• 14 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2024

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  • That’s… concerning.

    I definitely don’t expect to find solid resources on the Q fallout in the Middle East. But getting to grips with the actual magical political mechanics that millions of people now believe in? That’s what I want. Everyone around me is using the words “deep state” now, it’s not funny at all.

    I think YouTube would nuke my recommendation algorithm from orbit if I commit an hour every week to this guy’s videos. But I’m glad there’s light being shed from that perspective.

    I know there was a short podcast series that goes through the cliff notes of the whole thing’s history by Jake Hanrahan some time ago but this stuff has evolved so much since that was recorded like two years ago. That’s more of what I’m interested in, a more journalistic look structured for someone who is a complete outsider.

    Your guy is talking from an American Christian perspective, and American Christianity is basically an alien cult to me (I hope nobody takes offense to this, but Christianity here is much more… grand and ancient and focused on bringing people together and not deeply horrifying?). Like you joke about the rapture but American Christians invent a new rapture every other week, while our guys’ rapture is set in stone to be in the indefinite future, and anyone in my society claiming to have a date for a rapture would be referred to a psychiatrist by the clergy. I typically have more bad things than good to say about the church but comparing to what you guys have makes me feel like it’s not so bad at all.

    I think the average person is seriously underestimating the horrific damage to people’s mental models of the world this movement? Cult? Politico-occultist messianic dispensationalism? Virulent cognitohazard thing is unleashing on humanity.






  • I hate paying 5x for a German-made Bosch spare part for my car when I’m tired of the AliExpress quality lottery but I have to admit it’s one of the few hardware manufacturers I still think pretty highly of. They make Dremels too, right? I imported one of those at an extortionate price and haven’t regretted a single penny, reminds me of how old durable tools were built to actually last.

    When I was a kid and you picked up something with a (for example) Sony logo on it, you know you were holding something that was at least relatively well made. Nowadays pretty much every single company gives me marrow-sucking quality-be-damned vibes. And come to think of it Bosch was not one of the companies I saw that way.

    Disgusting how they’re treating their workers (who I’m assuming are damn good at their job given how highly I think of Bosch’s stuff), but someone still needs to be doing that job.




  • Wouldn’t even call it a pun, as someone pointed out already. I’m going to sacrifice the joke in the name of explaining it.

    brief Arabic cultural lesson for those who care

    You have your Good Morning (≈Morning of Peace, صباح الخير) in English. In Arabic we have more variations. The standard reply to this first one is Morning of Light (صباح النور). Basically wishing each other a good day by describing what makes it good. There’s a couple but these first two in this order is the standard (and secular *) greeting.

    * you’ll see why that is even worth pointing out in a second

    Then you have more abstract ones that imply a good day by referring to something (commonly a pleasant smelling flower), like Morning of Roses (صباح الورد) or Morning of (a specific type of) Jasmine (صباح الفل). All of these have a musical quality to them in a way I can’t write out.

    You’ll get older relatives sending you standardized photos with these greetings in groups or just to text you to invite you for lunch (or to fix their phone). Here’s the google images result for Good Morning (≈Morning of Peace):

    I’ve highlighted the religious stuff in red and the roses with blue, to see how common they are. The religious stuff is mostly variations with Islamic Duas (prayers asking for something - in the case of all of these it’s basically “asking” God to give the recipient good health / a good day / a pleasant path in life - it’s really just a “good luck” phrased in the only way a religious society can express it.

    FWIW I’m (mostly) not from a Muslim family so I get secular or Christian versions of these. Often the photos I get are flowers, traditional breakfast food, coffee, a nice breakfast table set in a shaded garden. And often there’s very few pixels. Sometimes an aunt will just take a photo of her coffee and that’s basically a greeting. But it’s usually garbled old jpegs from 2007.

    Critical subtext: these are literally forwards from grandma. Well-meaning, but eventually obnoxious, especially back when phones had 8GB of storage.

    This meme says Morning of Strawberries (صباح الفراولة) which is both clunky (Arabic’s got a poetic quality and these two words put together just intuitively do not work that way. It has the meter of a punchline if that makes sense) and silly, but with the textured elephant and the 13x12 resolution as you can probably guess it’s just a surreal meme.

    But now you know why it’s a surreal meme.

    Come back next week for the much less wholesome next episode of Arabic forwards from Arabic grandma: videos alleging the Jews invented homosexuality, cancer, and sex


  • Well, eating > restaurants > a list with potential promoted entries.

    I really don’t think the intention of integrating this “intelligence” into Facebook is explicitly to make us dumber. I think the only real purpose is to supercharge marketing. Eroding the mental capacity of functional human beings is just a happy little accident.


  • The Italian food thing is pretty common in many cultures, I’ve seen it in a few countries myself and it’s big deal here in Lebanon. My own parents used to be livid about me bringing friends over and not offering anything to eat when I was younger. It’s a part of my culture I’m a bit resistant to doing, I don’t know, it’s pretty intuitive if it’s time to eat or not, and if someone’s dropping by between meals I am totally fine not setting the whole ass table. Maybe a beer or coffee (the good stuff, it’s a nice thing to share) nowadays.

    The Dutch food thing has zero resemblance to my culture but it is in line with something I’ve read before about western (at least the description I read was western) food habits. Going completely off the top of my head here. As far as I remember, historically you had one heavy meal and everything else was a smaller meal. I think I was looking up “dinner” vs “supper”. The impression was that the word “dinner” was originally for the big meal of the day, and that “supper” was for a light meal at the very end of the day. “Breakfast” is more of literally breaking a fast than it is a whole meal and lunch referred to a small mid-workday meal.

    So I think the idea of temperature might be connected to the size or heaviness of the meal in your Dutch thing.

    Or maybe my nerves are completely cooked after work and this is more word salad than word coherent comment.





  • The monkey’s paw curls.

    We now have a one-state solution where every citizen regardless of origin has full legal rights, stolen land and houses have been returned, the renamed towns have been reassigned their original names, and a sizable proportion of colonists have willingly chosen to leave because they were only ever interested in being the protected class in an apartheid society. Robust border infrastructure has been rebuilt to Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, with a direct maglev like from Al Quds to every major nearby city. The world rightly recognizes the crimes that have occurred west of the river and the Nakba now sits in the global public consciousness in the same place as Rhodesia and the Nazi Holocaust.

    The catch? The country cannot be named Palestine. It has the be named Donald J Trump (PBUH) Presents: The Miraculous Peace in our Time West of the River of America Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter, Buy Gold and War Bonds

    Too optimistic huh. We are allowed to dream