If you didn’t think people can change, you probably wouldn’t spend as much time arguing with people on the internet as you do. Not really much point in doing that since you’re not going to change their minds after all.
But even if you genuinely don’t think people are capable of improvement, I think it would still be worthwhile in a “know your enemy” sort of way.
I have a friend who worked at a convenience store in an area where the KKK still has a decent presence. The local grand wizard or dragon or whatever ridiculous rank he had took a liking to my friend (it should maybe be noted that my friend is practically a caricature of blond, blue-eyed whiteness.) I wouldn’t say they were friends, it was more than he was on the clock and couldn’t really afford to lose his job by telling some racist fuck to pound sand, they didn’t keep in contact outside of work, neither of them changed each other’s minds about anything (my friend is now engaged to a black woman) but they did have some fairly in depth and civil conversations about race and society and such.
I can’t say for what Mr Pointy Hat’s takeaway was from their talks, but my friend’s overall impression is that the klan guy was kind of stuck. He kind of seemed to know that the world had changed around him, and that maybe he was in the wrong and there was no place for someone like him anymore, but he was unable and/or unwilling to change himself to adapt to the new world and to different ways of thinking than he’d been brought up with, so the kkk was kind of his way of carving a safe space for himself out of the world where he knew how things worked and where he had some sort of value. And his hatred towards black people and other people different from himself wasn’t really that they should be killed or enslaved or treated poorly, but that he didn’t get why they needed to be part of the same society as him, sort of like if they could just all go off and live in their own countries he’d wish them the best in their endeavors.
I’m not saying that’s at all a good philosophy, I find it absolutely abhorrent, but it’s also more nuanced than I would have otherwise thought a klansman would be capable of.
I also won’t say that my friend necessarily had a perfect read on this guy, it could very well be that he totally took the wrong things away from what the guy said. And even if he did hit the nail on the head, with a sample size of 1, you can’t exactly extrapolate that to say that the rest of the klan or other racist shitbags feel the same way.
But I do think there can be some value in talking to some of these types of people, maybe not befriending them exactly, but building some sort of mutual understanding might help get some of them onto the right path before they end up too old and stuck in their ways like that guy.
First of all, I find your phrasing that he “is/was” a cop kind of interesting. Is he a cop or is he not? If he was but is no longer a cop, it could very well be that he left that career because he shares some of your same thoughts and feelings and you’re getting yourself worked up over nothing.
Anyway
To me, ACAB means that all cops are bastards collectively
It does not mean that each individual cop is a bastard.
There are undoubtedly some cops that are good people, doing their damnedest to do the right thing, standing up for the little guy against the bastards, who are trying to make the system better from the inside, who understand the role that policing should be, etc.
And there are of course some who are bastards, who abuse their power and do all of the things that make policing shitty.
And there are cops who aren’t actively bastards themselves, but also aren’t doing anything to make waves and stand up against the bastards.
It’s a case of a few rotten apples spoiling the bunch. The apple barrel has a couple absolutely amazing apples in there that are everything you could ever want from an apple, a whole bunch of meh run-of-the-mill grocery store apples, that do the job of being an apple well enough, but aren’t going to make you stand up and say “holy shit, that’s a good fucking apple,” and then there’s a handful of rotten apples that will make you puke your guts up, and unfortunately you don’t get to pick and choose which apple you’re eating, you just have to reach in blind and take a bite, and since those rotten apples are in there, it’s a pretty big gamble to make, you have to really need that apple for it to be worth it.
However, entering into a friendship is different than other interactions you’d have with the police. You get a chance to inspect the apple before you eat it, to see if it’s good, ok, or rotten to the core.
I’d say don’t dismiss him outright because he’s a cop, but try to feel him out, see what his attitude and philosophy is like, don’t grill him on it, but take note of how he reacts when different subjects are brought up, and if you find something problematic with what he says, try to explain how your views are different in a non-confrontational way, don’t make it a fight or an argument or a debate, just try to explain your thoughts and feelings and try to understand why he thinks the way he does as well. With the right people around him, it’s possible that you could help make him or keep him a good cop when otherwise he might go bad, it’s up to you if you want to take on that task.
