You have thin soles so you can tell where you are in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

Ps Drink room temp water and you won’t even want any cold drinks ever again.

It keeps it moderately acceptable to drink, really.

Wow, folded real quick there, huh?

Wait…

I live in hot Ecuador and no ac in main rooms

So you say room temperature, but really it’s warm.

Ah! You got me! I made a spelling error. I concede all on your points now. I guess you’re 100% right now. Man, you really got this arguing thing down.

I having a stroke or are you? I’m not sure what her having won the popular vote and lost the EC in states she didn’t campaign in has to do with her “elevating trump.”

The person you’re replying to seems correct to me in that these are excerpts from a plan drafted by her team, but it does seem to be missing evidence they put it into action. Her not campaigning in some states isn’t that, right?

And honestly, I can kind of see their point. Sure, in hindsight it’s easy to criticize the idea post trump election, but most people would not have taken a trump campaign seriously. Especially in 2014 when this was written. It’s a extremely normal and valid tactic to try and prop up what’s perceived as a candidate that can be easily beat in a national election to cut out any real competition during the primaries.

But strategy aside, there’s still nothing showing the Clinton campaign “elevated” trump. Even reading that article, the most they did was nothing. They just focused their attacks elsewhere because he wasn’t a serious target. Again, that’s what everyone does. Why waste millions in advertising dollars to attack someone who seems like they’re going to lose anyway? Surely you want to work on taking down your actual rivals early? Turns out they were wrong, but so were most of us in 2014.

I worry that the decades that republicans spent demonizing Hillary Clinton worked all too well on even more progressive voters and people will see malice in everything she ever did, and misjudgments that we were all guilty of are viewed as unforgivable when she does it. By all accounts I remember reading, she’s not terribly charismatic, but has always been a very effective leader once in position. Nobody like campaigning Hillary, but poles for her when she was in an office were great.

So… your source to back up your point is an excerpt from a fictional book written by someone who’s expertise is in writing fiction?

Personally, I try not to take the word of someone who is not an expert, or at least versed in that particular area. Just because Pratchett was very a progressive writer doesn’t mean his opinions on gun control should be taken for anything more than his own personal position.

And if we’re just going to cite his fiction as his opinion, we have to assume he was also pro-police violence. I don’t know how much Discworld you’ve red, but even as Vimes progressed as a character and got better in a lot of ways, he always ended up resolving the issue by skirting the actual law and bending the rules to fit his purpose. Often he would espouse how much easier his job and the city would be if he wasn’t restricted by the law. Not everyone else, they still need to follow the law, but Sam Vimes knows better. There were even times when Pratchett would start to push back on that idea like he was going to have Vimes actually understand that police aren’t special and should be as answerable to the law as anyone… then the conflict would always be resolved by Vimes going outside the law and taking it into his own hands. He never learned that lesson. Quite the opposite actually.

So for those unfamiliar, Pratchett was so conservative, he was writing about rogue cops taking the law into their own hands before you kids ever heard those words put together.

But they gave their honest pov as a representation of white people in general.

Yeah, but until relatively recently, white folk didn’t think that way. At all.

Edit: Also, to be clear, what we currently call the “confederate flag” wasn’t associated with the entire rebellion. It was the battle flag of a specific army, the Army of Northern Virginia. It was mostly moved to irrelevance by everyone other than confederate apologists until the civil rights era when old-school racists started to put a bunch of confederate statues up everywhere and promoting the flag as a symbol in an attempt to frighten Black people fighting for their rights.

Even before World War II, cracks were evident in the foundation of the flag’s status as a symbol of heritage. Occasional northern and African-American voices questioned the wisdom of displaying a flag they associated with disunity or treason. And young white southerners began using the flag in distinctly non-memorial ways as a symbol of regional identity.

The growing battle over the post-Reconstruction South’s established racial order of Jim Crow segregation resurrected the Confederate flag’s use as a political symbol.

Supporters of the States Right Party (aka the Dixiecrats) in 1948 embraced the flag as a symbol of support for segregation. Although the Dixiecrats emphasized Constitutional principal, “states rights” in the 1940s and 1950s translated, as it had in the 1860s, into the purposeful denial of fundamental human and civil rights for African Americans.

