…what. They’re everyone’s largest trading partner, why would they do that?

that’s how you teach them to highlight and copy/paste text

It was just one line of dialog, but the sequel did mention that the company is expanding from just resource extraction to selling settlements to the wealthiest who are fleeing a dying earth

kinda depends on your definition of politics

the one I heard that I think is the most useful is, On the broadest level, Politics is how societies decide how and where resources are distributed

by that definition, healthcare can only be a political question, cus no matter how you set it up, you’ve made a decision about how it’s staffed and funded, who it caters to and what its goals are

gotta agree

nicotine is more addictive than cocaine, I’d never touch the stuff

but gun to my head? I’d take a cig over a vape any day. looks soo much better

I think there’s a tendency to see inter- (and intra-)stellar travel through the lens of the inter-continental expedition and colonialism. It… kinda makes sense… superficially, there’s some similarities; a voyage in a vessel, going to uncharted places, kicking off a new era of settlement and extraction. For this reason, movies and games really like the comparison, cus it makes for an easy narrative the audience is already familiar with.

In reality, though, nothing about space bares any similarity to anything in our past. Everything about the expeditions to, the colonizing of, and the industrial development and extraction of the Americas? All that was couched within the biosphere, contingent on it. Movies and media and junk get to ignore that because they exist to tell a story. So what if SciFi du jour doesn’t actually make sense? Doesn’t harm anyone, right? Except…

…except Musk and his fanclub really like describing Mars as the next colonial outpost. They’ll tell you it’s only a few short decades away! And I think that’s cus they don’t see where the metaphor falls short. To them, colonizing Mars is just the next thing that will happen in the narrative of history. After all, it’s happened once - so it must happen again right??? They don’t see the sheer wall of work and resources and work and decades (probably centuries, realistically) that would have to go into it. They don’t think about anything more than a superficial picture on a screen. People needed boats to cross the Atlantic, we’ll need rocketships. Now that they’ve got rocket ships, thats most of the work done. Afterall, in movies, you just need to get there. Then the plot can advance.

kinda sucks to be less free than the fucking geese

I guess you can draw that comparison, but then human territories are exponentially bigger than anything an equivalent social animal might claim as “enter at your risk” area. A traveling pack of dogs can just go around another pack’s territory. We can’t do that, we’re boxed in. There’s no neutral space left. I guess you could argue there’s international waters, but that’s practically inaccessible to most people.

I know these things take time, but it’s really hard not to be skeptical of CHIPS amounting to much. It reminds me too much of all the grant money given to telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon - supposed to be for improving infrastructure and implementing 5G, but they just pocketed the money as profit.

This isn’t something that gets solved by just hoping people’s individual lifestyle choices fix it. Production has to be scaled back, and market economics is clearly not capable of that sort of conscious decision making.

This is an english meme about the one event in Chinese history that gets repeated in english-speaking spaces over and over and over again. This isn’t attempting to make an argument to a Chinese audience. Why shouldn’t we draw comparisons to similar things in the US? What else would we talk about? Just a whole thread of “yeah, that’s bad” again and again? For every time this gets trotted out?

Pretty sure polar ice caps are still shrinking.

Sorry the consequences of industry aren’t snappy enough for your short attention span, I guess?

It was organized over twitter, “big players” were not involved. Hell, Trump himself was only interested in showing up because he likes being on stage in front of people. There was no plan, no goal. It was the political equivalent of an angry sports riot.

isn’t political violence our main export?

Yeah, Trump himself has no policy commitments. He’ll say whatever he thinks is popular biased on the last thing he’s seen on television. In office, he delivers bog-standard republican policy because that’s who his cabinet gets filled with.

I don’t see Biden changing his stance on arming Israel. Trump could, but the question is whether would it last long enough to actually affect policy.

Season 5, Episode 13 For The Uniform

He does this to a Maquis settlement after they had similarly poisoned two Cardassian planets.

the special effects are really impressive, it’s worth checking out

Pretty much. Secular education tends to begin with Columbus sailing across the Atlantic and seldom ventures north or south of our boarders – let alone touch on the rest of the planet until World War 2, after which a lot of curriculums just end. Elective courses are better… which is why nearly every year at least one of the states try to ban them.

Most of our protestant schooling likes to make special note of the fact that people fled here to escape religious persecution, that this or that sect wouldn’t be possible without American Freedoms™. Hell, Mormon scripture straight up says the US is a promised holy land.

You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You’d rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.

The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there’s a road to ‘unfreedom’, we traveled down it a long time ago.

You’d rather believe Trump is result of foreign interference, that our own institutions would never result in this without being sullied from outside. It’s fan fic, it’s Cold War nonsense.

Trump is the consequence of our political systems, of our spiteful culture, of our economics that promises success and leaves people sick, broken, and in debt. So what if the Russians had a few hundred Facebook posts? That “seed” would not have taken if the soil weren’t already fertile. Frankly, I don’t think it made a difference. We were barrelling toward Trump with or without the oh so spooky slavs typing on a keyboard.