Zinnia

@Zinnia

QFS_Global #crackpot #wingnut #conspiracy

If it helps to make any more sense of this, “City of London” does not refer to the city named London. The financial district in the heart of London is treated as its own separate city with its own government and everything, which is confusingly called “City of London”. There is a whole complicated history behind that (which I only vaguely remember, but I think that there was an agreement that the King/Queen can’t interfere with the place’s financial doings) and there are a bunch of conspiracy theories about it.

Wayne Allyn Root #wingnut

None of that money matters if his popularity tanks among non-MAGA voters. And I suspect that he’s going to at least try to use most of that money on his legal woes rather than campaigning. Nobody prosecuting Trump is doing anything illegal, so throwing them in jail for it is political persecution, which I thought his fans objected to. Of course, what matters is that they *feel* Trump is being persecuted, and that they don’t *feel* any retaliation is persecution, and that matters more than any clear or consistent definition of persecution.

E. J. Preston #fundie #wingnut #homophobia #psycho #mammon

@Malingspann #198906
if anyone has what they regard as “good Christian values” then their acts are “good Christian acts” by definition.

In other words, it matters less what one does than who’s doing it. In other other words, like IOKIYAR, except IOKIYAGC - “It’s OK If You’re A Good Christian”.

Brian Niemeier #fundie

He is guilty of nothing, except a willingness to exercise heroic virtue

That’s not what “guilty” means in a legal context. If you broke a law, were proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have broken the law, and had sufficient mens rea in cases where that matters, you’re guilty. Any virtue associated with the action doesn’t really apply here, though I suppose you can make an exception for jury nullification. It doesn’t even matter if the judgment was correct, as juries (and judges during a bench trial) can get things wrong. I’m aware that there are other meanings of “guilty”, but using them in this situation (he was judged guilty in the legal sense, but that’s “wrong” because he’s not guilty in a different sense) is a form of equivocation.

the state of Iowa found Cassidy guilty of being Christian.

Again, not how it works in a legal context. He was found guilty for his actions, not the belief system and/or worldview which motivated his actions. It might be *metaphorically* true if vandalizing statues (or specific symbols regardless of what form they take) was inherent and/or common behavior to Christianity and to no one else. This would be similar to how anti-loitering laws don’t specifically target the homeless, but they make being homeless essentially illegal. However, that’d be a pretty weird assumption.

It’s that in a rightly ordered society, […] Cassidy wouldn’t just get off without a fine, he’d be rewarded by the state. The spiteful mutant Luciferians would be the ones whose guilt would be correctly discerned and punished.

Oh, so you’re judging his supposed lack of “guilt” in the context of a hypothetical society with a very different set of laws which you wish existed? That’s bordering on “not even wrong” territory.

Sigrid Obenland #crackpot #dunning-kruger

@Bastethotep #198891

Yes, well, my fault for jumping all over the place reframing the math in various different ways without fully explaining any of it. It also probably doesn’t help that I didn’t demonstrate how any of it works with pictures. Let’s just leave it with that there are always alternative methods in math which do the exact same thing, meaning most conventions are arbitrary.

This conversation has resulted in me realizing just how arbitrary some of it really is, and a better idea how many (at least potentially useful, maybe even situationally better) alternatives there are. I mean, the math we use was basically cobbled together over millennia by many different people who expanded on it for different unrelated purposes, and our conventions are based on those original purposes. There’s no reason why those conventions would end up being perfectly consistent with each other so long as it all works without getting too messy.

E. J. Preston #fundie #wingnut #homophobia #psycho #mammon

Jesus was the one who set the kind acts as a standard for a typical Christian to behave; the rest comes from the Old Testament.

Taxes, Abortion, Homosexuality, the Death Penalty and Guns

Jesus said to pay your taxes. He said nothing about abortion, but the Bible does permit it, at least under some circumstances. He said nothing about homosexuality; the only part of the bible which *maybe* says “gay bad” is that oft-quoted line in Leviticus which is a questionable translation. The “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” part strongly suggests that he was against the death penalty, at least sometimes. Personal weapons (what I assume “guns” is a stand-in for), depends on whether his references to swords were meant to be literal or metaphorical.

Doesn’t seem very Republican-like to me.

