A Door on Other Time

Title is from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories". Handle means "storyteller" in Nahuatl. This'll mostly be about pop culture, linguistics, philosophy, history, and other things that interest me, but also about writing.

[tlaquetzqui]

[tlaquetzqui]

Honestly kinda want to start a collection of things people say about how alcohol and tobacco Taste Bad/Smell Bad, Actually that just reveal they have never tried them.

Unlit cigars, O Halo novel author, smell like chocolate or fresh-ground coffee beans. If Doctor Halsey finds the smell from a cigar box offputting, it’s odd. Especially considering how much coffee she drinks.

“Alcohol”, O Tumblr poster, is not in fact consumed on its own and is virtually flavorless, but if it did “taste like lead” that would mean it had a candy-like sweetness. That was why kids used to eat paint chips.

You don’t need to justify not wanting to drink or smoke. Good thing, too, because saying untrue things about liquor and tobacco doesn’t justify it.

[antinymphs]

Study for those interested

[tlaquetzqui]

If the first one said pornographic publication instead of magazine, I think the women’s numbers would look different…

[padbuck]

the devil is reclaiming los angeles

[beaked-whales-in-exile]

That's what you get for refusing to maintain or expand decades old infrastructure made for a fraction of the state's current population in the name of the environment.

[europe-abolitionist]

(popular leftist voice) these right wingers are so mad because they get no women. if you are a Good Person a woman will appear and suck your dick.

[lilkakow]

(popular leftist voice) these right wingers are all sooo poorrrr and stupid. They are stupid because they are poorrrr, racism would never exist in my suburban area

[zitongzi]

Popular leftist voice: these right wingers must have brain damage. They must be bigots because they are literally reta suffering from blsck mold, or brain damage.

[prettyflyforajedi]

Popular leftist voice: Every single right-wing person is literally so ugly and chopped, let me point out their exact features and how they're ugly. Having bad thoughts literally ages you. Good People are always hot and sexy and have kind countenances.

[greek-mythologies]

If I had had a penny, I was absolutely right about him making Penelope "the Feminist TM"

[mysharona1987]

[lizluvscupcakes]

To anyone confused- he said he’d give money to anyone who could give him a concrete action plan, then the UK called his bluff and showed him one and now he’s leaving them on read.

[daysleftofsecondterm]

Good LORD, the notes on this post are SICKENING. Your mothers raised you better than the way you’re behaving.

[tlaquetzqui]

Your mother also raised part of me. And then she brought it back down again.

[miss-rum-hee]

....This person literally just took away her breasts and curves, the fuck?

[saintofpride201]

Most of us are for the de-objectification of women, but a lot of people think that means "desexing" and taking away the most basic sex appeal.

Not to sound like a feminist, but that legit feels sexist in itself. Especially since it's only women that are getting that treatment.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

And many people will argue atlength that conventionally attractive men don't count as objectified.

[demonofbabylon]

pro prison leftists are so funny to me because i'll say something like "perhaps it is inhumane to send people to knife island where they must compete in the knife games" and someone will respond, thinking they've destroyed my argument, "I get not sending drug users to knife island, but are you really proposing we don't send (whispers) ...pedophiles to knife island? what else would you have us do with them?"

[needabetternamelater]

And yet you still didn't say what you wanted to happen. They also asked about involuntary confinement of all kinds, not just 'current American prison'

[fierceawakening]

Exactly what I want to know. What SHOULD have happened with Epstein? If we shouldnt have sent him anywhere, how should we have made sure he didn’t harm anyone else, given that the previous time he wasn’t sent to knife island he continued abusing girls?

Making fun of me for asking this doesn’t get me any closer to figuring out what your answer is, Demon.

[needabetternamelater]

So congrats, @demonofbabylon, you go in my queue as yet another dodge. At this point, I'm starting to think the prison abolitonsits can't answer this because they don't actually know. We all know how prison reform works but we were asking how prison aboliton would work.

[tlaquetzqui]

I mean, prison abolition can work. You just fine for petty crimes, flog for medium crimes, and execute for serious ones. You only need temporary lockup because nobody is in custody longterm.

This is very strange to the people that scifi writer Tom Kratman memorably dubbed ICOTESCAS, the International Coalition Of The Ever So Caring And Sensitive. But it’s a completely viable alternative to prison, known to work tolerably well, since it’s been used, with broad variations, in every civilization we have any direct records of.

