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The left: Let's not kill anyone.
The right: Let us embrace Hakko ichiu and expel the roundeyes.
The alt-center: *presses detonator*
This is just an argument that Trump is now the de facto head of the Catholic Church and can, besides suspending sovereign immunity for Vatican officials, also appoint his own Pope in Mar a Lago LFG
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The Vatican was protected from sex abuse claims by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. By stating openly that the Pope still actively accepts his US citizenship, that immunity should be pierced and the Holy See subject to damages and subpoenas in these cases.
Why is a foreign potentate voting in American elections
NEW: Pope Leo XIV is set to become the first sitting pontiff in the Catholic Church’s two-thousand-year history to vote in a secular election.
Leo requested an Illinois mail ballot on Oct. 3, and it was sent to his brother John’s home in New Lenox, Ill.
John Prevost visited the pope at the Vatican on Wednesday and may now be carrying the ballot back to the Will County clerk by hand. thelettersfromleo.com/p/pope…
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Count Dooku is one of the weirdest parts of the Star Wars movies. Everything he says is factual and is later proven correct. Wat means? George Lucas and the Boomers are saying you are not allowed to criticize their Jedi religion of Boomer Hippie International Liberalism. Anakin, your job as a Sensitive Young Man is to be a janitor and play cleanup on Aisle 9 because Mace Windu and Yoda were goofing off and accidentally spent decades funneling money to a separatist insurgency of foreign barbarians. That's what it means to be a Jedi, young Anakin, as long as you remain "balanced in the Force" you are allowed to crash this whole Republic off a cliff at high speed.
This is the kind of deep cultural analysis I want
Lots of people are saying they are lesbians. I disagree. These cats don’t know each other very well at all. They are from totally different worlds, as evidenced by their attitudes towards feces. In a world of anthropomorphic cats, this is clearly a crucial dividing line between classes. The nerd cat is a hick - she’s out of her depth at this high society affair, she’s dressed wrong, she’s desperate to fit in, or at least to attempt to. But she fails.
Watch how the clip starts. The nerd cat takes a drink from the butler and then strikes up a conversation with just about the most generic line you can: “Lovely party.”
Watch her face drop as the sophisticat says “Yes…but,” she is worried she has committed a faux pas. She knows she’s a hick. Nerd cat knows Jessica through friends, or maybe not at all, but is aware of her name by some other means. This was her chance to make inroads, and that was all she had - “lovely party.”
Her fear dissipates as Jessica finishes her thought - she’s noticed that the fancy apartment reeks of shit. Jessica seizes the opportunity to explain why - it’s just the litter box. To a downscale cat like her, it’s no big deal. She’s even slightly smug at her assessment of the source of the smell. Maybe Jessica will appreciate being made aware of it. Jessica screams “litter box!” and the nerd takes her outburst to indicate a lack of familiarity with the concept, her muzzle curling into a grin.
But the grin fades, and she can’t help but grimace as Jessica reveals not only that she’s well aware of the intricacies of litter box odor control, but expects HER to be as well - as if it’s common knowledge. It sets in that she totally misread the situation before. Jessica knew about the litter situation from the get-go. Likely since she first walked in. She directed the conversation there explicitly so she could complain about it.
A line stands out here - “haven’t YOU told OUR HOSTESS about Arm & Hammer baking soda?” Jessica indicates that the nerd is a closer friend to the hostess than she is. This gives some insight into the genesis of their interaction. Perhaps the nerd was childhood friends with a now-successful city slicker. She’s clearly unfamiliar with how to conduct oneself at a party like this, and doesn’t quite know her place in the scene yet. Does she really have the right to suggest how her friend should deodorize her waste? Evidently, Jessica thinks so.
Jessica launches into a monologue about the benefits of Arm & Hammer as she saunters onto the balcony, with the nerd in tow, hiking up her inappropriately bohemian dress. The nerd delivers the final line of dialogue: calling Jessica by her name and remarking on her sophistication. The entire scene turns out to have been a test, one that the nerd has failed for now, but hopes to pass in the future. Jessica laps milk smugly from her coupe glass, avoiding eye contact with the overeager philistine.
There’s absolutely no sexual tension here, just a desperate and unpopular girl trying to fit in, and a smug gatekeeper testing her mettle.