Ken Ham #forced-birth #fundie #wingnut

I have pointed out in the past that access to abortions or lack thereof don’t necessarily affect the population levels very much - it being unavailable can occasionally result in people having an additional child or two which they didn’t plan for, but it can also result in people having fewer children than they planned because being forced to have a kid too early can do long-term or permanent damage to their financial stability. And also infanticide goes up at least a little. It depends on how those factors balance out.

Now if you really want to boost the population levels, you can make people’s lives more miserable, ban contraception, and enable rapists in addition to banning abortion. Hmm, sounds like the Republican Party platform…

Stephane Baillon #crackpot #ufo #magick #conspiracy

@TheKingOfRhye #198887

It’s possible that they did incorrectly use “-” in place of “~” to mean “approximately”, but it’s also likely they were confused by the uncommon year numbering convention where no indicators like AD, CE, BC, BP, or BCE are used, instead 1 BC is considered year 0, so 2 BC is year -1, 5 BC is year -4, 3918 BC is year -3917, etc.

David Guyll #crackpot

@Creativerealms #198868
Yes you expect consistently and fairness from an NPC.

Well, in the case of a literal NPC, you can certainly expect consistency. Except in cases where they’re programmed to be random, but even then they’re consistently random.

Sigrid Obenland #crackpot #dunning-kruger

Couldn’t you also define circles as a shape where every point on the perimeter is the exact same distance from the point opposite to it? This definition doesn’t mention a center and would strongly suggest one should use d=1 for the unit circle rather than r=1.

I will also point out that some aspects of trigonometry are rather unintuitive to most people because the convention is to use radius and π, despite that π is associated with diameter, not radius. In the past few decades a minority of mathematicians have been advocating that things should be changed to use τ instead of π (τ=2π) because it makes it easier for beginners to see/understand exactly how trig works. While I haven’t seen anyone suggest it, you could also get the exact same results by replacing r with d.

…While I was originally making an observation, coming from a place where I rarely use circles or ellipses and found them inconsistent with the rest of the geometry math that I use, I’m now starting to wonder if I *should* be objecting to certain mathematical conventions.

@Bastethotep #198879

If you’re going to consider squares/rectangles to be “special cases” rather than the baseline for which all other shapes are compared, then are you advocating to use circles as the baseline for area measure instead? Then we’d be describing areas in terms of “circle-feet” (or circle-meters, or circle-miles, or whatever distance unit) then the area of a circle would be defined as 4r² and the area of a square would be defined as r²(16/π). Or d² and d²(4/π) respectively, either way. Which might be a bit confusing considering how ² is usually pronounced “squared” in English rather than “to the power of two”.

@Bastethotep #198875

Area is given in square feet. We don’t measure squares, or for that matter, just about any other flat shape, from the center. If we did, the area of a square would be defined as 4r² instead of x². Which you can do, it’s just very nonstandard. One might object to the idea that squares have a radius, but they technically have two, and this does come up in unusual situations; r is the distance from the center to the middle of an outer edge, while R is the distance from the center to one of the corners.

It’s not so much an objection, but an observation: circles (and ellipses) are treated as a special exception in geometry, and the main reason why seems to be that it makes the math a little easier, as there appears to be no actual reason to otherwise.

various commenters #transphobia

Maybe you should try to get out of your echo chamber for awhile? Then you won’t have to make up reasons why other people believe things and do things, you’ll actually have some idea why, even if you still disagree with their premises or conclusions. Though that knowledge would sever you from your online community, so… I can see why you’d be afraid to.

David Guyll #crackpot

Not only do you think there are wrong ways to play,

Correct.

you think there are very, very specific things you must do,

Nope. The entire point is that outside of not doing certain wrong things, there are no specific things you must do. “All which is not forbidden is required” is your framework, not ours.

and if you don't? Well, you must hate your players.

You can be called out for not following the rules, yes. Funny how people like you had no objection to it when you were the ones making the rules.

Stephane Baillon #crackpot #ufo #magick #conspiracy

Scientists have proven that these stones were put in a semi-liquid state

I can’t comment on whether this is true because I don’t know about any recent discoveries about the construction of the pyramids; HOWEVER…

Transforming stone into a semi-liquid state is scientifically IMPOSSIBLE today.

