Just use your own brain and eyeballs.

When I was coming up learning about the long slow path of climate change, it was “We have to act now, because by the time you can readily see the effects with your eyes, we’ll be fucked cause it’ll be too late by then.”

Whelp here we are. All we can do now is mitigate the damage however we can.

Zoomed in it appears to actually be reflection off the edge of the front mounting holes in their helmets.

In the 1980s, boomers were in their 30s/early 40s, so no they were not likely to be senior leadership in colleges at the time.

Oh it’s a complete ghost town. Absolutely useless as actual social media. I suppose you could try starring/favoriting all your friends lol…

Sometimes the “realism” critique is certainly pedantic and unproductive, but other times what’s really meant is contradiction. Situations should make sense within the fictional world. And in the fictional world of DC, norms around politics and economics are portrayed to be analogous to western neoliberalism with capitalism assumed and unquestioned. So with the Wayne family being a relatively well-regarded billionaire family like the Gates or the Buffets, there is still the issue that it is clear under the current system and that portrayed in DC universe that such wealth cannot be accumulated and sustained without massive exploitation of working class people somewhere along the line. So billionaire + “good guy” starts to become more of a glaring contradiction even in DC. But sure, we can explain it away as fiction with magically ethical capitalists. The interesting thing about the billionaire Wayne discussion though, is when people apply this fictional view of capitalism to how they interpret the real world. And now we’re back to propaganda.

What I would say that sets West Wing and B99 apart is sometimes there’s a tonal difference or way in which certain themes are handled/portrayed that signals to the viewer that the writers acknowledge this isn’t what real life is like but we hope one day we can get there. And it’s a spectrum right. Some do this to varying degrees, other more propagandistic media do not.

They’re for storing the molecular correlates of trauma, obviously :3

I tend to lump it in with The West Wing as idealistic wish fulfilment of how we’d like things to be, or a picture of our human potential.

They’re invested in PC gaming as social capital where the performance of your rig contributes to your social value. They’re mad because you’re not invested in the same way. People often get defensive when others don’t care about the hobbies they care about because there’s a false perception that the not caring implies what they care about is somehow less than, which feels insulting.

Don’t yuck others’ yum, but also don’t expect everyone to yum the same thing.

This is not a generational shift. The iron dome of irony is a tried and true coping technique for the brutality of teenage culture where the rule of cool rules with an iron fist and being uncool means social death. And what is cool shifts at a moment’s notice, yet uncool is forever. So normies learn to armour themselves by treating everything ironically to pre-empt any whiff of uncool. Because at the very least, it’s never uncool to make fun of something. This carries forward into one’s 20s when some begin to rediscover the coolness of being authentic, sincere, and genuine regardless of what others think. So then you have the reaction of radical acceptance, not yucking others’ yum, respect for others’ interests, etc. GenX had their equivalent, even Boomers. It’s part of growing up. And of course not everyone gets there.

Exactly, if we let more people die during the pandemic, workers would have more jobs to choose from and less family to take care of. /SARCASM

Well yes you are absolutely correct from a materialist standpoint. If you limit reality to material things, then truths are limited to material knowledge. Emergent properties such as subjective experience, society/culture, and ultimately meaning and meaningfulness are excluded from what is considered reality and truth, except for their material correlates. And this is why philosophers moved on from materialism because, while highly fruitful, it was ultimately insufficient in capturing all forms of knowledge.

I prefer a pragmatic blend of constructivist realism.

I see it as a heightened period of different people “trying shit out” when it comes to new gender identities. None of these are necessarily definitive norms that will define future society. As with any aspect of language and culture, it’s a part of an ongoing process of evolutionary change, adaptation, and discovery. Some might call it a church, some might call it a shifting paradigm, but it’s always going to be a bit messy and won’t necessarily make perfect sense right away.

How was DEI not politicized from the very beginning? It was literally born out of the civil rights movement.

There are no lies. All perception involves interpretation.

OR OR OR, seeing as there’s plenty of room for everyone, there’s no need for war?

The other option is “women”

It helps me a lot for getting started and staying on task. I used to use the countdown timer with alarm, but now I use Windows stopwatch timer with it set to be always on top so it’s near the top right corner. Whenever I get an automatic impulse to open a distraction tab it helps me catch myself. I let it run until I notice I’m over 25 min. Then I decide to break or keep going. If I break, I set it to count up again so I see how much time I’ve spent on break. This seems to be a decent compromise for flexibility for me.

They’ve moved onto Ciri now for Witcher 4. Mad that the character doesn’t look like a teenager now that she’s aged into her 30s.

Assuming you’re coming from a place of arguing in good faith, you raise an important point. We must always scrutinize the alignment of our means with the ideals of our ends. And in war, even with a just cause of repelling invaders and securing a people’s future, there is a spectrum of injustice against their people that leaders must weigh against achieving these goals. Conscription is a good example of this. War makes monsters of even the most well intentioned. However, we must consider the alternatives that appeal most to us with equal scrutiny, using history as our guide. If Zelensky surrendered at the very outset, it would have avoided this particular bloody war, but what injustice would it have incurred for the Ukranian people? If Zelensky sued for peace terms and conceded territory 2 years ago instead of leaning into conscription, what harms does it risk for the Ukranian people and their long term security using Crimea as an example? I am not qualified to say what are better choices. I just know that when a superior force invades you, the grim situation that results means that any choice you make as a leader will involve harm to your people.

Koko is a great example! I should clarify that when I say evidence, I mean the collected body of scientific evidence, of which Koko would be one data point. I will also clarify that I was talking about weak evidence for sapience in dogs, not animals in general. Different species are different. We have much more evidence for sapience in animals such as simians like gorillas, as well as dolphins. Just because gorillas are sapient doesn’t mean Koalas are likely to be. But heck Cows may well be more intelligent and closer to sapience than dogs.

None of this is to put a downer on how folks may perceive dogs and it certainly doesn’t shut the door on their possible sapience. I project all of the sapience into my dog. I just think it’s important to understand and acknowledge where scientific knowledge is at as we rely heavily on it for policy, if not individual beliefs.