I do feel shame. It won’t do much good.

Of course, once they decide we’re enemies of state, there is no reason not to revolt.

We just need the public to recognize their faces are on the menu next.

In the meantime if we could get some scholars to clean out the inequity in our constitution, maybe even try some non-FPTP electoral system, it might give the rebels something to fight for that isn’t Same as the old boss.

Temporary infertility or permanent infertility?

At first thought it sounds like they want more pregnant teens.

I do this kind of explaining, and yeah police and some bureaucrats have no patience for it.

I am also a total, total (ASD) dork.

I want that song. Is it just called Castamere?

Yes, but among my regular players were Agatha Christie enthusiasts, and they failed to notice as well.

My Grandson is 11 now and is reading YAF, so there’s still hope. My partner, who is an avid reader has been calling him up to read a book together.

Curious, so you believe in the cases where the US, or its respective states execute a prisoner that it is warranted because there’s no other way?

I could go ahead, as you did to me, and assert you’re a monster, but instead I’ll give you a chance to elaborate.

You could make a career out of that.

From most like to least likely, according to academics, the hypotheses are:

1. Literary device (mythical fiction)
2. Impostor (Someone else pretending)
3. Visions and grievance hallucinations (these happen)
4. Only mostly dead (was not quite killed)

By far, the consensus is literary device, and there are even indications of stages, starting with the empty tomb and embellished by later authors.

Religion is wrong. We visit sweet, sweet death every night when we go into theta sleep. We don’t notice because we’re not there. By the time we wake up REM has frontloaded so much of our subconscious memory that we don’t even notice that we’re back until Oh! I’m not trying to daredevil-scale my way up a skyscraper and stuck at the twelfth floor.

In Heaven’s River (Bobiverse #4 by Dennis E. Taylor) the characters discuss the caloric needs of intelligence. They mention 35% of caloric intake but that might be for the local intelligent species. Wikipedia says it’s 22% of our caloric intake average when at rest. (If you’re jogging, your legs take up more. Also you may find it harder to do complex math.)

After a long ardent search for the mechanisms by which the material world interacts with the spiritual world, with every religious edifice watching for centuries, we’ve found absolutely nothing. Not a sign of souls or spiritual intelligence. There’s nothing powering the spirit, and there’s nothing powering any spirit’s capacity to think (to remember, to receive and process sensory input, to sense the passing of time, to assess current circumstances, to wonder and ask questions, to follow logic and compute arithmetic… all absent.)

The dead have infinite patience. The universe ends in a blink. They give absolute zero fucks, putting every well-dressed goth to shame. They don’t remember The Cure, or flying buttresses.

Suicide is a big choice, but we can’t rely on religion or spirit to keep us here. We have to find our own reasons to stay in this life, which is why some people choose to kill themselves than face the long dwindling fade of dementia or when spies decide to L-pill rather than be tortured to death (even when they have no intelligence to give) or why people will self-immolate in protest or go on suicide attacks in war, to serve a cause they will never appreciate themselves.

When we are suffering, it’s tempting to unlife impulsively, which is why we have some veterans on gun watch, where a friend will hold their weapon until they’re in a better state.

But when you talk to someone on the brink, they’re staring down jumping out of a burning building. They may soon between choosing between getting extrajudicially detained by the federal government’s round-up-the-undesirables plan or going out on their own terms. The US just actively voted to dispose of millions of undesirables (undesirable according to the guy they just made POTUS and to the transnational white power movement). So you have to make it personal: If you go, I will miss you, and there will be fewer of us to fight the Tigers.

The US has a huge and rising suicide rate, (about 50,000 in 2023 according to CDC. ), and this only includes the ones that succeeded that were reported. About three times that just end up in the ER, or end up recovering without medical care. And the new movement is eager to see more of us dead… in fact, anyone not in the movement; anyone who doesn’t believe as they do.

So we have to make a society that doesn’t compel us to consider death just to escape it. And for now, we have to be that society when we can.

Delicious, delicious healthcare insurance executives.

I could eat them all and still be hungry.

This was a game that got a huge boost in popularity in 2020 thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown.

In the movie Glass Onion (which takes place during the lockdown) Benoit Blanc is introduced playing Among Us while taking a bath (implied for a very long time). Two of Blanc’s opponents are Angela Lansbury / Jessica Fletcher and Stephen Sondheim

Technically, Among Us the killer isn’t a human assassin but a creature like the eponynous thing in John Carpenter’s The Thing. The game features a tongue attack that no human (known) can do.

Personally, I was turned onto Among Us by my grandson who loved the game, and it was a way to bond. I went by Wargraves and nobody ever got the reference. It was a little wierd thay most of the players were grade-schoolers who had a tendency to assume everyone else was also their age. After all, I’m wearing the top hat and am named after an Agatha Christie character.