What? No. We’re talking limestone here, not granite. Limestone is not like most rocks. All you need for that is heat and water. Not even that much heat; a wood fire will do. The Ancient Romans could make a form of cement, by turning limestone into a semisolid (or semi-liquid, same thing, unless you’re talking about a non-newtonian fluid) and adding volcanic ash. I would hardly be surprised if someone figured that out (minus the ash) quite some time earlier.

Not all Ancient Humans were as ignorant as you.

Kevin Sorbo #wingnut

Occasionally I think it might be useful to have a word or phrase which means “nobody is claiming a thing, but some people are claiming that other people are claiming that thing”.

Sigrid Obenland #crackpot #dunning-kruger

Off topic, but πr² has always struck me as weirdly disconnected from how we usually handle areas mathematically, though I never really cared enough to explore why. Recently I figured it out during one of the very rare occasions I was using that formula: expressed more conventionally, it would be d²(π/4). (d is the diameter; π/4 is the ratio between the circumference of a circle and the perimeter of a perfectly overlapping square.) Pretty sure I’m not even remotely the first person to have that epiphany, but still. It’s just an easier-to-remember-and-work-with formula which does the exact same thing, though at the cost of making geometry a bit harder for some people to grasp.

[Edit:] Wait, maybe they don’t understand either math or geometry very well yet somehow still noticed that using πr² objectively doesn’t make sense? Either specifically in the context of squaring the circle, or more generally and the concept of squaring the circle happened to get involved while they were researching things. I would imagine that this would go somewhere stupidly wrong if they really tried but still failed to get it.

Tatsuya Ishida #racist

@Bastethotep #198836
So when will you go back to Japan?

Recently his comics started posting several hours earlier, at what would be midnight UTC+9 instead of UTC-5. Which suggests that he’s either in Japan now, or trying to fool people into thinking that he moved to Japan for some reason (as if anyone other than his most diehard anti-fans would even notice). In this case the comic itself may be a subtle way of drawing attention to that. Or it might be entirely coincidental and unrelated, who knows why he does anything anymore.

If he did move to Japan recently, that would be the least hypocritical thing he’s done in a very long time. Which is why I kind of suspect he didn’t.

(Side note: It should be “Ausländer Raus” (“Foreigner Out”), not “Aũslander Raũs” which, ignoring that the diacritical marks don’t look like umlauts because that might just be a stylistic thing, isn’t correct German.)

fschmidt #dunning-kruger #god-complex

Don't eat things that weren't eaten 100 years ago

So eating things of recent invention won’t be kosher until the 2120s, got it.

RazörFist #wingnut #dunning-kruger

As if “not knowing where to find the place on the map” has ever stopped conservatives from opining on places which they only just heard about due to propaganda telling them to hate people from that place.

Tru Trips #homophobia #transphobia #pratt

In the past some pride events allowed limited displays of sexuality, but that doesn’t happen in most places anymore. Whenever homophobes try to show proof of “immorality” at pride events, they show old pictures, or from Folsom Street Fair, which takes place in a fenced-off area and is adults-only. Or they might occasionally show something from hetero events like Carnival, because they’re either lying or gullible. As usual they’re forced to make things up in order to “prove” that LGBTQIA+ people are evil.

ProtoMario #wingnut

I managed to track down the sportsball players.

The football player is Tom Brady. He was a prominent Trump booster back in 2016, and I vaguely remember that now that I checked into it. But he apparently stated in a 2022 CBS interview that he doesn’t support Trump anymore. The basketball player is Caitlin Clark, who was a low-key Trump supporter in 2020 but this year is/was a low-key Nikki Haley supporter, at least according to the most recent info I can find - which isn’t that recent, and Haley’s since dropped out, so no idea if she’s switched back. Looks like whoever made this hasn’t been keeping up with them.

The wolf is, of course, Jacob Black from Twilight. 😜

Wayne Allyn Root #wingnut

Assuming he goes to prison or is put under strict house arrest, he’s not likely to live through his sentence. That puts a damper on him being able to accomplish big things after he gets out. You seem to have forgotten that Trump is already older than Mandela was when he was released from prison. Even if he only gets a few years or somehow dodges everything, he might not even survive to 2028 to run another time, assuming that being elected would be his only real shot at accomplishing much by that point.

