Yes it does, but I imagine not all pistol parries are created equal

You see real democracy is when you subvert the will of the people and call it “checks and balances”.

Its been a long time, like I said I read it right when it came out. I’m glad people enjoyed it! It was quite an investment, and I loved most of the books leading up, even the Wizard and the Glass. You all make some good points but it just didn’t hit me that way and I’m not liable to go back. I hardly read any fiction anymore, except the occasional classic, Philip K Dick, or whenever Joe Abercrombie comes out with a new book I’ll usually pick it up.

I hated book 7, ruined the whole series

I hated book 7. Ruined the whole series for me. I read the last 3 books (excluding Wind through the Keyhole, I’m done) when they came out, book 6 was just a setup/tease for book 7 and I was so excited for it. But it was so dumb and disappointing. I’ve talked to people who liked the ending and I just don’t get it. 6 books building up the existential evil that lived at the center of all existence, and when he gets to the tower to face the evil it’s just an old guy on a balcony throwing Harry Potter hand grenades. You have to suspend so much disbelief to get there, trudge through thousands of pages, and it’s just a sad, pathetic, uninspired, lazy ending.

I have a constitutional right to glue an Uzi to a quadcopter to protect my GMC Sierra

Roko’s basilisk is gonna have a field day with this one

Okay but have you considered shoving AI down the throats of consumers and forcing them to use it? I say invest in more gigantic server farms!

I didn’t mean it to be antagonistic, and I provided a source. Its just such a disgusting story, bereft of any humanity. I wish I had never heard about it, I just couldn’t believe someone wanted to like read about it

Jesus, you want a citation for this?

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israelis-protest-arrest-of-soldiers-accused-of-gang-raping-gazan-detainee/3288825

There have been protests inside Israel for ceasefire, the org Standing Together has done a lot of good organizing inside the country.

But one thing that Oct.7 accomplished was show the divisions in society wrt Palestinian apartheid. Its getting more difficult for people who can’t abide it to coexist with people who are okay with it; and the people who believe there should be even more brutality and violence against Palestinians are becoming a major problem for both of those groups. The state of Israel is fracturing, while groups like the PFLP, Hamas and Fatah are coming together for the first time in decades. While some of the tactics of Hamas are unconscionable, and Fatah has a long collaborationist history with Israel, it definitely indicates a dramatic change of the dynamics in the region. We’ll see what holds together and what breaks apart. Its very sad that Marwan Barghouti is currently imprisoned, he’s one of the most popular figures in Palestine whereas Fatah and Hamas are fairly unpopular

Pat Tillman has entered the chat

If the Israeli government was trying to nationalize their oil or mining resources, we’d invade their ass so fucking fast; but they’re just murdering tens or hundreds of thousands of people, starving children, bombing infrastructure, destroying culture, and traumatizing generations, so let’s just ask sternly for a cease fire, and frown a bit for the cameras – if that

I will stop using a mouse and get really good with hotkeys rather than pay a subscription.

And that’s why the top 500 companies should be publicly owned

I was singing this the other day to my wife and she was confused. Haven’t listened to Bungle since college, gotta dig Disco Volente out soon

I recommend Clown Core all the time, but yeah it’s not for normies

“I Got a Feeling” by Neva Denova. It’s not a famous band or song, but its so incredibly sad and angry and nihilistic and there’s nothing else that comes close. When I’m feeling really shitty though, it kind of cheers me up. It has this long sing-along outro, “The world’s a shitty place, and I can’t wait to die.” But after repeating this over and over the song ends and someone in the background says affectionately, “I’m just kidding world, you know I love you.” I’ve struggled with intrusive negative thoughts for most of my life, and there is something cathartic about having my internal pain externalized in song-form, and that final line is like a voice I’ve had to develop that fights against all the negativity, to like survive the worst of the blackest depressions. Except instead of taking no small amount of energy to consciously or automatically summon that voice, it comes easy; it’s right on the recording, and it plays every time.

I wouldn’t say I’m embarrassed to tell people about the song, but I do think people would worry about me if they knew I listened to it when at my worst. But it really makes me feel like, “well at least I’m not that depressed and nihilistic,” and it helps.

Noone believes that people have full freedom with no context, no extenuating circumstances. What makes arguments like this seem convincing is how uncommon it is for people to think dialectically.

Here’s a very good essay that steps through all of the different parts of the problem, and looks at different views historically. https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html

To the hard deterministic explanation that “something always came before,” it asks “what is the role of the individual in history?”

This excerpt isn’t a substitute for reading the whole essay but it makes a point pretty concisely:

But let us return to our subject. A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes. Carlyle, in his well-known book on heroes and hero-worship, calls great men beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others, and desires things more strongly than others. He solves the scientific problems brought up by the preceding process of intellectual development of society; he points to the new social needs created by the preceding development of social relationships; he takes the initiative in satisfying these needs. He is a hero. But he is not a hero in the sense that he can stop, or change, the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course. Herein lies all his significance; herein lies his whole power. But this significance is colossal, and the power is terrible.

Why are we assuming we don’t have free will? We do. Its not total freedom, our freedom is contingent on existing circumstances, but hard determinism is easily disprovable.

The idea that there is no free will is a mind fuck that keeps you from questioning your reality. You might as well ask, “assuming the earth is flat, why does the stick disappear on the horizon?”

I don’t know, maybe a proclivity but our family wasn’t really the type for diagnosing mh disorders. I had to fight like hell to get my own diagnoses as an adult.