my little brother and I showing up to the Christmas party

A future

Look they ran out of soldiers with able bodies and sound minds, years ago. I’m sure you could get in just fine 👍

If someone brushes their teeth in the next room over I have to move an additional room away. Or turn completely inside out. That’s not loud at all, but bad bad bad bad bad.

Isn’t that the rub with the spooky off-site list, though? No documentation to point a definitive finger at who did precisely what. I suppose we could scapegoat the person who wrote the original call for the list, but if they aren’t the only maintainer then the rest of the plotters get to slip through our fingers.

That which is asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. Since we’re two claims in, if you can dig up that simple research then you can compel the other guy to actually back up their claim.

The subtle cultural fascism of women doing things while I seethe about it in the corner

It’s in the subtext

Fun fact: This is because the writer of Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski, originally pitched it as a Star Trek series. The studio told him “No, that’s stupid. Go away.” Then as soon as he was out of the earshot started writing Deep Space 9.

Only amendment I’d put in there is that if we do get a competent gestapo it won’t be ICE. ICE, the border patrol before them, and the Texas rangers before them all have a storied history of being impossible to appropriately train and outfit. Since their inception, they’ve been quantity-over-quality bucket of racists and failsons that have only ever been useful as a blunt instrument, despite work stretching back to the Harlon Carter days.

If we get a proper gestapo or KGB, it’ll either come from a different agency or they’ll have to completely gut and restructure ICE first. For now we can scare them off with crowds and airhorns.

It bothers me SO MUCH that the film cut the plotlines from the book that that riddle was hinting towards, but kept the intro as a cryptic, unfulfilled promise.

Hong Kong was seeking independence after the treaty that ceded it to Britain expired. China occupied the island and violently put down resistance.

Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Djibouti, Bangladesh, and Cambodia have all had valuable trade capability strong-armed away from them by China, who exploited financial instability to establish century-long leases on all maritime activity from their premiere port cities. This is in service to their “String of Pearls” geopolitical strategy to expand their naval trade and military power projection.

The Belt and Road initiative is part free economic zone, part debt-trap, as it forces low-income nations such as Tanzania, Pakistan, and the DRC into loan schemes that will take generations to repay, offering the ceding of key natural resources as a quick and easy out.

They have claimed the entire South China Sea as natural maritime territory without the consent or agreement of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, or Taiwan. This is speculated to be a move against Taiwan, specifically. But the outcome is the same: Heightened tensions between neighbors and the claiming of sea lanes that are not theirs.

Amnesia moment

If someone explains something you disagree with, you have to actually explain why you think they’re wrong. Conversely, if you just say ‘nuh uh’, then ‘nuh uh’ is enough to prove you completely wrong.

Actually, if you want a real answer, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

So, wrong.

That

You are incorrect

Yes, they’re both authoritarian. I’ll give communism one over capitalism for at least trying to wield authoritarianism for good instead of evil at the outset. But at the end of the day it’s like the One Ring, deranging anyone who tries to use it.

Realistically, our local and federal law enforcement has always been like this. See: Blair Mountain, Black Wall Street, the Jim Crow South, the post-Jim Crow South, any of the L.A. Riots, Ruby Ridge, the entire history of the Texas Rangers, COINTELPRO, Black Lives Matter, or the life and times of J Edgar Hoover, just off the top of my head.

The only difference right now is that we’ve let it get so out of control that now the average white American are getting caught in the collateral of what is otherwise standard operations. So now it gets treated as unique. But it’s the same shit as always, just bigger.