Charlie Kirk #wingnut

@Bastethotep #198475
How is the Orange Abomination’s whoremongering adultery an embarrassment to his wife?

Men at the top of the conservative social hierarchy are allowed to do pretty much whatever-the-fuck (emphasis on “fuck” in this particular case) with no obligation or accountability, so if he strays from the marriage, that’s a stain on her honor, not his. It’s the same sort of mentality which leads to blame-the-victim when it comes to rape. But then it also gets mixed with the tradcon ideas of women needing to be protected by men, sometimes including their honor. Wouldn’t be anywhere near the first time a man tries to “protect” a woman from losing honor over the evils which he himself keeps doing to her.

This is ridiculously old-fashioned, not to mention severely dysfunctional. And while any tradcons who are desperate to believe that Trump is one of them might buy that, nobody really cares about whether it’s true except where they can use it as a distraction to avoid talking/thinking about the real issue, which is what he did with the money.

Prince Caspian #fundie #homophobia #sexist

re: Dragons, knights, princesses: I’m pretty sure there’s only one actual example of it, and it’s not usually referred to as a fairly tale, even though it kind of is one - St. George and the Dragon. If you really stretch the definition of “dragon” and “knight” you could maybe also include Perseus, Andromeda, and the Sea Monster.

Parents With Inconvenient Truths about Trans #transphobia

I didn’t read the story - not in the mood - but given who’s saying it (specifically, someone from a community which caters to transphobic parents) there are two ways that I can think of to interpret it metaphorically.

The first is that a trans child is not a real person, was never a real person, but a is figment of a collective nightmare. If they ever wake up, those people will vanish altogether. In other words, total dehumanization. This seems less much likely given that it sounds like the Queen is a stand-in for a mother and the Princess for a trans son, and because it doesn’t seem like most people in that community wish their kids would disappear, but again, I really don’t feel like reading it to be sure.

The second is that inside their seemingly happy trans child, is a miserable, trapped member of their AGAB, the real child which got locked away at some point, but if they ever wake up from the collective nightmare that person will finally be free. I’m going to reverse that - if you can be trapped in a dream for years, what’s preventing it from being a dream that your son has always been a “daughter” and both of you only just woke up? And you personally have either forgotten the reality which existed before the dream, or have been dreaming at least since they were born, possibly longer? That kind of thinking can go both ways.

Carrots90 , RighteousIndignation & Spencer_Shayy #transphobia

This is just a bunch of one-note gags in the form of puns and portmanteaus, essentially. Maybe one or two will catch on… in your tiny community… if you’re lucky. I always roll my eyes at “hey, here’s a long list of very-limited-use words which I invented to add to our lexicon” and it gets even stupider when someone proposes to make a permanent record of it so that people won’t forget. You make a glossary out of words which people are *already* using so that the newbies/outsiders/laypersons have an easier time keeping up with discussions, not stuff that you hope will eventually get used.

I will also note that some of these imply that being LGB is inherently transphobic and enbyphobic, and the ones which aren’t are a perverse and/or traitorous minority. In reality it’s very hard to find a ‘phobic bisexual (and ‘phobic pansexuals, if any exist, are practically a contradiction), and nearly all mainstream lesbian communities welcome trans women and kick out the open ‘phobes. (I admit to not knowing much about the situation with trans men and gay communities, because I’m much more focused on women’s communities and issues. But then again most TERFs don’t seem to care about that very much anyway.) This alone makes this sort of language disconnected from reality, let alone the more obvious reasons.

Kevin Downey Jr. #elitist

Terrence Howard #conspiracy #crackpot #dunning-kruger

Whut.

I was going to bring up the long-defunct “electric universe” theory again, but this isn’t even that. It doesn’t seem like he even knows what that is, aside from maybe hearing the name somewhere. For that matter it doesn’t seem like he even knows what electricity, magnetism, or really anything is. It might be even worse than his math.

We're about to kill their God, gravity, and they don't want that.

No, seriously, whut. That’s unrelated to anything anyone has said, ever.

Wayne Allyn Root #conspiracy #wingnut

Quantico is a Marine Corps base. Terrorists don’t attack the military, they attack the public. This is something different, even if it’s being called such by the media.

