What the american people want has almost no bearing on what the elites who control the american empire decide to do.

No major policy has matched public opinion since the end of the civil rights era. In gender, ethnicity and wealth, our representatives are not representative of us either.

It’s naive to think we live in a democracy.

I was gonna recommend Othan by Heilung, it sounds like casting a spell.

I don’t know that it’s wise to trust what anthropic says about their own product. AI boosters tend to have an “all news is good news” approach to hype generation.

Anthropic have recently been pushing out a number of headline grabbing negative/caution/warning stories. Like claiming that AI models blackmail people when threatened with shutdown. I’m skeptical.

elected him

Someone doesn’t understand how our oligarchy’s electoral system works.

She’s depicted here with dark hair, she’s just wearing a yellow headdress.

There’s a great story in i think the pseudepigrapha, where child jesus is playing with his friends and gets upset and turns one of his friends into a pillar of salt and mary comes and yells at him to turn the kid back.

This this this. It’s basically impossible to get that rich without having endangered others.

Multiple genres of games are about doing mass killings for fun.

You know that bit when you get bored playing some open world game, go around killing everyone, then reload? Postal is That: The Game. Just without the reloading.

Or that was how i thought about postal 1&2.

And fully co-operating with ice means breaking countless laws.

So, logically, all NOPD are criminals!

North and south are fundementally different, climate and biosphere -wise, so i don’t think it would ever make sense to people to modify the same word to describe two very different things. East and west maybe less so, but dawn and dusk are pretty important differences.

Some polynesian cultures use two main direction words, which usually translate as something like mountain-ward and beach-ward.

You gotta say “nor-nor-east” instead, that’s a blast.

given the fossil and archeological evidence for the spread of H. sapiens into the Levant and Arabia during [the era 130,000 to 80,000 years ago] and absence of Homo neanderthalensis from the Levant at that time, we argue that H. sapiens was responsible for the tracks at Alathar.

Scientists: Since we already know H. Sapiens was here then, we think they did it.

Headline: Human footprints shouldn’t be here then!

Those articles contradict your claims, because you’re wrong.

They very clearly state that men report intimate partner violence at lower rates than women do, which explains why M/M IPV numbers are low and F/F higher.

Thank you for proving youself wrong! I trust you’ll update your opinions and beliefs accordingly.

There are several more. My favourite is proprioception - the sense of where your limbs are. Phantom limb syndrome exists because we have proprioception.

This was just a top notch meme. Informative and a very clever arrested developement reference.

The rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

I guess i don’t really see the point. Is there a strong use case out there, or is this a marge’s potato? (“I just think they’re neat”)

I was careful to say perminant heirarchies for that reason. Bao Jingyan said that power originates in the contrast between the weak and the strong, and the cunning and the naive. I’m inclined to agree.

But we can have social institutions that break up and flush out these natural channels of inequality, rather than institutions that metastize them into heirarchies.

Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen. We could tax all inheritance above say 500k at 100%. Eliminate all personal debt every 7 years.

There’s a lot we can do to make heirarchies more temporary.

There are lots of ways to organize people that aren’t heirarchical, or that dilute or limit power rather than concentrating it.

Directly voting for laws, appointing officials by sortition - like being picked for jury duty, pushing decisions down to neighbourhood councils, consensus decision making, a culture that always permits insulting the successful and plenty else has been suggested.

It all comes with drawbacks of it’s own, of course. And having grown up in a heirarchical society, it can be very hard to imagine anything else, until you read about all the times and places where people have organized themselves differently.

There’s a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.

Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.

Or that’s how i see the problem.