tannertan36
wallacepolsom
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Discoholic 🪩
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Show & Tell
Three Goblin Art
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Kiana Khansmith
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
izzy's playlists!
Mike Driver
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Claire Keane
if i look back, i am lost
Xuebing Du
Origami Around
PR's Tumblrdome
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@bmpixy
Idle musing, but I wonder if a part of the current brand of American Stupidity™ is the fact that for the past century or so, a vast portion of our male population has either played the sport that hands out significant amount of head trauma or idolized one of the people who has, and I wonder if we'll look back at the current form of that sport the same way we look back at leaded gasoline
“Why should a French or a German citizen be born with access to world-class services and well-protected rights (actual implementation on the basis of minority status may differ), while a Somalian citizen is not only denied those things, but also faces huge obstacles in becoming a citizen (or even a resident) of anywhere else? If you are born a citizen of Japan, there are 190 countries you can travel to freely without a visa; if you are a citizen of Afghanistan, there are only 25. If you are born a U.K. citizen, and feel like a change of scene, you can pay $7 for permission to go to Canada, hop on a flight, and stay for up to six months without anyone bothering you. If you are born in a refugee camp, it can take years before you even get a chance to live in a place like Canada. So how can we possibly consider ourselves to be people who care about freedom and autonomy, when thanks to borders our destinies are practically assigned to us at birth? Is it absurd to form your own state? Or is it more absurd to have states in the first place?”
— Aisling McCrea, No Man Is An Island?
Ok, so Somalis and Afghans are people, but why are they people that other countries don’t want moving into their countries? Like, generally including adjacent countries in Africa/The Middle East? Why aren’t nearby and culturally similar countries taking advantage of this opportunity to expand their economies?
Like, this is literally free money lying on the ground and nobody is picking it up, right?
They are, in fact, moving to neighboring countries. For instance, in 2017 about 300 thousand Somali refugees entered Kenya. As a point of a comparison, in that same fiscal year, the US only admitted about 110 thousand refugees total from all countries. Additionally, to continue about Somalia, there are many migrant workers originating from there. While I cannot find any numbers, the fact that Somalia has recently passed extensively legislation to regulate and protect it's migrant workers speaks to it being a non-negligible volume. The reason we don't hear about those sorts of migrations is for the same reason a Kazakhi probably hasn't heard about Mexican migration to America - it's too distant and too insignificant to be informed about.
kids deserve so much more respect and it turns out that saying that is a great way to locate the horrible people in any community <3
you'll say something as simple as "no child deserves to be hit" and people will crawl out of the woodwork to explain why they should be allowed to beat a 6 year old for spilling some water
you'll say "i think it's weird that adults literally have control over when children are allowed to use the bathroom" and up pops a teacher to say that when they're not shouting at the kids they teach, they're trying to stop them from hiding in the bathrooms
you'll say "i think children shouldn't be forced to eat food they hate" and here comes someone who feeds their kids plain rice and boiled chicken (while eating a nicely seasoned stirfry) claiming that it's okay actually and kids shouldn't be allowed to taste things
you'll say "i think kids should have bodily autonomy" and in comes someone who pierced their babies ears before it was even 24 hours old, frothing at the mouth because their kid wanted a haircut and thats somehow an insult
children are an oppressed class and everyone should be looking back at their own childhoods and making sure they don't ever make a child feel the same way they felt.
We literally just found life on another planet and everybody is just like "and?" Life on earth so wild rn we don't even care 💀💀
Scientists find new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life.
To be more clear, it's not 100% it is 99.7%, which is .2% less than confirmation (99.9~%) but it is also expected to rise to confirmation as they learn more considering their initial testing was much lower and rose to a whopping 99.7% at their last testing. To most this is considered IT as far as finding life!
I remember when they first found possible signs of life on this planet there was a nat geo article and the last couple sentences really stuck with me
Also, just for another layer of clarification, it's 99.7% that certain gasses are there that, on Earth, are only known to be produced by living organisms. If we apply that here, the planet could have oceans with life on them. But they don't actually know what the surface of the planet looks like, and there's still a chance that the gas could be produced other ways in conditions unlike any we have on Earth
Bold claims of ‘biosignature’ molecules trigger an outpouring of scepticism.
So basically, we've found smoke, but it's too early to say whether or not it's a gun?
less confident than that. it's more akin to us not even being sure it's a cloud of gas, let alone smoke, let alone gunsmoke
How come only they had the spine to try an insurrection though? I said this when it happened but the only thing wrong with it was the ideology behind it. Imagine how far a violent anti government mob could go if it was made up of people who actually know which things the government is doing wrong.
The question of why the left/blm/opposition failed to show on January 6 has always been there for me. The leadership knew, they absolutely knew, and they chose to not show up to storm the capitol, on a day when they could have claimed to be saving democracy too.