99.9% of Americans are asleep at switch.

Do you even know what that phrase means? It’s normally used in cases of a specific individual failing to do their job at a critical moment. This would imply that virtually every American is on an anti-terror task force or something similar.

My CIA sources

Suuuure. Either you made them up, they’re lying about being in the CIA, or they’re an untrustworthy junior member who doesn’t know much and may be being fed disinformation for whatever reason.

Terrence Howard #dunning-kruger #crackpot

@JM1234 #198223
yet another person hung up on the square root of two not being a rational number.

I know some people struggle with the idea, but even as a child it seemed intuitive enough to me. I mean, look at this:

1.4 × 1.4 = 1.96
1.41 × 1.41 = 1.9881
1.414 × 1.414 = 1.999396
1.4142 × 1.4142 = 1.99996164
1.41421 × 1.41421 = 1.9999899241

Every time you add more decimal places to the multipliers, the number of decimal places in the answer increases by twice as much as you added. No matter how many more decimal places you add, the answer will never get down to zero places, thus reaching 2. The only possible way to get it to end is if there were a non-zero digit where, if multiplied by itself, resulted in something ending in 0, which doesn’t exist. So obviously the square root of two could never truly be calculated, but you can get close enough. This simple analysis doesn’t rule out the possibility that the answer is a repeating decimal with a long repeat interval, which could at least be represented as a fraction… though I didn’t think of that possibility at the time. Even if that were the case, the fraction wouldn’t be simple and almost certainly wouldn’t be elegant. (Fun fact: 99/70 is equal to 1.41428… which is good enough a substitute under the vast majority of circumstances, if you need/want to use a fraction for some reason.)

Then again I was taught to brute-force square roots without a calculator. It was clunky, time-intensive, math-intensive and involved a lot of guessing, but at least I could sort of see what was going on. I have no idea if anyone really teaches that anymore (or even if that was ever common).

I would be open to the possibility that there’s some sort of basic math operator out there that we’ve completely missed, because it’s so unintuitive, yet would simplify some of the stuff where we would otherwise need to use calculus or infinite series or something like that. But I wouldn’t trust anyone who thinks that the multiplication table is simply wrong to provide any useful insights there. It would be one thing if someone claimed that they found a more useful way of manipulating values, at least they’d be aware that they’re not doing “real” math. But multiplication has a very well-established definition of how it works, and you can’t derive a different table from that¹. What’s one row of one? Hint: it’s not two.

¹I mean, you can always write up different tables in different number bases, but those numbers are still exactly equal in value to their counterparts in all other bases.

Wayne Allyn Root #conspiracy #wingnut

counting votes for days on end until only Democrats win,

It takes a few days to count all the votes. If a race is close you might not be able to tell who won until the very end, at which point it might have to go into recount, depending on the State’s laws. This is how it has always worked, you just forgot or failed to notice before.

Unless you’re talking about the Cyber Ninjas and similar nonsense, in which case the Democrats weren’t the ones responsible for that.

Snake Baker #homophobia

This is apparently a reference to a Japanese lesbian couple being granted asylum in Canada. Some people think that this is ridiculous, since while LGBTQIA+ people are still discriminated against in Japan (despite what you might see in Anime or Manga) it’s “not nearly that bad”. I don’t know enough to comment on that. There was a high-profile murder of a lesbian couple last year, but it was in Hong Kong, not Japan.

Of course there are people who are going to find a way to be super gross and/or rapey about it. That’s practically a given when you’re talking about same-sex relationships involving women. And they wonder why a lot of bi women are opting out of dating men…

Tatsuya Ishida #conspiracy #wingnut #psycho

Earlier this year I said that I wasn’t sure whether his oddly sorta pro-Nazi takes were just Tatsuya being weird with his antisemitism and he wasn’t aware of the subtle implications (because he doesn’t normally do subtle), or if he was hinting at being actually pro-Nazi. Welp. Whatever really was the case before, that wavefunction sure has collapsed.

Hitler-Senpai won’t notice you, Tats. He’s long dead.

Eric Hovind #fundie

Hey, if we make machines capable of reproduction, and allow minor mutations in design, that could actually happen after a long enough time scale!