On further research, you are correct. I’ve heard the thing about it being deductible for the business repeated enough that I thought it was true. Guess that’s just a reminder to always be fact-checking. I will be editing my comment accordingly. I do feel like the rest of my comment still has some value on how to determine whether it’s worth it or not.
Thank you for pointing out my wrongness.
How are we defining “worth it?”
EDIT: THIS IS INCORRECT, the business cannot deduct your donations.Yes, the business can claim it as a deduction on their taxes. If it’s a business you like, maybe that’s a good thing, if it’s not then that may be a bad thing. Does the money that goes to charity outweigh whatever harm may come from that company paying less in taxes? I don’t know if there’s any good way to objectively say that.
You don’t really get much say in which charity that money goes to, it’s just going to whatever charity that company has chosen to partner with. Some charities can be kind of sketchy, not all of them are on the up-and-up. If it’s a cause you care about, you may be better off just donating directly yourself to a charity you trust.
Now your individual contributions doing this are really a drop in the bucket, let’s say you go to a store and donate at checkout 3 times a week, and since you’re rounding up to the nearest dollar, you’re donating a max of $1 × 3x a week × 52 weeks a year = a maximum donation of $156 dollars a year donated by rounding, probably going to several different charities, and realistically you’re probably donating about half of that unless you have some real OCD about your purchases being even dollar amounts, so probably about $78/year divided up among however many different charities the various places you shop at are involved with.
Now of course you’re not the only person making those donations at any given store, each store is probably making hundreds or thousands of dollars in donations between all of their customers rounding up their checks.
Unless you’re really struggling, you’re probably not going to miss the maybe $100 or so that get siphoned off from you making these donations spread out over a whole year.
Can you Deduct those donations from your own taxes? I’m genuinely not sure, my gut says no (EDIT: you can), but let’s say you can. Do you think that $100 or so + whatever other deductable expenses you have in a year are going to beat the standard deduction? If it does, then sure, feel free to save those receipts and try to add it all up, that sounds like more trouble than it’s worth to me, but maybe it’s worth it for your purposes, there’s a lot of different tax situations I won’t pretend to know for certain.
Are those charitable donations going to improve your life? That’s hard to say, I don’t know your life. EDIT to expand on this a bit Are you in a position where you’re going to benefit directly from a charity? If you are you may need to reconsider making a donation because you may need that money yourself. Although there are cases where a charity may be able to make better use of money than an individual, for example being able to pool money from donations to buy things in bulk at a better price, but you’d have to know how that organization is ran and how the money is going to get used to determine whether you’ll be able to benefit from that directly. Indirectly maybe you’ll see some benefits but probably not immediately and it probably won’t be immediately obvious. Maybe donating money now to a charity that supports youth sports leads to some kid taking up baseball who wouldn’t have been able to afford to otherwise which in turn keeps him off the streets, gets him scholarships, etc. when otherwise he might have ended up in a gang or hooked on drugs or something and broken into your neighbors car 10 years down the line to steal some change which resulted in your insurance rates going up because your in a “high crime area” or something. Or maybe it will just give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
I think in many cases a bigger issue is going to be how the game is designed, whether open or closed source.
If your open source game is a mess of poorly-documented, barely-decipherable spaghetti code, held together by a bunch of tacky bullshit, that’s going to be a nightmare to mod.
On the other-hand, a closed source game may have absolutely phenomenal documentation and tools available specifically to enable the modding community.
Similarly, you can have well-written, open-sourced code with built-in mod support with proper documentation, and you can have ridiculous bullshit closed-source code that no one is quite sure how or why it even works.
My family had an interesting experience with this
My mom’s cousin was a wonderful woman, I don’t think there is anyone who would have anything bad to say about her.
Her husband was a piece of shit. I’m not going to go into all of the ways he was a shitty person, I’ll just leave it at he was an illiterate moron who wasted all of their money, never held down a job for long, weighed probably well in excess of 300lbs (my mom, who is not petite by any definition, could fit in one of his pant legs) bought stupid cars and all kinds of shit for himself, and his wife had very little despite usually being the sole breadwinner of their household.