The institutional left isn't willing to risk the power they do have; the oppositional left knows that the media hates them and so will turn any action they take into the worst possible interpretation of that action; and the part of the left that's crazy enough to try is either dead broke, unwilling to organize, completely lacking the means, or is hamstrung by the first three groups. (The differences between the left and the right here is that the oppositional right is at the very least tolerated by the media and there's a much larger overlap between the oppositional-right and right-crazies than there is oppositional-left and left-crazies, bolstering the number of people willing to try.)
This is Money Snake. She only appears every 312 years.
If you reblog her picture within the next twenty-five seconds you will have good luck and fortune for the rest of your life.
I reblogged her late last year and my 2024 has been very satisfying work-wise and (secure enough to not stress out) money-wise so far. Money Snake is wise and good.
Not worth taking the risk
snek please bless me
Haven’t seen a Tumblr good luck post in a long time, and I especially loved the money snake back when. Snek plz.
Complete list of the greatest military geniuses of all time
General Tso Tsung-t'ang
Colonel Harland Sanders
the rest of them don't even have a decent chicken recipe, so we're done
thought of kung pao chicken, but apparently the guy was a governor, not a military commander
If this wasn't specifically chicken recipes, Wellington would be an option.
also while Colonel Sanders was in the military and was a Colonel, he was not a Colonel while he was in the military. he was granted the honorary title of Colonel by the governor of Kentucky, and in that sense the title is more akin to receiving an honorary doctorate than any expectation or ability to lead a military unit. thus it is my opinion that Sanders should be struck from this list, leaving General Tso Tsung-t'ang as the undisputed greatest military commander of all time, lacking any peers.
someone stop me from making a whole set of this, please
i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess what’s gonna happen next, and yada yada
so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise
apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time
then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years
and god i think about him all the time. like. that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, i’ve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it
like i tried to tell him suspense isn’t about having no fucking clue what’s going on, it’s about having expectations subverted in novel and interesting ways that nonetheless accord with one’s understanding of the story’s universe, etc
and he’s just like “no. suspense is when i cannot guess what is happening next, full stop. quantum physics is a suspense novel”
Brain: "Why aren't you doing anything? You're never gonna improve if you don't do anything, you'll never make anything of yourself if you just sit there and do nothing."
Me: "Fine, I'll try and make something."
Brain: "Oh, you're making something? You're genuinely trying to do something, and it isn't coming out absolutely perfectly?"
Me: "I mean, yeah, of course it isn't perfect, bu-"
Brain: "How *dare* you try to make something! Look at this, it's shit! All shit! Throw it into the garbage, set it on fire, then leap in after it! You're not blowing it out of the park, therefore you're worthless, so might as well die!"
Me:
y’know, if instead of hating myself for not making things every time I wanted to try to make something, I instead actually tried to make something, I’d probably have made a lot more things
unfortunately, I’ve realized this about a decade too late to undo how much I’ve hurt myself with my old philosophy
Yeah, sure, the government forgot that they had their replicators set to ‘bombs’ rather than ‘masks’, that’s why there’s a shortage. Oh, wait, that only exists in Star Trek. Maybe the government can walk into all those bomb factories they own and tell them that they’re now going to make masks. Ah, dammit, they don’t actually own the bomb factories, do they? Well, then the government will tell the people who own the bomb factories to make masks instead. Except no, because the bomb factories have equipment and materials for making bombs, not masks. I’m sure a mask made of RDX and steel will work wonderfully in keeping out the virus. And even assuming that they would switch over their production to masks, that would mean getting rid of all their bomb making equipment, materials, and personnel trained in making bombs, and then replace it all with the equivalent for making masks. Then they actually have to make the masks, whereupon they have to be shipped off to where masks are needed, then distributed to people who need the masks, and all of that is completely ignoring all the overhead our market economy imposes, but nevertheless means ‘we won’t have masks now, but we will later’ and hey, isn’t that what’s being said right now?
You know, you’d think that knowing the answer on how to get myself to keep writing would make it easy to apply it. After all, I manage to put together a session for my tabletop group pretty much every week, so the answer is clearly to just get it out there, and then obligation to other people will keep my going. Yet, despite knowing that, I never do that. It’s always something else on top of that, like “I don’t have enough to put out there” or “I have no idea where to put the sort of stuff I’d like to write” or “I have no idea if I’m even a good writer, so why should I take the chance of exposing people to something that is potentially garbage”.
And yet, still, I have that answer. Maybe I’ll be able to do something with it.
always and forever
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Twitter screenshot
Srsly Wrong Podcast
@SrslyWrong
message to my enemies: when the revolution comes you’re not just gonna get the wall, buddy, you’re gonna get four walls, a roof, clean clothesm good food, education, and quality health care because that’s what every human being alive deserves
[End id]
Everybody declaring that we should eat the rich has clearly forgotten that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
People say that the best thing about being a writer is that you get to express yourself and share truths about the world or whatever
But the REAL best thing about being a writer is that you get to name characters things like Parsimony Schnapp.
