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am i the only one who enjoys political debates more when the other person is just as snarky as i am? at that point its less of an argument n more like two angry cats having a play fight I LOVE IT SO MUCH
A nice round of mutual “we’re all having fun here” political discussion is one of my favorite things tbh. Kinda requires mutual understanding that both ultimately want the same thing (freedom and human thriving more or less) but perhaps have different ideas about how best to achieve it rather than one considering eg. people of the other person’s kind as a plague on society or as inherently evil. Two people can both sincerely believe that very different socioeconomic programs would be most likely to create the most pleasant and functional society and be friendly.
You guys (=American supermarkets) should sell milk by the litre like we do. It's a much more suitable amount for small households, and those who need more can always buy more cartons.
I agree. I felt inspired in passing to post about the milk in my life that I bought today (Jun 8) and will keep you posted when I've finished it.
These 4 cartons are 1.75L or slightly less than 1/2 gallon each. The cheery text below the date says "Best before, but not bad after" or in some versions "Best before, but often good after" as part of a campaign to reduce food waste.
The "Columbian Exchange" line of fantasy criticism catching on so much is evidence that most people do not actually think about fiction very well. Tolkien can get tweaked for it because he was explicitly writing a pre-history of Europe, but no, it is not in fact a universal narrative law that, in a fantasy world with multiple continents, potatoes, tomatoes, and maize will always be native to one continent and apples, brassica cultivars, and wheat will be native to another, why the hell would it be.
Of course, you could say that about other cultures-bought-in-bulk fantasy stereotypes. No reason that Thrygvar Wulthenstaal can't be a bearded, turban-wearing man from an agrarian culture who mastered the macuahuitl to drive away the leopards and jackals that threaten his freshwater fish farm. But readers and writers alike don't seem to want that.
Allow me to propose as a tongue-in-cheek replacement the "British Empire" line of fantasy criticism, for something else copying modern effects without their cause.
Through history, the vast majority of people and cultures have only opposed slavery when it happens to the ingroup. "But what if you were the slave?" Well that line of argument was thoroughly tested with Ayuba Solomon Diallo, who was first a wealthy slaver in Senegal, and then he was captured and sold into slavery and shipped off to America to work on a plantation, and then he managed to get his freedom and come home, and he went back to slaving again. The actual experience of being enslaved in the very bad way didn't convince him slavery was wrong, only that it should happen to his enemies. The idea of mass convincing people by mere argument is absurd.
Abolitionism, in the sense of broadly generalized opposition to slavery, was historically extremely rare. There have been many lords and rulers who rescued friends and neighbors from slavery out of personal interest, or manumitted some slaves to show off their wealth and charity, or declared Jubilee for a great celebration, but they did not reason that they should end slavery as such. The fact that abolitionism is widespread in the present is a bizarre historical fluke.
Abolitionism popped up only about three times and places in history independently: First in medieval Western Europe around people like Queen Balthild, which died out when the Renaissance brought slavery back because all the cool people (Romans) had been doing it. Second in medieval Korea, which didn't spread beyond the border of Korea, and I say "border" in singular because their sole neighbor for much of that time was China. Sometimes they were adjacent to a mongol horde too, but those didn't care much for borders anyway. ;-)
Third in Renaissance/Industrial Age Britain, which is the one responsible for pretty much all other abolitionism in the world through the power and prestige of the British Empire and its influence through the colonies. Sometimes a country like Japan would decide to westernize by copying everything from Britain including the ban on slavery, sometimes the Brits forced it on other people at gunpoint. The general course of the latter was that the British would sail the Royal Navy over to Mwambaland and say "Hey, you're going to abolish slavery now" and the King of Mwamba would say "Fuck no I'm not, I need those slaves for my mines" and then the Brits would kill the King of Mwamba and most of his army and family tree and find some grand-nephew to put on the Throne of Mwamba as a puppet ruler and tell him "You're going to write a constitution abolishing slavery now, also we get the tariff revenue from your ports".
[insert nuance and caveats because I'm summarizing centuries to a paragraph, history has a lot of detail that you can read about in longer books.]
