FriendOfDeSoto

Yes, they are. Me thinking something in the early 90s and it being objectively so at the time are not the same thing. I’ve already let 90s me know that you think my opinion was wrong.

I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram’s encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I’ll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn’t mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.

It happens. A very highly intelligent user will occasionally post something in a lot of communities and gets a rise out of downvotes, annoyed comments, and blocks. It’s annoying but that is often the nature of the internet. Report, block, and move on.

It’s only the very highly intelligent users who do this. So it doesn’t happen a lot.

Don’t engage with anybody you don’t know well on DMs. And if some other very highly intelligent person goes to the effort of sending you abuse via DM, take pride that you really got under their skin. Ignore it if you can.

I’m sure there was harder rock in existence. My point wasn’t they were objectively the hardest. It was that our perception of music changes over time.

You grew up in a world where Rock’n’Roll already existed. They liked it because it didn’t before and it took a while to slap a label on it. You grew up in a world where people bought music or paid to stream. When Rock’n’Roll started sheet music was the big seller. They had just introduced vinyl as a medium. You are exposed to all sorts of music today. Back in the 1940s US, predominantly, white people listened to white people music and black people listened to black people music. It’s only when some white people saw the black music was better and then unabashedly copied it for the more economically impactful white audience that this became a hit. It’s not just the quality of the music; it’s the culture and the change within it that came with it. It’s a big package.

I remember listening to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit when out came out thinking this was the roughest rock could ever go. ~30 years later it sounds rather tame. That’s the way our musical ears work. We tend to have a hardcore recency bias.

a few years ago

Like 15+ years ago.

They performed horribly

I mean, this is all a matter of opinion. They promised stuff they couldn’t do - like everybody else. They gave us a revolving door of PMs - like the LDP, the party that won all the other elections, does as well. I think what broke their back was having to deal with a big earthquake, massive tsunami, and exploding nuclear reactors. The LDP can consider itself lucky they weren’t in charge then so the stink of failure to deal with an impossible crisis didn’t attach to them. They really aren’t the more capable politicians.

There is enough crime happening on either side of this 15-year divide to care about.

Zufallsbegegnung, chance encounter, is as close as we can get to it, I think. Germans don’t dress to impress. Look at us. I mean, look at us. Norm core to the max. If you are caught wearing the same shirt twice on different days, people tend to think you are merely handling limited resources responsibly.

I’m gonna go out in this limb: without more detail you won’t get any good answers.

Many things the internet will tell you exist in Japan are still not the norm around here. I’ve been here a decade and have come across traffic warning signs for deer, cattle, tanuki (raccoon dogs) and in the mountains for bears, never for cats. So these are irregular signs. The one on the left strikes me as one given special dispensation for by the authorities to prevent accidents on a public road, maybe even in just one village that’s overrun with ferrals. The writing underneath just reads look out for animals. The one on the right looks to me like it could just be on private property somewhere.

Compare: In America they have presidents carved into mountains! Factually not incorrect but misleading, as it’s just four of them and they’re all in the same place.

The one on the right does reference cats specifically. The writing under the one on the left just references animals.

It’s not just the SS, the Wehrmacht also “suffered” from having to shoot all these people. Read up on Babij Jar, Ukraine. Even Himmler is on record expressing sympathy for his killers. That’s why the bullet based plan turns into a gas based one. Because it’s “easier” to flip a switch on a room full of people than to shoot naked people to fall on other corpses already in the ditch.

I think what’s standing between us today and the bottom of the genocidal slippery slope is the (relatively) free media. There are too many ways to check up on them today. Commercial satellites, FOIA requests, people with smartphones. If ICE were building a death camp or digging mass graves now, we probably would find out.

So it’s important to look at how CBS gave in and how the pentagon restricts coverage in exchange for accreditation - those are your first dead canaries in the news coalmine. When commercial satellites are suddenly forced to blur or not cover ICE camps …

I would be surprised if they hadn’t killed more people in detention already. The aim of ICE is to be state terror, their people are of questionable character, poorly trained or vetted. A duty of care is probably not first and foremost on their mind. There probably is a way to brush some cases under the carpet. Deaths by “natural causes,” “misplaced” death certificates, “corpses” on repatriation flights. The spotlight of public attention needs to be on these motherfuckers constantly.

I think it depends. I’m my experience, towels last longer if they get thrown in the dryer. Wouldn’t throw my cashmere sweater in there though, if I owned one. The quality of the clothes you own plays a part. And most of us tend to go for the bargain over quality.

I feel like this depends on your climate as well. If you have sufficient sunlight outside, why do you even have a dryer? If it’s humid and stuff takes forever to dry on its own, a dryer might prevent certain bacteria to build up in the fabric and thus expand longevity. Although any act of aggressively drenching the fabric in water and chemicals and then blow drying it ought to age it by default.

I know I deserve to burn in hell for stopping them. But I’m also not sure what was I supposed to do.

I’m not sure why you feel this way. It looks to me like you tried to do your best looking out in a reasonable way for a colleague in your group who was in a chemically altered state.

In the end, you’re not responsible for him. Don’t go partying with him again. If you end up in hell, it won’t be due to this stuff.

Let’s hope then that I’m right and even out of towners of the armed forces will not want to shoot.

Regicide is a Latin lego word created at a time when people had long stopped speaking proper Latin. It combines “of the king” with “killer.” It followed an established pattern like fratricide, killer of the brother. Note that we slightly perverted the Latin grammar over time by using these words to speak of the killing rather than the killer.

My Latin is shit. I’m not aware of a snappy expression that encompasses “Head of state or government” so we can add -cide to the end like all political scandals since Watergate get -gate at the end.

You are more supporting my gut feeling here by invoking Kent State. A handful of people died there; hundreds+ died in Beijing.

A situation like Kent State is very possible but they will have learned the lesson and it won’t be NG or other armed forces opening fire. It’ll be the obese SA or a right-wing militia that opens fire from a sniper’s nest.

Neighbors, countrymen - choose your own metaphor.

I’m no expert on the people’s army. I don’t think they had any way to refuse an illegal order. The US armed forces do have this. I think there are enough people in the US military that would refuse to shoot on protestors. Supposed drug smugglers are the out group and scruples are sadly low enough not to refuse that illegal order. Sending in the tanks in Minneapolis or Boston to shoot on their in group would be crossing the line. Not a good, sterdy, moral line but a line nonetheless.

First of all, I don’t think the Anerican military would follow that order. Shooting supposed drug smugglers illegally and shooting your neighbors illegally are two different kettle of fish for us humans who want to belong to sonething.

They would have to turn off the internet including satellites and then destroy all camera capable gadgets, maybe with an EMP. I think this is too much hassle. There won’t be a Tiananmen Sq in the US. The Chinese could control the narrative internally and didn’t give af about the rest of the world - in 1989. As we see in Iran today, the world is but a village and footage travels fast. The risk is too high.

But keep looking at ICE or “proud” militias. I would not be surprised to hear about these bastards sniping at protest leaders or even rando participants to discourage more protests. Look for fat guys on roofs.