Not too far from the one I came up with:

Show me your feet, boys

And taste my soles

Treat my toes like a tootsie roll and lick away

You’ve changed the subject immediately, none of this has anything to do with a general strike. Did you seriously think I was talking about 2020 when I brought up Seattle? But hey, if you want to change the topic to another thing I’m pretty knowledgeable about, that’s cool, too.

Oh right, I just remembered you also used to complain all the time about BLM because you had to briefly sit in traffic a couple times and now are on the side of the police state. Way to remind everyone of your petulant pettiness, too.

It sounds as though you’re advocating against any kind of protest now. Your sentiment seems to indicate that if you don’t get every single demand met permanently, then it was a total waste and you should’ve just stayed home and stayed silent, but that’s ridiculous. It’s worthwhile to stand up and fight against an unjust system simply for the sake of opposing evil in the world. Getting crushed under the boot of the police doesn’t make you wrong for that. You don’t protest with the expectation of winning any concessions, you protest to stand up for what’s right.

Besides, cops having a way outsized budget was the case before the protests, too, so what’s your point? It’s still just as worthy of protest now as it was then. The protesters won concessions, but they were almost immediately and undemocratically reneged on. For all the “defund the police” hysteria the media threw around, it never really happened anywhere (not even Minneapolis), despite many promises from officials in major cities all over the country. It’s like if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was dangled to get marches to stop and then it was thrown out as soon as they did. You make it sound like it was the fault of protesters that city councils nationwide voted to increase their police budgets after promising they’d decrease them.

Tell that to Seattle.

General strikes can be localized, too. They don’t need nationwide adoption.

I think I’ll take my activism advice from someone who doesn’t actively despise homeless people, but thanks, Jordan.

Indeed, Chinese cops laid siege to various universities during the Hong Kong protests, which were strongholds of opposition and organization, just like American universities have also been under siege at times for the same reasons regarding their Palestine protests. Cops never change and they’ll always have the cop mindset, though I will say that American cops seem to be especially trigger-happy. From what I see, cops in most other countries are able to neutralize threats with non-lethal force most of the time. I never hear about German cops, who I believe also carry guns, shooting someone’s dog or unloading into a guy failing to follow conflicting instructions being shouted at him. I can’t claim to know much about German cops, though. Maybe someone with more knowledge could fill me in.

The Hong Kong protests, though… I’m not saying that’s worse than American police, but I have little reason to believe they’d be much better, either. Your experience may not reflect the whole truth.

Japan has strawberries that can be $500+ each.

Seth hasn’t been writing for Family Guy since like 2006

It’s true, but intelligence and counterintelligence is kind of their whole thing, isn’t it? They’ve certainly had a long list of laughable fuckups, like their many failed assassination attempts on Castro, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Iran-Contra, etc., but they’ve also successfully toppled governments in South/Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, etc. Apparently they’ve made at least 70 attempts at regime change since the end of the Cold War, according to Wikipedia. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the CIA as a non-threat, personally, especially if they’re going to be following the malevolent orders of a Trump loyalist. I fear the CIA will turn more inwardly to our own country and use their efforts against US citizens (more than usual, that is), specifically against those who would oppose a Trump regime.

We already saw FBI agents engaging in 60s-and-70s-style surveillance of BLM activists in 2020, where they and other feds went around in unmarked vans snatching random activists off the street and traded literal baseball cards they made about different individual activists for fun. Those feds were also sent in at the express direction of Trump. With that in mind, I have no doubts the CIA would do the same in heartbeat. I know they already conduct domestic surveillance operations, but I’d predict a substantial increase in that under the current administration, especially given the ways things have been going after only the first couple weeks with Trump demanding absolute fealty throughout the government and vilifying all opposition. It’s just frightening that Trump had a ready-made intelligence org that was so easily converted to his agenda and seems poised to be his personal secret police. I think that’s probably even scarier than the CIA of old. At least for right now, I might somehow prefer a CIA that says, “Sorry, Mr. President, but we don’t follow orders.”

CIA, too. I thought they sort of just did their own thing and aren’t really beholden to the president. People think the CIA is such a rogue organization that some people have suggested they killed JFK because he sought to shrink the org and make them more accountable. Seems unlikely, though, since apparently all it takes to completely take it over is just to change around some personnel.

