• 4 Posts
  • 64 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • That’s not the question.

    The question should be what choice does Harris have, except to stop Israel?

    If (as I strongly agree) trump is the worst human on the planet who will cause irreparable damage to :gestures wildly: fucking everything, then why doesn’t his opponent have the responsibility to do whatever the hell it takes, within the law to keep him out of power?

    Especially as in this instance his opponent is currently sworn to be responsible for the ongoing welfare of the nation.

    Imagine being so fucking intent on enabling genocide half a planet away that you’d rather let your own country fall into the hands of Camacho Harkonnen rather than attract progressive voters.

















  • Mirrors can totally reverse top-to-bottom, you just have to bend over to see it. The left-right bias is based on the way we look behind us, not any property of the mirror.

    This takes a little explaining.

    A rotation is a reversal through two dimensions at once.

    If you turn around to look behind you, you’re swapping front-and-back, AND left-and-right.

    If you stand on your head, you’re swapping front-and-back AND top-and-bottom.

    Stand facing the way the mirror does, then turn to look into it. You have to do some kind of rotation - a two-dimension reversal - to get there. If you’re a normal human, you’ll twist around, swapping left-and-right as you swap back-and-front. Your left and right ear swap places, your nose and the back of your head swap places too.

    But your reflection doesn’t do that.

    A mirror only reverses ONE dimension: front-and-back. It’s the equivalent of punching your face out the back of your head: its ears are still on their original sides. You have swapped left and right in order to face in the opposite direction, but your reflection hasn’t - so it’s ears are on opposite sides to yours.

    But you can do it the other way.

    Stand with your back to the mirror, and bend over and look under your arm (or between your legs) to see your reflection, instead of twisting around.

    Hold something with writing on it, and you’ll see: the letters in the reflection are upside-down, but they face in the right direction.

    The only reason you don’t see this very often is that it’s a fucking weird thing to do and nobody ever does it.




  • As for helping - I think that once they get far enough down the path, there’s probably not much you can do for them. But compassion is always a good thing no matter who you spend it on.

    As is sparing a thought for the poorly-socialised, and for the lack of opportunities people have to just hang out in any kind of casual social setting, if you’re not already part of a friend group.

    Someone works a shit job in a dingy office with three people they hate and no general public flowing through, they’re exhausted at the end of the day and even if they had a place to go they just want to go home. Weekends are for laundry and chores and recovering from the week - and besides, what are they going to do, head to some bar and spend all their money drinking alone, just getting aloner?

    Most of the opportunities out there rely on having either a pre-existing set of people to hang out with, or enough acquired charisma that they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.

    Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.