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Some of the greatest female and homosexual minds of my generation have been lost to astrology and tarot cards.

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so you're telling me that the Catholics have a new mascot that's a cute anime-style blue-eyed teal-haired anime (girl(???) or boy, possibly???) and her name is Luce? As in latin for light, so they're a bearer of light? like... Lucifer? Okay.

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it's too late. i've already depicted you as the buffoonish juror 3 and myself as the unbothered and collected juror 12. it's over.

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I've slowly been chipping away at drawing scenes from that imaginary Muppet retelling of the Princess Bride, figured it was about time to share what I've drawn on Tumblr!

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Using a deep learning model to generate an image uses the same amount of electricity as a computer does in two minutes, and it produces about as much pollution as driving a car six metres. If you're going to criticise the artificial intelligence economic bubble then I'm begging you to pick something sensible to point at.

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The supposed efficiency and effectiveness of fascism was always propaganda: in reality, fascist regimes were deeply inefficient, hobbled by interpersonal rivalry, had institutions weakened or totally subverted by the personalist nature of leadership, and were deeply corrupt and lawless.

So it really, really bugs me how so much speculative fiction and even casual discourse since has taken WW2 era propaganda about fascism at face value, and depicted authoritarianism generally and fascism in particular as an intrinsic tradeoff between the chaos and disorder of liberty and the order of repression. Fascism is not orderly! That was always a lie. There is a reason right-wing authoritarian regimes have mid performance at best and at worst collapse due to infighting and military defeat—they suck at running states!

Democracy is the ideology of order and stability. Democracy provides for stable succession and can sustain rule of law in ways personalist rule cannot. Democracy can create avenues of accountability to reduce corruption that authoritarian (or even one-party rule) could never contemplate. “Democracy is chaos” is a lie invented by fascists to try to discredit liberal principles, and the apparent “chaos” of interwar democracies was often caused by the fascists themselves because they did not believe in liberalism.

I think of this most often in the context of video games about politics where it is assumed that authoritarian governance gives you efficiency bonuses at some cost to happiness or freedom—but I think these mechanics are backward. Fascism and authoritarianism are good for the narrow ruling clique at the top, the people they personally enrich, but they make for brittle and weak states, and they often fuck over even the narrow ethnic group or core citizenry whose will they are supposed to be channeling. Starting World War II was very bad for almost all Germans and Italians!

By contrast political scientists debate if a consolidated liberal democracy has ever deconsolidated, and the biggest challenges to democratic systems of government have tended to come when those systems are illiberal (as before the American Civil War), or being sabotaged by most participants (as Weimar Germany, where neither the left nor the right were really interested in democracy).

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I love the NFL. Did you know they're eating all of the uncrustables?

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it does still make me insane specifically how many queer people lovingly embrace astrology. I went to a poetry workshop yesterday that was genuinely quite good but also included an option to disclose astrology designations during introductions and so many people broke out some variation of "I'm a [x] sum but I have a [y] placement and it SHOWS" girl no it doesn't. that's meaningless correlation you completely invented the causation

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saw this absolute king at the Paris Miku Expo

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I need to start NFL-posting on here so that you nerds can get caught up on all the stupid-ass jokes I can't reference because none of you watch american football. You guys don't even know about god peed that one doesn't even require context

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So I started watching tng

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Taste the Honour!

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"when people ask how you're doing, they don't really care." most of them do, actually, the amount they care is just directly proportional to how well they know you. you're just mad you can't be the main character of the Twice Daily.

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#indulgences

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discourse over shipping the two guys in the mariner’s revenge song by the decemberists but it focuses entirely on the fourteen year age gap and anytime anyone tries to bring up how that one guy fucked the other guy’s mom, gave her syphilis, and stole all her money, leading directly to her tragic death and the titular mariner’s lifelong quest for revenge, they seamlessly pivot into arguing over if actually the mom was in the wrong for fucking an eighteen year old