[alan713ch]

"The mexica didn't sacrifice people that was a lie the Spanish invented"

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I HATE THE DECOLONIZER MOVEMENT SO MUCH

[alan713ch]

WE FUCKING KNOW IT HAPPENED! WE CAN SEE IT IN THE GLYPHS IN THE RUINS AND IN THE SURVIVING CODEX AND EVEN IN THE STORIES TOLD ACROSS MULTIPLE TRIBES!!!

The historical argument whether it was a sacrifice or an offering - whether they killed captive people or people offered themselves for the sacrifice is an ongoing debate, but for crying out loud, WE KNOW IT IS TRUE

Fucking decolonizer movement. Fucking idiots.

[alan713ch]

GAH I'm still angry

This is why I have never liked the decolonizer movement, at least not how it's been presented in Mexico - it tries to blackwash the Spaniards more than they already were.

Mexico sits in a weird spot in the Spanish Invasion narrative becaue Hernan Cortes saw what Columbus did and said "ew, no?" and mostly succeeded at not wanting to kill people! Also, like, literally EVERYBODY HATED THE MEXICA because they were FUCKING HORRIBLE PEOPLE! It is known that Cortes would've failed had it not been for Malintzin successfully negotiating an alliance with the Tlaxcalteca. But we also know that had Cortes failed, then it would've been fucking Pedro de Alvarado and now that bastard was probably even more cruel than Columbus ever were.

And yes, there were different attitudes from the Spaniards based on who had the crown - particularly with the Bourbons there was a stronger introduction of the caste system, while before it was less strong as there was a lot of early mestizaje. And it's not like I am trying to absolve the Spaniards - indigenous people are still feeling the effects of the Conquest.

But not to bring someone down, you need to elevate someone else. People are complex, and nobody's a saint, for fuck's sake.

[thestuckylibrary]

#when we say “you don’t become an empire by being nice that applies to the aztec empire too#two things can be true: Aztecs committed human sacrifice and that’s bad#and that didn’t justify what the Spanish did to them#and the Europeans did exaggerate human sacrifice and misapply it to tribes who didn’t participate in it

[hazzardevil]

Nobody ever seems to remember that the Aztecs ruled over a variety of ethnic groups that we know sadly little about today because of their colonialism.

They won a total cultural victory by getting the descendants of their subjects to identify with the empire after it ended and whitewash its behaviour.

[shieldfoss]

I think you'll find that only capitalists can have empires actually. Other systems are just sparkling Negusa Nagast.

[barryogg]

There's an old satirical story by Sapkowski, In a Bomb Crater, in which Poland is at an irregular war with Lithuania. A subplot involves the protagonist's friend with a last name Indyk (Turkey), whose family tries to naturalize as Lithuanian citizens.

The problem: their last name would be translated to Kalakutas. The friend's father tries to sidestep this somehow, but is rebuked by the immigration office, who point out that "kutas" is only a slur in Polish (being one of the many words for dick), and if he truly considered himself Lithuanian, he would have no problem with it.

I think of this every time some pagan or decolonizer tries to 'splain away human sacrifice, be it by Vikings, Aztecs, whatever. I'm sorry, I thought you wanted to repudiate the white, western, Christian morality? Why would you have a problem with human sacrifice then? The peoples you advocate for didn't consider every human life to be dignified and worth preserving.

And they continue to do so, even today.

[tlaquetzqui]

Columbus wasn’t actually very bad either, and most of the accusations against him came from his rivals. The lurid accusations against him were popularized in the English-speaking world by the Know Nothings and Klan.

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

i don't like that 'metal' here means like, iron maiden. dimmu borgir is taylor swift to me

[barryogg]

"Why do people consider Iron Maiden emblematic of metal here"

[tlaquetzqui]

“You don’t have to know everything about your magic system, no one in the real world knows everything about physics!”

Just because a vegan soprano doesn’t know exactly what will happen when she uses a borrowed shotgun on the zombies overrunning Broadway doesn’t mean you, the writer, can get away with not knowing. There are probably entire websites, there are definitely entire subreddits and forum threads, just for making fun of writers who get guns wrong.

If you make up a magic system and don’t know beforehand what is possible (you can revise it as you go but it has to stay consistent: from the reader’s perspective that has to be how things always were), it is indistinguishable from cheating. And we do in fact make fun of writers for that, too.

[worldweaverofmediocrity]

got a link to some of them?

[tlaquetzqui]

Well if you want to see people making fun of writers and guns, just google “James Patterson” and “guns”.

[beardedmrbean]

[granmabarb]

He was just a young man. His life mattered.

