Gotta wonder what just parking all these gas guzzlers on the south side of the Equator is costing us.
Not that it matters, since we have unlimited money for stupid military bullshit. But I’m about to hear a bunch of hawks tell me the US Treasury is out of money and we can’t afford Medicaid anymore. I can’t help see this next Glorious Christian Invasion of a recalcitrant petro-state as a big hole in my pocket leaking money.
I mean, it comes back to Dunbar’s Number. We care much more for individuals in our immediate circle than for “people” in the abstract.
There’s a spot in Houston’s Chinatown with a big gallery of claw machines. I think my success rate was better than 50%. Even got two at once on one try. But when its $2 to play and you’re winning toys that are worth less than $1…
Incidentally, they have a desk at the front where you can trade back your winning toys in bulk for bigger prizes. But they’re all random dodads you could get on Temu for a few bucks each. Like, you can turn in twenty stuffed animals for a cheapo touch pad. Basically a fancy kind of Chuck’e’Cheese ticket, when considered in bulk.
But if you’re looking for a dog’s chew toy or a way to bloat your 2-year-old’s stuffed animal war chest? Hard to beat the value in bulk.
Arguing in general is pointless.
To borrow a scene from “Thank You For Smoking”, it isn’t pointless but it is performative. The reason to argue is to get in front of a neutral or uninformed audience and state your case better than your opponent. Your goal is not to change your opponent’s mind. Your goal is to change your audience’s mind.
The DebateBro gambit is to raise personal exposure. The more you can get on TV and reiterate your views convincingly, the more people hear them and are swayed in your favor. You’re a salesman and the Debate is your opportunity to gather a crowd and entertain a public through conflict. But the goal is to sell your ideas to the crowd, not the target of your conversation.
I’ve found that arguing with conservatives isn’t about arguing with an individual. My father-in-law is a staunch libertarian, we go back and forth all the time. His positions change. My positions change. Yadda yadda.
But then the conversation ends, he gets back in his car, he turns on the Talk Radio, and he gets an earful of information and ideology that I never hear. And I throw on my leftie podcasts, getting a perspective he doesn’t hear. When we meet up again, we’ve had our brains saturated in information and ideas totally alien to one another. So the brief conversation we had a week ago doesn’t move our political alignment in any meaningful way.
Freckles AND a jawline? Unplayable.
The degree to which people will idolize God of War’s Kratos and shit all over Horizon’s Aloy is crazy, given how these are functionally the same character.
I really didn’t understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.
She didn’t look like the silhouette on a truck’s mudflaps. So she’s hideous by default. But then nobody seems to qualify as “hot enough” anymore. Sidney Sweeny isn’t hot enough. Taylor Swift isn’t hot enough. Ciri from the Witcher isn’t hot enough. Freya Allan from the TV Show of the Witcher isn’t hot enough. Fucking Jessica Rabbit isn’t hot enough.
Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough.
Almost as though its a heavily astroturfed community and many of the accounts are exactly this.
Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box
That’s just social media in a nutshell. You’re either a loyal footsoldier or a radical insurgent. But you need to find your opposing faction and do battle with them. And then, if you get too confrontational, the Mods/Admins need to ban you for doing exactly what the site incentivizes.
Per David Graeber in “Debt: The First 5000 Years”, people used to record debt with “Tally Sticks”. You’d notch the debt you owed at the end of a branch. Then you’d bend it in half. Creditor would get one end. Debtor the other. When you wanted to call in your debt, you’d hold the sticks up together to confirm they matched and that’s what was owed. This practice goes back to the Paleolithic Era.
Incidentally, the Tally Stick would often be longer on the creditor’s end. This was the stock of the stick and thus designated its recipient the “stock holder”.
But assignment and collection of debts isn’t the same thing as assignment and collection of rents and interest, which is at the center of the capitalist economic system.
Humans were constrained by their material conditions. Now that those material conditions have changed, their behaviors have changed to match. This is not a fixed state of affairs. Humans continue to transition between stages just like every other living being.
Greed is as much a part of modern human nature as fear and love. And it is the product of a social condition that rewards growth, punishes disobedience, and requires a larger community to reproduce itself. It is a consequence of social conditioning executed iteratively from parent to child. And a consequence of statistical survival and prosperity played out over populations.
What defines human action is not the basic libidinal impulse, but the interplay between people and their environments over lifetimes and generations. That’s not socialism or capitalism at its root. Socialism and capitalism are simply fruits grown from the post-industrial branches of the tree of human history.
“Russia risks new Lenin”
I mean, tell it to Jeffery Epstein. The man was pulling strings halfway around the world with his endless supply of blackmail and bribery.
For badmouthing a sitting President?
I mean, I can think of at least one administration that agrees with you.
Soviet Russia Born
This is such a weird way to start a headline. Alexander Smimov was 11 years old when the Soviet Union collapsed. Does he just have Gorbachev-particles in his blood from thirty years ago?
which administration—which you promoted
Jeronimo Gonzalez did what now?
Listen, if you … uh … like your Measles, you can keep them!
yet its not illegal to not have kids
Gotta get back to you on this. Currently being pummeled with billy clubs for having an unsanctioned abortion.
the purpose of romantic and sexual relationships is to bring into being the next generation of workers to build socialism
It’s so funny how you’ve taken some of the Silicon Valley Techbro logic and just inserted “socialism” into the center of it to let us know its bad.
You think the Brits would do that? Appoint a single family to a powerful position of authority and let them just loot the national treasury generation after generation? Cause I find that very idea offensive and suspect you’re just another Tankie Wumao Corbynite Bot.