Uriel238 [all pronouns]

A dark age is a low-data age. It’s not dark as in a slow development age. We see the end of the Islamic Golden Age (areound the 14th-15 centuries) as as time when advancement in the Middle East slowed as astronomy and algebra were reinterpreted as sorcery against God (except when done for the religious authority or the caliphate / sultanate). Compare witchcraft and witch burnings in the late middle ages and early reniassance. Anyhow a lot of smart people got executed by the religious authority, and so development slowed, allowing Christian imperial interests from the west to catch up.

This won’t be a dark age even as the US state tries to bury what happens in disinformation campaigns. There’s too much archeological data to be available. Though future civilizations may not prioritize studying what happened while we navigate some great filters like the climate crisis.

It’s going to suck and people will die, and some atrocities will be so heinous as to require memorials and denial movements, but it will be super hard to bury the records.

The US is going to join Russia as a has-been, but it was always a genocidal bully, and deserves to crumble like Rome.

And match the red on the poster!

< James Bond Opening Boilerplate Sting >

I feel better about this one, Your prvious offerings have been all complete and pretty compared to my flying spaghetti monsters. To be fair, I’ve been building more for easy dissembly rather than prettiness.

I may soon join your new religion.

Once again the ownership class pirates freely while disparaging the common folk for violating copyright.

It’s almost if it’s not a real law, rather something by which to disparage the proletariat.

The logic is that if we should be able to detect orbital teapots but can’t find any that it may indicate time travel is not possible, or at least never readily available for MIT students to engage in practical jokes. Because they totally would.

Like Roko’s Baskilisk it relies on a lot of presumptions that we cannot immediately make. We still struggle to detect teapot-sized satellites in the inner solar system. Time travel may exist but may never be freely accessible. There may even have been a task force to intercept all the teapot-placement missions before they launched, or a good reason not to frivolously drop objects into the past such as teapots. We might even have evolved to where we just don’t consider trolling each other as appropriate behavior.

As with many of my hypotheses, it’s more of a thought experiment than an actual conjecture of the real world.

It may be related to all the trolling we do to each other, such as deckpeckers, left-handed smoke shifters, snipe hunting and soft-punching contests.

It may not make reasonable sense at all, but humans are silly muppets.

It’s why I hypothesize that teapots in space (between the Earth and Mars, orbiting the sun) would be almost certain evidence that time travel to the past becomes possible and cheap, and if we ever attain the capacity to detect distant teapots and don’t find any, that may be evidence that time travel is not possible, or at least cannot be made cheap enough to be used for practical jokes.

In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.

During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren’t undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.

It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.

The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle’s exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.

This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.

As a society, for instance, we tend to think that telling kids that Santa Claus exists is unproblematic, because doing so protects certain values – such as children’s innocence and imagination.

Santa Clause may be a fun myth, especially if kids receive presents from Santa for Christmas. But it does not protect children’s innocence and imagination.

Though this raises a question if kids received mischief-enabling presents from Jesus (A Red Ryder BB Gun comes to mind) that might improve their take on their personal Jesus.

Humans don’t have the technology to manipulate society to deal with the climate crisis. But then we can’t get a four-day work-week in the US because a handful of billionaires oppose it.

So far, we’re showing about the impetus that cyanobacteria had when it was their turn to kill off the planet. It would have been better if they could have stopped multiplying but they couldn’t help themselves. We can’t help ourselves either, just with extra steps to reach the same position.

University of Missouri, I believe. (Sent to me from there.)

Clarification: The Mouse as in Disney Corporation not as in the thing you use to move your pointer.

More crime is committed in the making of media than in pirating it.

Also more wrongdoing against society and the public that the justice department couldn’t be bothered with (so doesn’t count as crime).

Pirate it all or don’t watch it.

Only monarchists think communist is an insult.

Maybe the climate crisis would be addressed if more weather reporters were brought to tears by the events they have to report.

and…?

Monkey Paw!

I was looking forward to someday having some nice Cannon or Panasonic or Fujifilm hi-res eyes to replace mine but my insurance won’t even land me decent glasses.

I miss being able to read six-point font or see more than ten meters in front of me.

Relevant XKCD

What’s frightening to me is our semi-autonomous drones and robots, including police attack bots.

Well, yeah, but I wouldn’t trust NYT news as trustworty without confirmation from other sources. I’d say the integrity of the rag has been compromised, but I don’t actually know if it ever was integral even in the Raymond and Jones days.