He may (arguably) be the nicest guy in the world, roped in to this madness by emperor Xi and the CCP, but you HAVE to shut this down in the strongest terms when it’s discovered. Over and over again. As long as the deceit and fraudulence is repeated.

Unfortunately, these ‘secret police’ stations are fairly common across the West.

I guess I have to reluctantly agree, and so change my initial upvote to a downvote.

Sir David is to me one of the greatest human beings on the planet, but the article simply isn’t “Not the Onion” material.

@[email protected],
Je peux t’offrir un café ?

Not nece-celery.

I think it’s important to break such things down as clearly and concisely as possible when it comes to late-stage capitalism and other elements actively at work, destroying what’s left of democracy.

Oh, c’mon now… we’re naked apes, we are. We’re naturally gonna react in all KINDS of different ways, completely outside of “Starfleet.”

Suggestion to get over yourself upon that nonsensical, @[email protected].

If I understand correctly, the classic dictator approach is to appoint relatively competent underlings in positions of power, as long as they aren’t real threats, with most of their aggression spent punching down or squabbling amongst themselves.

By contrast, the idea here seems to be in appointing bumbling nitwits at said positions, such that after they make fools of themselves, they can then be blamed for this or that and ejected like a used diaper.

Tbh, I used that phrasing specifically because you were snippy about someone else making a claim based on their own experience and I was trying to prod you about the evidence you’re using.

Good point. Yeah, and I was kinda rushing through my replies in general at that point, much of that due to… well.

When people kill each other “for no reason,” there’s often still a reason (though not an excuse)- territory in the case of gang or murder of romantic partners…

Sure, I get it. Thing is, we’re talking about species-wide behaviors. Not personal vendettas, and so forth. We naked apes are absolutely captured upon that shizzle, without question.

What I said still holds perfectly true. And–

if we know that other animals kill in scenarios where it hurts them and we don’t actually commonly kill each other for no reason.

Like I said above, animals can be ‘excessive killers’ for a variety of known, documented reasons. Not to mention, we naked apes absolutely DO commonly kill each other for bullshit reasons, unless perhaps you’re a NAZI (etc) apologist…? In which case it’s VASTLY more terrible, egregious, and anti-life as we know it.

Circling back to this:

I don’t know where you saw that fact being presented

It’s not something I read yesterday, but something I’ve encountered upon most life scenarios, upon all my readings and personal experience over the years. So again-- it’s absolutely true in general, far as I know.

Indeed, right in the article you linked, reasons and causes were specifically mentioned, so it wasn’t really a case of pointing killing, far as I know.

That said, I do suspect that a predator’s instincts to kill can indeed go on ‘automatic’ at times. Easy enough to see in domestic cats upon zillions of examples, but I think it can also be argued that keeping one’s predatory skills sharp is generally super-important for predators. A little but like how given the opportunity, we naked apes love to spend loads of time on flying, killing, driving simulations, etc.

So, far as I know? What I said originally still commonly holds, with some caveats.

deleted by creator

So… not so “recent,” and data that’s already been out there for a while? Implying that this latest thing likely isn’t the first nibble…?

Oh, I thought it was more of a breaking-news thing based on recent, ongoing observations? (if not, then that’s what I get for not reading the damn article)

I remember not so long ago, the fact being presented that only rats and humans killed for unnecessary reasons. For example, outside of the broad, known idea that species could kill as part of a territorial / protection / etc thing. But based on what Goodall observed, some chimps seemed to have no particular reason to kill some others of their species. It was more of a ‘I just don’t like you’ kind of thing, IIRC.

That for all our so-called advances, in the end we’re still a lot more like the other apes and other monkeys (for we are both), than we commonly like to perceive.

And Goodall of course already observed this stuff many decades ago (regarding chimps).

oeuvre

Btw, that’s a great, but hard word to learn in French. Took me like 10x to pronounce it correctly, so I might just be a…

I suspect that the market and capitalism has had a hand. In my youth, I remember opinion pieces being marked quite clearly in newspapers, and in general it seemed like there was a sort of a popular, chatty, slightly-pompous style they were usually written in. I.e., it was pretty clear what exactly they were, and by that very nature, it allowed the writer to have some real fun with the premise.

Over time, my guess is that the faster nature of modern civ / society combined with capitalism skewed things towards dropping much of the former signal language, and treating news as more of a pure product, with a certain deception and advertising built-in to drive engagement and revenue.

On a side note, my take on scientific papers is that they’re generally very difficult for laypeople to understand (hand raised here), and need a certain trained class of news-people to represent them accurately, simply in terms of what the paper is about. But more than that, even more specialised people are needed to put the paper in to full context, considering the publication, peer-review level, and junk science possibility. Unfortunately for the public, I’m not sure those people exist in any significant quantity.

I’d say the term has undergone what happens with many other definitions over the years, i.e. it’s shifted somewhat in meaning. More than just being about an outdoor worker, I think it implies a certain type of conduct and attitude.

And I absolutely meant it as a slander to those ‘community leaders,’ as explained earlier.

TBH, there’s an intentional slander element I’m going for.

The idea being that such ‘community leaders’ are little more than rednecks to me, at the end of the day. And I’m not sure I agree about the ‘rural living’ definition. Nothing wrong with rural life IMO, but rednecks are moreso representative to me of toxic actors amongst such folks.

Thank you for this, Nocturne.
This strip was always a cut above IMO, and is still coming out today (Sundays).

Btw, you might want to add Heathcliff to any daily strip lists you curate. The typical format by @[email protected] is to take the day’s strip and remove the cat, as a thought experiment (like “Garfield w/o Garfield”), but he also shares the untouched day’s strip in comments, as well as other edits, sometimes.

Anyway, the community as a whole is dedicated to all Heathcliff content. I sometimes contribute, but am way behind at the moment… still working on cleaning up an article about the founder, Gately.

It still holds up nicely today, altho it’s only Sundays, now.

The humor’s fresh and still pretty clever for its’ genre.

Yeap, good points.

Maybe I’m being unfair to someone out there, but I kinda like the term “rednecks.”

Reddit has decayed to the point that its barely better than a generic Facebook feed.

That is certainly not the case for a well-curated personal feed.

My feeling is that if your feed is shitty, you can look in the mirror at the one who curated it.