NielsBohron

The Paradox of Tolerance writ large in real time

I’m not much of a gambler either, but I live in a casino town, and I’ve gotten lots of drinks comped by sitting with $20 in a video poker machine while I drink and shoot the shit with my friends.

Just remember to tip well, and go in with the mindset that any money you’re betting is the cost of entertainment for the evening. It’s a fun way to spend an evening, and plenty of times I wind up going home with money that I would have just spent at a bar.

Edit: also if you’re into sports, the sports book is the way to go. If you wager $10 in what’s called a parlay on 3 different games, you can win $160, so even games you otherwise didn’t care about suddenly become interesting. Betting in three baseball games can be a great way to kill a day hanging out in the summer

Even the cheap places as long as you are wagering a certain amount

No, it’s just I don’t think many of my IRL friends actually would know the term “hentai,” but I do live in a pretty isolated, technology-averse town in the mountains, so it’s probably just my circumstances

That’s a pretty narrow slice of Venn Diagram where you can actually tell that joke, though

I don’t know; my wrestling coach used to say “you’re never useless; you can always bad a bad example.” So, personally I think putting his charred corpse on display could serve as an effective deterrent on oligarchs that are considering meddling in politics, especially if Musk was loaded into the doomed capsule against his will by a coalition of the proletariat.

Note: I am not advocating for violence. I’m just saying that hypothetically, if Musk was executed by low earth reentry, others might think twice about trying to buy government influence.

Sound & Fury isn’t the Sturgill Simpson album I’d have chosen, but any Sturgill Simpson is better than no Sturgill Simpson.

Excellent craftsmanship. I am highly jealous of that entire setup as I sit over here with my particle-board record player stand and my crappy 5-in1 Victrola turntable.

I don’t think it’s a question that modern systems are more stable; any belief otherwise is just pure nostalgia (or someone who wasn’t actually working on computers in the early 90’s). Plus, the advent of autosave truly was a game-changer.

Even though weed is legal in Canada the legal stuff is the worst and most expensive.

Give it time. I’m far from a connoisseur, as these days I mostly just partake in edibles 1-2 times per week, but California has some pretty sweet weed prices, at least compared to my college/grad-school days. I saw an ad on a billboard just yesterday for 10 USD Eighths at a pretty reputable shop in my town, and I think I usually pay 35 USD for a pack of 10 2-dose THC:CBD gummies (compared to 40 USD for an eighth of mediocre bud in the early 2000’s).

As people get less paranoid about enforcement and local governments ease up on restrictions, the price should come down and the quality should go up (although this probably depends a lot on local government, so who knows, really)

I wish this was true for me, but I only have one record shop within 45-minute drive of my house (and their prices and selection are far from competitive), so I wind up buying pretty much all my records online through Discogs. Frequently, the new represses are just flat-out cheaper than the vintage vinyl, especially for a lot of the more esoteric albums I buy. For instance, even though they’re not really hard to find, for Black Sabbath’s first four albums I paid just as much for mediocre, water-damaged copies of Sabbath and Volume 4 as I did for brand-new represses of Paranoid and Master of Reality. If you actually buy your vinyl to listen to, buying used online can be a pretty big gamble as far as quality, so for the same price, I frequently wind up consciously choosing the new vinyl over the used copy.

Even though I do frequently manage to package one or two cheap used albums with each new album purchased to take advantage of that sweet “media mail” shipping, it’s not even close to a 10:1 used:new ratio.

Edit: I suppose now that I think about it, I’m starting from a pretty decent used vinyl collection from my days in the early 2000’s as a hipster music snob before used vinyl got nearly so expensive, so my collection overall has much more used vinyl than my current buying habits would indicate (I probably have 200 albums, of which 30-40 were purchased new in the past 3-4 years)

What the fuck kind of snakes do you have living around you?

If he wasn’t alone what would shooting him accomplish? You still haven’t actually presented a compelling reason he needed to be kept under a gun.