She got sick, my mom helped make arrangements for what would happen with their dogs when she passed because fat ass definitely wasn’t going to take care of them.
The day she died my mom was over helping take care of her, I was on my way over to pick up the dogs, I’m a couple blocks away and get a frantic call from my mom telling me not to come over, because he came downstairs with a shotgun and was talking about ending it.
I pulled up outside, my mom met me at the porch. He’d calmed down a little, I made sure cops had been called.
I go inside, there’s her cousin gasping for air beating down deaths door on the couch. He’s sitting in the kitchen, fucking around on his computer, distraught but not even giving a moment’s thought to his wife dying in the other room. He’s clearly more upset that no one’s going to take care of him than anything else. The shotgun is leaning in the corner of the kitchen.
We decide it’s best if I don’t stay long and I don’t pick up the dogs at that time.
I get on my way, cops come soon after, confiscate all of his guns. She passes, my mom gets the dogs and gets them to their new homes.
Fat ass never has a funeral for her, and definitely never tried to reach out to any of us.
Some months later my mom and grandmother are going to check out a new store that recently opened. They were driving near that house, and fat ass, being who he was, had recently purchased a ridiculous new Camaro, probably with life insurance money that most people would have used for a funeral.
My mom makes a small detour to drive by and show my grandmother that car, when they see several police cars and an ambulance turn down the same road, and sure enough they stop right in front of the house.
My mom pulls up and asks what’s going on, afraid that maybe he had done something to the neighbors, they’ve had issues before.
Turns out that they’d gotten a 911 call from the house, from a woman, who I don’t believe was never identified, we suspect probably a prostitute.
Fatass had a heart attack and keeled over dead.
She called 911, grabbed his computer and maybe a few other small valuables, nothing in particular that we noticed missing, and ran off never to be heard from again.
Good for her.
My mom was still listed as the executrix of their wills, so it fell on her to untangle their debts, see what could be salvaged, etc. it wasn’t much.
I’m especially salty about the whole situation because the house originally belonged to my mom’s aunt/he cousins mother. It had been paid off years ago, and at one point the plan had been for the house to be left to me, since her daughter didn’t have any kids, and most other branches of that side of the family were also dead-ends, I sort of represented the future of the family.
But when her daughter married fatass, since he kept wasting all of their money she let them move in because they would have probably been homeless otherwise, and they got the house when she died. They took out loans against the house, he didn’t really keep up with any sort of maintenance, etc. to call it a fixer-upper would have been an understatement.
My mom’s main priority was to have a proper funeral for her cousin, and had her ashes buried.
She never bothered to claim his remains from the coroner’s office. They tried to reach out to his kids from other relationships, other relatives, etc. and none of them wanted anything to do with him either.
After a certain amount of time, the coroner’s office here cremates the remains, and if they’re still not claimed I believe they eventually have them scattered or buried somewhere.
I’m not someone who cares much about what happens with my, or anyone else’s body, once they die. Once you’re dead you’re dead, and your corpse deserves no more respect than any other slab of expiring meat. I’d just as soon throw bodies unceremoniously into an industrial composter.
Many people of course have a different idea of that, and I’m willing to respect their beliefs.
But I think fatass should be more-or-less the model we should follow for bad people. Everything is carried out respectfully, but without ceremony, no fancy headstones, no elaborate funeral ceremony, and no easy way for mourners and kooks to make a pilgrimage site from it.
In some cases where religion and culture and such dictate that a body shouldn’t be cremated, I would support burial at sea, unmarked graves, or plain graves in in an area where they can be visited by family but not the general public.
For the US, I’d say a pretty strong contender is Woodstock, NY, with a population of around 6,000, and of course famous for the music festival of the same name (even though the actual festival was something like 60 miles away in Bethel)
One time I was working my way down the bread/dairy aisle at a grocery store. It’s one of the wider aisles there, if 2 people pulled their carts off to the side, a third person could squeeze down the middle as long as those first two took a little care to not stick out into the aisle too much
Of course they never do
So there I am coming down the middle of the aisle, trying to squeeze between some idiot agonizing over which container of sour cream they should buy, and some moron who can’t decide on a loaf of bread who are stopped directly across from each other, uttering plenty of “'scuze me/pardon me/lemme just squeeze through heres” and of course neither of them move an inch
I nearly make it, but do tap one of their carts a bit in the process
I give her a quick “sorry” and continue on my way.
