SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a “failed annexation”

It’s quite racist (and antisemetic) to think that just because things look similar that they were intended to be the same thing. They’re not.

“Oh, you think that this fantasy race that has many of the anti-semitic tropes of Jewish people might in fact be a reference to Jewish people? Well, you’re the one who associates those features with Jewish people, not me. Just saying.”

This is where the moronic “maybe the curtains are just blue” reddit-tier analysis of literature gets you - completely unable to see any kind of allegory or metaphor, especially when bigots say that, no, that person in that book totally isn’t a racist caricature, it’s just a person with those traits!

If I wrote a book about a fantasy world where I used lots of sexist stereotypes about women - that they’re less intelligent; that they’re inherently subservient to men; that they “belong in the kitchen”; that they should be “barefoot and pregnant”; etc, and without ever even making a critical judgement of those traits or showed that the men in that society are bad for maintaining this status quo, then I would rightfully be called a raging sexist by people. They would probably believe I was one of those tradcath, alt-right MGTOW incel people. If I turned around and said “Uh, it says a lot about liberals that they think these traits are stereotypically true of women! Maybe they’re the real sexists, not conservatives?” then you would, hopefully (though I’m not so sure given your lack of sensitivity towards Jewish people) call me a total fucking dipshit.

Very true, so long as it begins with the most carbon-emitting people (e.g. western billionaires who own large pollution-emitting corporations) and works its way down

The correctness of an idea is totally independent of how many people believe it, and to believe otherwise is to be some dipshit who says “Idiocracy is a documentary!!!” and invoke Hanlon’s Razor instead of having actual good, materialist analysis of the world

Because arriving at a party when there’s not many people around can be awkward especially if you aren’t already friends with the host. So you wait for more people to arrive first.

While many Palestinians do hate the Zionists and vice versa, framing the conflict as between two powers that hate each other for religious reasons or racist reasons or what have you is what leads to such terrible “Two religions fighting again for the billionth time!” analysis.

Israel is a modern colonial state. While most outright colonist countries are no longer around, Israel is the exception. One of the reasons why it’s allowed to be the exception is because it’s a stronghold for American interests in an incredibly important region - whoever controls the world’s oil supply, controls everything that depends on oil, which is a LOT of things. Lately, it’s also increasingly a weapons manufacturer and cybersecurity base - their technologies are tested out on Palestinians as if they are guinea pigs, and then these systems are sold to various countries for use in their own populations. In general, Palestinians today have low qualities of life and the amount of territory they control shrinks by the year as Israel shoves Palestinians out of their homes and puts Israeli settlers in those homes instead. Naturally, the Palestinians are not happy about this at all, but resistance is difficult even when you’re not surrounded on all sides (Gaza has the sea, Israel, and Egypt bordering it, and Egypt is currently sympathetic to the Israeli side due to a coup that put Sisi in power; while the West Bank has Israel and Jordan, and Jordan is also sympathetic to Israel currently).

Palestine wants a state for themselves, which is a fairly reasonable thing to want. Israel absolutely does not want a two-state solution let alone to give Palestine all its land back. The two are therefore at an impasse - there’s a fundamental contradiction here that cannot be solved by some middle of the ground solution. Palestine has attempted on numerous occasions to try and resist, both peacefully and violently - both methods get them killed in the thousands while the West says nothing, because again, it’s extremely important to have Israel in the region as a Western imperialist outpost. Have you ever noticed that the only time the phrase “… has a right to exist”, it’s always in reference to Israel? Few other nations seem to have this “right” in the West’s eyes. Yugoslavia sure didn’t. Neither did the USSR, or for that matter modern-day Russia given the rhetoric going around a year or so ago about how they wanted to subdivide Russia into a dozen oblasts.

There are other powers in the region that are against Israel, with the weaker ones being Syria and Lebanon, while the strongest is Iran. Up until fairly recently, while Hezbollah (a sort of state-within-a-state military force separate from the rest of Lebanon but also integrated into it) has scored a few points on Israel in the past, they were broadly speaking outgunned by Israel. Additionally, Israel has nukes, which made a war to actually overthrow Israel essentially impossible without the risk of nuclear bombs being dropped on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. This has changed in the last few years, due to a mixture of Israel (and the West broadly speaking) becoming relatively weaker because so much military aid has been sent and destroyed in Ukraine, and Iran and friends becoming stronger. The threat of nuclear annihilation still exists, and it’s one of the major problems still for the anti-Israel resistance, but given Hamas’ victory in Gaza a week ago, there is blood in the water and the sharks are coming.

