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]

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

Have you seen Dances with Wolves (1990)?

Yes

No

Haven’t even heard of this movie

Remaining time: 2 days 21 hours

[Note: This poll is a re-do of an older poll, as the original poll for it received less than 1,500 votes.]

[tlaquetzqui]

The language consultant they used was a woman, and apparently they asked her how she would say things rather than how the characters would. Siouan languages have men and women speak in two different registers (think watashi desu vs. ore da ze in Japanese), so basically to Lakota speakers all these badass warriors are talking falsetto.

[mossadspypigeon]

[tlaquetzqui]

One of the things the Israelis did in fact do is settle places that the Arabs couldn’t make livable. So no they are settlers.

And if a Jewish person believes “settler” has an inherently negative connotation, they have no right to complain that their history is being lied about, since they apparently endorse lying about other people’s history.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

[h4ganah]

”we talk about the holocaust too much already”

is the too much talking about the holocaust in the room with us right now? As a Jew. Just. lmaooooo. Most non-Jews (with the exception of many Germans who are often very well educated on this topic and often feel genuine sadness over what happened and a true desire to avoid the mistakes of the past even tho of course Germany has antisemitism too) could not name even the most basic facts about the holocaust - like where the Jews who were killed were or why the holocaust happened or where Jews were killed or any major perpetrators other than Germany - and have never felt one ounce of actual feeling over what happened.

Yeah lmao it is legitimately mindblowing. Always adds insult to injury when the very same people complaining about it make it their personal life mission to use the Holocaust as some fucking "lesson" which suspiciously often seems to be directed at jews for some reason

[syabm]

It's worth noting that many "anti-Zionists" today are still repeating the same racist nonsense that predated the Nazis. Sometimes by centuries.

[tlaquetzqui]

The Holocaust is literally the only genocide that all Westerners learn about in school, lolwut?

[weirdtranssexual-deactivated202]

just read a post with “12,500 years” of palestinian history mentioned and boy fucking howdy now they’re claiming palestinian history goes back before the entire history of civilization, before the entire holocene.

my god, you don’t need to lie about palestinian history. palestinians won’t magically lose their right to self determination if their history in the region is only a few hundred years old.

[discordantq]

Giggling about the concept of this, not just because it’s silly, but because it proves that Pro Pallies do actually know that Jews are indigenous to the Levant. If they didn’t, why would they be trying to get into a dick measuring contest about how long a place has been a place?

It’s Schrodingers Israeli. Simultaneously a colonizer who has no history on the land prior to the 50’s, and an ancient, entrenched evil that can only be overcome by an insane claim of indigeneity predating human civilization.

Pick one guys.

[syabm]

Might be DARVO. Trying to make Palestinians look like the indigenous folks, while Israelis are the "settler colonists". I've noticed that bigots often try to steal their ops' arguments.

[tlaquetzqui]

All Levantines are indigenous to the region but if you wanted to take up the cause of the Canaanites who were conquered by Hebrews (a different group of Canaanites) to form the land historically known as Israel or Judea…their only living descendants are the Christian minority of Syria and Lebanon. And it’s been so long we can’t tell which of them should get it.

Muslims in the region are Arab invaders.

[idle-drifter]

I had this little conversation last month. I don't know where they calculate the 85%. But I do get paid for my time and labor. Otherwise, I would quit. The nice thing about not owning the business. I'm not attached to any debt incurred by the owners.

[beardedmrbean]

I own a store, I pay people $20 hr to work there, if the store makes money I make money and my employees get paid $20 an hour, if the store breaks even I make no money and my employees make $20 an hour, if the store loses money I make negative money and my employees make $20 an hour. AC unit exploded, we need to replace it now, all the profits for the week are now in play replacing the AC unit, I make no money, my employees make $20 an hour.

If I make a shit ton of money I may give my employees a bonus, or I may squirrel it away for another potential store loses money time in the future.

Would my employees like to join me in the gamble of making money with the potential risk of making negative money, or would they like to be able to keep a steady stream of revenue?

[brosef-von-dudehomie]

If a guy tells you he'll give you 99¢ of every dollar you make a company but he keeps 1¢, then makes that same deal with 1,000 other people, you don't get to bitch that he's making more than you.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Profit is what you have after expenses and liabilities.