Then she yells down after me with a very indignant “excuse you”
Lady, you were the one blocking the aisle without any situational awareness, and I already apologized, fucking die mad about it.
2 bedrooms (one is an office that doubles as a guest room with a pull-out couch) 2½ baths
The two full baths are attached to the bedrooms and are pretty cramped with pretty cheap fittings, but they do the trick. The powder room is downstairs, it’s kind of an odd shape due to where it is in the house, and weirdly big but not in a way that makes it particularly more useable and still manages to feel a little cramped. No real counter space to speak of, or other storage options besides the cabinet under the sink. The master bedroom is weirdly huge, and the office is an ok size, but in both cases the way they’re laid out with doors and windows, outlets, etc. often leaves us wishing we had a couple more inches any time we think about rearranging or getting new furniture.
We could only afford this house because it was my mother in laws, she sold it too us for cheap when she moved in with her mother to take care of her.
My parents have 3 bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms, a powder room, and then I guess it might be called a ¾ bathroom in the basement. The master bath is pretty sweet with a whirlpool tub (albeit a fairly small one all things considered) 2 sinks, and a shower (the shower is nothing particularly special) and a TV.
The bathroom between the two other bedrooms is nothing too special, but has a nice-sized linen closet and pretty decent counter space.
The powder room is small, nothing too special there.
The basement bathroom has a sink, a weirdly huge linen close, and a shower stall, no tub.
The guy who originally owned the home was a landscaper who did a lot of business with a local builder so they tricked the house out for him. He ran his business from the home and we’re pretty sure that was the point of the basement bathroom, he could go in through the basement door and shower without tracking dirt through the house.
The master bedroom is huge, 2 walk-in closets, high ceilings, plenty of space for a king sized bed, a plethora of dressers, a couple small bookshelves, a desk, and a chaise with room to spare. The other 2 bedrooms are decent sized, nothing too special, with pretty huge closets.
It’s a pretty sweet house, I wouldn’t be surprised if my parents could get a cool million for it if they sold it now, the stars kind of aligned, they’d just inherited a bit of money, the market was right, and the original owner killed himself there, so they paid less than half of that probably about 15 years ago now.
The house we lived in before that had 3 bedrooms, none of which were particularly big, and one bathroom.
The apartment I was living in when I first moved out (to live with my then-girlfriend-now-wife, and a roommate) had 3 bedrooms that were oddly spacious. The master bedroom was pretty big, but again weirdly laid-out, with an en suite bathroom that was nothing too special, it had a pretty decent sized shower that was nothing too special, and there was a second bathroom by the two bedrooms with your typical shower/bathtub. The two other bedrooms were decent-size, our roommates technically had a walk-in closet that doubled as the utility closet for the water heater (and if I miss one thing about that apartment it was the water heater, you could practically brew tea with water from the faucet and it never seemed to run out, and since the apartment wasn’t all that big it was almost instant) one of those bedrooms started off as mine, because my wife and I had just recently started dating and I wanted to have my space in case things didn’t work out between us (we’d been friends for a good while before that and our plans to move in together had been in the works well before we started dating) but eventually it became her office/storage and additional living space.
Honestly I liked that apartment, I could probably still be living there pretty happily if they didn’t keep jacking the rent up. It was a first floor apartment with a washer and dryer and a decent little patio, my only major gripe was that the kitchen was tiny and there was no decent place to put any sort of dining table (at least not with how we used the space, we’d rather have a decent entertainment center setup and couches for entertaining) so we ate at the coffee table or on tray tables.
I think there’s at least 3 factors at play here.
