• 11 Posts
  • 214 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 15th, 2024

help-circle

  • Nothing quite so explicit as that I think, though obviously preserving something is always the intent when carving shit into stone.

    Ptolemaic Egypt was a culture populated by Greek and Egyptian speakers. Of those who were literate, many would only be able to read Demotic or Greek, but meanwhile there is a 2500 year history (at THAT time. Egypt is ridiculously old) of Hieroglyphics being the “official” way to write things down, and the scribal and priestly classes would be part of the cultural elites. Combine that with the Ptolemies attempting to situate themselves as both continuing Alexander’s legacy and being fully Egyptian, and there will be a place for all three scripts. Engraving laws onto stones and placing them in prominent public spaces would have been a pretty common way to “publish” them in a way that’s meant to be durable and secure. See the Code of Hammurabi and Draco’s code for just a couple of examples.

    The fact that Alexandria was cosmopolitan and had a sophisticated regime ruled by elites who were foreign but invested in the local traditions created a situation where this was done often enough for some to survive, several in fact, although the Rosetta Stone was the first found/identified.


  • Yes. The system set up by the US Constitution was a reasonably good attempt for a country of several million people with different practical needs, entirely along the eastern seaboard, and with 1790s technology, knowledge, and attitudes.

    The problem is that it has evolved pretty much the bare minimum amount to allow it to (mostly) continue to function. We are limping along on “Constitutional Republic version 2.27,” after version 1.0 was an immediate bust, but we need to be running 2.30 at least, and maybe even 3.0. We’re no longer feature competitive with many other Human Governance suites. :-)

    There are many issues, but an “upgrade” to install Ranked Choice Voting, rebalance Congressional Representation, and maybe remove the Electoral College (depending on how the congressional representation thing goes) would go a long way towards keeping it viable.


  • Yeah, I think the MAGAs will run mostly with the unfortunate garbled school shooter phrase, mostly because the eternally 12 year old bully Donald Trump seems to think it was some sort of fatal gotcha moment and not a facially nonsensical mis-speak. Ironically, I think this will mostly squander some generally skillful sanewashing BS from Vance.

    Kamala’s campaign on the other hand will get very good mileage out of the refusal to concede that Trump lost on 2020. Somebody on CNN said it would be the best “campaign ad” moment of the debate.

    Overall, it is what it is, and it will be impossible to tell how many people will really be swayed by the debate, but I doubt it’s a particularly large number. In particular, “leave abortion to the states” is unlikely to resonate with women in any state with a Republican legislature, including GA, AZ, and NC.








  • “White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin. Ask any black soccer player who’s ever missed an easy shot whether there’s a problem with racism in Europe. Or anyone of Roma descent.

    Most of their countries do not have the same issues of structural racism that the US does (largely because there weren’t enough people with recent non-European origins to make a viable political constituency to target), and they don’t have the legacy of dealing with a country that was involuntarily multicultural from the beginning, but in some sense that has allowed casual and personal racism to fester in a way that most Americans would find disconcerting.


  • I’m generally of the opinion that most people, even stupid people, are fairly chill when there’s only a one visible minority in their town, even if clueless and rude. Where things get dicey is when you combine economic insecurity from any source whatsoever with whatever number of visible minorities is enough to make a particular stupid person think, “hmm, that’s a lot of visible minorities.” Bonus racism/xenophobia points if any significant percentage of the minorities are gainfully employed. Double bonus points if any of them has ever committed a street crime.





  • Some of the older apps will still work if you can track them down. Most of the features will work with no Logitech software at all (and something like AHK can help). The custom drivers themselves will probably work without the app or at least without logging in. My old M560 still uses SetPoint in Windows, and it seems less oppressive than the newer LogiOptions or whatever.

    Finally, join us! There’s a whole world of fully programmable open-source-firmware custom keyboards, and mice are coming along, too, especially trackballs.




  • Yes, they do, and 99.99% of parents who fuck around and neglect their kids do indeed lose them forever. So do 99.99% of biological parents who did nothing except sign the papers under duress. It’s just that it’s a statistical non-issue that someone is going to even try to steal your baby back, and the 4-5 years of court cases are there specifically to make sure that all parties are heard. Honestly, the only time I’ve really even seen this recently has to do Native American tribes, who have a very different relationship with this process and some pretty strong reasons to distrust the system.

    I can tell you feel strongly about this, and I don’t want to imply there’s no room for nuance or that negligent parents deserve an unlimited number of re-tries, or that adoptive parents don’t love their kids. My adoptive parents are/were broken people in many ways, but I never felt unloved or unwanted. I do feel very strongly that infant stranger adoption has an outsized role in family planning options that pushes it to a darker place than it needs to be, and that in foster situations reunification should be the goal if it’s practical. For both, if all parties are acting in good faith and in the interests of children, then the numbers will land where they land. I just don’t think we’re there right now, through a combination of cultural norms and governmental policy.


    1. The genetic details absolutely matter. There’s no one factor that’s determinative, but it’s utter bullshit to say the nature half of nature versus nurture doesn’t matter. It matters even for adoption within similar ethnic backgrounds, to say nothing of trans-racial adoption.

    2. The main thing is the child’s welfare, and what’s best for kids is that as many natural families as is at all practicable have the resources to raise them. The fact that we route so many resources to get babies into the hands of rich white couples instead of supporting communities and families so that an unplanned pregnancy is not a disaster is what is bad for child welfare.