*nitter link below for those who can’t access the twatter. simply copy and paste to your preferred browser to watch the video and read the comments

https://nitter.net/Banksycat/status/2057500117905682762

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Henry Nowak death: Murder trial racism claim 'wicked lie', court told

Henry Nowak's alleged killer has claimed during his trial that he was acting in self-defence.

Here's the context missing;

>Vickrum Digwa, 23, claims he acted in self-defence after [Nowak] used a racist insult, punched him and knocked his turban off, Southampton Crown Court heard.

And;

>Police initially handcuffed the victim before discovering his fatal injury a short time later.

So, officially, the cops didn't even notice he was stabbed when they cuffed him.

Even being very charitable, that sounds a lot like incompetence. Were they in a very dark alley or something?

Still, the trial of his killer has been covered multiple times by the Beeb and other outlets.

Why did police handcuff Henry Nowak?

A Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, is standing trial for the murder of a Polish student, Henry Nowak, in Southampton, Hampshire

>It is admitted that Nowak, already weak from knife wounds, was trying to reach help when the police arrived. The evidence is that, having arrived, the police interviewed both parties; told that Nowak had started a drunken fight and racially abused Digwa, they immediately handcuffed him. Afterwards, they realised his condition. When he collapsed, they removed the cuffs and administered first aid. But it was too late. He died in their hands.

The popular narrative is that the police automatically arrested the white guy who allegedly made a slur. I think the punching complicated things, but I still wanna know why they didn't notice the stabbing.

[turtleduck-inc]

this is missing some of the big sticking points of this story. like that digwa's family was extremely complicit. his parents and his brother helped him lie to police on the spot. iirc, his mother even held henry down as he was bleeding out in the street. none of his family members were charged for any of this, last i heard.

but that's just a family of criminals. what's maybe more egregious is that henry told police multiple times that he'd been stabbed and one of the officers turned around and told him, word for word, "i don't think you have, mate".

they didn't just arrest him because they were told he attacked someone. they arrived at the scene and immediately started treating him with open contempt.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

That seems pretty polite to me, not "open contempt".

Especially when suspect lie about being hurt all the time.

Also, the original complaints were about Nowak, Digwa, and the cops' treatment of both. Not the family of either of any of those.

I have seen no evidence of any racial motive by the cops. Just assumptions.

[switch-up-snowfox]

The racial motive of the cops is attributed largely to

1, the family and suspect claimed racism in the first place to justify claiming victim status.

2, the murder weapon was a religious dagger that they were allowed to carry around as an exception to britains stringent knife laws.

3, someone's apparently put out the handbooks and such that the police are trained by and IIRC, it basically codifies "don't arrest the non-whites, arresting non-whites means contributing to racism" behavior, which people are also claiming is part of why they didn't bother checking Nowak for injuries at all until he collapsed and stopped responding.

also, as far as i know the only info we have of concretely what happened before the cops showed up with bodycams is the fact that nowak was stabbed and Digwa had the murder weapon. Dunno if there's medical reports on Digwa having any injury.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

1 and 2 aren't good evidence.

3. Were those handbooks for these specific cops?

What was the exact language used?

What are the rules and policies for this sort of situation if they were not acting on racial motives, and were they following those rules?

This BBC article says Digwa's brother called 999 and claimed Nowak was the attacker. Even if he was stabbed, it could've been in self-defense if they thought the call was true.

The operator also said they sent an ambulance.

And the cops called a bus and started CPR one minute after they arrested him. Which was one minute after they arrived.

So, two minutes total. That doesn't sound like they could've done a lot to help him even if they hadn't cuffed him.

The judge said Nowak's injuries were so severe he would not have survived, however quickly he received first aid, CPR or expert medical treatment.

Also, Digwa was convicted three days after OP's post. 21 year minimum sentence.

[judarud]

Notable medical specialist criminal judge said he would have died anyways. Case closed.

[syabm]

And you think the judge wasn't summarizing testimony from the actual medical folks who treated Nowak or looked at the evidence...why?

[judarud]

Considering that there is conflicting evidence related to that *AND* the case was about the stabber and not the negligence or lack thereof by the police officers I do in fact doubt that there was much relevant testimony to that.

[some-pers0n]

Genuine madness how people keep hyping up the taste of alcohol and it's absolutely repulsive and violently terrible. This tastes like lead and would be used for some sort of strange torture method as opposed to a recreational drink

[tlaquetzqui]

Lead tastes like candy, that’s why children eat paint chips.

[punster-2319]

How to make a generation cry with one gif:

[tlaquetzqui]

You could also use the big guns.

[important-animal-images]

@important-animal-images