Curiously as I thought about it, both Thompson and Mangione committed wrongdoing and caused harm. I also recognize the harm and wrongdoing caused by Thompson exceeds that caused by Mangione by many many orders of magnitude.

The folks who were detained at Auschwitz and Dachau, I am sure, not only understand that violence was right and appropriate to cease their imprisonment and processing, but really wish the Allies pushed ten times as hard to reach them.

It is an awful thing that sometimes we have to put down rabid animals for the safety of everyone and everything around them. I think we might also want to create effective ways to prevent, detect and treat rabies so that animals don’t have to be put down, and might even consider wiping out the lyssavirus entirely if there was a way to do so, so we never have to put down a rabid animal again.

I propose there might be similar approaches we could take towards corporate greed and desperate circumstances that lead to assassins killing rich corporate officers and the entire country celebrating the act of violence. I don’t know either what they are or how to implement them when they might threaten current structures of political power. Historically, violence will be necessary, but I’m open to ideas.

In 2003, extrajudicial detention and torture of detainees was legal.

Curiously, the English language uses the words sin and crime to talk about wrongdoing, even though sin is wrongdoing against God (as according to whatever ministry whose services you attend) and crime is wrongdoing against the state. We don’t have words for wrongdoing against the self, the neighbor, the community, the natural environment or (hypothetically) the universe, and often make up phrases, e.g. sin against nature, or crime against humanity.

(Granted some acts of wrongdoing against these other objects might be regarded as a sin or a crime, but then the focus is on the transgression against church and state; our entire justice system and our entire religious moral system cares very little about the victims, but retribution against the offender. If someone shoots up a school and kills themselves, the state and its justice system cares very little.)

🤓:

You raise a point that is not only valid but really rather pertinent in the US in 2024, that yes, it’s super easy to paint groups as generic enemy, at which point it’s acceptable to do anything to them.

Demonizing Arabs and Muslims became conspicuous in the aughts after the 9/11 attacks. The US was soon in Afghanistan (still with memories of where empires go to die since USSR was there a decade earlier) and the US was back in Iraq due to Weapons of Mass Destruction (e.g. nukes) that never materialized. Hate crimes surged against both Arab and Muslim communities (with the assumption that all of one category was in the other)

Then Abu Ghraib scandal became public in 2003. We Americans soon found out it wasn’t isolated, rather there’s a whole CIA extrajudicial detention and torture ( enhanced interrogation ) program. Apparently it was okay to torture terrorists. Also we learned we couldn’t rely on local news agencies, since they were too beholden to the White House Press Office. Only foreign news agencies were willing to talk about extraordinary rendition and waterboarding.

(Eventually we’d be able to look up on Wikipedia that torture was obsolete when it came to interrogation of the enemy, as this guy, a WWII Luftwaffe interrogator, showed that being nice works far better. We were torturing Arab Muslims because some rich people wanted to know brown people were suffering for 9/11 even if it wasn’t anyone actually involved, but I digress)

Pretty soon, any media person or activist that challenged the policies of the George W. Bush administration (including torture and the use of PMCs to massacre villages) was called a terrorist, and dismissed by the rapidly growing conservative media establishment.

In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump) talk of demons, of possession and exorcisms and ways to justify calling other people demons or associated with Satan is rising.

And the cool thing about Satan, if you’re a Christian fanatic, is you can do anything you want to Him because he’s the enemy by fiat.

So literally demonizing folk (accusing them of being demons, being possessed by demons or in league with demons) is the first step before deciding they need shooting or lynching or packed into detention centers.

/🤓 (Sorry about the rant. I’ve been specifically studying this stuff since Waco)

You seem eager to jump to conclusions while putting no thought into them. Why don’t you share your moral philosophy opinion with the class?

When, in your opinion, is it right and proper for someone to kill someone else?

You don’t pick an adult cat up by the scruff! But – at least for some videogenic cats – they will instinctively relax.

My cat relaxes, but then my cat gets all loungy anytime I interact with him.

Pet tax: He is one with the universe in a box.

A clamp (padded, preferably) on the scruff of the neck will temporarily brick a cat.

Try this only with familiar cats with whom you have rapport.

Don’t leave them for too long. A few minutes at most.

Not guilty on ground of necessity.

Self defense ( he killed me, I killed him back ) and deminished capacity ( coverage denial panic or coverage denial derangement syndrome ) are the first two that come to mind.

Most of the time the courts don’t take necessity defenses seriously, even when they are super valid. But sometimes when the defendant is white and has money or prominence, and the victim is not well liked it pops up now and again.

Case in point, when Dan White shot and killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone in 1978.

It may have been C+ or merely C with OOP features. I was writing the enemy-AI code (not to be confused with actual learning systems) in visual basic (and made some sweet pathfinding algorithms at the time), but took it too seriously and ended up breaking my brain.

We had a publisher and it was going to be awesome and then Windows 95 came out and broke all our code.