Thomas Paine is the only one I could tolerate hanging out with. The rest are getting pushed back into the time machine and sent to the Devonian period.

Or without turning some into Nazis. Gangs are prevalent in high-security prisons and often these gangs are racially segregated with the white ones being neo-Nazis. If you’re placed in one of these prisons as a white guy your only options may be either to stay unaffiliated and be outcast and vulnerable to attacks by other prisoners, or join the neo-Nazi gang for protection. It’s fucked up.

The Vietnam war began with majority support and slowly became unpopular over time. The Iran war started with the majority opposing it, and is the first war where that’s happened in US history. It’s a very different political climate from the Vietnam war era.

I think you’re underestimating how gen Z would respond to a draft. There has been no generation in US history less supportive of war. I think a significant number of gen Z would gladly turn their weapons on the general that asks them to commit war crimes without hesitation, and that’s if they even manage to drag us kicking and screaming to the front.

I fucking dare you to try it bitch. The backlash would be legendary.

You have friends that have made a therapeutic ritual out of using essential oils which helps them only because the placebo effect can be very powerful for pain. Literally anything could stand in for the essential oils. Swap their oil vials out with convincing fakes and they’ll never know the difference because it’s the ritual of smelling and/or applying the oils that’s helping them, not any real physical mechanism of the compounds in the oils interacting with their biology.

Looks like an American suburb but without yard space.

This is the logic behind conversion therapy and they actually do this (albeit with the addition of electric shocks and all sorts of abuse).

You’re connected to someone by a time thread like in Your Name and you just ruined someone’s life.

You don’t have to adopt the ruling elites’ definition of success. You talk about politics being a means and not an end, but you still insist on calling winning an election success. If the end/goal is determined by ideology then so is the criteria for success, and my personal criteria for success is improving quality of life for as many people as possible. Winning an election can be a means to that end, but just seizing power does not by itself merit the political theory that enabled it. Fascism has proven quite capable of seizing power in liberal democracies with capitalist economies, but I would certainly not call that success.

If we measure the success of a political theory by its ability to take, hold and exercise power

The success of a political theory should be measured by its ability to improve quality of life. Taking power may be a prerequisite, but that alone is not success. Seeing the seizure of state power as an end in itself is a mistake that leads to an authoritarian dead end.

I think my desire for a small electric pickup truck might override my caution in this case, we’ll see if I get burned. At the very least I’m not going to preorder and will wait for real critical reviews after it’s released.

What I wonder is how exactly are they going to enshittify it? It’s extremely barebones and modular in a way that anyone can design add-ons and accessories for it. I can see them doing subscriptions and the like for various add-ons but you can always just get the base model and get add-ons elsewhere.

They’ve been promoting it recently and have several working prototypes that they’ve been driving influencers around in. There was one video with Marques Brownlee and they even let him drive it himself.

Yes, he’s very good at directing attention. The media is happy to follow along because it’s great engagement bait. Can we try talking about the important things more than petty bullshit, or are we just going to let ourselves be misdirected forever?

Also I have no idea whether this comic is progressive or conservative…

Neither, it’s just cynical. Signs in the background suggest the artist may be progressive (or at least supports unions), but the message of this particular comic is an exclusively cynical one.

It’s not illegal to call it cheese because it has an emulsifier in it, it’s illegal to call it cheese because it’s mostly water. That’s what the emulsifier is for; it allows the cheese to mix smoothly with the water. They would rather call it “American cheese product” than “mostly water with <50% cheddar” because no one would buy that when the 100% cheddar is sitting right next to it.

It’s an emulsification of water and a mix of cheddar cheeses with preservatives, stabilizers, and an emulsifier (obviously) added. It has some culinary applications but the real reason it’s made that way is it lets them get away with selling less cheese overall for the same price as a block of 100% cheddar of the same volume by marketing it as a different type of cheese (American) rather than what it actually is (watered down cheddar).

So they’re trying to stop him from calling a vote on a bill that would create a pathway to citizenship for foreign workers. It’s xenophobes resorting to force because they’re afraid they can’t win democratically. Makes sense given how conservative Japan is and how low voter turnout is among the youth.