So if you see widespread abolitionism in fantasy, you might ask: "when was the British Empire here?" :^D
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Also it would be very funny, also he's a great American who loves America and the American people (as opposed to a lot of people who love what they imagine building after they dismantle America for parts), also @daisukitoo's other reply:
This would make Donald Trump's face the symbol of unethical, clandestine financial transactions.
also there's a kind of real life Scrooge McDuck vibe about him that's fitting for the American national character. My opinion of him is complicated.
speaking of douglas adams, it seems that, i assume as part of the general religious revival, his place in the culture has been given over to terry pratchett, who i've never read and shall continue not to read, but who i gather is a sort of cs lewis of unitarian universalism
2c: Terry Pratchett is also a bit like if JK Rowling had died shortly after releasing the last Harry Potter book, instead of sticking around long enough to catch the mob's attention.
Argumate supports the police in the Henry Nowak story because they killed a white guy, he’s being disingenuous. Ask argumate about the Rotherham grooming gangs for proof
You don't need to tell me that, I'm on record saying that "grooming gangs" is an overly PR-friendly euphemism, "Rotherham rape rings" is more accurate, and the somewhat-hardline-but-still-reasonable take is that they brought back slavery to Britain.
There's a long and murky sliding scale from alienation of affection, to giving alcohol to teens, to giving cocaine to a 12-year-old. The general category of the Rotherham rape rings is disturbingly large and contains many different degrees of manipulation and coercion used to make children sexually available in different cases. In some of the extreme cases, victims were held at gunpoint and branded and chained up so they couldn't escape from being pimped out for repeated gang rape, and that crosses the line into slavery.
In other cases, parents attempted to recover their children, and the response of cops was to arrest the parents for disturbing the peace, and hand the children back to slavers.
Argumate directs a reader's attention to more moderate cases when he discusses the Rotherham rape rings in terms like:
cops [...] being relatively uninterested in the sexual assault of children in the foster care system
which is also a true thing that got lumped into the category, but I think a less important and less relevant thing if one wants to understand why people are mad and what should change.
There is a direct connection b/w leftist ideology presuming that white people are racist and the policemen jumping to the conclusion that Nowak was falsely claiming he had been stabbed in a desperate attempt to avoid a racism charge.
this story is the current obsession of those who believe in race war, most notably the owner of twitter and the rubes who follow him, and in some ways it's even dumber than the George Floyd obsession, not least because people should have learned better by now.
if I was the cop in that situation I would probably have assumed the guy on the ground was drunk! which is what British cops usually have to deal with when they get called to deal with someone being disorderly; murders are rare and the perpetrator doesn't usually call the cops.
and when the cops realised he had been stabbed they arrested the murderer and jailed him for life; this story is only an outrage if you believe cops should be clairvoyant, or arrest anyone of Indian ancestry on sight regardless of what's happening.
but obviously if you're already mad as hell that an Indian family is allowed to live in Britain in the first place then this is a convenient excuse to stoke racial hysteria and call for dumb policies.
Looking at the bodycam video it really doesn't *look* like he'd been stabbed, you can't seen any blood or anything.
They arrive on scene to a call having been told that some drunk dude was being disorderly, find him delirious under a windowsil, drag him out, gently lay him in the recovery position. He says he's been stabbed, the guy who called the police says nobody was stabbed, police agree it doesn't LOOK like he's been stabbed but that they'll still check. And then they check, and then one minute later they call an ambulance. And once they figure who stabbed who the stabber is promptly arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Anything the stabber says to try to weasel out of life in prison (that the stabbed guy was racist and hate criming him) are swiftly dismissed.
The evidence of 'Two Tier Policing' here is that a murderer attempted to play the race card. But failed! The attempt to avoid a life sentence for murder by claiming the guy was racist and playing the victim didn't work, and they guy who did that got a life sentence.
But, like, The British Public can't really be reasoned with, so c'est la vie.
it's certainly not difficult to find more egregious examples of British cops doing a terrible job, but the incidents that spark discourse storms tend to be the dumb ones.
