Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Um no.

    A state can decide what it names itself or names a part of itself (e.g. Black Lives Matter Plaza). The story of Ukraine illustrates this.

    But geographers and cartographers don’t decide what to name a place or get orders from states by fiat (unless the mapper is a state agent working for a department) They name things based on what they’re called.

    The gulf is known to most of the world and the International Hydrographic Organization as Golfo de México or in English, Gulf of Mexico, and calling it the Gulf of America (say by Google Maps) is political allegiance signaling, that they are MAGA or MAGA collaborators.

    If you want to be spicy you can call it Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl or the House of Chalchiuhtlicue based on the South American deity of the sea. It has a nice ominous Siege of R’lyeh feel that reflects the tempestuous weather of the ocean expanse.





  • As I explained to Google (from Dan McClellan) _references do not assert from fiat what things are called. A dictionary definition is not an official definition but what a word means or what a thing is called at the moment.

    Most of the world calls it the Golfo de México or in English speaking regions, the Gulf of Mexico. Changing all the maps of the world won’t change this.

    Now granted, a state chooses what to call itself (such as the changing of The Ukraine to simply Ukraine but that is the incorporated entity that is the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

    As the US does not have sovereign control of the Gulf of Mexico, it doesn’t get to declare the name of a region of international waters.

    This whole thing just makes the GOP, MAGA, the Trump administration and by proxy the people of the United States xenophobic and barbaric as hell. It’s not a good look.




  • Oh they’ll come.

    The US will have to go to war to keep down unrest. Whether Trump makes good on Canada / Greenland / Poland, the world will have to form a coalition against us, and it’s likely China will take the lead.

    There will be Chinese bombers over Washington just as there were Russian and American bombers over Berlin. Not that we’ll be around to enjoy it, and those that remain will suffer as collaborators (whether they were or not).

    We really don’t want to let it get there. But then we really didn’t want it to get here, and we knew in the early aughts with George W. Bush’s administration this is where we were headed if someone didn’t chance course. Obama, who promised to change course, did not.



  • Under Stalinist soviet communism, which was dictatorship with extra steps?

    How about under Zapatista communism (which is still going on)? Or Black Panther communism, at least until the FBI (under J. Edgar Hoover, so acting as the capitalist state’s secret police) massacred the BP administrative leaders?

    Tell us more about the joys of capitalist healthcare. At least for the common American, we get bare minimum socialized healthcare, and even it is on the chopping block. The rest is an insurance sector that willfully (and oddly, legally) dodges its only job, and a medical system so hyperinflated it puts people into lifelong debt.

    So STFU with jingoistic platitudes and virtue-signaling to your fellow MAGAs, and put up a real argument.

    Or not.





  • No, I’m saying the species as a whole is failing because 77 million people could be simultaneously fooled into voting against their own better interests. It shows that democracy can always be subverted. People, brilliant rocket scientists, in the case of my own father, can be tricked by demagogy into backing malicious despots and kleptocrats, and the plutocrats and oligarchs can afford to find and hire them.

    Careening towards more than one imminent great filter, it’s going to take some miracles of innovation to successfully navigate them, and more divine providence in sociopolitical theory to reorganize people into some sort of community-focused government system that resists subversion by those who seek power. So while we’re not completely fucked, we’re absolutely playing long odds.

    Granted, not all is completely lost. Homo Erectus went through phases where their species was reduced to less than ten thousand, and they had to suffer through a harsh epoch of millennia before recovering and populating the world until they were weeded out by competing cousin species. We may still survive in small, meager tribes, but all this culture is going to be lost, ground into the geological record.

    We may get lucky, but that is not to say we can evade catastrophe at this time (not without extra-terrestrial intervention or other deus-ex-machina techological development that its inventor doesn’t try to restrict and license), but a tenth of our population might survive, and every day we do nothing, or stay subjugated to far-right efforts to cling to power, is a day that more of us are doomed to perish, or rather fewer that our world will be able to sustain, while we figure out how to migrate offworld.

    77 million people voting for an autocrat is a symptom of a greater problem, one that has plenty of other symptoms, and has shown us we are just not foresighted enough to act early; we can only be rational with effort, and are otherwise prone to emotion and fixed action patterns. It’s easier to blame the weirdos and marginalized in a society, than to recognize class conflicts, or acknowledge the wealthy fuck the rest of us over to retain their wealth and power.

    Feel free to provide evidence that I’m wrong. I often present harsh reality as I understand it with hopes that someone knows a development I don’t. And sometimes that even works! But for now, we have to face the dildo of consequences unlubed.



  • That’s a post-biblical interpretation based on Greek philosophy (as is the omni-etc. god, which is contradicted a lot in the OT). Modern ministries are not only trying to lock people in by threat of Hellfire, but also keep their own members doubting their own salvation so they stay in church and tithing.

    But science has advance amazingly far, to the point that we have many eyes, and centuries of looking for substance of the supernatural, and there is no place we’ve discovered yet where the material and spiritual interact. There are gaps in science. We still don’t comprehend how ball lightning works, for instance (and it’s definitely a thing) but curiously no religious ministry is pointing at ball lightning and saying see! a miracle and in the meantime lightning seems to be content to behave consistently according to the electrodynamics of static electricity.

    But this all brings us to a nihilistic existential crisis: It takes ~20% of your caloric intake to run your brain, all that thinking, feeling, remembering, analyzing, receiving and processing stimulus through sensory organs and so one. That would mean ghosts and spirits, without a clear power source (and a noticeable energy consumption) could be at the heart of the sun and not notice the temperature, or have the capacity to care.

    Oblivion is at the heart of zero energy consumption… unless we’re in a dream or simulation or something where the (extremely consistent) mechanics we deal with every day are computed, and some mechanics are deliberately hidden from us. As we’ve discovered a lot of our science through side-channel attacks, we’re prepared for anything that leaves a noticeable wake, and everything we know about does.

    This is why enlightenment and post-enlightenment philosophers start at nihilism and start from the foundation of what now? E.g. what does it mean that our warlords can commit so much atrocity and there is no divine justice? It means it’s up to us to lament justice lost, and to make a society that does better.

    Or, as according to current events, not. And have to learn again old lessons of why it is imperative to do better.