Once Bushnell was on fire and had stopped moving toward the gate/fence, you are correct, he didn’t need to be kept under a gun. However, if he had started to move in a threatening way or if he had been working with a larger group, having the guns drawn could have saved crucial seconds if someone else began to act in a threatening way. The security forces simply didn’t know what the fuck was happening, and in that situation, it is better to have the guns drawn and to be ready for the worst case scenario.

I think it’s understandable that people untrained for a situation like this would fall back on the default, I know I wouldn’t know what to do, but calling that “reasonable” as if it really makes sense in hindsight is a stretch.

That’s fair. I can get behind calling it “understandable” instead of “reasonable”

Considering the security forces had no idea whether he was working alone or what was happening, they obviously didn’t think they could rely on the metal fence.

Look, I’m all for a free Palestine and I agree that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. I also think that voluntary membership in any American or Israeli law enforcement makes them complicit in the heinous acts perpetrated by American cops and the IDF, respectively. I don’t know you, but I’d guess that you and I agree a lot more than we disagree on these issues. I’m just saying, from the PoV of the security forces at the Israeli embassy, this was a potential threat to the embassy and their job is literally to prevent threats from harming the embassy. Without any further information to go on, their decision to draw guns first and get the extinguisher second is reasonable.

Stop him before he got any closer to the embassy. Obviously a gun won’t stop him from commiting suicide, but it could easily be the difference between one person dying and a much larger act of terrorism

I’m amazed I had to scroll this far too find any mention of notepad++

Bozeman, MT for me, apparently because I listen to a fair bit of Jason Isbell and other new-ish alt-country and Americana. Despite the fact that none of my top 5 artists are alt country, the rest of my listening is apparently eclectic enough that nothing else really came close.

I would have thought that having 60-70% of my listening all in a small cluster of esoteric doom-metal-related subgenres would have placed me somewhere with some sort of a metal scene, but apparently not.

I would have to disagree. Sure, in the modern world, one function of art is to “move money around,” but it’s far from the only function or even the most important function.

I have read it, but I forgot about that detail until you reminded me. I probably have to reread now :)

Haha, I’m just glad at least some people enjoy reading them, since I can’t help but write them (and listening to my endless digressions down Wikipedia rabbit holes is exhausting for my partner).

I agree with everything you said, except I would argue that capitalism is the Sixth Horseman of the Apocalypse, seeing as one of the original four was already replaced during a translation. The original text were interpreted as “Conquest, War, Famine, and Death,” and the story I remember from my New Testament course in college was that in the early 1900’s, it was thought that Conquest was too similar to War, so they used one of the later passages that specified that the horsemen would bring death by “sword, famine, plague, and the wild beasts of the earth” to rebrand Conquest as Pestilence. In fact, now reading up on it from Wikipedia, apparently the first two horsemen were likely both supposed to represent war, with the white rider (Conquest) representing “righteous/justified war” and the red rider (War) supposed to represent “civil war,” which is interesting.

In fact, given how vaccines and modern medicine have dramatically lowered the death by infectious disease in the 20th century, it’s likely time for another rebranding (relevant xkcd), so I’d replace “pestilence” with “capitalism” or even “profit” if I were feeling flowery.

edit: Upon further reading, apparently the third horseman (Famine) could also be interpreted as a form of capitalistic excess, since it’s accompanied by a voice that describes rising market prices for staples such as bread and is carrying market scales. Traditionally, this is thought to indicate Famine as loaves of bread would be weighed during food shortages, but the accompanying voice seems to indicate that luxuries are still available, so I could easily make the argument that the passage is about the rich tending to their own needs while ignoring the needs of the poor (which sounds an awful lot like modern US politics/capitalism).

Edit 2: So I guess I’d rebrand all three of the riders preceding Death so that I’d interpret things as “Imperialism, Extremism, Capitalism, and Death,” or put a little more poetically, “Conquest, Discord, Avarice, and Death”