Disney has pleasantly surprised me with how they're dealing with Star Wars. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

LK

Sometimes, they write love letters to the fans.

LK

HBO might not mean anything to Gen Z and later but for us Gen X and earlier, there was still a level of prestige associated with the brand.

It was stupid to throw that away.

LK

I called it out on another branch of this discussion but I'm talking about things like, someone posts a question that goes something like this:
"Am I The Asshole for declining a second date with the chick I met on Tinder after she told me she was trans?"

Topics like this are ban honeypots because even getting too close to a verboten position will get you banned by Reddit.

I have seen it. I have been threatened with a ban for expressing the opinion that 8 year old children shouldn't be given sex reassignment surgery.

Reddit is toxic.

LK

I chose that specific example precisely because it's banned on all of reddit. If you say that there is any difference between XX CIS women and XY Trans women, you'll be banned from Reddit.

Ridiculous, right?

LK

Or general relationship subreddits.

Someone will ask "Am I transphobic for not going on a second date after this chick I met on Tinder told me she was trans?"

It'll be a ban honeypot.

LK

Good faith disagreements can get you banned from a lot of them.

Someone who is prone to falling in line with group think will likely never encounter it but it's real.

LK

It's a stupid echo chamber full of stupid people who are chasing stupid agendas.

It's a place where they will permanently ban you for suggesting that there is any difference of any kind between XX CIS women and XY Trans women.

It's a place where you'll be mod bombed into oblivion for saying that you wouldn't want to date a current or former sex worker.

It's a place where honest discourse goes to die.

Seriously, fuck Reddit.

LK

It's worth running the numbers.

In 50,000 years, there could be a whole new crop of coal to repeat this whole cycle all over again.

LK

That's the thing about the eco wackos that really burns my ass.

Nuclear is the only viable option for cheap, clean power and they fight it tooth and nail. Solar and wind are great additions but nuclear would give us everything we need.

They don't want that. They're not pushing for thorium power, they're not pushing to update safety standards. They're fighting to shut it all down.

They're not concerned with saving the environment, they're neo-luddites.

Cheap, clean power would do more than anything else within our reach at the moment to improve the lives of everyone on this planet and they oppose it, have you ever wondered why?

LK

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

Remember Rob Enderle?

I hope that now Elon Musk will step in and buy it to get rid of some of the idiotic policies that are in place.

LK

I do not like the amount of money my country is sending to the Ukraine either but a deal is a deal. The US, UK, France and several others pledged to defend Ukraine in exchange for them giving up their nuclear weapons.

LK

I'll say the same thing to you that I said to the Trump voters who were crying 4 years ago.

The guy who got the most votes won. That is Democracy in action. Get over it.

LK