Wayne Allyn Root #dunning-kruger #wingnut

Candace Owens #conspiracy #homophobia

Can’t speak for politics in other countries, but most (all?) LGBTQIA+ Democrats are out. How can you be blackmailed for something which is already public knowledge? It’s hard to say if there are a bunch of secretly gay Republicans or the few who resigned upon being outed were all that existed. But at the very least, it’s not a big deal for Democrats.

Now there are some high-level government positions which still enforce morality clauses, but I have no idea if “don’t be gay” is still included in them. But the purpose of morality clauses is to make blackmail less likely, not more likely.

Bennett Lee Ross #crackpot #ufo #magick #quack #conspiracy

The less human the people are

A bit of a digression to start with, but it will loop back on topic: I tend to be a bit weirded out by claims that future technological, environmental and/or cultural changes might make us “less human”. People’s ideas of “the essence of humanity” is usually based on the present day norms or the imagined norms of an idealized past; less often they might be based on a particular philosophy which someone has a very strong attachment to. Yes, major changes are likely to result in people becoming “less human” from that particular perspective, but it’s equally valid for those future people (or even our future selves) to see people today as being “less human” from their perspective. It’s a similar line of thinking that leads some people to dehumanize people in primitive cultures.

Human nature can’t be fully divorced from culture, technology, or environment. Without those things, we’re just feral, not even up to the level of apes as most apes do have a little bit of culture. Children who are feral too long have significant difficulty assimilating into any culture, and struggle to learn even basic grammar or even sometimes the concept of other people owning things. That is “human nature” in a complete vacuum, yet it’s hard for anyone to call that “most human”. Human nature will gradually shift as it always has, but that’s not “less human”, it’s “differently human”.

Now people who grew up in an environment where there were only rich people and servants, and had/have the expectation of gaining a lot of power, are going to be “differently human” than everyone else. That doesn’t make them not a threat which needs to be dealt with. It means that there’s no good reason to dehumanize them, even if they dehumanize everyone else in return.

The OP appears to be delusional and fell down at least one conspiracy theory hole, so clearly he probably doesn’t have a very good grasp on human nature (as it presently exists, and within Western Society) anyway.

Dallas Ludlum #fundie #pratt #dunning-kruger

an uncaused First Cause, which we understand to be God.

General response to this kind of statement, not the OP specifically:

When you’re talking about the origin of life, are you implying that God is *less* complex than a proto-bacteria?

When you’re talking about the origin of the universe, are you implying that God spontaneously popping into existence and then causing nothing to explode is more likely than nothing spontaneously exploding? (I’m aware the Big Bang does not work like that, just dumbing it down to their level)

Or if God existed eternally, why did he spend an infinite amount of time before deciding to create anything?

Tatsuya Ishida #conspiracy #racist

Sometimes I wonder if in at least half of his comics he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying, he’s just creating rage bait as a way of saying “please pay attention to me!” For the past few years at least, his anti-fans have greatly outnumbered his actual fans. I mean, the Illuminati is so hard up for new members that they’re recruiting Slick now? It might make sense if this were some sort of weird MLM or cult thing where the money and/or influence flows upwards, but Slick is poor and lacks any real sort of power or influence in-world, and giving him a free servant is a pretty big investment.

Or his beliefs might be as incoherent as they appear. Hard to tell, as he’s apparently a hermit these days, and doesn’t publicly communicate online very much either.

Steve Kirsch #conspiracy #wingnut

If a thing has appeared to happen, you shouldn’t use the prior probability of it happening in order to determine how likely it is that it really happened. If someone is dead, but it’s unlikely for them to have died, that doesn’t make it unlikely that they are currently dead.

Parents With Inconvenient Truths about Trans #transphobia

When things have gone this wrong, it’s because their “son” never existed. And not just because they have a trans daughter - even if they had a cis boy instead, their son would have still never existed. At some early point, likely as a toddler, perhaps even as far back as before birth, they developed a strong emotional attachment to the person they imagined their child would become, and from then on used their real child as a proxy for their imaginary one. When this sort of thing happens, one eventually comes face to face with a very harsh truth - despite living together so long, they have never met their real child. Anyone who is self-aware enough to realize they were that mistaken would be extremely unlikely to let it get that far in the first place. Expect such people to cling to their “truth” for a very long time, or for life, blaming anything even vaguely plausible to avoid pointing fingers at themselves.