Which includes paying employees.

This isn't even remotely addressing brosef's point.

Bosses can still make more than employees even if the employees get to keep the vast majority of their "labour value".

[nonenosome2]

I remember when people were mad a CEO made millions and people were like "that should have went to bonuses for the workers", but since so many people worked for them it would have been like a quarter per person, once.

[syabm]

I think that was the Walmart CEO? Or some other big company. I think a lot of people just start hearing anything over a million bucks as ∞ money.

[tlaquetzqui]

Secretly, everybody is those largely apocryphal primitive cultures whose numbers are “one, two, many”. At most there are a few more numbers between “two” and “many”.

[jewish-joy]

A very progressive group at my college just posted an infographic that states “ Zionists believe that Jewish people are indigenous to Israel” and I am losing my shit.

They said this in a post including that it’s okay to kill Zionists and they explicitly support all armed resistance

This is quite something. This is really quite the situation.

[funkopersonal]

wtf this is actually insane. this is... i dont even know what to say or how to describe it. its just... I cant quite believe this is what American colleges are coming to...

As a high schooler applying for colleges next year, this isn't making me too excited to go to college at all.

[snakelung]

"Zionists believe in historical fact" is a fascinating new reason to hate Zionists

[chutzpahchesed]

“This is why these conversations are impossible. You keep retreating into facts.”

I went to an anti-Israel dinner party. It did not go as planned.

They described it as “a safe space for difficult conversations.” What they really wanted was an Israeli who would sit quietly and confess.

[the-library-alcove]

I'm in awe that they think the BBC, of all media, is "justifying" it. The BBC is so institutionally antisemitic that they were repeatedly offered free resources--workshops, educational programs, etc--on how to be LESS antisemitic, and they turned the offers down every time.

[rosebramblewolf]

"Disagreement is welcome in the way vegetarians are welcome at a barbecue: theoretically, warmly, and without any intention of accommodating them."

that link has some very fine writing

[marq-winks1067]

Antisemitism has been greatly increased by the actions of Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. No news organization is perfect. Israel has been murdering reporters, doctors, nurses, food service people and anyone else in Gaza trying to help the victims of the massive and overblown retaliation from Israel in regards to what appears to be the allowed horrible Hamas attack against Israel. I say allowed because Israel has some of if not the best intelligence in the world. The biggest questions are why did Netanyahu remove the military away from the border wall hours before the incursion, why did he ignore reports from the border watchers that something was up, why did he take so long to send help to the area being hardest hit in Israel, and how much funding was he giving Hamas prior to the incursion?

[syabm]

[tlaquetzqui]

Other things Zionists believe include “the Pope is Catholic” and “bears shit in the woods”.

[takashi0]

"Antisemitism has been greatly increased by the actions of Israel in Gaza and the West Bank." Hey Tumblr I thought Victim Blaming was supposed to be a bad thing

[syabm]

It's the classic "Israel removed the defenses so they could get successfully attacked and have an excuse" conspiracy theory.

Which, even if it was true (it's not), doesn't actually remove responsibility from Hamas and their militants for murdering hundreds of people, which was their goal anyway.

It's just point-scoring.

[tlaquetzqui]

It’s just barely possible that Mossad allowed 10/7 because they knew it would get the Israeli public to support a war, and finally take out Hamas (“amoral and manipulative” is a spy’s whole job description). But even if that were the case, it wouldn’t excuse Hamas for attacking. “Yeah I left your door unlocked so you would get a breakin and be scared enough to get a security system like you should have a long time ago” makes the person saying it an asshole, but it doesn’t excuse the home invader.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[wire-smith]

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

[moral-autism]

It's true that colonizing Mars wouldn't be very useful right now. It would be really cool, though! Plenty of non-billionaires think it would be really cool too. Building a chapel with lots of fancy ceiling paintings isn't very useful and involves a lot of human drudgery, but we tend to still be happy that the hyper-rich of previous eras did that sort of thing.

Also, I'd say the Timnit Gebru quote on AI aged poorly, but frankly it was also poor in 2025.

[shieldfoss]

I feel like there's just a fundamental misunderstanding going on.

If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth?

Illegal on Earth

Same with a starshade to cool Venus.