The explicit use of the Confederate flag as a symbol of segregation became more widespread and more violent after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. Southern states resisting federally-mandated integration incorporated the flag into their official symbolism.

link

Not the same person but I googled “causes for secession” and clicked the first link.

First link.

Corporate has clarified that they use the ingredient Not Bugs^TM

“It’s definitely Not Bugs^TM!”*

… all those other words that don’t follow the rule.

Oh boy. I made the jump from SLA to (kinda) publication order. Going from his most intricate series to his first published book was almost jarring. I still liked Elantris though.

Personally, I read through close to publication order, but grouped series together. Well, I guess it’s really just Mistborn and maybe Emperor’s Soul with Elantris, but those last ones aren’t actually in the same set, just the same planet.

It’s because the author is friends with one of the lead guys over at Epic in charge of the game. They cycle through so many characters that they just start asking their friends for ideas I guess.

What? If there’s someone walking around punching a bunch of people in the face and I’m very anti-face-punching, 100% I’m going to go against my principles of not punching the one time to punch that person in the face. They should then, hopefully, understand what their actions were doing to those around them and develop a sense of empathy.

Oh man, every time someone asks a question along these lines I always think of the movie Hank and Mike. I found it in a discount bin at a grocery store probably a decade ago so I took a little time to actually look into it more this time. I knew it was Canadian and unlikely a big hit, but apparently it was just so poorly received. It made less than $17,000 of the $2M it cost, and it’s real tough to find anyone even reviewing it. I even struggled to find the music from it. (The one song is badass). And it’s got a couple B-tier actors that I remember doing a great job, and I think Joe Mantegna really went for it in his role as the god Pan. Chris Klein kills it in this song.

The crude humor kinda puts people off I think but the satirical aspects cut a little deeper than the movie needed to. And probably when I discovered it I was depressed and had a drinking problem and the overall mood of it really felt at home to me at the time so I was able to just live in those aspects of the film and really absorb the more subtle message. It’s definitely absurd in many points but there’s a lot of heart in it.

Jesus fucking christ. You know how water works, right? It fits the form of the container it’s in. It’s an simplified analogy to explain what that other guy linked to. We (well, you) see a universe fit to our kind of life, but the reality is that we developed to fit the universe.

You remind me of this guy I saw the other day claiming that a whole bunch of rocks that are vaguely shaped like body parts might be fossilized body parts.

He just kept saying “I’m not saying it definitely is, but imagine if we don’t understand the world, and it’s maybe this way? Crazy right?!”

It’s such cowardly bullshit. If you want to believe a thing because it sounds nice to you, don’t half-ass it and throw qualifiers on it. You brought it up, and then when challenged the tiniest bit, backed down with a “I’m not saying that’s definitely true… but maybe…?”

and that doesn’t match our expectations.

What expectations? Actual scientist, using facts, don’t have expectations of alien life. We don’t know the probability of life existing anywhere but here because we have nothing to compare it to. We have the one universe with the one data set available to us. Until we discover alien life, we should have no expectation for it. Do I think it’s likely there is life elsewhere? Yes. Does that mean I expect it? No. We don’t have enough information about the cosmos to even start to calculate whether it should happen.

I had a roommate once who believed that the stuff from the Alvin the Maker book series was real. The magic and shit. I asked if he had anything that led him to believe that or if he just really liked the books and wanted it to be. OF course he didn’t have any evidence or real reason for it. He just wanted it to be so, so he decided that he was going to believe that thing.

You’re doing that. Stop it. Be a grown-up here and stop believing in make-believe and believe things only when we have sufficient (or in your case, I’ll take any) evidence.

Have you heard of the puddle analogy?

A small amount of water sits there, it this hole in the ground it finds itself in. It looks at this cavity, observes how perfectly it fits the contours of their liquid body. It’s perfect! Every nook and cranny seems to be formed to fit the puddle perfectly.

“This hole must have been made for me! It’s too much of a coincidence that, with all the ways a hole could form, this one formed perfectly to fit me!”

You’re doing that. You’re saying it’s a crazy coincidence that all the right things were in place here for life to exist that led to us being here… but if it wasn’t, then we just wouldn’t have developed as life-forms. Or if the environs were different, life would have developed to fit into that kind of solar system. I think you just like the idea, so you believe it, but I think it’s better to believe things we have evidence for.