palordrolap

If what you’re saying is true, it doesn’t explain why the greatest increase in capitalism has historically occurred under governments that were not liberal (by the dictionary definition. Or my simplistic one.)

Unless, that is, that what you’re saying is that all the pro-capitalist governments were liberal by your definition (or some redefinition to which you and certain others believe is, or should be, correct). That, I think, is a ridiculous way to go about things, and smacks of trying to steal the word or besmirch people who would otherwise use that word to describe themselves.

In short, I think you’re being disingenuous.

The belief that no-one is above anyone else and that everyone should be treated equally. The doesn’t quite match with the dictionary definition, I grant you (I looked it up afterwards), but nonetheless I think I was nearer the mark than “capitalist = liberal”.

Capitalists tend to think of themselves as more deserving than others which would seem to be at odds with that supposed equivalence.

And there’s that the biggest capitalist booms of recent years have been driven by illiberal politics, by and large. Reagan wasn’t a liberal. Thatcher wasn’t. Today’s billionaires are stumbling over themselves to swear fealty to distinctly non-liberal political parties, in power or not.

Wait, what? Liberals are the capitalists now? Or is it that Liberals aren’t doing anything/enough to reign in the capitalists?

The nasal infix for present or very recent actions which was a feature in Proto-Indo-European. Best example is how vicit becomes vincit in Latin. (You’ll recognise the first one from “veni vidi vici” and the second from “invincible”. Both have to do with conquering. Or not being.)

It might also be the root of the word “now” in English, but the evidence for that is scant at best and it’s not in the Wikipedia article. Ditto the n in “recent”, which would be pre-PIE if true.

Also Linux kernel version history and smear frame to double check what I was talking about in recent Fediverse comments.

Someone needs to yarn-bomb this thing. Perhaps something like a headband that falls to googly-eye level maybe. Perhaps, you know, with eyes on it.

Either way, I’d be tempted to put up a sign next to it that says “Help! I’ve gone blind!”

The solutions:

For the individual: Don’t start in the first place, which is what the Maldives are hoping to help people achieve.

For governments: Copy whatever local legislation applies to heroin and make it apply to nicotine as well. The article doesn’t say what the Maldives intend to do to underage smokers and those who’d sell to them, but I’d be making it unnecessarily draconian just so people get the message.

For people who are already smokers: Nicotine patches of decreasing strength over time and some sort of media teaching pen-flipping or other legal hand-based hobby. Having something for the hands to do is a big part of it. If these can be prescribed by medical or psychological practitioners, all the better.

Sounds like someone has butted heads with an HOA or enforcement of some other covenant on look and feel.

Some people apparently have unseemly feelings about everything fitting to a certain design plan.

At the other end of the scale, there’s painting your house neon yellow. A house is not a tennis ball. It should not cause road accidents.

Came here to say something similar. And also to point out that this opinion is a perfectly sound argument in and of itself, thus making it somewhat paradoxical in context.

There are so many. Perhaps because I occasionally go back and watch a compilation or two for the nostalgia - even though I missed the whole phenomenon when they were new - and weep not only for what was lost, but also for how the world was back then.

Here’s just a handful:

Look at all those chickens.

Oh my God, they were roommates.

Five feet apart because they’re not gay.

Fre Shavocado

Stahp! I nearly dropped my croissant!

Road work ahead? Boy, I sure hope it does!

The Kermit singing one. And the fact there’s an extended cut which is probably the origin not the Vine. Also the fact there at least two more Kermit clips from the same car that are super hard to find.

There’s only one thing worse than a r-pist… A child!

Someone already mentioned T-T-T-T-Target

Shalissa is not Beyonce. (And the fact there’s at least one return of Shalissa in the super-rare Vines.)

There’s a bunch of others, but I think I might be dredging them up now because I’m thinking about them rather than ones that come to me randomly.

There are stories that contain devices that can create realities, so even if the top level can’t be a story you create yourself, deeper levels can be anything you like.

The hard part would be convincing someone in the top level to let you, a mysterious interloper, use such a device.

And the next hard part would be readjusting to mundane reality and trying to pick up where you left off when you finally come home.

… just ask anyone who has “returned” to what ought to be a familiar computer game world after an extended break in the real world and/or other games. Or even other worlds in the same game.

… politics is a hugely partisan-tribal affair with a lot of drama

This is a problem everywhere. In fact it may well be the definition of politics.

I know this isn’t particularly helpful in terms of this specific discussion (China, Taiwan, etc.), but that phrase leapt out at me and I had to call attention to it.

In before someone wants to reboot a server and the hypervisor is unresponsive.

YouTube’s algorithm seems to think that if someone watches one video by a creator they’ve never watched before, that their feed of recommendations should immediately be filled by everything that creator ever made, so unless someone at YouTube made a conscious decision for it to do that, it would suggest that people generally go nuts and watch everything.

The fact I noticed and was annoyed by it suggests I’m the exception rather than the rule.

Can’t mention Anton Yelchin without mentioning Grant Imahara. Both gone far too soon.

Whoever’s writing this reality really pulled a GRR Martin there.

Various factors have caused this to spring to mind over everything else and it wasn’t technically part of the cartoon:

Way back when I was a kid, a friend had invited me over to his house and somehow we ended up watching a VHS of The Real Ghostbusters. The episode centred around a baseball match between good and evil. Good had to play fair and Evil could cheat.

At one point, the batter for the evil side, some kind of demon, rather than hitting the ball, chose to swallow it and spit it back out at high speed.

The funny part is that my friend happened to hit freeze-frame with the ball just about to enter the demon’s mouth. I forget why he did that. Maybe we got distracted and wanted to watch it again. Rewind, stop/freeze-frame, play or something like that.

Anyway, because of animation smearing, the way the demon was drawn for that one frame was goofy as hell. The demon looked stupid enough already in a baseball uniform and cap, stretching suspension of disbelief. That goofy frame pushed it right over the edge. We fell about laughing.

Cockles are literally heart shaped when viewed side on. The cardioid in mathematics gets its name from the same thing and that’s bulbous by comparison.

Wiktionary also suggests that “cockles” may be a corruption of cochlea(e) which is one of at least a couple of names for the heart’s ventricles.

There’s an ancient rule along the lines of “If a new invention can be used for sexual purposes, then it will be used for sexual purposes.”

Internet Rules 34 and 35 are descendents of this rule.

People who don’t know are due a rude awakening.

Fun fact: In one episode, they talk about how a leap has to be completed in a certain amount of time in order to guarantee the ability to leap home. They say that the amount of time that each leap must be completed within falls by a certain percentage each time. I did the calculation once. Sam was still within the threshold even after all the many seasons. He should have leaped home.

And it would have been to the alt-timeline where Al and Ziggy were replaced by St.John and Alpha, the one which showed up when Sam previously leapt into Al and temporarily changed history.

All the pieces were there.

(If this feels familiar, I have posted this online before.)

The dude is intrinsically linked - in my mind at least - to time travel plots too. He’s in Timecop as the boss of the time agency, Quantum Leap as “Bartender Al/God(?)” and Voyager as Braxton, the rogue time-travelling captain who repeatedly breaks the temporal prime directive to get back at Janeway.

IMO, that mindset pretty much died the day the towers fell. There was and has been a little “it’s the 21st century” or “it’s <year>” but they’re generally not marked by as much optimism (or subversion of the same) as it was in the '90s.