First, you’re probably living in a largely eurocentric bubble. You’re not seeing other mythologies because they’re not being marketed to you, and in some cases you may not even realize some of the ways that those mythologies and folklore and such are being presented to you because you just don’t know what to look for (for example, Dragon Ball, in the beginning, borrowed very heavily from the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, which is a hugely important book in Asian literature, and I swear every couple of years there’s some new adaptation coming out, but it’s not nearly as well known to Western audiences) and translations can get a little wonky, if you watch a movie or read a book from a non-western culture, instead of naming specific deities or other mythological figures, the translator may figure that no one reading the translation is going to know who that is so they’ll translate it as something generic like “god” or “a great hero” instead of naming names.
Second, Western media is huge, and kind of overshadows a lot of other cultures. White Americans making movies in Hollywood are going to tend to pull from their own cultural backgrounds, and that often includes Greek, Norse, and Roman mythology.
Finally, a lot of it comes down to which mythologies we have actual written records of. The Norse, Greeks, and Romans all wrote about their gods to some extent, Slavic people, on the other hand, did not write until after they’d been converted to Christianity (the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian and some other Slavic languages takes it’s name from Saint Cyril, who helped to christianize the Slavic peoples, and was developed by his followers,) so there’s no real first-hand accounts of their beliefs and practices, only second-hand accounts from other cultures who interacted with them and wrote down what they observed, and people recalling stories they’d heard about earlier times, and that comes with them inserting their own biases and interpretations and just plain getting things wrong. So if you wanted to write something about, for example, the Slavic gods Perun and Veles, you probably wouldn’t have as much decent source material to work from as if you wanted to write about the roughly equivalent Norse gods- Thor and Loki.
I’ve always been lucky and my skin is pretty bulletproof, I could probably just about wash my face with acetone and shave with a broken beer bottle and be none the worse for it.
I shower, normally every day but occasionally skip a day or two due to weather, lack of motivation, and how much I’ve been sweating, with Dr Bronners Peppermint soap and a washcloth.
I like Dr Bronners because it’s the best I’ve found at stripping the wax out of my moustache. I also find the mint to be nice and refreshing, especially after a hot day. It’s also nice that its organic, fair trade, etc. and since it can be used for pretty much everything I like it for backpacking (I tend to go unscented for that purpose, but if I intend to brush my teeth with it mint in the way to go, still a bit gross and soapy tasting, don’t exactly recommend it but it does the trick in a pinch)
If we want to count it as skincare, though it’s more hair care I suppose, my moustache wax of choice is Firehouse Wacky Tacky
I shave my head with a double edge safety razor, I like Feather blades. I lather up with whatever bar of soap smells good to me when I bought it and looks like it will fit in my shaving bowl, right now I think I’m using Dr Squatch Bay Rum because they sold it in the checkout line of ace hardware and the line was moving slow one day leaving me with nothing much to do to entertain myself but stiff some soaps.
Sometimes, instead, I splash on some lectric shave and use a foil shaver on my head.
Then I splash on some aftershave. I used to rotate through the usual drug store brands- Brut, Pinaud Clubman, Aqua Velva, and Old Spice, but then I met my wife and it turns out she really likes me in Old Spice, so I don’t switch it up too often anymore. I do tend to get a bottle of cheap bay rum to use over the summer though.
I use whatever beard oil or balm smells good to me when I run out and find myself needing more. I honestly couldn’t even tell you what brand I have kicking around currently, I use it pretty infrequently, mostly when I’m dressing up and feel like my beard could use a little extra taming and shininess. I tend to like woodsy scents like cedar.
When my hands feel a little dry and cracked, which isn’t a very common issue for me, I use Duke Cannon Bloody Knuckles balm. Again, I’m pretty sure that was an impulse buy from the checkout line of a hardware store or something, but I think it works pretty well. My wife probably uses it more than I do and she has an actual skincare routine so I guess she agrees.
And for deodorant, I again like old spice. It works for me, and I’ve used it pretty consistently since I was in about 4th or 5th grade when we had a basic sex-ed/some-of-you-stink-so-use-deodorant-please assembly where they handed out a small stick of it to all the guyse Again, apparently my wife likes old spice so that worked out well, and I can usually find a 2-pack of it at most grocery stores and such that is probably the best value in the deodorant aisle.
