Honestly Star Wars has always had trash writing, it was the people around George Lucas that made Star Wars good and the more success and fame Lucas got the less he listened to others and the worse the movies got.

Specifically Lucas subscribed to Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces which is a widely discredited work of anthropology and besides Campbell was an outspoken raging sexist (women can’t be the hero they have to help the hero he said many times).

It is a reductive, authoritarian way of telling stories, it only leaves spaces for the chosen heroes. I also find it makes the universe of Star Wars cynical, evil just happens because we are sinful and it is inevitable. It is boring and not very compelling.

Andor of course goes against the grain on all of these things, brilliant series!

Sure why would I question the wisdom of taking a mysterious pill offered to me by user TubularTittyFrog?

It’s monkey-brain thinking taking over

This is far more needlessly cruel than nature, monkeys are highly evolved for an extraordinarily challenging, diverse landscape with many threats and opportunities. They are not primitive enough to have their minds broken by cancerous ideologies that make them behave against the survival of themselves and their species.

What we are talking about is not primitive behavior, it is a hostile contagion composed of ideas rather than bacteria or viruses.

I’m also skeptical of mass surveillance laws, but I’m glad NYT posted this article so I could read an opinion from someone who disagrees, and I don’t think this establishes an opinion or stance on the part of NYT at all because it’s not what op-eds are for.

Op-ed pieces are about establishing the Overton Window, not establishing a news agencies position on anything. The fact that the NYT considers this part of a reasonable overton window is embarrassing and honestly revolting.

I know I am throwing stones in glass houses because I am saying this as a person from the US, but wow Germany is a really scary country, it seems like the culture is always extremely primed to radicalize its young men into serious violence around an obsession with masculine and machine strength/purity.

The US is a scarier country in most respects, and certainly has the same issue, but Germany is a much older culture and these brainworms seem to have ingrained deeper into their cultural mindset in some ways.

Are leftist movements growing to a similar degree among young people in Germany?

You know what would keep us safer? If the most prominent news agency in the US actually did its job and did critical journalism instead of acting like RT news.

For example, more intelligence gathering power given to intelligence agencies would not have stopped the Iraq war. If anything, the more power given to these agencies, the more official they sound when they make boldfaced lies because people assume they most know something actually substantiative with all that intelligence capacity.

We would have just launched even faster into the Iraq war.

Which of course is the point

I 100% agree about the importance of learning doggie language, after all studies have shown domesticated dogs are extremely adept at learning human body language and are excited and motivated to learn human body language far past the point really any other animal gives a shit about doing. We owe them the same curiosity and interest in their language!

Simple things like a yawn usually means “hey I’m just here not trying to start anything” or a playbow is actually an invitation into playful energy most of the time, or how dogs evaluate how nervous to be about the threat of a nearby unfamiliar dog or person by whether the dog/human’s hips/shoulders are aiming towards them or not (a dog has to “aim” it’s shoulders at something it is about to attack, so aiming your hips and shoulders to the side is a form of de-escalating an immediate threat of violence for dogs).

Knowing how to differentiate the stress/pain pant from a normal pant is also CRUCIAL to picking up when your dog is suffering.

• Train your dog with a wait command before going through doors, big dogs that try to barge their way past you out of excitement to get out the door are sort of cute but also incredibly annoying it can honestly hurt someone who is frail.

• If it is a young dog you trust and you are raising them, touch their paws lots. Pick their paws up and shake em like a hand, don’t be rough but just handle their paws so they become comfortable with humans handling them as dogs can be really nervous about this and it makes it extremely hard to inspect your dogs paws for a cut that is making them limp or something.

• similarly if you are raising a dog and it is too small to hurt you, when you feed your dog hang out next to their dish, put your face near theirs (ONLY with a dog you trust), give them pets, make your dog used to the fact that humans might come near their food but that humans won’t take away their food so they don’t need to be defensive.

• the more dog time you give your dog (where you do dog stuff with your dog) the more human time your dog will give you (where you both do human stuff and behave according to human norms). Going on walks, throwing the ball, rough housing, all of these things give your dog the mental stimulation they need to relax and behave

• a good dog park where your dog can socialize with lots of different dogs and learn their doggy language is not only a fantastic way to get your dog exercise it gives your dog the opportunity to practice interacting with other dogs.