It's unfortunate that the police put handcuffs on a guy who turned out to be dying of a stab wound; but yeah I think given the situation the police were in - as soon as they come up to the incident, a family of sikhs including the murderer is actively lying to them about what happened, it's late at night and dark - I don't think it's super-unreasonable that they made the wrong call in the moment and corrected themselves within a few minutes and called help. And it seems like at that point there was no way to possibly have saved Nowak's life.
Anyway, race war is already happening - it happened when the brown sikh foreigner randomly murdered a white person, his whole family tried to help him cover up the crime, and the specific method they used to cover up the crime was by claiming that he was racist. The people claiming it is wrong for white people to care about this are also engaging in race war, in a sense.
I think the George Floyd incident was not merely similar, it was a contributing factor, because British policemen knelt for Floyd while on duty and in uniform. That was a very bad precedent to set, showing that some British policemen are so devoted to racial politics ("war" is an exaggeration) that they'll take sides in a foreign racepol event, and the institution as a whole is fine with this. Once the institution has behaved that way, it is unsurprising that many people will read its later actions in that light, actions which might have been ambiguous in a void.
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You guys (=American supermarkets) should sell milk by the litre like we do. It's a much more suitable amount for small households, and those who need more can always buy more cartons.
I've been using Claude to explore the chemical balance problems of the sci-fi trope "agri-world feeding city-world" (ecumenopolis) and hearing fascinating new things that I also checked from a non-LLM source.
Selenium, for instance.
The Food and Nutrition Board at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has established Recommended Dietary Allowances and Adequate Intakes for selenium. These values range from 55 to 70 mcg for adults and from 15 to 70 mcg for infants, children, and adolescents, depending on age and life stage.
It's a necessary trace element for human health in very small amounts; but it's toxic in slightly larger amounts that are still very small, and easy to get by accident from safe-looking foods like Brazil nuts.
In fact, one ounce of Brazil nuts (approximately 8 medium nuts) contains 544 micrograms of selenium, which is 777 percent of the recommended daily allowance.
Recommendation: No more than one or two Brazil nuts in one day, eaten only occasionally.
The warning level for such things is often set very low to be on the safe side, but there's still reports of selenium poisoning from small amounts.
A 61-year-old female patient who presented to the emergency room with vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain accompanied by discomfort in the left hemithorax, with electrocardiographic alterations with ST-segment depression and troponin I elevation, with echocardiogram and coronary angiotomography without alterations. On direct questioning she claimed to have consumed in the previous days half to one Brazil nut seed per day to weight loss, after which, selenosis was diagnosed.
Caveats about low accuracy of self-reporting, people frequently underestimate how much they've eaten.
To maintain a healthy equilibrium, in general, the ecumenopolis has to filter out net imported substances from its waste and atmosphere, then send those and only those back to the agri-world for reprocessing. This is a massive undertaking of replacing intra-planetary atmosphere and water cycles with a manual chemical distillation system on an inter-planetary logistics chain. Authors like to handwave this by saying "The filters". Some of them forget the return supply entirely.
Some elements are a bigger problem than others. Selenium is perhaps one of the subtly worst, because: the healthy range is so small, most selenium ingested passes through humans into wastewater, it's very hard to filter out of water, and it's imported in kilotons per year but has nowhere to go on an ecumenopolis. Earth has large environmental buffers of soil and sea for selenium concentration. Most 'polises in fiction have only a few decorative lakes. Selenium also bioaccumulates, becoming even worse of a problem if the 'polis tries to supplement its food supply with concentrated local growth like aquaponics.
Some other issues that would arise from shipping food one way:
Source world would exhaust the easily-available atmospheric and soil carbon in about 400 years by binding it into plant matter that is shipped out, but well before complete exhaustion the field productivity would fall from lack of atmospheric CO2. If the planet has an Earthlike amount of fossil fuels, burning them all to refill CO2 buys about 500 years more.
(note: exact time varies with scale, these estimates are based on feeding an ecumenopolis world with circa 5x Earth's current population.)
There's a lot more carbon bound in Earth's crust, but putting that into the atmosphere fast enough means replacing a chunk of the Food Planet with Mining Country.
Phosphorus is probably exhausted on a similar scale of 600-ish years but academic sources have much larger error bars on bioavailable phosphorus.