I hope this all shows that thinking along the lines of “X hates Y and so they’re fighting” obfuscates a lot of what’s actually going on geopolitically. It’s extremely important to say that the fact that Israel is a Jewish state doesn’t mean that they have, according to various right-wing conspiracy theories, some kind of outsized influence over so-and-so countries. Israel does have an influence over various countries because their propaganda department is very active in the West to shut down anti-Zionist (which is unequivocally NOT the same as anti-semitism) viewpoints, and the aforementioned cybersecurity and weapons development programs, but this is a two-way street. The West needs Israel. Israel needs the West. The United States is essentially what has kept Israel alive for the better part of the last century.

This isn’t to say that Zionist and Islamic beliefs have no impact on the calculus here - they have a lot to do with it, in fact - but merely to say that this isn’t just some inherently religious war.

I think there’s (at least) two factors here: the first being that western leftists in general (it’s not even necessarily based on sect, I’ve seen this in most major tendencies) still have brainworms from the (capital-L) Liberal society they grew up in and so have weird views on certain issues (I won’t even deny that I don’t still). I mean, truthfully, most leftists around the world have weird views on certain subjects, not just western ones, but the West has absolutely astounding propaganda networks and techniques, so much so that most don’t even think that they could be propagandized - that’s a thing that non-democratic countries do, and we live in democracies!

And second, there’s can be a tightrope to walk on some scientific issues. Like, take the coronavirus vaccines for instance - there are people who argued, from the left, that because all these massive pharmaceutical industries are only interested in profit and not really for curing anybody of anything, that we therefore should oppose the vaccines. This is obviously a harmful, crank belief, but one can see how by opposing everything a giant corporation and the imperialist and racist etc American government tells you to do, that you might consider yourself “more of a leftist” regardless of what that thing actually is. In that case, you might even try and adopt crank scientific positions by only paying attention to papers that suggest that vaccines don’t do anything, or even harm people, while ignoring the vast majority that correctly claim that they are beneficial to take and that people should take them. If you’re that person, you might think “Oh, I believe the scientists on all these other issues, but on THIS one I think the influence by X corporation is just so high that all of these papers are biased in favor of vaccines; if anything, I’M the one who’s more strictly obeying the scientific method!” Again, they’re obviously wrong, but if you already disregard (as many of us should) the findings of very official-sounding thinktanks that are actually funded and staffed by capitalist ghouls, then disregarding actual science might be an easy jump to make for some “leftists”.

In the broad sense of “using euphemistic language”, obviously quite often, and it’s not always intended to be bad even if it is obfuscating the truth - but only really when doing things like explaining complicated topics to a very young child, or when both people in the conversation know that doublespeak is being used (e.g. saying “he’s in a better place now”, which is technically hiding the truth with something more pallatable if you didn’t already know that that phrase is synonymous with “he died”.)

In politics, which is the most appropriate place to use the term, I would argue it’s a standard, even characteristic, part of capitalist politics and economics, because the actual truth of the matter is directly opposed to the interests of the working class, and you do not want to anger them or encourage them to organize in opposition.

“Increasing efficiency in X sector” simply means “We’re going to fire a bunch of people and reduce the money we spend on it with no increase in quality of service.”

“We should cut social security spending and stop giving handouts so people work harder” simply means “We need to increase the profits of the capitalist class, and so hundreds, thousands or even millions of people will have to suffer and die.”

“We should restore freedom and democracy in X country” simply means “This country is opposed to our capitalists in one way or another and we should kill their leaders stopping us from having greater market access, even if that plunges that country into years of suffering” for example in Libya. Countries with dictatorships and monarchies that are subservient to American rule are rarely targetted - if anything, several of them were put there by America itself (e.g. Pinochet).

Hell, the words “market access” in that previous one is just doublespeak for “widespread exploitation of that country’s resources and institutions”, like how the ex-Soviet states were massively privatized under the Shock Doctrine and their resources harvested for Western capitalists.

One of the important first steps for any leftist is seeing these phrases for what they actually are, because otherwise you just continue to exist in the dreamy world of capitalism where actions are disconnected from consequences, and the problems and what caused those problems are shrouded in fog and confusion and become difficult to discuss. For example:

“Wow, cool, we should definitely increase efficiencies in the healthcare sector! Efficiency is a good word that means good things!” -> five years later -> “Dang, it sucks how our healthcare sector is in such dire straits, look at these long waiting lists, look at these burned-out nurses, how could this have possibly happened? Perhaps we didn’t increase efficiences enough! As efficiency is a good word that means good things, it is inconceivable to me that it might have done something bad!” -> read a post online from a leftist -> “This person is saying that we should hire more nurses and doctors and give them free degrees and training and lower housing/rent prices! Don’t they know that this will decrease efficiency and lead to - gasp! - bloating in the healthcare sector? That’s how we got into this bad situation in the first place! Socialists are so ridiculous, they need to read a book on the subject because they clearly don’t see what is patently obvious to people like me, who can see common sense without even needing to have read a book on it, I’m just that smart and read all the articles! (most of which are owned by the people trying to privatize healthcare)”