Robin Ortiz #fundie #conspiracy

asteroids getting closer and with greater frequency

Better detection methods. In the past we would mostly just not notice if an asteroid passed near Earth.

earthquakes in places that rarely have them

Fracking.

Sun's untimely behavior

Major solar flares happen every few years, they just rarely hit Earth. Temporary increases in the number and severity of flares appear to happen every few centuries.

what is happening miles under our feet deep within the earth, as well as in the furthest reaches in space.

These two baffle me; I have no idea what these might be referring to.

You are correct, those are not caused by climate change. But nobody is saying that they are. It appears that your argument is “some things which nobody is claiming are caused by climate change aren’t caused by climate change, therefore climate change isn’t real”. That is not a useful argument.

Irenaeus of Asturias #fundie

Brother Nathanael #racist #wingnut #conspiracy

The continuous demand by some people that the value of real estate must rise, rise, rise at all costs has resulted in houses being more useful as a financial instrument or a fungible trade good than a place to live. Too bad the value of a whole house is largely beyond the reach of even the middle class. This is why you can now own a fraction of a house which you don’t live in…

Tatsuya Ishida #transphobia #sexist

Now that I think of it, a lot of Tatsuya’s transphobia seems to manifest as a very weird (and probably unintentional) message of “If they appear to be an extra-manly man, look out! They might be a trans woman in disguise!” and this is just a particularly obvious example of it. It just adds to the general incoherence, either way.

Dr. Michael Salla #ufo #magick #conspiracy

Off topic: The Dyson Sphere in that episode wouldn’t work under known physics. By default, “down” would be towards the star, so you’d need to counter that with some sort of gravity equal to the star’s pull plus the amount of surface gravity you desire, pulling outwards. Star Trek does have “gravity plating” in order to explain away why people don’t just float around the ship, but there’s no way to do that under known physics. (There are a few maybes, but the ship would still weigh as much as a planet.) I *think* if you had gravity plating in all directions pulling away from the star, it would be a stable arrangement (not 100% certain on that though) though it would make the star at least a bit bigger and puffier, which would probably be both good and bad. If I’m wrong and it wouldn’t be stable, then there are ways of stabilizing it so that the shell and the star don’t gradually drift into each other.

There are a bunch of other issues, such as heat management (think Mercury during the daytime, and it’s always daytime everywhere), but if you’ve got the means and motivation to build a shell around an entire star, they’re hardly insurmountable. I’m going to assume that whatever systems the builders had in place were self-maintaining over extreme timescales but eventually failed… and their far, far distant descendants had such an idyllic low-tech lives that they couldn’t be bothered to keep records how it all worked, so once things got bad enough their charred corpses fell into their sun. 😛

Without strong gravity plating or an equivalent, you’d have to live on the *outside* of the sphere, where it’s an eternal warm night and the heat comes from the ground rather than the sky. Or you could spin the shell extremely fast and live in a very narrow band around the equator, but at that point it’s just a ridiculously overbuilt Ringworld with all the issues of both a Ringworld and a Dyson Sphere.

Tatsuya Ishida #transphobia #sexist

The next strip is even stupider. Straw trans person attempts to “subdue the beast with my feminine charms” and gets mauled. The enemy is both threatening and harmless. Also possibly cannon fodder.

The next one after that is Goldilocks and the Three Bears, except that “Goldilox” is Jacob Fauci in a wig and a dress. If you don’t know who that is, that’s the heavily-bearded Israeli guy who was captured on camera tying to squat in a Palestinian family home and said “If I don’t steal your home, someone else will steal it.” But if you don’t know who it is, it’s just the fairy tale except vaguely antisemitic and maybe transphobic (note: there’s absolutely no reason to believe Jacob Fauci is trans).

Dr. Michael Salla #ufo #magick #conspiracy

<@KeithInc.> #197541

A number of stars have been found with unusually high infrared levels relative to their visible brightness. A possible explanation is a partial Dyson Sphere/Swarm. A more likely one is dust clouds. Also possible is that they’re just like that, and there exists very rare stars with a naturally high degree of “contamination” of some sort. We’ll know better later, but for now it’s a very new thing which can only be seen with the James Webb telescope.