Very helpful, thank you!

Ahh that’s interesting, so the issue is as much having a conveniently shifting position as it is a further-right-than-progressives static position. Thanks a ton, that helps me understand a lot!

Gotcha, so it means fake leftists almost? Does it imply someone is even further right than a current “centrist”? Or more like, “the center is right wing at this point, and so much so that even the Dems who are just left of center are still on the right [but therefore less than centrists still]”? This is not meant to be obstinate, your response was just very helpful and I want to bracket in on where folks consider liberals to be on the political spectrum so I can understand/use it properly.

The use of “the French” in this tweet by @AP was inappropriate and should have been “the Fr*nch 🤢.”

Who is she?

Wow that’s interesting, cuz I share zero trust with the NSA, too.

Dang, really thought that’d work…

Good to know, thank you! Yet more reasons to avoid it

I think the point is that to you, it’s just semantics. But, to use your example, given that some people have started intentionally using “female” in place of “woman” as an (arguably) subtle way to exclude trans women, it suddenly becomes more than semantics to both trans and anti-trans populations. That’s what Smotherlove is saying about “dog whistle” language only being transparent to the perpetrator and the victim.

So from your/my perspective (admittedly assuming you’re neither trans nor anti-trans), it’s largely a case of “a few rotten apples ruining it for the rest of the bunch.” What should just be a semantic difference has been coopted and intentionally weaponized by some, so all of us have to be conscious of whether or not we’re making that worse.

It’s also not a new phenomenon. Many epithets start as PC terms and then become offensive based on how a specific group starts to use them, notably, almost every one-time PC terms for Black Americans and people of color. Unfortunately, it’s basically the reason that, for at least 100 years, (responsible) individuals/media have had to change terms for many marginalized peoples every 10-20 years, with many other examples, like “Oriental” and the terms that predate it, and plenty of others.

This must be how you get “binders full of women”

Unprecedented

Not that hot, only Luke warm

Read G.E. Moore’s take on it https://uen.pressbooks.pub/knowledgeforhumans/chapter/g-e-moores-hands/

It’s a common and ultimately pointless/self-indulgent philosophical “question,” lots of good essays on it.

Lol they said “threatening violence” because it was the easiest thing to ban you with. The real reason you got banned is that you’re a psycho, man. You sound like you are saying you wish you were allowed to hurt or kill your own children, and you’re talking about them as property. That’s crazy person shit.

The shock wave needs a medium (air) to travel through. So if the bomb was touching a ship, it would certainly transfer kinetic energy, but if there was any space (not air) between them, there is still no shockwave for the ship to feel.

Like almost any concept, the argument over free will really becomes semantic (and pedantic) when pushed to academic extremes. At a certain point it shifts to “is there a difference between free will and the apparent ability to choose what we do in any given moment?”

This scientist claims that the inability to tease any choice from the infinite variables that affect that decision means that the decision isn’t ours. It is an equally valid conclusion that you don’t need to know every single thing that influences you in order to have agency among those influences.

Moore’s take on the Cartesian question of “how do we know we exist?” is similar. It points out that the debate actually has nothing to do with existence, but what it means to “know” something, and that “knowing,” like anything, can of course be made impossible with philosophical and academic contortions (e.g., arguments like “but what if this is a simulation and there is a “great deception” that only convinces you that you exist?”). It is not that some form of knowing cannot exist, it is that people are capable of imagining fantasies in which knowing cannot exist, and Moore denies that we should let the ability to conceptualize something beyond the intended context of our language (i.e., perceived reality) pervert our ability to see and accept something concrete.

Is Moore right? Who knows, but he gets at the point that the answers to questions of free will, existence, ontology, etc. have more to do with how the questions are framed academically and philosophically than with how the same concepts actually operate in real life. It will always be possibly to frame a question (or to define the words within a question) in a way that denies the possibility of knowing or agency. But the ability to do so doesn’t mean that other methods of asking or knowing are impossible.

Ireland must have really upped their Air and Space Forces

They had only Han Solo, but, by miracle, be became Han Octet

Just wish I could remember the spoiler formatting haha

Square root of -1 is called i because it’s an imaginary number butl gets used often