It’s likely that at no point have the people arguing for “increasing efficiency” actually laid out exactly what they mean by that word, or if they have then it’s couched in further doublespeak (“incentivizing hard work” = “increase hours without a meaningful pay rise so we can fire people and save labor costs”), whereas because left-wingers are too honest to come up with their own doublespeak phrase for what we propose, we have to lay it out bare.

who has donated a lot of money to charity

where did they get that money in the first place? the dollar mines? the grand tree of bills? if the only way to get money is to work for it and dollars don’t magically fall from the sky, which I think is a reasonable theory, then it’s necessarily true that they stole it from us. not even being glib, that individual person didn’t do the labor to get that much money - it’s literally impossible, it would take millions of years of work to get billions of dollars at any reasonable wage - they had to take the surplus value of the labor of other people to obtain it.

it’s akin to a thief stealing the money of a group of people and then giving a fifth of it back and demanding we bask in the light of their charity

there are people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc who still believe this

Old people aren’t really the problem, capitalists are

I’m going to assume that you’re being facetious when you talk about “culling” them (otherwise that’s pretty concerning). many old people are annoying, many of them are downright hostile to any progress whatsoever, but they, and the viewpoints they hold, are the symptoms of a much larger problem.

libs will say this and then turn around and say “BRICS is just an arm of China, it’s dominated by them economically”

(not that that point is entirely false, BRICS is indeed economically dominated by China and I wonder if there would be half as much interest for countries to join if China wasn’t in it, but India is a pretty big counterweight to China’s power in BRICS in practice)

World order is acknowledging sovereign countries exist and it’s wrong to invade them

The United States has invaded many more countries than Russia and China, and yet they are sanctioned for doing so/if America thinks they might do so, while not a single person in the American government is punished for the deaths of millions. They even get promoted and hired again on later governments! America created the world order! Rules for thee, not for me!

the only people trivializing fascism are those who see fascism symbology like the swastika, Black Sun, various nordic runes, etc on the soldiers they’re egging on and go “doesn’t look like anything to me!” while advocating for the double genocide theory

“What if they invaded, pillaged, and coup’d the countries WE were going to invade, pillage, and coup! Can you imagine the tragedy?! Better that us, The Good Guys, exploit these countries than The Bad Guys!”

Typing is better than writing in a solid 75% of cases in my opinion. I agree that you tend to remember things that you physically wrote down better than things you type, but that can be mitigated against if you’re in a situation where you need to remember things with strategies like spaced repetition.

In a lecture setting I would prefer to physically write things down, but you also have to be careful with this and only try and summarize because many people have the wrong strategy and try and transcribe slideshows or the lecturer’s words verbatim, get halfway through a sentence, the lecturer moves on to the next page, you then have to try and remember the rest, probably get bits wrong, and by the time you’ve finished that then they’re on to the next page and you’re just not having a great time. If you get good at typing then you can keep up much better but that’s still not the right thing to do in the lecture hall, unless your lecturer doesn’t give out the notes or slideshows afterwards or record the lectures. then you’re just kinda shit outta luck.

In just everyday settings, like writing a shopping list, keeping reminders? probably on my phone or laptop.

people like the hexbear news threads I guess

Kautsky, just so Lenin would think I was cool

Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.

Muons are naturally generated by cosmic ray protons colliding with atmospheric molecules and creating pions, which then rapidly decay to muons and muon neutrinos. These themselves then decay into a bunch of other things.

If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don’t travel very far at all on average.

That muons can hit the Earth is one of the key pieces of evidence in favor of relativity, in fact. As you say, with a mean lifetime of 2.2 nanoseconds, they shouldn’t be able to hit the surface of the Earth, but because at relativistic speeds time dilation occurs from our frame of reference (or, equivalently, in the muon’s inertial frame, it sees the distance it has to travel be radically shortened via length contraction), they do end up hitting the earth.

Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I’m curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.

I doubt it, because they decay so quickly. AFAIK you have to do it via the pion decay route, and all the muons we create are in particle accelerators. I guess it would be like how we create radioactive isotopes in hospitals on-demand for medical purposes that wouldn’t survive transportation to the hospital before decay, and couldn’t be stored long-term because, well, they would decay.

as an aside, Nature is rather more pessimistic about the discovery, which I think is reasonable.