Yeah 😅 But if the bomb’s instructions spelled it correctly, there would be no challenge for the diffuser. They should have gone with a sorta phonetic boo-zshwah-zee for the text in the comic.

Thank you!
It looks like jumble.top has a pirate feed for that podcast, so I’ll subscribe to that and find it from there.

Do you happen to have on hand any article or even blog post or something that goes into detail about NYCrimes’ evil stance on trans women? I have an older liberal (but very pro-LGBTQ for a boomer lib) relative who thinks it’s the pinnacle of journalism and I’m going to start trying to convince her of what a wretched fascist-abetting rag they are.

That could literally be an alternate title for the bingo card, and is almost certainly the motivation for like 90% of the people who wish plants were conscious. And even if their flawed logic were true, it’s just more testament to how morally bankrupt they are. Because all they’re saying is “since we might be causing suffering on an incomprehensibly massive scale in this hypothetical case, that means it’s perfectly fine to also keep causing suffering on an incomprehensibly massive scale in this other case where it for sure is happening undeniably. Gotcha, vegan!”

The picture is definitely just some artist’s conception, but it’s not claimed to be a photo or meant to be anything other than what it is, an artist’s conception. You’re right that for the most part, a star is needed for aurora, at least for the kind of aurora we have on Earth since it depends on the solar wind interacting with the planet’s magnetic field. But if there is anything that can be said about what we’ve discovered astronomically in the last century or so it’s that there are always exceptions to every supposed rule.

The authors attribute the auroras to SIMP-0136’s magnetic field being vastly more powerful than Jupiter’s (750 times stronger according to a previous study). Electrons (presumably stripped from atoms by internal processes) would flow with the field and hit atmospheric molecules fast enough to make them glow, they conclude.

• How Does Rogue Planet SIMP-0136 Have Auroras When It Has No Stellar Wind?

Aside from the aurora part though, none of this is exceptional or rare (and maybe even the aurora part isn’t rare either). Rogue planets are probably extremely common, possibly even more common than planets that are gravitationally bound in a star system. And objects of this size, which is really around where we’d start calling it a brown dwarf, are also very common, with more of them than there are main sequence stars.

Yeah, a lot of the historical references and descriptions were good, but then when it got to the present day, essentially the “what is to be done” section, it just flopped hard. Paraphrasing: “a coalition of blue states can just ignore the federal government and do their own thing, boom, fascism defeated.” It’s not actually discussing anything about how fascism can actually be defeated even though the whole first half of it sounds like it’s supposed to be a set up to do just that.

Instead it descends into ridiculous cringe:

California could request Canadian peacekeepers for “election security.” New York could invite European observers for “financial transparency.” Make it embarrassing. Make America’s collapse visible to the world. Force the international community to pick sides.

This is your solution? That’s how fascism is defeated? Any respect I may have built up for the author when they were accurately talking about how fascists slither their way into power using the liberal* political apparatus was nullified by this point.
*(even though the author always insisted on calling the fascist appeasers “conservative” at every turn rather than using the more appropriate word “liberal”)

Every solution is just another form of “blue states should just pretend there is no federal government,” even the last one which is titled “International Intervention” but that just means making all the other totally-not-fascist liberal “democracies” play ball with the new blue coalition instead of the liberal democracy that elected Trump.

No, the UN can’t invade America. But they can isolate it. Sanctions work. Ask Russia.

Ask Russia? The country whose economy improved after “the mother of all sanctions” were imposed on it? Russia, who is indisputably winning the conflict that those sanctions were supposed to stop, all while Russia’s economic ties with other enemies of the US have grown and blossomed? How about asking Cuba if sanctions work. Yeah, they work to starve the population and cause civilian immiseration and death, they don’t and never have worked to depose rulers. This doofus has no fucking clue what they’re talking about.

And even with the historical stuff, it left a big fucking gaping hole where the people and organizations that DID successfully fight fascism should have been. But nope, not even a mention. Clearly Christopher didn’t want to admit that communism IS the cure to fascism, theoretically and in practice, historically and right now. This essay is just more cringe liberal drivel.

You ever fuckin’ seen a homeless person? How about the miles and miles of tents along stretches of highways just outside the cities? That’s one of many other forms of political violence. Remember how we stopped counting the death toll from Covid and were all told to get back to work? You know how many “incarcerated” “prisoners” we have doing slave labor? GTFO with your “have to be chronically online to see any political violence” bullshit. You’re fucking steeped in it but you’re too blind to see even what’s right in front of you, even if it’s a boot your tongue is apparently stuck to.

Even a ways back before that he got famous for making a movie about an AI apocalypse time traveling murderbot (Terminator). Also the movie Aliens was famous. And Abyss, but that was kinda about a boat too.

Are you genuinely that ignorant of reality, or is it a willful ignorance thing?

They’re fighting because they woke up to an invasion.

lol, right the Ukrainian nazi coup regime just suddenly woke up one day and that mean ol Putler was invadin! Ukraine hadn’t been running an ethnic cleansing campaign in the east, bombing and murdering civilians who identified as Russian speakers for years. Nothing like that. The “invasion” just happened out of nowhere!

How did this absurd cringe comment even get 11 upvotes? Must be a lot of dipshit libs who think history started in February of 2022 still lurking around here.

And for the record, I am not against phasing out certain species (allowing them to go extinct by not giving them the opportunity to breed while providing and caring for the individuals during the time they’re still around) for those species that exist wholly for human exploitation. I am not opposed to the extinction of, for example, cattle on some anti-extinction principle. I just fundamentally disagree with the position that domesticated animals can’t coexist with humans in a mutually loving and compassionate symbiosis, since clearly they can.

