balderdash9
@balderdash9@lemmy.zip
- Comment on They know that is NOT what people will use them for. 1 day ago:
Obligatory “salid mixer” adult swim skit:
- Comment on Perfection. 2 days ago:
The widest of backs
- Submitted 3 days ago to [deleted] | 18 comments
- Comment on nooooooo 3 days ago:
- Comment on choice 4 days ago:
Turn anything into poo: turn plastic waste into manure/fertilizer. Millionaire pretty quick.
- Comment on badass 4 days ago:
- Comment on Elephant 5 days ago:
In early stages, the meditator sharpens their powers of attention. In later stages, the meditator no longer has scattered attention (i.e., “monkey brain”) and can focus effortlessly. So the monkey disappears. Excerpt from “The Mind Illuminated”:
The Ten Stages of Meditation: The monk is the meditator. The rope he holds represents vigilant, alert mindfulness. The goad in his other hand represents strong intention and firm resolve. The elephant represents the mind. The black color of the elephant represents the Five Hindrances and the Seven Problems they give rise to. The monkey represents scattering of attention, and the black color represents subtle and gross distraction, forgetting, and mind-wandering. The rabbit represents subtle dullness. The flames represent vigilance and effort, and when effort is no longer required, the flames disappear. The length of the road between successive Stages indicates the relative time required to progress from one Stage to the next. The Stages come closer together until Stage Seven, then they begin to stretch out again. Because the road folds back, it is possible to jump up to higher Stages or fall back to lower ones.
- Comment on Elephant 5 days ago:
This man is on stage 9 of the 10 stage path
- Comment on Make America Great! 1 week ago:
Yes, the decline of our institutions is more blatant now. But it’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
- Congresspersons, on the left and right, have been insider trading for decades.
- The SCOTUS ruled that corporations are people that have unlimited “free speech” with their money.
- Trump bombed Iran without congressional approval but before this Biden bombed Yemen.
- Bush started targeting terrorists with drones and now the U.S. president can order drone strikes. (Some have called Obama a war criminal due to excessive civilian casualties resulting from drone strikes. But Americans don’t really care about this.)
- Bush sent “enemy combatants” to Guantanamo Bay without due process. Now Trump sends “illegal aliens” to detention camps without due process.
- The CIA has brazenly declassified many covert operations to stop the spread of communism. Including installing brutal dictators and interfering with democratic elections. (They admit to doing this but, again, Americans do not care.)
- Questionable wars in Asia and the Middle East that feed the military industrial complex and make a well-positioned few unimaginably wealthy.
- Bush and Obama both bailed out corporations that are “too big to fail”.
You likely disagree with some of these examples. But my point is only this: Trump is the symptom of a disease that we have ignored for far too long. We all pledged allegiance to the flag in school. We are learned that America stands for liberty, justice, equality, etc. for all. But this country has never lived up to those professed ideals.
- Comment on Make America Great! 1 week ago:
When has the United States government ever been ethical? The older I get the more I realize that I live in the Death Star.
- Comment on Anon is an artist 1 week ago:
What a time to be alive
- Comment on The duality of man 1 week ago:
This country has been going to shit since Ronald fucking Reagan. Yes, that means Republicans are terrible. That also means the Democrats are either complicit or powerless to stop it.
- Comment on The duality of man 1 week ago:
When you look into the history of this country it’s fucking horrific. And not just in the obvious “we used to have slaves” or the “we bombed the Vietnamese” way.
- Comment on Make America Great! 1 week ago:
Most people understand that becoming a billionaire requires a ruthless pursuit of your own interests. Regardless of the impact on small business owners, the environment, employees, etc. the billionaire does what it takes to beat the competition. And even though everyone has done good and bad things, the propensity for billionaires to harm millions of people in search of endless profit makes them particularly immoral.
In this regard, global superpowers are like billionaire but on the world stage. American atrocities are particularly bad because American geopolitical hegemony has harmed millions of people both domestically and abroad. We can acknowledge this history while agreeing that every country has done immoral things.
- Comment on Make America Great! 1 week ago:
Is your point that America is better than other countries? Or that every country is bad?
