democracy that happens to have a strong majority of Jews for obvious reasons, but is tolerant of people from other faiths, and there's lots of people from around the world working there.
Therefore it does follow that if "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free [from the state of Israel]", it will be free of Jews, since that's already the situation in palestine, as well as most of the Middle East.
Islam was founded by a warlord, meaning that it has a stronger link to the state directly than Christianity which is why Islamic regions tended towards forming caliphates (though there are no generally recognized caliphates today, the fact that Islam has many prescriptions about the form of law and government is important)
Another important thing to keep in mind when it comes to Islam is that they do consider people who aren't Muslims to be lesser, and sometimes to a major degree. The strongest slave trade was in the Islamic world and the only reason that there isn't a legacy of slavery today is that they castrated their slaves. As late as the Ottoman empire however, slavery was still prevalent in the Muslim world. They do consider Jews and Christians to be part of a separate class from others, as "people of the book", but even they are still part of a different, lesser class.
The end of the Islamic golden age including the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate by the Mongolians was so traumatic to the civilization that they have preferred the relative stability of homogeneity and fundamentalism for much of the aftermath.
All that being said, historically speaking Islamic civilization isn't totally averse to cultural pluralism. In fact, as I recall, in the first caliphate they didn't want conquered people to convert to Islam because it was supposed to be a religion for the national leadership rather than the masses (and Muslims could charge a special tax on non-muslims). Another example of pluralism was in the Iberian peninsula where Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisted under a caliphate.
Unlike many people who will claim that genocide is built into Islamic doctrine, I don't believe that that's the case and it's simply a long-standing effect of the end of the Golden age end the crisis that followed. During the era of the first caliphate, it looked like Islam was going to end up overtaking Christianity and Judaism as primary religions in Europe and so when the Mongolians came over and demolished the Abbasid Caliphate, it fundamentally changed the way Muslims viewed outsiders.
In spite of that, the combination of demographic reality, government policy in the region, ideological realities and the history of the region, calling for an end to the Israeli state almost certainly would result in a partial or full genocide, and so supporting the Palestinian people does require much more nuance than authoritarian sheep chanting "from the river to the sea" because that's the latest marching orders. It isn't accurate to consider the destruction of the Israeli state as just the destruction of some buildings and a few leaders, since it's also implied that a similar state wouldn't replace it. They intend for a friendly government to replace it, and we know what that looks like in the middle east.
I got vaccinated before it was mandatory to get vaccinated. The reason I did is that my workplace was shutting down every single time someone got the coof and I figured that eventually they would stop opening it back up if they kept on having to deal with that.
Once it did become mandatory, I was always outspoken in my support for people's choice not to, as well as my opposition to policies such as the vaccine passports. I have to travel for work, and I kept my vaccine passport inside of a Soviet passport that I bought as a little piece of protest against an authoritarian measure.
When the trucker protests happened in canada, in spite of being fully vaccinated myself, I donated to the campaign, and wants to gofundme shut down the first campaign, I donated to the second, double the amount. That would make me one of the people threatened by our fuhrer Trudeau with having my bank account shut down.
The unvaccinated are my brothers and sisters, as are the vaccinated who nonetheless fight for freedom. This fight isn't about vaccinated versus unvaccinated, it's about authoritarian sheep who do as they are told vs. Individuals who decide their own lives for themselves.
As an example of what I mean, a mere 4 years ago people who were unvaccinated or supported the unvaccinated were called Nazis and anti-semites by people who today are supporting the elimination of Israel (and thus the Jewish people within Israel) -- and while there are certainly things one can criticize the state of Israel, it doesn't matter -- these sheep don't have values, they have marching orders. They never even thought about Israel until the teevee told them how to think.
Once it did become mandatory, I was always outspoken in my support for people's choice not to, as well as my opposition to policies such as the vaccine passports. I have to travel for work, and I kept my vaccine passport inside of a Soviet passport that I bought as a little piece of protest against an authoritarian measure.
When the trucker protests happened in canada, in spite of being fully vaccinated myself, I donated to the campaign, and wants to gofundme shut down the first campaign, I donated to the second, double the amount. That would make me one of the people threatened by our fuhrer Trudeau with having my bank account shut down.
The unvaccinated are my brothers and sisters, as are the vaccinated who nonetheless fight for freedom. This fight isn't about vaccinated versus unvaccinated, it's about authoritarian sheep who do as they are told vs. Individuals who decide their own lives for themselves.
As an example of what I mean, a mere 4 years ago people who were unvaccinated or supported the unvaccinated were called Nazis and anti-semites by people who today are supporting the elimination of Israel (and thus the Jewish people within Israel) -- and while there are certainly things one can criticize the state of Israel, it doesn't matter -- these sheep don't have values, they have marching orders. They never even thought about Israel until the teevee told them how to think.
this 1000%.
If we just get more "users" then all it'll mean is a few instances cost infinite money and have way too much power and so have to start doing shady shit. If way more people are just doing their little thing then the resources required are decentralized, nobody has that much power, and nobody needs to pay that much to run their little slice.
If we just get more "users" then all it'll mean is a few instances cost infinite money and have way too much power and so have to start doing shady shit. If way more people are just doing their little thing then the resources required are decentralized, nobody has that much power, and nobody needs to pay that much to run their little slice.
Once the Rubicon was crossed, it would be crossed countless times until the whole decadent spectacle ended in collapse.
Our society is in a period of extreme elite overproduction. With income inequality getting worse and household income not keeping up with rises in prices (over generations, not just right now), a lot of people think the answer is more education and so we end up with more and more people highly educated. As more people end up in the elite class, naturally the people already in elite positions need to find ways to keep people out of elite positions to reduce competition. First they do that by rejecting anyone with "commoner attitudes", then by trying to find ways to reject other people in group of elites. For this purpose, all this junk is perfect. The sign over Auschwitz doesn't say "We need to gatekeep a bit", it says "Abreit macht frei" -- an aspirational positive message at the gate to a death camp.
As an example, my brother is a guy has a masters in English literature and is working as a local newspaper reporter for peanuts -- that's fine, but the fact is our society is creating way too many masters in English literature and there aren't enough positions for them all.
This is one reason why we've got the strange culture we have right now, because there's a lot of jostling for position, people playing musical chairs hoping to get into a seat before the music stops. Arbitrary, contradictory, ever-changing and draconian rules and such start to show up because with so many people there needs to be ways to exclude many of them.
As an example, my brother is a guy has a masters in English literature and is working as a local newspaper reporter for peanuts -- that's fine, but the fact is our society is creating way too many masters in English literature and there aren't enough positions for them all.
This is one reason why we've got the strange culture we have right now, because there's a lot of jostling for position, people playing musical chairs hoping to get into a seat before the music stops. Arbitrary, contradictory, ever-changing and draconian rules and such start to show up because with so many people there needs to be ways to exclude many of them.