kbal

Science is a religion in the same way that golf is a religion. It’s not, but it’s easy to see how one might get the wrong idea by listening to the rhetoric of its most enthusiastic admirers and not looking too closely at the actual thing they’re talking about.

If we’re including television I’m disappointed that nobody mentioned Blackadder.

If not, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Anachronism means something else, especially with respect to movies.

Guess I should’ve gone with “Academic? It doesn’t even cover ancient Greece.”

Academic? History of the World Part I? I guess you could say it has about as much academic rigour as the average Mel Brooks movie.

We customarily refer to the ends of the bed as “head” and “foot” which are analagous to the head and foot of a sail in nautical terms. Therefore “forward” in the ordinary bed naturally corresponds to the direction of straight up toward the ceiling, and the port side is the one on your left when lying in the bed facing that way.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-your-freedom-is-my-freedom

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#NatureIsMetal

Election 2025: Wakko vs. Skippy

He’s probably right about Israel and Palestine and all that, but I think he underestimates the willingness of a rational player of Sid Meier’s Civilization® in analogous circumstances to spend a turn taking out the obsolete unit that can’t do any damage to their modern infantry. Those musketeers can still pillage your mines, slow down and spy on your troop movements, blow up your roads and railways, and of course kidnap your workers. In this instance the game reflects the cruel reality of war slightly better than it’s given credit for. Its more salient departure from reality is in mostly failing to depict the suffering of all the non-combatant civilians who we must imagine living in the lands where the wars take place, a failing it shares with for example the game of chess.

Vladimir Putin’s landslide reelection

He gets so much good press about it around the world, I wonder why he doesn’t have himself elected more often. Once a year perhaps, on Vladimir Putin day.

That analysis would be sufficiently absurd without trying to cram it into a “fact check” format. That it took 40 years since the start of the “one child policy” for the population to actually start declining in any meaningful way is indicative of the fact that to understand these things you need more long-term thinking than is even hinted at here. Will the present trend hurt next year’s GDP growth? Yes. Will they be better off for it 50 years from now? Probably.

Twitch. I figure their corporate masters are about equally evil, so if you really have to choose one you may as well go with the one that still has better discoverability, community, and chat. #AlternatePlayer makes it tolerable.

Sure, it’s inevitable. China is so great and prosperous that one day the people of Taiwan will see reason and enthusiastically petition to join it. This will obviously happen some day, so there’s no need to do anything but sit back and wait for it, President Xi.

Illiteracy. People are addled by the constant barrage of propaganda, most of it in the form of advertising, its characteristic obsessions with superficial appearances, its constant reliance on lazy stereotypes, its overestimation of the worth of stupid jokes dressed up with a clever veneer, and its insipid pandering to the lowest common prejudices. Intellectual laziness and sloppy thinking based on learned heuristics rather than any kind of logic hace come to dominate our politics, our workplaces, our social lives, our whole culture. It has begun to sink in at an unconscious level and undermines the foundations of our socially constructed worldviews. It is the final victory of the Spectacle, the complete divorce of humanity’s understanding of its own situation from the reality of it.

On the other hand, I like memes. They’re funny.

Yes but what did Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Ben Shapiro have to say about it? What about David Duke? Was he unavailable for comment? You can’t just go to Elon all the time, let’s get some diversity of opinion in there.

It’s remarkable that Tibetan culture has been so tenacious that there’s anything left of it today. If the government of 50 years ago had been able to exert the kind of control over its people that they do today, it’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t have been fully eradicated by now.

Somehow I get the feeling that equating “reality” with “propaganda created by kindergartens” is the rhetorical equivalent of dividing by zero.