Nitrogen has a different problem: there's lots of it in the atmosphere but natural processes don't fixate it fast enough for us, let alone for a city-world. Humanity is sustained by the Haber-Bosch process producing fertilizer to make up the difference, at scale.
Ammonia production via the Haber-Bosch process is estimated to comprise 2% of the world's total energy consumption.
Casually, an agri-world would need an Ammonia Factory Country, which in turn would need a Power Plant Country (maybe a second one, since the automated harvesters probably needed the first one).
I Executed The Demon Lord With One Flawless Strike And After A Brief Power Struggle The New Demon Government Is Substantially More Committed To The War Because Of Some Reason I Don't Know
I Successfully Overthrew The Demon Lord And Instituted Demon Democracy But They Voted For A Commie So The CIA Not Some Fantasy Equivalent The Actual CIA Who Have Known About Magic And Alternate Realms The Whole Damn Time But Won't Just Unisekai Me Launched A Counter Coup And That's When Things Really Went To Shit
I've seen this post a few times now and, like, seriously
Do you think that believing armies require leaders to function and removing their leadership causes harm to them is "a flawed belief in Great Man theory?"
It's hard to know what unit to measure "greatness" with, but I find it helps thought to have at least some idea of a scale where Great Men can be measured in units, and one reframing for that is Value Above Replacement (VAR).
If a time traveler slips birth control to Napoleon's mom, how much worse is the 'average' French general who replaces Napoleon in the timeline? How much earlier does alt-hist-France lose or back down? How much less influential is the Napoleonic Code and accompanying legal reforms?
Or turn it around: are there Incompetent Men, or is everyone between average and helpless in the face of structural forces? If the alternative timeline imperator of France is tactically incompetent or isolationist, do you think the French footsoldiers are nonetheless destined to mutiny so they can subjugate half of Europe in spite of their commander? Surely not.
But even if Napoleon had zero VOR, killing him in the middle of a military campaign would have a significant negative effect on that campaign and that is the part I'm talking about.
I Executed The Demon Lord With One Flawless Strike And After A Brief Power Struggle The New Demon Government Is Substantially More Committed To The War Because Of Some Reason I Don't Know
I Successfully Overthrew The Demon Lord And Instituted Demon Democracy But They Voted For A Commie So The CIA Not Some Fantasy Equivalent The Actual CIA Who Have Known About Magic And Alternate Realms The Whole Damn Time But Won't Just Unisekai Me Launched A Counter Coup And That's When Things Really Went To Shit
I've seen this post a few times now and, like, seriously
Do you think that believing armies require leaders to function and removing their leadership causes harm to them is "a flawed belief in Great Man theory?"
It's hard to know what unit to measure "greatness" with, but I find it helps thought to have at least some idea of a scale where Great Men can be measured in units, and one reframing for that is Value Above Replacement (VAR).
If a time traveler slips birth control to Napoleon's mom, how much worse is the 'average' French general who replaces Napoleon in the timeline? How much earlier does alt-hist-France lose or back down? How much less influential is the Napoleonic Code and accompanying legal reforms?
Or turn it around: are there Incompetent Men, or is everyone between average and helpless in the face of structural forces? If the alternative timeline imperator of France is tactically incompetent or isolationist, do you think the French footsoldiers are nonetheless destined to mutiny so they can subjugate half of Europe in spite of their commander? Surely not.
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I once suggested that nonbinary "they" should conjugate as third person singular, whereas indefinite "they" should retain the third person plural. Being a perfect compromise, in that it would have annoyed absolutely everyone, it never caught on
Ah yes, the proposed "they is" to distinguish one person from "they are" of a group. I might have had more respect for singular-they if its users had followed through on singular-ness, rather than copying plural verb agreement and making English even worse.
Long tradition of that, really. You know the silent B in "debt"? The word used to have a sensible spelling of "det" or "dett" in Old English and then some people added the B to highlight the relation to Latin debit.
I checked on the recent post that I figure you're reacting to, and found @mereologic had blocked me. I will interpret this as him fleeing the field and conceding the argument.
But that means venturing into territory beyond all known lands, a wild and mountainous region filled with monsters, and dragons, and worst of all…Armenians.
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