My friend forgot their umbrella at the office.
They nervously answered the phone.
They’re a lazy motherfucker.
I gave my friend a hug and wished them a speedy recovery.
Any of those sound unusual, or like they’re referring to more than one person?
Centrifugal governors are possibly one of the origins of the phrase “balls out” or “balls to the wall” (although many say “balls to the wall” has to do with the ball-shaped handles on old aircraft throttle levers)
Also somewhat similar to governors are centrifugal switches, which are used in just about anything with an electric motor to disconnect the motor from a capacitor which gives the motor a little extra juice to get it going (I like this video for an explanation of how they work)
It’s been a long time and I’m not sure of it’s current state, but some friends and I used to have a blast play Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator (I think there’s a couple other games out there now that are similar)
You kind of need the right setup for it to work well, a big TV or projector you can hook up to a computer and everyone needs their own laptop, etc.
The basic idea is- picture the bridge of the enterprise (or your starship of choice) you’ve got a bunch of people with their own consoles responsible for different aspects of the ships operation, the helm, engineering, weapons, etc. That’s what you’re doing.
I think at some point they added support for support fighters and such to accompany the main starship so if you have more people they have something to do.
We also made up a couple extra positions, like a captain who didn’t really have his own console, he just got his own chair front and center and a fancy hat and gave out orders.
For what it’s worth, many, maybe most (sorry, can’t be bothered to look up the stats right now) nuclear plants in the US are already owned by some publicly traded company beholden to its shareholders who expect it to turn an ever increasing profit for them.
Not that it gives me the warm-fuzzies that that’s the case, but it’s not quite as big of a departure from the current situation as you’re making it out to be.
If you’re fucking around with your radio equipment doing something you shouldn’t and end up causing interference on, for example, aircraft frequencies or emergency service radio systems, you could be a contributing factor to an airliner crashing or an ambulance not being dispatched in a timely manner and a patient dying because they didn’t get to the hospital in time.
You didn’t directly kill anyone, but you set up the circumstances that resulted in someone dying.
My dog likes to steal things when we’re out of the house and leave them on the stairs or on our bed.
She’s not a breed that’s known for having a particularly soft mouth, their claim to fame is probably the opposite if anything (malinois) so it’s kind of impressive when I find an avocado or a martini glass somewhere unexpected without even the slightest bruise.
We joke that they’re her “emotional support objects.”
The price point is way off, but strangely enough I’ve personally been champing at the bit for something with pretty much exactly those specs,just at about half the price.
Currently, I daily drive an SUV and do get good use out of it. I have to commute in the snow (essential employee,) I have outdoorsy hobbies that require hauling people and camping gear around, I tow some small trailers, I use it pretty frequently to move furniture, pick up lumber and other bulky stuff from the hardware store, etc. and while I don’t go off-roading in the sense that I don’t purposely go looking for rocks to climb and mud to drive through for fun, I do sometimes drive onto a beach to fish or drive onto fields for various reasons, and find myself on some really shitty dirt roads where some ground clearance and 4wd are necessary. I’m doing those things usually a few times a month.
But most of my daily driving adds up to 20 miles a day or less, on paved roads, rarely going over 45mph. I also have a wonky schedule where I rarely have to work more than 3 days in a row, and it’s usually just me and occasionally my wife or my dog (rarely both at the same time)
I can’t quite afford 2 cars, but something like this at the right price point would probably tip the scales in my favor. I could daily drive the small cheap electric car and save my SUV (or maybe a small truck) for my days off when I’m doing stuff that it’s needed for while the small car charges.
My dude, what the actual fuck are you on about?
“Know your enemy” isn’t a saying about peaceful turn-the-other-cheek, love-thy-neighbor, forgiveness bullshit
It’s about knowing how and why they fight so you know how to defeat them.
You can’t and won’t win over every individual Nazi or klansman and make them see the light, but each one you do is one less enemy on their side and one more ally on yours, and my talking to them you get a better understanding on how to beat them.