- Comment on Make America Great! 1 week ago:
There has not been a single year in American history that was great for all groups of Americans. This country was founded on the murder of natives and the exploitation of slaves/immigrants: that foundation has reverberated throughout our entire history. Government and corporate policy, often racist and sexist, works to maintain a permanent under class of exploited workers that provide cheap labor for the ruling class (e.g., Jim Crow, redlining, denial of reproductive rights, etc.). So while I wholeheartedly agree with taxing the rich, taxation alone did not prevent injustice in the 20th century.
Not to mention the devastation that America has inflicted on the developing world. Obvious examples include millions of civilian casualties during our wars in Asia and the Middle East, foreign resource extraction that provides us with cheap consumer good (e.g., banana republics in South America, slave mines in the Congo, etc.), as well as CIA operations that have been brazenly declassified (e.g., overthrowing presidents, installing dictators) because this country can’t even pretend to live up to its professed ideals. Any serious study of American history suggests this country has never been “great” in anything beside our wasteful military expenditure and our inexhaustible favoritism of the wealthy.
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 93 comments
- Comment on Here's the top 50 most played games on Steam Deck for August 2025 - with Hollow Knight the champion 1 week ago:
It’s got great reviews, I’ll check it out!
- Comment on Who could have predicted this? 1 week ago:
I fully switched to Linux this year: it’s nice not having to worry about what Microsoft is up to.
- Comment on Here's the top 50 most played games on Steam Deck for August 2025 - with Hollow Knight the champion 1 week ago:
Slay the Spire on handheld is a fucking time sink. I need to stop.
- Comment on He took it literally 1 week ago:
Yes, I know. The US. has literal slave-labor in prisons and US corporations depend on slave labor overseas. But even workers who are better off are being exploited.
- Comment on He took it literally 1 week ago:
All workers under capitalism are slaves in a loose sense of the word. Your labor creates more profit than what they pay you in wages (otherwise the owners wouldn’t employ anyone). Typically, your wages are only a small fraction of what your labor makes the owner.
While the capitalist gets to pick a profitable time in which to invest their money (e.g., buy labor, machines, stocks, etc.) the worker is born into institutions that force them, on threat of destitution, to sell themselves by the hour. We are really not much different from feudal serfs.
- Comment on My favorite board game! 1 week ago:
- Comment on He took it literally 1 week ago:
Land of the free smh
- Comment on Apple Envy 1 week ago:
I don’t know why people write these emotionally charged comments that are dripping with sarcasm. Your entire comment is a series of strawman misrepresentations that you’ve erected to unceremoniously “dunk” on the opposition instead of actually arguing with any nuance. You give one piece of evidence in your favor and conclude that you’ve had the final say on the matter. This sort of discourse boils down to “You’re an idiot!” … “No, YOU are!!”
My point is that Orwell is more anti-Stallin than pro-leftist. People on the left think many be tempted to interpret Orwell as arguing against right-wing fascism. But he is arguably arguing that left-wing politics is fascistic. This explains why our governments are so quick to hail 1984 as some literary achievement. In reality, the novel slows to a crawl in the middle and is not inventive at all; especially when compared to the great works of science fiction such as The Time Machine, The Dispossessed, Roadside Picnic, Necromancer, etc. (Manual surveillance of millions of people through their TVs? Seriously? 1984 is not fit to be compared with any of Ursula Le Guin’s works. As a fan of the genre, I question whether you actually read science fiction at all.)
By the tone of your comment I can see that you’re pretty entrenched in your position and don’t care about Orwell’s character or motivations. Everyone else can make up their own minds:
- Comment on Apple Envy 2 weeks ago:
Reminder that Orwell has an exclusively anti-Stallin grudge and that 1984 barley qualifies as science fiction. Issac Asimov wrote a scathing review in the 80s.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to [deleted] | 133 comments
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to [deleted] | 14 comments
- Comment on Anon is Banished 4 weeks ago:
BRB gonna replay
- Comment on Anon is Banished 4 weeks ago:
I have played rimworld before, fair point. Haven’t heard of SAELIG but I’ll check it out!
