Hegar

Yeah, I’m guessing it was that, which won an IgNobel prize like a decade ago.

If you’ve ever worked in a call center, this kind of thing happens from time to time. After a couple times you learn to ignore it and push through.

I think you’re confusing approved and appropriate.

Kicking a bigot or a creep off a train is appropriate, if even it’s not done by an official, approved authority figure.

Support for that doesn’t mean supporting behavior that is unapproved and inappropriate, like religious persecution.

Relying only on action from approved authorities doesn’t make it any more likely that the actions taken will be appropriate. As the police show us daily.

Fellowship.

At least from me. It’s lunatic christian speech for “friendship”, as if having friends without the bible being involved is dangerously queer.

If I see someone using the word fellowship outside a LotR discussion, I’ll downvote because they’re almost certainly an evangelical, christian nationalist or some such danger to the world.

I feel like ‘fascist dictatorship’ is used in common parlance to just mean a political system without effective representative mechanisms, even though political scientists or historians would use more specific definitions.

I’ve heard terms like managed pseudo republic - there’s a lot tightly controlled theatre of representation that you wouldn’t need in a textbook dictatorship, even if the effect is the same.

There are obvious and strong autocratic elements in putin’s personal power, but the need to keep key elites on side - and everyone (including actual generals!) building PMCs - highlights oligarchic elements.

There’s also the resource-curse so there’s petro-state elements.

The state ideology is a little loose to fit neatly into fascism, but is certainly heading more in that direction.

A hybrid mafia state seems to describe it fairly well from what I know, but I definitely think it’s too unique to fit into any one textbook definition.

That’s an easy block. Not today, troll!

I don’t have a problem with the smell - if anything I love smelling it everywhere. It reminds me that the world can get better.

But people vaping large stinking clouds annoys me, so I can sympathize. I don’t think that people should go to jail for annoying others though.

"This is stealing and needs to be looked at that way,” said a property owner

😂

That song is so fucking good. Just unreasonably good.

Pop songs aren’t written by the singer and more of the writers are men.

There’s no reason why we should be, we just are. Like everything else.

The best thing about the super bowl is that it’s the christmas eve of not having to hear about the super bowl. The anticipation! It’s so close!

I do find that very comforting.

It reminds me of a bit in the outer chapters of the zhuangzi that’s talking about fearing death. It points out how bad a lump of iron would be if it demanded to only ever be a knife and never recast into anything else.

How am I to know that the current configuration of the molecules I’m made of is the best use of them? There will come a time where everything that’s me is recast and put to better use.

If you like that character just go watch some Nina Hagen music videos instead.

She was the inspiration for the character, she’s the original punk opera prodigy, she’s crazy and she was once a strong contender to be the german voice of marge simpson.

Smack Jack, So Bad, Naturträne, Imma Lauter are all tracks I still listen to a lot. Her recent cover of 16 Tons is great too.

the meaning, the dream-manifestation, is more important to them than the actual experience.

I’m going to be thinking over that for a while.

Back home I used to go to the annual exhibition of the top high school art students. The explanations were often long-winded, pretentious, not always super coherent. Fair enough I was too in high school. But there was one I loved. It was a very industrial looking metal sculpture of fish skeleton made of rusty engine parts, all teeth and gears. Maybe 3’x3’. The explanation was: “A fish. A big fish. A big scary fish with a motor!”

Eve was made from Adam’s rib, so presuming that humans work like bananas, eve is Adam’s clone, not sibling.

Heaps of other animals learn from the experiences of others.

Orcas have culture, crows in europe taught each other how to peck out just the liver of frogs and make them explode, capuchin monkeys make stone tools, even plants release volatile organic compounds to warn each other of attackers and disease.

I can’t recall for certain but I’m pretty sure at least one of the far northern american languages has it. Like something from Eskaleut or Athabaskan. A quick scroll through their wikipedia pages didn’t help, and I can’t remember the formal name for this feature. If anyone else can chime in, that would be appreciated!

Some languages make a grammatical distinction between them, like there’s a different affix or a different form of the verb or noun if it came from personal experience, a trusted source, a distant source, inference etc.

Most cultural institutions exist in imaginary space but have incredible power over people. The state, god, heirarchy, status, identity. I definitely think the unreal is way more present in our lives than people normally accept.

Have you read the zhuangzi? “How can I tell if I’m zhuangzi dreaming he’s a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he’s zhuangzi?” is probably the most famous line from that text.

Personally, I think the story is encouraging the joy of not knowing, becoming comfortable in a world that lacks fundamental certainties even about yourself and reality.

If this question interests you, you might enjoy the full text - it’s public domain and there are plenty of recordings on youtube.