• 18 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • Adjacent pet peeve: When there’s captioning, and a character in a movie speaks a foreign language, and the captions read “[Speaking in French]”, or even worse, “[Speaking in foreign language]”.

    Just caption “Jette-le à l’arrière du camion et emmène-le hors de la ville.”! If I do or don’t speak French, and if I can hear or if I’m deaf, then the caption would serve the same purpose either way!

    The Disney movie Moana made me furious with this, in the flashback during “We Know the Way,” when the islanders are singing (I assume) Polynesian, but the lyrics are just “[Singing in foreign language]”. The fuck, Disney?! You’re usually good at translation!















  • Russia would never threaten China with nukes, because 1) China ALSO has nukes, and 2) China has been the only thing keeping Russia afloat recently.

    But it would have to be a scorched earth kind of invasion. The kind that pisses off basically everyone, because it leaves every single Russian, military, or citizen, dead. They’d have to come in, take everything, and kill everything. Take the land.

    First of all, if you’re being invaded by an army planning to genocide your entire population, then you have no reason not to use every weapon in your arsenal. If the options are A: China kills 100% of your populace or B: Launch nukes and even 1% of your populace survives whatever follows, then B is the most rational choice.

    Secondly, there’s no reason to assume that states will make rational decisions to begin with. I’d say the current state of affairs in Ukraine is a very good example of that in action. So even if China wasn’t planning to genocide all of Russia, even if it was some kind of “benevolent” invasion where they were going to tiptoe around the flower beds, gently pry Putin out of the Kremlin, and basically leave everything the same except that now Russians pay for groceries with renminbi instead of rubles… there’s still every reason to imagine that Putin and his top brass would still launch nukes on the mere principle of the thing.

    So no, let’s not glibly plan for a fast forward on nuclear Armageddon, thank you very much.



  • So help me there was some big deal right wing personality who talked about how the government shouldn’t subsidize education by saying that when he was a kid he wanted an education so he… went down to the public library and read books there. Not a hint of irony. Can’t remember exactly who it was, but the dissonance stuck with me.