Naming characters is an absolute joy, and reminds me of a little saga from the Exalted tabletop game I ran. A little backstory in that Exalted naming conventions are all over the place - one guy might be named something recognizable as name like Volk, while another might have a flowery literally-translated-wuxia name like Ardent Emerald. So, I decided to have some fun with this and have a series of friendly NPCs to assist the party be apart of the Red Fish family, named so because all of their names followed the pattern [shade of red] [type of fish].
So, first my players met the information broker Ruby Minnow, as part of them getting together as a party. Later on they met a sorcerer named Crimson Trout, who helped them with some demon business. Next was the boat-merchant-who-didn’t-ask-too-many-questions Vermilion Bass and his pirate wannabe son Sanguine Barracuda. My players thought they hit the punchline when I introduced Salmon Salmon, a village priest who helped them in beating up a rogue god.
But I had one more trick up my sleeve, and it requires a little tangent to explain. So, throughout the first ‘arc’ of my game, there was a recurring minor villain who went by the sobriquet ‘Ominous Star of Death’. Very mysterious, wore a mask, but only seemed interested in collecting ancient and powerful swords rather than anything immediately world-threatening, so she was able to do her thing in somewhat peace. Until, of course, the party uncovered that no, her gathering swords actually was world-threatening, and they would have to treat her as a serious and major task.
However, they were just a smidgen too late in going to stop her, and Star successfully achieved her goal, using the swords to free her master from his centuries-long imprisonment to do as he pleased with Creation once more. His first words upon obtaining freedom? “Thank you, Red Herring.”
I wish I could have seen the looks on their faces.
The sacred mystery of any deterrence theory is that it should stop me from doing something I would otherwise do. If I claim that I am a typical person wrt this enforcement system, yet I would never do the Bad Thing, and if any circumstance that could push me to doing the Bad Thing wouldn’t be stopped by the deterrence, then what use is this punishment? It must only have in mind a vanishingly small portion of the populace.
Yet if I do admit “I would do the bad thing except for the threat levied here”, well uh, all of a sudden I would be treated as a degenerate and dangerous. Who can trust anyone that would murder you in your sleep, if they could get away with it?
I think a lot of people WOULD tell you that it’s only a small portion of the population they need to deter. I don’t know if they’re right to argue that, but I think they would bite that bullet.
the fact that millions of murderers in the 20th century were technically legitimate and thus never punished due to the fact that they were wearing uniform at the time suggests that morality is much more contingent on social context than we might naively expect, and that maintaining strong norms against murder is actually a relatively recent social technology that not all societies have and it is worth preserving it.
So in other words, “If I were not raised in this murder-hating society, and if I thought I could get away with it, then I would murder”.
Yes, but that’s a needlessly obtuse way to frame it.
Someone who lives in a peaceful and supportive community, who has a remunerative job that isn’t too awful, who has a family that loves him, will very likely never once consider turning to murder. That same guy, in the counterfactual world where he lives in a dangerous slum where only violent criminals prosper, working a back-breaking job for barely enough to survive, might well consider turning to murder. But, uh, he’s probably not sitting around contemplating the personality and the incentives of his counterfactual self. People usually don’t.
**********
The actual effective response here is something like:
Have you ever been to a place where there are no police? Deterrence sure seems to be doing something, at least on the macro level.
Which is not actually a surprise. If you’re contemplating a model of human nature in which everyone would immediately turn to violent savagery if it weren’t for the immediate deterrent effect of the law, then yes, you will rightly conclude that it’s very stupid. But the deterrent effect of the law is enough to make a bunch of people, on the margins, somewhat less actively criminal than they would have been otherwise. And the absence of those people’s criminal behavior is enough to make other people less criminal than they would be in a counterfactual more-criminal world. Etc. This is an actual domino effect.
Also known as “how can we build norms that stick?” in other contexts.
Yeah but that’s because “preventing murder from being a viable way to get what you want” is very different from the bloody-glee that is known as deterrence. If any time you commit a crime, something happens, the fruits of it are taken from you, you have to go through an investigation and a trial and at the end make restitution, then people are less inclined to crimes. And that does seem to work! But doubling or tripling the punishment, so that in a game theoretic way rational people would now see the expected outcome is net negative, even if they’ll probably get away with it, does not work. No one thinks “oh, that’s ten years in jail, not just five years, well, nevermind.”
I would commit tax fraud if I believed no one would notice. But I believe the government would notice and it would almost certainly be ineffectual and cause me at least some hassle. I have no idea what the punishment is.
Not to mention that increasing the punishment can cause people to say ‘well, I’m already going to jail forever anyways, might as well double down’. For instance, the Dazexiang Uprising, which was caused by the penalty for a soldier being late to their post being death, so they figured they might as well rebel if they were going to be executed.
