Hegar

Ah yeah fair enough, tbh i was worried i got the SW characters wrong, i saw phantom menance and decided i didnt really need to see the other two prequels.

I didn’t know that the three musketeers were really Quigon Gin, the Sheriff of Nottingham from prince of thieves, Anakin Skywalker and Matt Berry.

1/1 is the birthday of all horses.

not compatible with the kind of life i lead brain i have

Oh i didnt know that! I definitely feel linehan’s influence in the writing for black books though. It feels similar to father ted and IT crowd, you know?

The writer of the IT crowd (and black books 😭) is a massive supporter of jk, a well known transphobe, and generally consider a lunatic. It’s a shame those shows are hilarious.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Chuang_Tzŭ_(Giles)/Chapter_1

The text itself is a really easy and fun read. Even a couple thousand years later in translation, the inner chapters are hilarious, nonstop brilliance and plenty of the outer chapters are thought provoking. It got me through the pandemic.

Though it would go on to become foundational for Daoism, I’m skeptical that it was ever intended to be part of a larger tradition.

Have you read Neither Lord Nor Subject, by Bao Jingyen? It clearly and passionately makes an eco-anarchist critique of authority from a daoist angle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs23tDAaEho

Zhuangzi, the author of one of the top 5 texts of our species, talks a lot about 遊 yóu - a word that means roam, wander, stroll, walk, associate with. It’s sometimes translated as “free and easy wandering” and used in words like friend, play, sightsee, visit, amuse yourself, parade, dissociate.

For Zhuangzi, yóu is really important for happiness and to understand the world.

The clearest example of yóu I’ve experienced is the kind of judgement-free free-association of talking to other neurodivergent friends.

What if corn syrup was somehow both chalky and waxy? I bet people would pay us to put that in their mouths.

Yep, I do still think this too. Nothing going on at the moment makes me think maybe I’m wrong and the rest of the world is well designed, rational and just.

The only quibble I have is I don’t think it’s more about elite-dominated societies, of which capitalism is just the current incarnation.

Of course!

On a completely unrelated topic, have you noticed that people with authority have a hard time admitting that they’re completely wrong?

For the first ~thirty years of my life the explanation for “why didn’t you do the thing?” that made the most sense to me was that the thing must not be worth doing, so it was everyone else’s problem for wanting it done in the first place.

Many people in positions of authority over me disagreed with this interpretation.

I blocked like that on reddit but here there’s fewer users so I have a higher block threshold.

Plus I want to give people credit for choosing to be on the fediverse - that earns almost everyone a “well maybe you just had a bad day”.

civilized society

I’m sorry sir but such a thing does not exist, I fear you must have dreamed it.

Like ~15 years ago I heard peter singer saying that the emissions from the lifetime use of a car were lower than those from making it, so you should only ever buy a second hand car.

That was before widespread EVs though.

I often wonder how long you have to use a 2nd hand gas car for, before the emissions outstrip those of making a brand new EV.

Seeing only the thumbnail at first I was sure that lynchpin piece was going to be “the plot of babylon 5”

Problem is that having social power actually affects the brain, suppressing the parts that do empathy.

It will always be harder, neurologically, for someone with power to engage their empathy or to consider the pain of others in their decisions.

Hence gestures at the world.

I believe this is just about which word a language uses to say that an adjective applies to a noun. While ‘to be’ is very popular for this, ‘to have’ is quite common too. Mandarin uses ‘very’.

☺️

滿庭芳 is man ting fang, in case anyone was curious. I’m guessing that was the intended meaning of MTF.

“Aroma filled hall” seems to be the meaning, but “good Manchu court” is not out of the question 😆 I am not a native speaker.