• periodically (gently) surprise your dog by nabbing their tail and giving a tiny tug, or poking them a bit on their rump when they aren’t looking. BE GENTLE and always transition to pets and praise after the initial surprise moment for your dog. If you have a large dog and some kid gets loose and runs up behind it and yanks your dogs tail for no reason and entirely takes your dog off guard, your dog will be used to this kind of bullshit and simply be surprised it is a tiny human annoying them rather than a full grown one. This can be a really dangerous moment if you have a huge dog like a german shepherd, because even if the dog isn’t normally aggressive towards kids, if the dog isn’t already well used to its owner frequently low leveling annoying it with boops, it might react in fear and self defense. If you extract enjoyment out of mildly annoying your dog for the goofs sometimes, you know tease them in a loving way…, they just aren’t going to react in fear and self defense when they are surprised by a human coming out of nowhere and abruptly surprising them.

• if you are raising a dog and you can figure out a way for your dog to meet cats, it can be helpful so that they don’t meet one in a situation you need them to behave and they go “WAIT WHAT IS THAT”. Same thing with human kids and babies.

• going away for the weekend and leaving your dog with a friend or someone else’s care is actually a really good thing for dogs that tend to get super attached to their owners (german shepherds are a classic example) as it stretches their mind a little bit encouraging them not to see their owners as the only thing in the universe, it gives them experience trying to relax without needing their One Human.

• get a collar that helps with walking better than a normal collar that just chokes out dogs when they pull, if you get the right collar/harness it will feel like you are walking an entirely different dog

• big dogs can absolutely learn how to “be mouthy” while also being incredibly gentle even though they have a mouth full of knives that can crunch through bone. Remember, dogs will carry puppies by their scruff. Dogs like humans have to learn the language of play, and they have to learn when they are being too rough with their mouth when they play with you. Many people train their big dogs to NEVER be mouthy which is understandable but if you know what you are doing your dog can absolutely learn how to play wrestle with you on the ground with their big scary mouth “chomping” (extremely gently) on your arm and both of you going at it having fun and being careful not to hurt each other. A dog can also be easily trained to get the signal for “ok playtime is over now, let’s wind down this energy” or “this is not the correct social situation to go nuts and want to play”. I tend to use the loose command “gentle” with my dogs, and I say it with a calming intonation. I have found practicing playing with a dog and then giving the command/signal that playtime is over is extremely effective over time at getting dogs to learn to become aware when they can be crazy tornadoes of chaos and when they need to chill the fuck out. If you do this right, your dog won’t ever play too rough with anybody because they aren’t going to be getting the right body language signals from those people that now is supposed to be playtime and they are invited to play,

• all dogs love it when you scratch just above their tail on their rump, it is like a cheat code for making a dog stop worrying about who you are as a stranger

• have friends over to normalize humans coming in your house, if you don’t your dog can easily fall into the habit of barking like a maniac every time friends come over and it can be scary and disorienting for guests

• the way you keep your dog from barking way too much (and jumping up on people) is literally just making the commitment to be more patient than your dog in making sure to always give feedback to your dog when they do those things (whatever your training style is).

• take your dog for dumb trips in the car to the store and back sometimes, definitely try to make it fun for them (and definitely don’t leave them in your car in the sun when it is hot for really any amount of time) but your dog will likely enjoy the stimulation of all the sights even if it is just a boring car trip and assuming you don’t have to go in wherever you are going for too long they will see it as a fun adventure. This helps train your dog to be chill about car rights and not loose their damn mind every time you are actually going on an adventure with them.

• if you have a big dog it is worth getting them used to being picked up in a bear hug occasionally as this can make dogs really nervous if they aren’t used to it and you don’t want to try to make them used to it in an emergency where they can’t walk or you need to lift them onto something. Make sure to support their rib cage (and back legs if possible) when you lift.

• Dogs are like people in that most of them want a job, they want something they can do for the pack that they are good at. Understand dog tricks from this perspective, you are giving your dog a job that they can do that gets them praise from you and other people and stimulates their brain.

I wonder why people might feel compelled to honor Irish immigrants specifically, surely it is just because people are being mean to those poor British people from that tiny backwater island.

