Sorry, everyone who knows how to make khlav kalash has been deported.

The leader has issues a new memorandum. You will only be allowed to drink flat, room-temperature, caffeine free Diet Mt. Dew.

Because of your lack of patriotism for our national beverage, the leadership has decreed that you will now only be able to drink caffeine-free Diet Mt. Dew.

In our techo utopian future, the only caffeinated beverage will be Diet Mt. Dew.

Now there’s another shower thought.

What if one day airplanes just like…stopped working…

Spinning is better than not spinning.

Require all philosophy professors at the Athens University philosophy department to be middle-aged gay men with 20-something twink lovers.

We should give a bunch of military aid to Greece. But make it all contingent on them recreating the Sacred Band of Thebes.

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

I too am disturbed by the noted decline in Austin Powers references among high school students.

Sure. It means they can ask you to do other things that aren’t explicitly written in the original job description. But every time they tell you to do something beyond it, you just start doing THAT exactly to the letter of the request.

Well, first, I’m not a guy. But two, if anyone ever makes a comment like that, I just say, "look…my work involves cutting, grinding, smashing, burning, and straining wood specimens until they break and buckle. If you really want to associate that with certain body parts, be my guest. But…it sounds quite painful.*

This reminds me of a work-to-rule or a “White Strike.” It turns out that every company, even those that supposedly operate off of “unskilled” labor, utterly rely on employees making a ton of judgment calls and often working outside their job description. When employees start working to the letter of their job description, the whole operation quickly grinds to a halt.

I didn’t know that was a thing. Thanks! I’m honestly surprised some MBA bean counter hasn’t replaced those with a chip of some sort by now. Really cool!

Any mechanical regulation process that used to be handled by actual machine parts. Think of the centrifugal governor, this beautiful and elegant mechanical device just for regulating the speed of a steam engine. Sure, a computer chip could do it a lot better today, and we’re not even building steam engines quite like those anymore. But still, mechanically controlled things are just genuinely a lot cooler.

Or hell, even for computing, take a look at the elaborate mechanical computers that were used to calculate firing solutions on old battleships. Again, silicon computers perform objectively better in nearly every way, but there’s something objectively cool about solving an set of equations on an elaborate arrangement of clockwork.

I suppose it really depends on your perspective. If you’re that uncontacted tribe, you see birds all the time. The idea of a creature being able to fly is pretty mundane. Humans can’t naturally fly like birds, but neither can they naturally wield knives as long and sharp as tiger claws. But flying is ultimately just duplicating something already found in nature.

But the ability to instantly and effortlessly summon fire? The closest thing in nature is the bombardier beetle, and that shoots boiling acid. Impressive, but it’s not true fire. There are no creatures in nature that can just summon fire on command. From a natural perspective, instantly creating fire is a lot more impressive than a flying machine.

Sure. But again, it’s a distributed platform. And it does tend to be less subject to zero-thought zero tolerance policies built to appease advertisers. If you start posting death threats to politicians, you’ll get banned (and probably visited by law enforcement.) But I never posted anything like that. I never threatened anyone. I never advocated vigilante violence. I never posted anything that I couldn’t, completely legally, write on a big sign and literally walk around in front of the White House fence advocating for.

I’ve had a few accounts banned from a few of the larger subreddits, then I got a general permaban for ban evasion. Among the things I was banned from big subreddits for:

1. Making even vaguely pro-Palestinian comments on r/worldnews

2. Commenting in r/politics, that if the SCOTUS ruled that the president had complete immunity and was effectively a dictator, he should drone strike Supreme Court justices until that power is taken away. (Actual news stories proposing this were allowed on r/politics. But the comments section had an idiotic zero-context zero-thought “no violence” policy. IMO, the only moral use of dictatorial powers is to force through changes stripping yourself of those dictatorial powers.)

3. Literally on January 6th, as a group of armed insurgents was actively trying to overthrow our government in a coup, asking why they weren’t being met with automatic weapons fire. I have zero doubt that if BLM tried to storm the inauguration of a president Trump, they would be shot by the dozen. But right wing extremists were allowed to openly attempt a coup in broad daylight. (We later learned the reason this didn’t happen is that the president had deliberately kept troops from being deployed to protect the capital building.)

My primary account on reddit had several hundred thousand comment karma on it. I’ve had accounts with 15 year histories on there. But the main subreddits have been completely taken over by either right wing radicals or pro-advertiser zero-thought censorship policies. I literally had my main account banned from r/politics for wondering why my nation’s military wasn’t defending the peaceful transfer of power from a group of armed revolutionaries.

Looking back, I think we would have been a lot better off if January 6th HAD resulted in scores of thugs being gunned down with machine guns. Instead, the people who planned it haven’t been brought to justice and have been left to simply try again. And since then, in right wing circles, it’s been recast as some noble peaceful protest. We would have been far better off if the leaders of that movement never made it off the capital grounds. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s when fascists try to seize power violently, you need to come down like the Hammer of God upon them. Giving them a slap on the wrist to appease them does not work, it just teaches them that you are weak, and that they should keep trying til they succeed. If a thousand of the countries most violent right wing extremists had instead never left capital grounds alive that day, I think today we would be in a far better place.

But…you can’t post that kind of thing on r/politics without getting instantly permabanned. They censor any discussion of violence, even when it is entirely justified and legal in the defense of a nation and its democracy. It’s been said that from time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants. But on r/politics, the tree of liberty is doomed to wither, as discussing watering the tree with the blood of tyrants violates community guidelines and doesn’t make advertisers happy.

Or, as a final example, I think there was a story on there once that was hyperbolically lamenting, “OMG, what happens if Trump raises a group of right wing militias to stage an armed revolution if they lose in 2024?” I replied truthfully and correctly. What do we do if any group of people tries to overthrow the government by force? We shoot them. We send in the most powerful military on Earth, we shoot them, and we put them in the ground. That is what you do with rebels. That is what any democracy needs to do if it wants people to respect the results of elections. When you try to overthrow a legitimately elected government, your life is now forfeit, and you will be met with unrelenting merciless force. That is how that scenario would actually go down in real life. Democracy is worth fighting for. And democracy is worth killing for. And I wasn’t afraid to state this plain and obvious fact. That got one account permabanned from r/politics.

In short, I am not afraid of saying that under certain circumstances, it is entirely just and legal for violence, even extreme and lethal violence, to be used to protect a nation and its republic. But on a big subreddit like r/politics, you’ll be permabanned for saying it’s OK to shoot people trying to violently overthrow the government.

Was on reddit for many years, didn’t like the direction it was going. Also I’m permabanned from there!