To me it feels like every year a new joke from Rocko’s Modern Life that I didn’t get at age 8 becomes relevant.

I don’t want to type stuff into a command line. Like ever. If this is possible then I’m in.

This might be when I finally jump ship and go to Linux. I should do Mint, right?

There’s a whole section in The Art of the Deal devoted to how a Saudi guy had a nicer apartment than him and how he built a whole apartment building so he could have a nicer $50 million penthouse.

The fake reason he gives for this suicidal policy is aesthetics, right? So he prefers the sight of a coal fired power plant to wind turbines? Or should I just give up trying to understand?

The objections are about its personality? Who cares, as long as it’s good at coding? That’s the only thing it’s actually useful for.

The thing all of you militarist posters have in common is you’re completely convinced that you have the correct position and you manage to come off as arrogant as well. Enjoy your globe-spanning military industrial complex that wages forever wars and sanctions genocides.

What part of having Japan’s military annihilated, their cities firebombed, and their population starving is “letting them roll over us”? The war was won already. Why was it necessary to carry out a land invasion?

There’s no false equivalence. There is no equivalence at all. There’s absolutely no point trying to figure out the most atrocitiest world power. Atrocities do not justify further atrocities.

In terms of whether the bombings were justified or not, I don’t think it’s impossible to say. Same with the firebombings, which were carried out under false pretenses of total warfare hypotheses that were later disproven.

There was talk of doing a nuclear demonstration in Tokyo harbor before the decision to annihilate two cities was undertaken. Yes, these were decisions made with limited information and lack of 20:20 hindsight, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t war crimes or that the people who made them aren’t mass murderers. This kind of zero-sum my atrocities vs. your atrocities thinking is an intellectual dead end, but it’s great for justifying American exceptionalism.

And so therefore it had to carry out a land invasion? Can you explain why this necessarily follows?

I wonder when, if ever, this narrative will finally be laid to rest. Perhaps, as long as the US military exists as a globe-spanning hegemon, we will always have to hear some version of this story.

No contemporary historian or political scientist takes this view for granted. It is one of many, and I encourage you to read about more than the wikipedia articles about Japanese atrocities. All militaries commit attocities. This is not the point.

The argument you offer is that the United States had a moral imperative to invade and occupy the Japanese home islands. What is the justification for this? Why would this have been necessary? Everyone who has seriously studied the history knows that the Soviet Union was preparing to invade Japan and its leadership was preparing to surrender in one form or another. The bombs were dropped because the US wanted to ensure that they were the negotiating party and occupying power.

The justification to avoid further violence is extremely cynical. Nowhere in the rules of war does it say that the only way to end a conflict is to utterly annihilate your oppnent. That rule was invented by expansionist empires. You can go back to the history of Rome’s wars with Greece to see this type of logic (or lack thereof) play out. It is a message. It says that we are not your equal and we will not broker any deals on equal footing. We are your hegemon and we will dictate the terms. And then we’ll blame you for any atrocities we commit, and everyone will know that we did what we did in the name of peace and justice.

How come school shooters aren’t on here?

The article was talking about how Mamdani will have to handle the rich if he is elected. For the rest of us it suggests revolution.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard the Republicans are imploding, or the Democrats are imploding…

America is not a monolith. Signal’s developers are very much aware of the risks of operating there and probably already have several escape plans given recent developments. I also think five-eyes probably has access but getting it might be computationally expensive.

For those of us new to whatever this is, I’m legitimately curious about what a “3-level summary” is.

Sorry to keep bugging you but I’m looking for solutions for my entitled cat. Currently trying a rope ladder on my window. She doesn’t like leashes. Do you use a leash?

How do you explore the outdoors with him? You take him hiking?

If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I’m supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I’m here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we’d have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don’t waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.

Ok I see my sarcasm was lost on you so let me try again. There is nothing ethical about pet ownership or industrial civilization. If we cared about the well being of pets we wouldn’t keep them, and if we cared about the well being of the planet we wouldn’t build cities or burn fossil fuels.

I already have a cat. The above is moot for me. If I had to rethink this then maybe 12 years ago I would have made a different decision. At this point I am not going to euthenize my cat or blow up an oil pipeline. If you allow my cat agency then she should be allowed to explore her world and make her own decisions, just like the pigeons and rats that are forced to adapt to human civilization by eating garbage.

Anyway she’s safely locked away and miserable now so none of this matters.