Lol, yep. Oh you spray lots of stuff that’s designed to kill bugs? I think it might be killing lots of bugs!

I mean, if you’re willing to view TLJ as a standalone film, why wouldn’t you also grant the same reprieve to TFA? They were both cinematically beautiful and told internally consistent and compelling stories, but they looked like dogshit against the backdrop of the rest of the Skywalker storyline and the fundamentals of the SW universe. I just give TFA more leeway because it didn’t intentionally retcon its own set-up material.

Gotta agree with you, unfortunately. I’m just not excited about the Skywalker story anymore. I watched 7-9 with giddy excitement and even left the theater each time thinking good thoughts, but it only took a few hours of reflection for reality to sink in afterwards, and it quickly became clear that Disney somehow managed to fumble at the goal line three times in a row (TFA being the best of the three). Andor and Mando are giving me hope that there’s still room in that time period for good content development, but for the most part I’m shifting my attention to the high republic era and hoping that they can formulate a coherent hero/story arc from that timeline.

Yep, ‘New Jedi Order’ was the working title.

Fascinating, as I had no idea it could start to happen this quickly. This really helps explain how regional dialects like the Carolina Brogue emerged in isolated parts of the country/world.

Whatever the fuck you do in the comfort of your own basement is your business, chief.

How many different ways can I tell you guys that a doomsday clock is the most ludicrous and flatly ineffective tool for communicating the stresses we’re facing in the 21st century? Do you need me to send you a telegram? Maybe a passenger pigeon? I can have it written in the sky by a biplane if that’ll help. Maybe in another language? Hieroglyphics perhaps?

My dude, I studied this. I have two graduate degrees in these subjects. I’m no stranger to the very real problems we’re facing as a global species, and in fact I’ve dedicated my entire career to fighting environmental degradation, often at the expense of my family, my finances, and my health.

A DOOMSDAY CLOCK IS STUPID AND HASN’T HELPED ME OR ANY OF MY COLLEAGUES AT ANY POINT IN OUR ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL CAREERS.

God fucking damn y’all are dense.

The clock is supposed to be about impending doom.

Which I’ve already clarified is ridiculous and unhelpful even if a crisis deserves our utmost attention. That’s on both a pragmatic and a psychological level. If you want a long series of continuous eye rolls, by all means continue telling people the sky is literally falling.

Slow moving disasters can include many things and I used climate change as an example. But there are many others.

None of which include global annihilation as even a remote possibility.

Disease, blight and even an asteroid if it’s big enough.

Do you think telling people we’re seconds from an asteroid hitting will help them do literally anything? What if you tell them that every single day for 40 years? Do you think it’ll help them more in 40 years than it does today?

Since you completely avoided meaningfully responding to literally anything I just wrote and fell back on repeating yourself as if I somehow don’t understand English, I’ll bow out here. Enjoy your masturbatory doom fetish.

I have a graduate degree in climate policy and have worked in the environmental field for almost 15 years. We do not have a high chance of self-ceasing thanks to climate change, and I implore you to stop framing it that way. That kind of language is absolutely and unequivocally unhelpful when it comes to communicating the challenges we face. The fact that laypeople have spent decades saying climate change is going to “destroy the planet” or “kill us all” is exactly the kind of problem I’m talking about. It breeds paralysis because it’s something that you can’t possibly conjure a constructive response to address. If literal Armageddon is coming, then the solution isn’t to try to stop it, the solution is to live your life as best you can, while you can.

Do we face significant challenges as a result of climate change? Absolutely. Is some kind of global food crisis and/or localized famine likely? Absolutely. Will storms and sea level changes displace entire communities of people and worsen an already bad immigration crisis across the globe? Absolutely. Will infrastructure suffer and become increasingly expensive to maintain and adapt? Absolutely. Will changes stress local ecosystems such that extinctions become more likely? Absolutely. Will governments struggle to meaningfully respond when the public purse is constantly stressed by increasingly expensive natural disasters? Absolutely. Will some people die of heat stress, starvation, drowning, etc? Absolutely. Will we “self-cease” as a result?

NO.

So then given that I don’t accept your premise that global annihilation is in any way relevant to climate change, and given that the threat of nuclear Armageddon is something the individual is completely powerless to address, I’d like to counter that a “Doomsday” anything that constantly creeps closer and closer to an imaginary red line, is a completely fucking stupid way to communicate the challenges we face.

Let me put it to you this way: if someone told you an asteroid was going to hit the Earth 90 seconds from now, would you try to stop it? Or would you call your friends and family and tell them you love them?