I am vegan. I have been a vegan for over a quarter of a century now. I also have a cat. There was of course breeding of his ancestors for exploitational purposes, but there was also co-evolution that benefited both species. Regardless, my relationship with him is not one based on exploitation but on genuine mutual companionship. Our relationship is mutually beneficial on a number of levels. I am confident in saying that I not only allow him to live an enjoyable, self-actualized cat life, but that I also at times bring him joy. And he certainly brings me joy. I respect him as an individual being with his own wants and desires and do my best to fulfill them. I know of plenty of other humans who have similarly mutually beneficial relationships with their nonhuman companions. This is not welfarism and it is no more exploitational than many human relationships where a power imbalance exists by necessity but is still one based on mutual caring. I think the welfarism argument also completely ignores the reality of co-evolution (as seen between many other species that don’t involve humans at all). Humans and nonhuman domesticated companions can and frequently do exist in non exploitational harmony. There is no reason this should be at odds with veganism and no reason we need to move towards phasing out the domestic cat (or dogs, etc.) as a species in order to be morally, ethically, or ideologically consistent as vegans.

Succinct and right on. Thanks for posting it. Hopefully some of your FB friends are amenable.

I deeply sympathize with both your position and your sister’s. But I also can’t help but remember that the only thing that can possibly save us from the worst outcome is the full recognition of how bad the situation is, how immediate it is. That desperation in your kind-hearted sister’s eye is the only thing, on a mass scale, that has a chance of mitigating the worst of the apocalyptic scenarios. I know it’s easy for me to say, and I’d be lying if I claimed to be doing everything within my power to stop capitalism, but I think confronting reality must happen if we are to have any hope at all for a world worth living in for our children. Because confronting it and truly recognizing the unimaginable horror of it is the only way that people will ever get mobilized to do something about it (beyond the bullshit pressure-release-valve feel-good non-solution pablum like “green capitalism”). If she let down that wall of pretense that things will be ok for her kids, that wall she already knows at least on some level is a lie, and actually internalizes the hell that her children are going to have to face (whether she acknowledges it or not), then what’s left to do but to fight against it? Fight it for their sake, because there will come a time for them when they will have no choice but to fight it. Existential-scale climate catastrophe is coming either way, but even as merciful as the sand is, the longer we keep our heads buried in it in lieu of action, the worse the catastrophe will be. And by worse, it could even be the difference between extinction or survival.

They’re murdering our children. It is absolutely understandable that we would want to look away and deny this. But if staring that fact in the face is the only way to get them to stop murdering our children, then aren’t we obligated to look? There’s no easy answer here, but I do think there is an answer.

Would it make you too easily dox-able to post an edited version of it here? Sounds like it could be a good read.

Yes, this. I’ve been called doomer for talking like this before, but I don’t think even most leftists, many of whom I look up to and defer to on all things historical and political, really grasp how fundamental and existential climate change really is as a threat to humanity and to much of the biosphere. A lot of times I see otherwise cogent and thoughtful conversation about potential future trajectories, discussing how climate change is going to throw an extra wrench in the machinations of the evolving material conditions, adding more variables that could slow or speed sociopolitical development towards communism, basically make geopolitics more chaotic and unpredictable for a while, but that ultimately, communism will emerge the dominant form in the next couple centuries. And it’s like… my siblings and comrades, the shit that’s coming down the pipe is a lot bigger of a game changer than a wrench and some extra variables. It’s a mass extinction event we’ve only just barely entered.

I would agree, given enough time, communism will win. But that “given enough time” piece is the load-bearing part of that phrase. What we are looking at from realistic projections right now for what is locked in to happen over the next couple centuries is literal civilizational collapse. Not just the collapse of an empire, but a total destruction of the systems we rely on to maintain, for example, intercontinental interaction, let alone global trade and complex distribution of labor. That means no global communism. IF our species survives, which is also by no means a guarantee and also teeters on the precipice of exactly how much average global heat ends up increasing, it means primitive communism in small pockets if we’re lucky. Our only hope of avoiding this is large scale revolution basically immediately. It may not have to start in the imperial core (which I think we all agree is extremely unlikely), but it will have to quickly subdue the imperial core which is responsible for the vast majority of climate change, and obviously is the biggest threat to revolution anywhere. The imperial core will have to be forced into rapid degrowth. The fucking clock is ticking here, and it’s not looking promising. But that’s no excuse to be “doomer,” (and by that, I mean “give up”) it’s the opposite, it’s all the more reason we need to do everything we can no matter how significant the sacrifice to tear down capitalism and imperialism now.

That’s such obvious nonsense though

he doesn’t have to buy this truck with the financing, there are other options already!

To which he would say there is no problem here then and that the buyer in OP is just a stupid consumer for getting bilked needlessly. He would say this reasoning is iron clad.

::Feynman-diagram-emoji::

I’m not sure this answer is universal, but based on the one I’m unfortunately related to and have to talk to from time to time, libertarians would say that regulation is preventing other truck manufacturers from entering and competing in the market. If the market were “truly” free, then a competitor could come along and do better by selling their vehicles at a lower interest rate, taking all the business away from the interest-rate-abusing company. If you try to explain that this problem is not due to regulation but due to a lack of it, or how trusts happen and how monopolies work, they will fall back on the same set of naive circular reasoning. It doesn’t have to make sense or reflect reality, it just has to vaguely sound plausible and fit with what they want to be true.