Illegal around Earth

Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations.

Illegal on Earth.

So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

You, and people like you, have made it illegal to make Earth better. They're hoping to reach Mars before you also make it illegal to leave.

[magus7a]

this. Making mars comfortable is probably impossible, it is however less impossible than convincing a significant portion of the population to stop trying to make things worse for people like Elon

[shieldfoss]

For everybody. Those people have made it so you can't build a high speed rail that doesn't even cross state borders, how the fuck are you supposed to fix an entire planet when they live on it?

[fipindustries]

is this one of those pithy jokes like "death and taxes" that only work in like a cutesy folksy level?

like, even taking political opposition into account, on a purely raw, net consideration of "what is possible to achieve" with our currebt access to raw materials and power geberation it is still like orders upon orders of magnitude easier to reshape the earth than to make mars habitable.

like what are we saying right now, "we would be fixing the earth if it werent for all these naysayers and busybodies making it illegal, so clearly mars continues to be the more feasible option"?

[samueldays]

Briefly: The original American transcontinental railroad, which passed through California, was built in about 6 years (1863-1869) for about six billion inflation-adjusted dollars. California's currently ongoing intrastate railroad project has already exceeded its budget by that much time and money.

Longer:

Let us be generous to California and note that the 21st century state has much less opportunity to build on unoccupied land, or "unoccupied" land where the government expelled all the previous occupants. So they budgeted more time and money for fewer miles of rail. Let us suppose they set a reasonable baseline. (This is not entirely sarcastic.)

In 2008, California authorized ten billion dollars for a rail project to be done in 2020.

It is 2026, the California rail project has cost twenty billion dollars and counting, the rail program is not done, it is not even close to done, reports say that a small part of the planned rail could start carrying passengers in another six years.

The 171-mile Merced-to-Bakersfield stretch of high-speed rail could begin passenger service by Jan. 1, 2032, according to a report released Friday by the state agency administering the project.

Completion maybe in 2038, expected total cost maybe a hundred billion, large variation in estimates from different sources.

Even granting the original higher baseline budget, the overrun is measured in multiples of 19th century transcontinental railroad cost, in both time and money. That's fucked up.

(data caveats about inflation scaling across long periods, and the transcontinental railroad was funded partly by land grants of land whose value was closely tied to getting a railroad, etc, so there's a lot of wiggle room in comparative estimates... but still, multiples.)

"what is possible to achieve" in terms of reshaping the Earth appears to be on a downward trend in California.

[switch-up-snowfox]

If i may also, there's a point to be made about "it would be easier to fix earth" and the examples listed are events that would trigger the kind of mass casualties and enviromental changes that would probably leave humanity unable to fix earth for fuck knows how long. Like its not just a matter of "it happened now we need to fix things" its "how do you keep the people alive and the technology intact to fix earth after?"

The point of folks who are trying to get humans onto multiple planets is "this makes it harder for one catastrophic event on earth to leave humanity wiped out or crippled for possibly centuries."

[tlaquetzqui]

So you build O’Neill Cylinders in the Lagrange Points, you don’t waste time and energy going a gravity well that’s over a hundred times as far away. Especially not one where it’s a frequent occurrence to have so much dust blow around that some years, an entire hemisphere doesn’t get a spring. And that dust is corrosive, toxic, and magnetic.

Mars is for chumps.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Source

[skulki-d]

"Why does everyone focus on this one and the rest have no notable presence?"

The question answers itself, guys. This isn't hard for anyone who isn't willfully ignorant of the answer.

[syabm]

Yes, racism.

They looked for or latched onto an excuse to hate (supporters of) Israel.

It's not even that they usually cite supposed evidence of AIPAC exerting undue influence, or what they actually push for. Just existing is bad enough.

[tlaquetzqui]

Ted Cruz literally said his his job is to represent Israel just as much as the US. But it isn’t, and he should have been impeached for saying it was. And I would say this about a Knesset member who said their job was representing the US, or a PAC that pushed for a similar attitude in Israel.

I support Israel but AIPAC is sketchy as fuck.