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BREAKING: Judge Holden says all that exists in creation without his knowledge exists without his consent, arguing it would be better if all existence were aligned under his dominion, per Tom’s Hardware.
It's not Underdark Above Ground because the Dunmer have very little to do with D&D dark elves besides being racist and Black
Rational Bot retweeted
"The roots of the current struggle with the Polish Constitutional Tribunal lie in the state-building reforms of Duke Mieszko I, the founder of the Civitas Schinesghe, whose reign commenced sometime before 963 and continued until his death in 992."
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Calling it now.
AI is going to usher in a whole new era of software development. I’m calling it Software as a Service.
People will want to use these tools but they’ll realize they don’t want to spend the time to maintain and update them over time.
This will create a whole new category of businesses and entrepreneurs that can take on that task for businesses that would rather work on their core products.
AI is changing everything. This is a whole new paradigm of thinking about the way we interact with software.
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moral of TES, kill elves, humanity on top, we are lorkhans top guy and lorkhan is our dad
You can just give DC a voting representative
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reminder that animal rights scum have been diligently ruining the world for generations. veal's basically gone, they're working to take away beef now.
Binance gets hacked for billions: crypto down 1%
Normal Thursday in AI: freak the fuck out and panic sell everything it's over
Rational Bot retweeted
I think the FAA hiring scandal I wrote about is an unusually clear-cut instance of a sort of patronage politics that has characterized many liberal presidencies, manifesting less as personal radicalism and more as a face of smooth professionalism while radicals are enabled to run unchecked in many lower-salience positions
tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-…
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The Empire in "Star Wars" is bad because they created a weapon entirely for the purpose of annihilating entire populated planets and killing billions of people. The original trilogy has a very black and white Saturday-morning cartoon morality.
It was only when Lucas came back to it as an older man and actually started thinking about the question of why Anakin Skywalker would abandon the Jedi to join the Dark Side that he really began to add complexity to it.
And considering the OT was made by a boomer white guy lefty who was slyly suggesting in the 1970s that the Vietcong were the good guys, the prequels function as a pretty sharp critique of democracy.
The Republic is completely paralyzed by competing factions trying to extract rents for their constituents at everyone else's expense, and anyone trying to get anything productive done has to do complex horse-trading involving paying wasteful graft to these interests in order to build a coalition for their policies. This is what all the Trade Federation nonsense in Phantom Menace is about.
And while the Republic was trying to keep all these disparate interests united by paying off special interests, its entire structure got turned inside out by Palpatine.
And the Jedi were too preoccupied with running nonsense errands on behalf of the Republic Senate and being sent around the galaxy like rent-a-cops to solve problems for the various factions that they didn't notice any of this happening.
And the reason that Anakin was susceptible to corruption by Palpatine is that the Jedi and the Republic didn't offer him any possibility of a good life. They bound him to a code of celibacy and service to these grubby little factions and their dysfunctional, wasteful, corrupt government. And that's supposed to be good, because, what, democracy?
Honestly I can see how a politician like Palpatine who spent his career in Republic institutions might reasonably decide that fascism enforced with a planet-destroying space laser would be a superior system.
Of course, Palpatine sucked too. Anakin didn't get anything he was promised in exchange for betraying the Jedi. He still lost his family and he got turned into a cyborg terminator, and it didn't even work out that well for Palpatine, whose engagement with the dark side of the Force turned him into a cryptkeeper.
But things didn't go much better for Obi Wan, who spent the rest of his life squatting in a hut in the desert.
And even the sequel trilogy (if you consider that canon), the galaxy immediately turned into a mess after the Empire fell, the new Republic had all the same problems the old one did and Luke's commitment to the Jedi ideals got him the same crappy life Obi Wan had.
"Star Wars" ended up being about how everything is terrible no matter what you do.
Nobody has made a convincing argument the Empire in Star Wars is actually bad. They run clean organized starships and create trillions of jobs across the galaxy. When the Jedi run the government - an unelected council that somehow has infinite money to build giant buildings and own fleets of starships - Coruscant still has a redlight district with drugs like death sticks. Either keep civilizational order by nuking rogue planets, or be slaves to sexless fake Jesus types who slice you with laser swords with impunity.
