It’s weird to me that vanilla and chocolate have a similar history and applications but vanilla got designated as plain and boring at some point.

Wait until you see the more recent lore that explains that Gamma radiation comes directly from super hell and there’s magic involved. It technically doesn’t make what is in the encyclopedia untrue, but it wildly recontextualizes it.

I think you’ll be surprised at how much asbestos is still used worldwide, including in the US. We’re not using it as wall and ceiling insulation anymore, but it’s still used for things like pipes and vinyl floor tiles.

It’s populism. You have to see if someone’s policy positions are consistent over time, that they have a specific ideal they are following, vs what they think is the most popular policies.

Granted, it’s a huge pain with new politicians when they don’t have that history, but I think Tulsi had a pretty clear history that showed she wasn’t progressive.

It’s called a “faithless elector” and what happens depends on the law of the state the elector is representing. Some states void the vote without penalty, some void it with some penalty, some allow the vote but with penalty, some allow the vote with no penalty, and some have no law at all (which seems like no difference from allowing with no penalty).

It’s entirely conceivable that enough faithless electors from states that do not void the vote could swing an election, though there’s never been enough to do so before.

I’m usually fine giving the benefit of the doubt, but this comment was in direct response to a scene from the show that was absolutely blatant, so they had to wilfully ignore that.

I saw someone complaining that the old X-men show was at least subtle and not in your face about how it approached social issues.

This was in response to a clip from the old X-men show of a bunch of anti-mutant brownshirts in armbands getting mad that a filthy mutant was touching a human woman.

I think it’s safe to say that person was not arguing in good faith.

You’re moving goalposts here. You said millions of Russians would die if Ukraine was given aid and I asked how you determined that number. By the same token, Russia should simply surrender.

Because the millions for Ukraine accounts for civilian casualties, not purely military. For anything similar Ukraine would have to counter invade Russia and launch artillery at residential areas.

Even if we assume the worst of Ukraine’s intent, they wouldn’t have the capability to go beyond securing their borders.

How did you come to the calculation of millions of Russians?

In the 2004 Bard’s Tale game you keep running across kids who die thinking they are they chosen one.

And then trows (basically goblins) come out and sing an oompa loompa style song mocking the kids.

If they can’t give a reason that’s internally consistent why should I believe them?

Even allowing for the unproven assertion that souls exist, at no point does that soul obligate giving up bodily autonomy.

You can’t use organs from corpses without permission, you can’t force a drunk driver to provide an organ to a kid they ran over, you can’t force a parent to donate an organ to their own child. All of these things would save “souls” but is hardly part of pro-forced birth platforms.

And if fetuses have souls, that would surely make the Christian god the true murderer as 10 to 20% of all pregnancies end in miscarriages, but the Christian god is held to a lower moral standard than human beings by pro-forced birthers. And the governments that reject welfare programs are also held to lower moral standard for some reason, as well.

Sometimes I put stuff somewhere “safe”. Which means I’ll find it 2 years later.

Nomads from Cyberpunk 2020/2077 were not on my bingo card for this year.

I’m not against algae as a food source, but the similarity of this research to Soylent Green’s cover source in the movie being plankton is hilariously on the nose.

Yea, the term is a “straight man” although this is slightly different in that the straight man is usually allowed to acknowledge the antics of the comedic characters, where-as Michael Caine treats the comedy as done straight.

I guess it would be a sub-category of straight man though, not a different thing to itself.

The guards that patrol the ice wall.

Entirety of NASA. Entirety of NOAA. Meteorologists. Cartographers. Everyone who works on Google Earth. Every engineer who works on satellites, rockets, and planes. Physicists.

However, I do think 10% is probably too high an estimate. While these are a lot of people in a lot of areas, they represent pretty small demographics each.

It’s white man’s burden BS slipping back in, where people (like Robert E. Lee) would say “We don’t want to enslave these people, it’s just our duty to civilize them.”

I assume it’s some kind of mechanism for maintaining their cognitive dissonance.

The original design of that bench is an art piece protesting the commercialization of life (although it may have been implemented seriously in some place where they missed the point).

Ironically, I’d expect a person living on the street to have actual coins capable of operating the bench more often than most people.