[granmabarb]

Congratulations to the employees. Loyalty earns its own reward 🪐🌌💫

*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/heyshrutimishra/status/2065470413753487700

[radicalcavecryptid-deactivated2]

Conservatives have zero value or worth in their lives so they cling to other people's success

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

You seem very mad that Elon Musk has lifted more people out of poverty than any leftist policy has ever come close to.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

Elon Musk is a conservative.

Also, that account looks suspiciously like the standard troll format.

Hilariously, they recently defended this following post. I say 'defended' but it was really more 'insult people who disagree without actually addressing the original'.

So when rich people spend money on luxuries, it's evidence they don't care. But when a rich person makes lots of other people rich, including working-class people, conservatives are still wrong for celebrating it?

It's almost like this person is just saying whatever comes to mind to hate on conservatives and rich people!

Which is a lot more pathetic than anything they've said about conservatives.

PS: it's kind of hilarious to see a red - you know, people who are often driven by envy and (stereotypically) their own career failures - get mad at "conservatives" for celebrating the good fortune of working-class people, just because a billionaire capitalist is responsible.

[glowsticks-and-jesus-deactivate]

Isn’t it just the coolest thing that we can talk to Jesus directly? Like… we don’t need temples or blood sacrifices or offerings or idols.. we can just go the creator of the whole universe and tell Him everything on our hearts and minds. How amazing is that?

[tlaquetzqui]

The temples and blood sacrifices were never for just talking, and Jesus specifically still receives blood sacrifices—it’s just that he’s the one whose blood is being offered.

[ryan-sometimes]

I think it's so funny how we bred JOBS into dogs. I have two shih tzus and they were bred to be lap dogs. All they care about is looking cute and cuddling with people. Meanwhile my grandma has a border collie and that dog needs to feel so useful all the time, he acts like he will pass away if he doesn't have a job to do constantly

[halomancer]

On one hand this is extremely fucking funny, but on the other hand, it really boggles my mind how many people punish their dogs for just… doing the thing they were bred to do.

Your husky isn’t “hyperactive”, it’s bred to pull sleds for 8 hours straight and you have it in a 400 sq ft yard.

Your English sheepdog isn’t “pushy”, it’s bred to herd sheep, and you have neither to space nor the herd to allow it.

Your terrier isn’t “nippy”, it’s bred to kill rats and your hamster looks a hell of a lot like one.

Your Catahoula isn’t “mean to animals”, it’s bred to hunt any and all animals smaller than it, and you didn’t acclimate it to your cat.

Your Lhasa Apso isn’t “yappy”, it’s bred to bark at any tiny noise and alert watchmen to intruders

Like Jesus Christ, if you can’t provide an environment where your dog can’t fulfill its literal life purpose, maybe?? Don’t get that dog??? And if you do, maybe know the breed characteristics so you can redirect those traits into more constructive outlets????

[lemonsharks]

Both your most common doodle's parts (labra and golden) want to hunt and retrieve water birds so the best suggestion I can give y'all is congratulations on your new duck hunting hobby.

[safetytank]

#people will overlook the perfect breeds to suit their needs based on just their looks#and get a work dog because it looks cool

[queerb]

tags from @gnarlystarships because YEAH

[maggiedeshiboux]

@gallusrostromegalus

[gallusrostromegalus]

Any time someone sees Herschel and says "AWWW I want a Corgi <3" (because he is Very Cute (TM)), I immediately reply: "Do not get a Corgi unless you have a job for it to do. They were bred to bully livestock across the hills of Wales. This is basically a Border Collie that knows he is cute enough to get away with murder. If you get one and it doesn't have a job, it will apply its livestock-bullying instincts to YOU. Herschel's job specifically is to help manage my crippling ADHD, because I don't have a bull for him to micromanage." This gets me odd looks at the home depot but it does get the point across.

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

christopher nolan shakespeare would be like “our much ado has been about nothing”

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

“our twelfth night is coming to an end”

[coldswarkids]

"that love's labour sure did get lost"

[curly-cottage-girl]

“that midsummer night was a dream”

[the-davest-of-uncles]

"that to be wasn't"

[beardedmrbean]

[morgan5451]

[the-davest-of-uncles]

democrats: what do normal americans like so we can hate it

[baygeethefirst]

The Cost of Teaching Girls That Assertiveness Is Confidence

For fifty years, psychology and education treated female accommodation as a defect to be corrected. We rarely asked what that intervention w