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Not exactly the same, but I'll never pass up a chance to mention the "banana pose" that seals do.

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This is a super important point. Violence is not just the direct application of physical force. Anything that harms is violence. All forms of enclosure or denial of life's basic necessities. Anything that causes people to starve or sicken, and so much more. Those are violence, justly met with violence.

As for Brian Thompson's kids: yes, I do have some sympathy for them. But I have no patience with selective concern. Did nj_vintage ever grieve for the children BT killed? I do, but I'm sure they don't. They don't actually give a shit about anyone's kids. Their guilt trip is just a rhetorical ploy, in support of a hierarchy they (delusionally) hope to climb, not caring one bit about the constant and enormous harm it causes others. Fuck them and everyone like them.

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Kind of off topic, but at first I read "monotheism" as "monotremes" and I was having some trouble making the connection.

Anyone who genuinely believes that monotheism is the reason we have patriarchy should go read the Code of Hammurabi.

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If you asked a hundred people where the glabella was, I'll bet the majority of answers would center around a lower part of the body.

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also consider: LOTR but hobbits have Tapeta Lucidum

Boromir gets the fright of his life their first night on the road

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Half formed? That's how whole-ass religions start.

Not expalining WHY bookburning is bad and WHAT books were targeted has left us with Bookworm uwu girlies treating any art project or act involving destorying/modifying any random ass mass printed novel as if it was a crime against humanity

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I know most of you don't know me well enough to find this interesting, but a few probably do so here's an update on my prostate-cancer journey.

Recap: on November 10, I got my biopsy results and learned that I have prostate cancer. Not only that, but it had progressed significantly since my MRI almost a year earlier (though still confined to the prostate which is really good news under the circumstances).

The reason for the year gap was repeated communication screwups by my urologist, for which the hospital's chief of urology and director of practice operations issued a reprimand (to them) and an apology (to me). Accordingly, I looked for and found another urologist - actually a chief of urologic oncology - at a different hospital. They had three requirements before I would technically become their patient with my first visit.

A new PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) test.

A current MRI.

The biopsy slides.

The PSA test was easy. I already had that done the same day I talked to the new doctor's office. Since then I've been fighting to get the MRI. Insurance denied it, claiming no medical necessity. Yes, this was all around the same time that awareness of medical-insurer bullshit exploded into the public consciousness. Anyway, I used all the tricks I had heard about, had my primary-care physician do a peer-to-peer, all to no avail. Fortunately, the new doctor's office relented and said I didn't need a new MRI after all. I guess if they need that information the new guy can order it, and since he's quite likely a co-author on the guidelines they cited for the earlier denial he might be able to push it through. I'd love to sit in on that call, especially since the doctor who issued the denial is a breast cancer specialist ("practice limited to...") in California and might not even be qualified for this case. Still, would have been nice if the new folks had told me it was unnecessary before I spent so much time on a failed mission.

Today I arranged to pick up the (old) MRI data tomorrow. I also called the pathology lab about the biopsy slides. They seem OK with me picking those up myself, so I might as well do that as part of the same trip. Then, hopefully, I can take all three items over to the new office myself and be done with all this bullshit for the year. My consultation is on January 8, shortly followed (I hope) by treatment. So there's a decent chance I'll have this whole saga behind me before my 60th birthday. 🎉 Or maybe the cancer will have spread to my bones by then, but no sense worrying about that yet. It's always possible something terrible could happen and I have no control over it, so might as well focus on the most likely path.

Obviously this process has taught me to hate medical insurers. I'm also not fond of hospitals now. I had to spend hours calling around five different departments at the old hospital on Monday, trying to find the right office to get that MRI data. Then it turns out that the radiology library (separate from the main records department for some reason) is staffed by one person half time, mostly in the early morning, so I had to wait an extra couple days to reach them. The impression I get is that the front-line folks are good people doing their best - including the doctors except for That One - but they're operating in a system thoroughly devoted to gatekeeping and gaslighting for profit. Maybe when I'm all done taking care of my own medical needs I'll make this my cause. There are worse ways to spend my time.

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Este vídeo es importante:

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As others have said many times, any crime that is punished only with a fine is only a crime for the poor. I'll add that any inconvenience that can be avoided with money is a tax on the poor.

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You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is, ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia,’ but only slightly less well-known is this: never talk about how liability works where @sasquapossum can hear you.

Let me explain! No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

(OK, enough Princess Bride quotes. On with the show.)

One of the most vapid things libertarians seem to believe (and that's an intense competition) is that we can get rid of regulations and just let people sue when they're harmed. Well ... no. For one thing, the court system would have to be multiple orders of magnitude bigger than it already is to deal with that caseload. It would have to be the biggest employer in the country. We'd be the United States of Civil Court. It's absolutely insane to believe that such an approach would work, just from a pure logistical perspective.

But there's an even bigger problem. Much bigger. Courts and legal procedures by design have lots of rules about standing, evidence, etc. Those rules aren't perfect by any stretch, but relaxing them too much would invite a flood of garbage cases. It would open up whole new worlds of ways that the already-rich could harass and oppress the rest of us. And it would make the caseload problem (see above) even worse. So we can't do that. We're stuck with something like the rules we have now ... and that brings us to the real issue.

Courts as they currently exist just can't handle harms that are diffuse, indirect, delayed, or otherwise not conformant to the model under which those courts were designed. Dump a ton of toxic sludge on a single neighbor's yard and they can sue you. They can establish standing, meet the required burden of proof wrt causality, etc. Dump that same ton of toxic sludge into a river, so that hundreds of people downstream get cancer twenty years later, and nobody can sue. Not effectively, anyway, and often not at all. They won't be able to establish standing. They won't be able to prove causation and therefore culpability. They might not be able to find you, or identify you as a possible culprit. The harm is done, and you're long gone. (BTW this completely explains the libertarians' fascination: they hate accountability.)

This is why we have regulation. Even if all harms could be addressed after the fact like that, it would be heinously inefficient to do so and government should operate within reasonable resource constraints. I actually kind of agree with libertarians that we should be very careful about what we regulate and how. This is true not only for human-liberty reasons but also because complexity is the enemy of both efficiency and fairness (see also: the medical/insurance complex). But to say that regulation is fundamentally or usually bad is insane. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" is not always true, but nowhere is it more true than this. Of course we need rules, and of course we need to apply some of them before harm occurs.

P.S. This doesn't even get into the problems with limited liability, "corporate personhood" 🤮, Citizens United, or unfair (and counterproductive) taxation of capital vs. labor. Those all deserve essays of their own, but this one really got me going today.

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Insensitive to his what?

Killing 68,000 people was United's choice.

Murder by algorithm is wrong.

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He probably thought he was.

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No, the guy on the jetski is.

help I’m dying

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Not to overthink this, but I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that Tumblr users tend to be avid media consumers - TV shows (including foreign), movies, games, books, graphic novels, etc. Especially with the fandom connection(s). That necessarily involves "switching gears" a lot, so it's second nature.

Xitter and the rest, on the other hand, are not full of avid media consumers. A lot of those people haven't read a book in years. The only TV they watch is Fox, and the only movies they watch are mass-market franchises. Also guns and trucks. Their interests are nowhere near as diverse, and they're generally averse to change of any kind, so the same kind of shift makes them uncomfortable and they take it out on everyone around them.

OK yeah, I overthought that a bit.

the average twitter vs tumblr community experience

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As others have also (not really) wondered: what happened in 1980?