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Every computer program is a procedure and a list. The same observation is true for I am holy.

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'boobs', by which they mean 'there is a chest. it's flat but it exists, unlike the lower torso'

statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

the elesh norn poll is making me lose my mind. "she's got a snatched waist" you know what else is snatched? her fucking skin. off her body. "she's got boobs 🙄" and exposed organs. "she's a white girl in a mask" whose SKIN has been REMOVED what are you TALKING ABOUT

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One of the legitimate concerns about California's recent universal marriage amendment was that while it is clearly intended for gay marriage,

(a) The right to marry is a fundamental right. (b) This section is in furtherance of both of the following: (1) The inalienable rights to enjoy life and liberty and to pursue and obtain safety, happiness, and privacy guaranteed by Section 1. (2) The rights to due process and equal protection guaranteed by Section 7.

will, quite possibly, make it difficult for a law restricting child marriage to stand up in court. And that's in the state constitution now. Good luck to us?

Hey i learned smth extra super fucked up about smth that 39 states in the US allow!

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Better weapons technology is also a factor. When everyone in the whole polity can be part of the militia, because guns are cheap and so is training to use them, that changes the equilibrium. There is a principle that guns and votes map 1:1; the 'imperial heartland' may be richer, but it's not much better at turning residents into soldiers, and so trying to impose empire on them is probably doomed.

Since about WWII that is no longer true and communications technology is probably extremely critical to why the notion of the nation hasn't broken down since.

If anything, one of the "lessons" of both ancient Greek and ancient Roman history is that self-government and republican values simply don't scale well beyond the level of the city-state. If a city acquires an empire, like Athens or Rome, it will be corrupted by it in one way or another. And if you fail to acquire an empire, well that just leaves you vulnerable to your more aggressive neighbors. And confederations of self-governing units are simply too weak and fissiparous to compete with more centralized states. It's a somewhat well known fact that the founding fathers in the US were concerned by this. There weren't any good historical examples of republics working on as large a scale as the early United States so they had argue a positive case for why this time would be different.

And it was! It turns out that this lesson, if it was ever true, doesn't really hold in the modern era. You can argue about why (and it's something I'd like to read more about myself) but some of the obvious explanations are 1) better communications technology, 2) better constitutional theory, and 3) nationalism creating a wider sense of shared community. (There was never much sense of Greek nationalism in the ancient world until it was far too late.) But now, big republics are common enough to be banal and hardly worth notice.

Anyway, I find it interesting how an obvious conclusion that a smart person might draw from a careful reading of history can just turn out to be wrong like that. It's a useful lesson in humility. There are always going to be new things, and new combinations of things, for which history will only ever provide an imperfect analogue. And perhaps it's also a lesson about being too fatalistic about human nature. Something which has never succeeded before may one day do so, given the right environment.

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Johnny Eck was a performer from the 1930s who was born without any legs:

He's primarily known for appearing in the 1932 cult classic Freaks directed by Tod Browning.

However what I'm mostly obsessed with is this account of a magic trick he did with his non-disabled twin brother (text under the cut)

Like this is the funniest thing I've ever heard. Can you imagine

Wikipedia screenshot:

"In 1937, Eck and Robert were recruited by the illusionist and hypnotist Rajah Raboid, for his "Miracles of 1937" show. In it they performed a magic feat that amazed audiences. Raboid performed the traditional sawing-a-man-in-half illusion, except with an unexpected twist. At first Robert would pretend to be a member of the audience and heckle the illusionist during his routine, resulting in Robert being called on stage to be sawed in half himself. During the illusion, Robert would then be switched with his twin brother Eck, who played the top half of his body, and a dwarf who played the bottom half, concealed in specially-built pant legs. After seeming to have been sawn off, the legs would suddenly get up and start running away, prompting Eck to jump off the table and start chasing them around the stage, screaming, "Come back!" "I want my legs back!" Sometimes he even chased the legs into the audience. The subsequent reaction was amazing – people would scream and sometimes even flee the theater in terror. As Eck described it, "The men were more frightened than the women – the women couldn't move because the men were walking across their laps, headed for the exit." The act provided the perfect jolt by frightening people at first but then caused just as much laughter and applause. The illusion would end with stage hands plucking up Eck and setting him atop "his" legs and then twirling him off-stage to be replaced by his twin Robert, who would then loudly threaten to sue Raboid and storm out of the theater. Their act was so popular that they played to packed audiences up and down the East Coast."

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Rice Krispies smartest decision is by far their Treat. Turning their cereal into a strange brick relies on the natural fact that all children are hopelessly dependent upon the ingot.

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Size isn’t everything- unless you’re a fantasy character!

Here is some of the logic behind it, and some of the reasons why real weapons tend to be smaller than fictional ones.

Please support my videos if you like them and are able to! You’ll also get tutorials, bts, and art references!

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

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...Martha's Vineyard is labeled the Land of the lotus-eaters. Then there is a sign pointing to a different Vineyard. 2/10 git gud at geography.

the narragansett bay is kind of like the american aegean

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

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The Celestial Emporium of Mechanical Knowledge

those belonging to the entrepreneur

mothballed ones

pretrained ones

pocket-watches

gacha

vaporware

secondhand cars

those included in this classification

those that tremble as if they were mad

priceless ones

those schematiced with a very fine camel hair brush

et cetera

those which have just broken the power grid

those that from afar look like helicopters

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No? Lying is often a lesser evil, but it's still wrong. If you can do something without lying and the cost isn't huge, you should. Always.

In almost all of those situations, lying is just straight-up wrong. There's no ambiguity. You're harming other people to make your life slightly easier, and just because it's not tangible harm doesn't make it harmless.

I would trust a petty thief more than someone who routinely lied just because it was tricky to articulate the truth, or they didn't have an answer when it was expected, or to be cruel on purpose. A petty thief who might steal from me I can at least check my pockets.

If you lie just to see if you can get away with it, fuck you, I want nothing to do with you, ever. You are declaring yourself my enemy and the enemy of everyone who cares about themselves, those they know, or society believing things that are true, or even mostly true, rather than mostly false.

"lying is wrong" what evangelical nonsense is this???

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smol vaudeville hook

I didn't expect that at all 😺🤣

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My great-uncle was unemployed and on welfare for at least a decade and I think two later in his life.

He had a trust fund. He bought a new car every three years or so. I don't remember whether they were Cadillacs but they probably were. He lived in what we now refer to as affordable housing, which he qualified for because a trust fund did not count as enough income to disqualify him.

He was a piece of shit.

But also no one was mistaking him for anyone actually poor, on the street or otherwise.

I guess friendly reminder that you can't actually judge someone's socioeconomic status based on what they own and the classic republican "they can't be poor they own a smart phone/computer" argument doesn't suddenly stop being complete out of touch nonsense when a poor person makes it.

Anyway insert "y'all can't be trusted to eat the rich bcs you'll target taco bell shift leaders and people with playstations instead of actual billionaires" post here.

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

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Need you guys to validate me here so I can win arguments