Abilities Considered Unnatural

Classic Aspiring Rationalist/N00b Cult Leader/Physics and Maths Student/Transhumanist/Effective Altruist/Reluctant Intersectional Feminist/Crazy Cat Lady/Shameless Fangirl

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

Something went wrong with British public healthcare that did not go wrong in Australia. The British demand personal sacrifices of citizens in the name of protecting our NHS. The Australians vote for politicians who keep Medicare working.

Anarcho-capitalism as an ideology deserves better defenses than "public healthcare is shit because British healthcare is shit". Like even if the vile spew that would make a Ukrainian prison guard blush were actually true, it would be beneath you to not try to best the French. John Oliver is British. Like Alexey Navalny, it's not like he's this sparkling anarchist born of the dreams of the turn of the century, he's some milquetoast fucking liberal. If a country's government is so shit that the milquetoast liberals are doing an opposition, then you might actually have a popular mandate and you should use the milquetoast liberals. Gun enjoyers would probably object to his gun control episodes. However, you have to give him credit for appealing to Swiss gun culture as a superior alternative to America's rather than choosing "British police keep you safe" as his hill to die on. If you're going to take a "if the America liberals complain about existed, it would be awesome" stance then at least try to manage that.

[argumate]

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

jordies has a real thing about crackheads, like his model of the down-and-out isn't a homeless dude passed out on downers who's probably pretty grubby but whom you can generally stay 1.5m away from, it's the fucking nutter who makes your bus ride real interesting

Very American attitude

and yet he correctly recognises that if you go full American and cut the welfare then you just get a bigger violent nutter problem, and on the other hand that there are lots of lazy cunts who are technically in paid work. Whereas for the denizens of this website, the argument is this: you know all those dipshits who post stupid shit and you're pretty sure they're on the dole? Yeah? Now, compare with those dipshits who post stupid shit amid e-begging. Getting them on the dole would cut out the worst 50% of their blogs, and the parts that are most annoyingly spread around!

[feathershy]

possible advantage of forcing students to study Shakespeare in highschool: Shakespeare is so old that he doesn't land on one side or the other of the culture war; so he is a compromise option. Plus, he is a classic, so any demands for censorship seems extra absurd. And in this way we can smuggle novel to them ideas to the highschool students.

[isaacsapphire]

Also hilarious jokes about sex and sex workers, but you gotta understand King James English to get them, so only the people who most need the sex jokes (sheltered Fundamentalist kids) will get them.

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

Normie discourse on nuclear power seems to have been remarkably impervious to asking "hey, how are things going at Chernobyl?" but that dipshit SJW writer better not gain traction with their Asimov interpretation. The Second Foundation are Freemason-level creepy and we love them for it. If you want to worship a celestial bureaucracy for the West in the shape of the Roman deep state, well, psychohistory can give you that, but don't pretend it runs off your gated community vibes when the whole damn point of that strand of 20th century media was that it was a machine. A machine that, if not built with the telos of serving humanity, perhaps still may do so, and that was an honour to witness.

(You've got the update where you realise that early 20th century physicists were often atheists, yeah?) >Science fiction in the 1950s imagined flying cars, abundant energy and more – but it did so before Three Mile Island, before Chernobyl, before we learned, often through disaster, what happens when you prioritise speed over safety. ... Literal Chernobyl mention, huh? The author has a weird name but turns out to simply be another American, their minority voices a different colour of Americans. But hey, for the same reason that I noticed you didn't even do the little genuflection to Ukraine's spelling of the Zone because you're a level above that, I have read stories from some of the lesser known parts of the Empire. >Octavia Butler’s Parable series (1993-98) depicts communities surviving collapse through adaptation and care rather than escape to Mars. Wrong! Oh, the early chapters feel like they fit the vision of "Whitey's on the Moon", that the protagonist has been left behind. But while walking around post-apocalyptic LA with its artisanal violence, Lauren is dreaming of the stars, and she founds a cult about it. I grok this black girl a lot better than I do Le Guin.

Anyway yeah there's something subtly wrong with a) blaming everything on capitalism while using an example of a nuclear disaster that happened under an allegedly communist state b) building some anti-individualist narrative about the hordes of people who are here now without mentioning China Like, the author's slick enough to wrap the nuclear disasters up under a need for speed, but the sudden generalisation still leaves questions! Anyway, they don't think non-American military drones are worth mentioning the existence of, like holy shit a European might ask if we can trust the Ukrainians with such power but this guy can't even see the Ukrainians or the power.

[kevytmaitohorsma]

Reblog this photo of a käpylehmä to have a käpylehmä in your blog

It's a trick! If you reblog you get TWO käpylehmäs in your blog!

[kevytmaitohorsma]

They're traditional Finnish toys, little cows made out of spruce cones, on their way to see the world from one tumblr blog to another

[books-bread-and-brigandage]

@elodieunderglass not horrible, but things with legs?

[elodieunderglass]

I’ll send them on their lovely journey, thank you!