Do you know your history about how Britain starved Ireland during the “””””potato famine””””?

History, it makes you understand things!

organice is front end that runs entirely in a mobile or desktop browser that allows you to access and edit org files easily with a touchscreen or mouse and keyboard. It obviously doesn’t have full org mode functionality, but it does a have a calendar view.

https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

All you have to do is navigate to https://organice.200ok.ch in your phone’s browser and then pin it to your start screen. The PWA is downloaded and you can now access a remote webdav server with the locally saved front end of organice. No data is sent to organice, the only function of the website is to give you an easy place to download the PWA to your device using a web browser.

I love love love love org mode, it is just simple yet so powerful and there really is nothing else like it, I can’t really recommend anything else in good conscience here, especially since most other options (except for logseq https://logseq.com/ which I am not sure does everything you want?) are commercial and who knows what the hell will happen when the company goes out of business or is bought out by someone else?

I recommend Spacemacs or Doom emacs as a nice starting point for emacs, or you can just start with basic emacs and build it yourself as org mode is included in the default distribution of emacs.

An additional thing to think about, there is an android release of emacs coming up, so org mode might get much more accessible on the go in the future!

No worries if you aren’t interested, I am just providing some additional context.

https://www.spacemacs.org/

https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

This video is a great thorough but approachable explanation of why org mode is so special:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEeStDz_imQ

“It’s always two steps forward one step sideways with you Gary”

A social network/online community can either be significantly profitable or healthy for its users. Pick one

I know this seems pedantic but this is “european classical music”, just calling it “classical music” helps cement the narrative that music is a European project that white Europeans pioneered, developed and mastered instead of music being a global phenomena of human culture stretching back millennia.

I mean whatever I am not saying calling it classical music is absolutely terrible but it is worth thinking about because there is actually a lottttt of politics behind “Classical Music” and none of it is cute or fun.

Wait… what happens if you use the Hamas recognition software on Netanyahu…….?

Cover it up probably

What really scares me is that Ireland was a prototype for british colonialism and the Palestinian genocide is clearly a similar a prototype, and it terrifies me what it is a prototype for.

Everybody who is cool with Palestinians getting slaughtered like this have no idea that this is a pilot project for authoritarian violence that will be administered in the future and everyone should be terrified because virtually everyone will be a target of it.

What?

I mean as long as UBI isn’t spearheaded by a bunch of libertarians who think they are bravely forging an unprecedented path forward towards creating a social safety net while ignoring the long history of social safety nets in different societies, and the entire left movement in the US that fought successfully for things like the 8 hour work day.

I think UBI can be great, but there are wayyyy too many libertarians into UBI to the point that the ruling class has a super clear route to catastrophically cutting social welfare programs across the board while saying “we don’t need these if we have UBI!”, making UBI completely insufficient, and fooling libertarians into taking the bait hook line and sinker because they don’t have political or historical knowledge about how social welfare in societies is actually achieved through organization of worker power to leverage against a hostile ruling class.

~30% of the US population are white men but according to that link 52% of mass shootings are perpetrated by white men. That is a ~22% increase over what you would expect if the US didn’t raise its white conservative men to be violent and hateful and specifically teach them they are the only types of people who are allowed to be violent or threaten the possibility of violence in public spaces.

How is this not evidence that white men are the most dangerous people in the US? Not in terms of being likely to commit a crime of desperation but rather to be an utter loser and decide to shoot a bunch of random people out of pure hate? White men might not be the most likely to hurt you in the US, but they are BY FAR the most likely to hurt you for no reason other than you who happen to be and what you happen to represent to them.

A man that feels he has nothing to lose is a dangerous thing.

Billionaires with nothing to gain but money for moneys sake are far more dangerous, it’s just they are going to kill your loves ones with crushing debt or an opioid prescription not a bullet.

Between 1999 and 2015, around 350,000 people died from opioid addiction related deaths in the US.

350,000

Guess whether any of the Sacklers went to jail who knowingly pushed opioid prescriptions in situations where it was dangerous or unnecessary based rational from studies conducted to purposefully sell more opioids?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827319300096#:~:text=According to the CDC%2C there,counties from 1999 through 2015.