I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood (TM) was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.
Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren't many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it's the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.
It's really interesting how the right has embraced moral relativism on a case-by-case basis. Often it is a strategy to quarantine/localize ideas, so as to avoid the need to reconcile them to any broader worldview.
It's also a strategy for insulating ideas and events from history that they want to shelter from criticism, like criticizing slavery, theocracy, monarchism, etc. I've seen real cases in the wild where criticism of slavery was dismissed as "presentism", as inappropriately imposing present day moral values.
Between Dale and Amelia, the Earnhart family has been through a lot.
It wouldn't even matter if it was "right". The idea of looking to wolves for models of ideal human behavior is wrong for like 17 different reasons, even if it were technically true as a description of wolf behavior.
P.S. why do AlphaBros specifically look at wolves, or lobsters, to instruct us on social hierarchy? There are so many other animals, those seem pretty random choices. And pretty far afield from humans. Wouldn't you at least want something more proximate to us humans on the evolutionary tree? Heck, why not just use humans as a reference point?
And the original concept, as it pertains to wolves, is evidently not a thing. So if we're just saying things, the software metaphor is as good as any other.
Pretty sure the Scrub Daddy came first! It gained huge notoriety for being on Shark Tank, as one of if not the most successful Shark tank product in history, and it's now in every Walmart and Dollar store in the country.
So the meme treats the derivative like it's the original, which I suppose is true to form as an indicator of how people lose track of ideas as they get constantly recirculated.
Thank you for demonstrating my point without the slightest hint of irony.
Do you really not understand that there's a conceptual distinction there at all? You started out by saying it's a proud leftist tradition to call out other lefties for not being left enough. Which, honestly, fair enough.
But you think even the very idea of a conceptual distinction between liberals and leftists is an example of that? That's fucking nuts, and it's not the nuanced point you think it is.
Echoes of Peter Theil's strategy to destroy Gawker.
It's too bad. I feel like they're a versions of Ubuntu from 2006 to, say, 2012 or so, that were beautiful and perfect and were accessible to me as a college student. It set a new standard. It seems like half the battle is having people with good vision making important decisions so things don't go off the rails.
I've got to disagree here. Well, partially agree partially disagree. I think it's absolutely the case that your example qualifies, making a big deal about representation of Nazis in the armed forces is a kind of big lie that's just getting repeated without any sense of context or proportionality.
But I don't think it's a both sides thing the way you're making it out to be. You're acknowledging that it's Russia being worse than Ukraine, but it's not merely a difference of one being slightly worse, it's a huge part of the Russian narrative, whereas it factors in in no way whatsoever in Ukraine's message to the outside world. Ukraine has made historical analogies, in major speeches and communications to the outside world, but has not made the case that their sovereignty is legitimized due to anything having to do with Nazi representation in the Russian armed forces. It just doesn't at all play an equal role in the moral cases they're making.
The prison escape in the first Deus Ex, when you learn where you really are. I guess for some people this was easy to figure out beforehand, but when I first played it at age 15 it was a shock to me.
This is who I want telling me reading is bad