I am not in a position where I have funds, and while I very much wish others the best when it comes to their own situations, I cannot help.
I am pinning this post to my blog because I have gotten numerous asks and messages asking for donations for various people in need, and I don’t have the energy to keep responding to each individual request.
If I had money to spare, I would love to help others, but I do not. Please stop asking me for money.
an interesting linguistics find! so I’m reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing “hp” in the context of “not being at full hp” “applying your full hp to a task” etc
and I’m like……. okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don’t mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean
and it’s not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere
horsepower. turns out it’s horsepower.
and I’m absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader
I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he’d be like, ah yes I understand, this “’‘pokemon”“ loses horsepower throughout the fight
I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation “theories” to explain the fact we’re not.
Some of my favourites include:
Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they’re not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they’re doing experiments on us???)
Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they’re all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?
Planetarium Theory: What if there’s at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that’s just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?
Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!
Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?
The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it’s not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as “intelligent”. But, like, we’re realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.
So I’m proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the “Fool in a Field” hypothesis. It goes like this:
Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It’s pitch black, he can’t move, and he’s been standing there for ages. He’s just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. “Oh no!” He says. “Robots have killed them all!”
i also wish we could all “just get along” but we have to actually do something about the material structures preventing that rather than waxing poetic about some vague sense of idealistic unity
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
Michael Parenti quote that accurately describes imperial core logic surrounding socialist states today
ALT