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

The Twitter right appears to be doing an ancient Greek version of the usual "true manhood is driving your enemies before you with your sword" / "true manhood is getting on your knees for Jesus" dilemma, where Odysseus is like a war hero but also is getting dicked about by the gods. The woke left sometimes got its panties in a knot over female characters being weak in stories where everyone was weak, like Katniss is superficially badass but is a plaything of the system, but having a female protagonist of your "war is pretty shit" story is feminist in its own way. But then, I don't think the right would like a "war is pretty shit" story, for all they're fearmongering about the draft.

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

>People just don’t understand that having people from the other side of the world – India, China – in a movie about how incredibly difficult it is to travel even short distances just makes Odysseus look incompetent and ridiculous.

I see the original was from Stefan Molyneux (yikes) on Twitter (yikes) so I mean what did I expect, but: Facetiously: Odysseus was trying to do a sea voyage, you're supposed to get around Afro-Eurasia by land. More seriously: getting around the Mediterranean is a lot easier than getting around many similar-sized regions of Afro-Eurasia by land, certainly seems to have been the case for the Romans. But yeah you need to square "the Silk Road existed" with "part of why shit from the other end of it was so expensive was the difficulty of travel" with "but given centuries of this kind of contact, some cultural things will spread hundreds or thousands of kilometres from their origin". The Far East is far away, but you know it's there, and something equivalent goes for the Chinese. The Americas, those are truly the other side of the world. It's an American production, I'd assume there's someone who's 1/16th Cherokee or who claims to be the Mayan kind of Hispanic.

[argumate]

People just don’t understand that having people from the other side of the world – India, China – in a movie about how incredibly difficult it is to travel even short distances just makes Odysseus look incompetent and ridiculous.

isn't the point of the Odyssey that it's difficult for Odysseus specifically to travel even short distances, for supernatural reasons? like it only took them a few weeks to reach Troy (after being stuck for a month waiting for the right wind / for Agamemnon to kill his daughter).

like humans reached Hawaii around this time, long ocean voyages were difficult but routine, Odysseus was just uniquely bad at them.

[coolxatu]

[bai-marionette-deactivated20180]

*leaves

[coolxatu]

where are you going

[markv5]

via https://t.me/russian_cat_meme

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

Pretty sure someone high up in the production of the Conan movies was really into horses. Like idk if there were being realistic but there's a lot of shots where you're meant to really enjoy those horses doing their thing. And like, obvs a lot of Western fantasy is going to have horses as a big deal, but this is very much not drawing on the knight-in-shining-armour tradition of cavalry is it? There's a decent amount of "Mongols are fucking cool" representation of mounted raiding parties, though...

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

To pile on all the shit wrong with me, I had a 24-hour stomach bug so nasty that a heaped teaspoon of vanilla yoghurt was a serious test. The only one of my prescription medications I expected to be able to keep down was the fucking weapons grade stimulant, because that is also precisely the one carefully formulated to be given to children. I mean, the way you're meant to do that is crush it into soft food to mask the disgusting taste, but food was a really bad idea so I just fucking lay there chewing it to make it dissolve faster in a mouthful of water. Like all stimulants I've attempted to put under the tongue or whatever, absolutely foul, but not as bad as stomach acid so that's a win.

[pervocracy]

observations from urgent care

- People who exercise a lot get knee injuries from overdoing it

- People who only exercise occasionally get knee injuries from being unprepared for the exertion

- People who don’t exercise get knee injuries from being out of shape

- Maybe knees just suck

[argumate]

I think Tyler Cowen has chose comfort, contrarianism, and class allegiance over truth and while he’s good at what he does it makes it impossible for him to be a truly great intellectual.

[argumate]

the urge not to be grouped with people making silly critiques of Trump (or Bush) should not encourage you to make silly defenses of Trump (or Bush), you can just make a better critique and still feel superior!

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

My mother force-tomboyed me but was so British about it that I didn't come out anything like what Americans past like the 80s think a tomboy is. But real Australian men in the 2000s did understand the spirit that led us to follow a burning bush into the desert with no exit strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxkjc_9gT6o

[abilitiesconsideredunnatural]

To understand the state of the kind of American Protestant who isn't Talarico, you need to meditate on my piece of shit mother and her reading CS Lewis to my nascent kinky child-self But in her repression, she wouldn't even let me watch the Americans who were self-aware about their culture, and hence I never experienced true satire of 2000s American bloodlust. But Contrapoints, who like I grew up in Australia's Langley grew up in, well, America's Langley, and yet is technically vanilla, can bridge the gap. To explain the British version of crime and punishment to any American who isn't mogging me by actually reading Russian literature, I'd point to her Saw video. And she, she can get me all hard and ready to understand the prophetic vision for our age, Idiocracy. Thesis: Idiocracy is a documentary Antithesis: Idiocracy is a eugenicist parable Synthesis: what are you, fucking Catholic, stop pretending you watch anything on the History Channel that isn't about aliens even to mine it for cheap ammo; it's a documentary