And the voices. “Billy…”
“You fucked the whole thing up.”
“Billy, your time is up.”
“Your time… is up.”
Everyone wants to belong
Everyone wants allies, close friends, brothers and sisters they can rely on and love and support
In the modern world we have pale imitations and crap. There is no village, there is only a dim landscape through which we shuffle, largely alone.
And so there is craving for some substitute, because the under structure is unfulfilled
Filled with self advocacy, more like
Shelter cats have limited avenues for expressing their disagreements, and it sounds like he’s being as measured and puncture-free in voicing his opinion as he feels like he needs to be
The interfaces are relatively modern too, with VGA and a PS/2 keyboard.
Yeah, you’re right. It looks like there’s a consensus now that the population in the Gulag was way lower than I thought. Fair play. There’s also a chart year by year, in the “history” section, which I missed.
If it was 2.4 million in 1953, out of total population of 179 million, that’s 1,340 in detention per 100k. The modern US is only 40% as bad as the literal Gulag at its peak. Fuckin hooray.
Yeah; that’s probably why there is such a lack of data. The period for which there are estimates vary by a factor of 20 between low and high estimates. 🙁
Ah, got it. I was talking about USSR, not modern Russia. Modern Russia is its own thing and its own brand of horror but not the same as OG Communist USSR which was more what I was trying to highlight.
Yeah. I’m taking the high side of the widely varying estimates of the Gulag population, which in the period of the 1940s range from 3.5 million to 17.6 million depending on who’s doing the estimating.
The Gulag at the peak housed about 7,500 (edit: 1,340) per 100k of the Soviet population.
(And yes, the US’s 531 is still also an atrocity.)
Where did you get 329? I actually couldn’t find any post-Kruschev numbers, but I know after privatization, Russia was pretty competitive with the US’s dystopian nightmare.
Edit: I was way wrong about the size of the Gulag
Ha, that is fair. I was just poking fun at dessalines’s habit of giving a free pass to any country that is openly mauling and torturing its citizens as long as they wear the right color hat. But yes, it is fully accurate that the US’s prison system is an authoritarian nightmare that preys on its minority population without rest or mercy. And, comparing the US against countries which don’t even make the claim of being “democratic” and finding it competitive with the worst of the open tyrannies is maybe fair.
Also, I just looked, and I don’t think these numbers are accurate. I think they’re straight-up ignoring some countries with millions of people, and I think the numbers are about 8 years out of date. The US incarceration rate has been falling back down to merely horrifying levels after the Stalinist peak it rose to after Reagan+Clinton teamed up to ruin the world.
List of Countries by Incarceration Rate
The majority of states in our land of wonderful freedoms are newly competitive with such beacons of hope as El Salvador, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. The march of progress!
There is a particular type of emotion which “The VVitch” and “Hereditary” get absolutely perfect. It’s actually not really my favorite type of movie; it’s not particular scary, per se, but it is just some stuff that is really awful that you don’t want to see. If you don’t want that, they may not be good, but if you vibe with that particular emotion they are hard to beat for it.
The HBO “Chernobyl” miniseries is absolutely straight-up horror. It has pretty much all the elements of a perfect horror movie, except it’s (with tiny exceptions and artistic licenses) all 100% true.
“As Above, So Below” is fairly good “normal” horror of a fairly unspicy flavor.
That’s honestly all I can think of that really does it well. Horror books in my experience are far better. “The Shining,” “Pet Semetary,” “Night Shift,” and “Skeleton Crew.” Also lots and lots of HP Lovecraft; the “Dunwich Horror” collection is wonderful.
Hope this helps.
He was a weird motherfucker in several different ways
He had money though. That’s the great thing about money; you can just kind of motor around with whatever priorities you want and for the most part no one intervenes or tells you to stop
Weird angel investor took us all out to a fancy dinner and made a weird extensive speech about the importance of the future; kind of “Godspeed my young protégés I know you’ll do wonderful things.” Kind of sounded like he finally believed in us and wanted to let us know with a nice gesture. Idk. No one could make any sense of it.
The next day his lackey informed us we were all fired. Oooh, that’s what that was about; makes sense, oh well, we have to get real jobs now apparently.
Do you see any scenario where the IDF can allow itself to truly stop Innocent people? A soldier is being fired at from a school, should the soldier allow himself to get killed in such situation?
The whole concept is bankrupt. An IDF soldier is being fired at from a school because he is on Palestinian land, occupying it by force to maintain the land that was stolen from the Palestinians and facilitate the taking of more.
There are degrees. If he’s sniping schoolchildren, then that will inflame the conflict more and promote more October 7ths. If he’s “only” firing back at the school, so “defending” himself… well, it’s “better” I guess, but if you break in my house in the middle of the night and I attack you, you’re not “defending” yourself even if you limit yourself to fighting with me and not hurting my wife.
And vice versa, considering what you know about setlers in Israel, do you really think that they will not get even more violent in the west bank if they know that their actions has no cost?
Their actions don’t seem to have a cost though. Or rather the mechanism of retribution is so indirect and random that I don’t think that Hamas’s counterattacks make all that much difference to their calculus of what they can get away with doing to the Palestinians. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression.
And don’t get me wrong, I wish for Hamas to vanish, and I wish for the IDF to kill only militants (even that definition is not clear), just like you. But I don’t see any realistic scenario (considering the human spirit) that this can happen. Not in the current political situation.
Like I said, even “killing only militants” leaves Israel in the position of the war criminal. They are invading and stealing homes, farms, anything they can find and pushing the Palestinians into a vanishingly small series of refuges which they then invade in turn. Why would “militants” not fight back in that scenario? What should they do instead?
I do agree with your take on how unrealistic peace is in the present climate. It needs to be imposed from outside by force in order to happen, which won’t happen, because the US would need to be actively involved in making that happen and the US likes things more or less as they are (or at least as they were before the counterattack after October 7th got so genocidal that it started causing political issues for leaders in the US).
I don’t know a single person who was in the military who has good things to say about it.
After training, sure, they’re all for it. After doing the job for real (combat or not) and getting out, not a single time that I can remember.
I have a Brother MFC-J1205W and I’m super happy with it. Idk about the Linux support side, but it fits all the other requirements, it was pretty cheap, + so far for me it’s been super reliable, cheap ink, and very high quality prints.
I don’t disagree with any of that… the only part I was taking issue with was saying “there is a level of truth” that the armed forces of both sides are working for safety of both sides.
If the IDF stopped killing innocent people, it would dramatically increase the level of safety in the future for the loved ones of the soldiers. And likewise for Hamas.
I mean obviously having 0 Israeli military isn’t gonna work; I do get what you’re saying. But put it this way; if Hamas had disappeared entirely on October 6th, everyone on all sides would be a hell of a lot safer today.
without the auctions of their army their home will be at risk
Without Hamas’s recent actions, the home of the Palestinians would be at risk?
I think you gotta recheck your math on that one
And of course the same thing applies to Israel; without the IDF and settlers’ actions in Palestine, there wouldn’t have been an October 7th in the first place.
Yeah. I wouldn’t invest yourself too much in it. But yes, depending on things it might be worthwhile to just offer to let him put his money where his mouth is, if he’s super sure about things.
Don’t fuck with the paws