I agree, to be perfectly honest. I imagine the folks who initially came up with this clock thought it was a good idea, but at this point it’s just a cartoonish shadow of what it was supposed to be. We can only be minutes/seconds from total annihilation for so many years before people shrug and completely lose interest. It’s like listening to a Mayan cultist talk about what’s coming in 2012, or a Christian fundamentalist talk about the coming rapture. It also ignores basic psychology, in that even if you accept the gravity of the clock’s meaning, you’re still left utterly powerless to do anything about it, all while thinking…“ok, so what now?”

As shitty as this will be for the people of Argentina, it will be intriguing to see what a true right-wing fanatic is able to fuck up when given the authority to do so.

I’m not going to argue against what you think you heard 20 years ago, except to say that if you don’t believe Trump is the single most dangerous candidate to ever run for the presidency, then you go into 2024 more optimistic than me. I pray for our health and safety in 2025, and if his next coup attempt succeeds where the last one failed, I pray that we’ll survive the bloodshed after the fall.

Yes the alternative is worse, but election after election you can’t just keep handing centrists your vote who don’t give a shit about you or your policies (and actively shit on you while loudly posturing that they aren’t like you at all). At some point you have to make the threat of withholding your vote a real one, there are always consequences to that especially for this election but at the same time nothing is really going to change if we keep handing centrist corporate democrats the reigns to power because this time is an emergency too (just like last time).

Here’s where you’re missing something fundamental. You’re taking as a given that a protest vote will meaningfully register with the Democratic Party, and they’ll chase you around to get your vote back. I’d offer that a significant reason major US parties have drifted rightward over the past 40 years is this. Conservatives skew older. Leftists skew younger. Young people simply don’t vote. Ergo conservatives have an outsized voice in the political sphere. When more leftists disengage, the conservative voice grows louder.

If you protest vote the Democratic Party, you’re just proving to them that they can’t count on your vote. If they can’t count on your vote, they have the option of scrambling to try to figure out what you want, or chasing voters whose support they can count on, and based on recent history that’ll probably result in more of a shift to the right. Because, at the end of the day, right-leaning voters have a weird fervor that leftists don’t share, and leftists disengage at the drop of a hat. If we’re being honest, that’s not a great group of people to have on your team if you’re trying to sustain political relevance.

If your apathy opens the door to a Republican supermajority in your state legislature, then they can more easily a) strip rights from your friends and neighbors, b) assist in the ratification of amendments and calling of Constitutional Conventions, c) gerrymander away your power to influence Congress, d) remove your city’s ability to govern itself, among others. Down-ballot races can potentially affect all of us.

You’re right, but the people beating their chests all over the internet about taking some kind of moral high ground or voting with their conscience also should be mindful that many of us will be the first people strung up on the wall if Trump’s fascist vision comes to pass, so we’re more than a little uneasy at how cavalier they are about the dangerous situation we’re currently in. People should place whatever vote they think will keep Trump as far away from power as physically possible. Right now all signs are pointing to his counterpart from the other major party, because none of the 3rd party candidates have either the campaign infrastructure or the policy chops to carry them through to the finish line. So if it turns out that best option is Joe Biden, so be it. If it’s not, so be it. But in either case the singular goal should be to keep Trump away from DC. Everything else is just white noise.

Palestine ≠ Hamas

Assuming you give a shit, of course. I’ve not seen more than a handful of lunatics defend Hamas. Most folks are just trying to avoid exactly the same conflation you’re using here, because there are innocent Palestinians caught up in this bullshit, and they don’t deserve to be murdered any more than Israelis do.

Holy fuck, dudes.

That’s quite literally not what they said. You’ll get better responses if you don’t argue against what people are not saying.

Boil it down even further than OP and everything, ultimately, is just binary impulses between differently oriented clusters of atoms.

Time and time again I find myself coming back to a deterministic interpretation of the physical world. We’re now at the point where a simple scrape-predict-regurgitate AI language model (ChatGPT) can convincingly imitate the communication pattern of a human being with good factual recall but low social acumen, almost like what we generally associate with the autism spectrum. It’s harder and harder to argue that we aren’t just walking flesh bags with simple electrical impulses that carry us from decision to decision based on a finite dataset. It’s amazingly complex and sometimes can seem unpredictable, but it’s still finite. Were we ever able to build a sufficiently complex computer, I believe it could predict every decision we ever make with remarkable accuracy. The concept of “free will”, at least to me, seems a comfortable agreed-upon illusion that keeps us from killing and eating one another.

NPR interviewed a woman in the local Republican Party in Gaetz’s district. Her response to this shitstorm:

“The less Congress does, the better it is for all Americans.”

These people are fucking morons.