Like, my head cannon is that the new leaders would be figureheads only and that there’d be someone secretly chosen to keep things running behind closed doors and pulling the real CIA strings to resist such changes (and maybe have an encore, pretty please?), but that’s based on nothing at all. I’m no fan of the CIA or anything, but I do fear what such a shadowy government org might do when wielded by Trump cronies even more than the stuff they usually get up to.

That’s true and part of me would love to see that, but some utilities (such as water and electric) going under would probably be a bad thing if there wasn’t a plan to swoop in and bring them under public control right away. Otherwise, things would get bad really quick in a lot of places if power and water stopped being available for everyone for an extended time. Things like hospitals, grocery stores, repair shops, etc. would all be working at greatly reduced capacity and capability. Barring a full-on revolution where the people could seize these utilities for public ownership and operate it themselves, I don’t see that happening because the government would be likely to simply bail out a lot of the companies, or they’d be bought up and probably end up being consolidated by an even fewer number of people.

No, this passage is describing the care they needed.

It doesn’t make any sense as an interpretation to jump right to death if you look at what the passage actually says. They died because they couldn’t clap their hands? They died because they or their caretakers didn’t smile enough (gladness of countenance)? They died because they didn’t get enough gentle encouragement from their caretakers (blandishments)?

This was from a list of fucked up things Frederick II did written by a guy who hated him. If the kids had died as a result of the experiment, surely it’d say so. It’s just saying the experiment was a a failure (labors were in vain) because of course they did not spontaneously start speaking Hebrew, Greek, Latin and instead had to rely on nonverbal communication.

If someone says “I can’t live without my phone,” they aren’t going to literally drop dead one day if they forget it at home.

If you have a source laying around for info on the kids’ deaths, I’d take it.

It sounds to me it’s saying you had to do things like clap your hands to get their attention, gesture to communicate what you wanted them to do, and that you had to do so kindly and patiently or else they may not respond well. Alternatively, maybe it was the children who had to clap their hands and gesture, but then I’m not sure how they’d speak blandishments (kind, gentle encouragements, like “good job!”) to others.

According to Wikipedia:

“The experiments were recorded by the monk Salimbene di Adam in his Chronicles, who was generally extremely negative about Fredrick II (portraying his calamities as parallel to the Biblical plagues in The Twelve Calamities of Emperor Frederick II) and wrote that Frederick encouraged ‘foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which he took to have been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.’”

So, as you’d expect of someone raised without any formal language, other means of communication were necessary.

I’ve heard the shape of the head on the human penis might also be intended to scoop out other dude’s spunk so you have a better chance of passing on your own genes instead. Apparently cavewomen were just having trains run on them all the time, I guess.

POV: You are Paul Bunyan

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Forgetting how it works and having to relearn it again

You’re right, this is clearly a case of self-defense of a third party

I suppose it depends on how you’d define “solved”. If we’re talking about basically eliminating homelessness, Cuba has done immense work in that regard. Say what you will about the Cuban government, but Cuba has a near-zero homeless population because the government has built a ton of housing and caps rent at 10% of individual income in that state-owned housing. Cuba is also a country with a tradition of multi-generational extended family homes, so there’s a greater chance that you’d be able to move in with a family member if you fell on hard times. Home ownership rate is around 85% compared to 65% in the US. All of this is nothing new, though, so it’s hard to say if it’s the answer to current issues of housing that’s largely driven by corporate greed, but it certainly sounds like it couldn’t hurt. Granted, I’ve seen people give examples of homes that are rather small and spartan, where the walls are made of bare cinderblock and generally aren’t very pretty, but that’s way better than being homeless even if some of the housing isn’t as nice as others. I’ve also examples of state-owned housing lived in by the same kinds of people, but are really quite nice as well. Whether the US government would ever do this, though, seems unlikely. Not at the scale we’d need and not for so cheap, anyway, especially not with Trump coming to office. I can’t really speak for the governments of other countries, however, and I’m no expert on Cuba either, so I could have gotten some things wrong. The US embargo to Cuba since the 90s also means that Cuba has had a more difficult time procuring building materials for the low-cost housing that’s helped so many, which has led to an increase in size and number for those extended family homes over the years.

I’ve never noticed such a pattern myself and I’m not sure I’d agree that most kings are depicted as red-headed. It would be a little odd considering the relative rarity of red hair in people. What specific depictions are you talking about? Could you give us a list of examples? If you google “cartoon king”, you’ll find only a few redheads among dozens of brown or white-haired kings, which is what I’d expected to find. Maybe if this is a legit trend you see, it could be regional thing? Are there many red-headed people in your country?