It’s bud. Like cut it off before it blooms into whatever awful thing it’s growing into.

I’m all for sticking it to the chuddy guys who call themselves ‘alpha’ and behave accordingly. But there’s a bit more to it than “alpha wolves doesn’t real”.

The scientists who observed the ‘alpha wolf’ behavior were seeing something: wolves in captivity. Which is something that has an analogous human experience in prison.

But since there are an awful lot of these ‘alpha guys’ who have (somehow) never caught a charge, much less spent a stint in prison, maybe it says something about how, maybe, they feel imprisoned on the outside. Like maybe their school, work, home, or social life feels penned in in a way that is not healthy.

She also asked that people do things that she specially could not do due to having no authority to enact policy, whereas Musk is interacting directly with levers of power (whether he has any legitimate/legal authority to do so).

This line dropped as the second George W Bush term was getting underway. It felt super relevant then, too (I actually viewed him and Cheney as worse than Trump until he actively worsened COVID). But this term’s opening has been so bad so fast that the line really does hit different.

There’s no such thing as ethnic cleansing. It’s just a weasel word for genocide. It’s all it ever has been. When “ethnic cleansing” was going on in the Balkans in the 90s, it was just a genocide that nobody was intervening to stop. Same for Myanmar in the mid 2010s And for Karabakh in 2020.

Russia’s search for alternatives in Algeria, Sudan, or Libya

The logistics of a Mediterranean naval base in Sudan would be something to behold. Seems like they’d have to cross the Suez. That or portage past the Aswan Dam.

He can’t say that in a meeting that will obviously have leaks. It would be “value-destroying.”

What’s the point of having “Fuck You Money” if you don’t say “Fuck you” when it matters?

Whenever people act like disruptive protest is such a terrible tactic, I have to wonder what they think would work instead. Like, do they think the letter writing campaigns that have gone exactly nowhere in 40 years are on the verge of a breakthrough?

Or would they prefer the environmental movement to compile an overly literal companion reader to Andreas Malm?

The Prime Minister is de jure the acting president in case of a vacancy. Given the strength of legal institutions in Russia Mikhail Mishustin would have some work ahead of him to actually hold power.

I wonder how much of the rejection of real issues with marijuana are the after effects of nearly a century of it being demonized with sources like “we made it up” or “we just really want to jail black people and college students”.

Then again, we have people out there believing that the entire world was ruled by a single nomadic horde, the world was flooded with mud in the mid 1800s, and 1*1=2 so we might just have a broader issue with people rejecting facts they don’t like.

Order people to fire off more explosives than the human mind can comprehend in a war, then launch more explosives than that entire war in every battle of the next war, and you get called a “great man”

You toss a single grenade at that first guy and suddenly you’re the “bomb thrower”.

Blue sky (and just about anything else) is an improvement, but remember, there is no bottom, things can always be worse. Truth Social and Gab both still exist.

These websites, because they are all centralized, are all ultimately moderated in accordance with the whims of their owners, the effect of which was thrown into sharp relief after Apartheid Willy Wonka bought Twitter.

With a federated platform like Mastodon, no single owner would be able to do this. If an instance suddenly became terrible, they could be de-federated and they’d lose their reach.

Of course, if one instance became particularly large, the ‘whims of the owner’ problem would come right back, but at least the alternatives would still be readily available.

Society will have to relearn a lesson like this every so often, because people kind of yearn to offload the mental energy involved in controlling some aspect of their lives to someone else. And while they’ll probably start by offloading or to someone competent and with their best interests at heart, eventually someone who wants to extract wealth from that position will rise in such a space.

Can’t get there. The Bosphorus is closed to warships

What if your robot was just a guy?

Because your dermatologist isn’t used to checking for skin cancer where the sun don’t shine.

Well, one of their founders and early PMs (and the grandfather of the ex-PM and recent assassination victim, Shinzo Abe) was one of the guys who ran Manchukuo (Manchuria under Japanese occupation in the run up to WWII). With these guys, you always have to wonder how much of the ‘rehabilitation’ took.

Grok Habsburg

We even let AI write our script!

That’s a remake of (and is subtitled as) The Incredible Journey.