I like /srs, but /gen is growing on me

This feels, prescriptively, like the correct answer

Some people are wealthy because they provide a valuable, well-paid skill (neurosurgeons, for example). Some people are in positions of power because they sincerely want to make their communities a better place.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s probably more likely to get there through sociopathic greed. But that doesn’t mean they are all horrible people.

Are you talking about specific wealthy, powerful people?

I will come back to it eventually, when the time is right.

It’s not important enough to bookmark, it’s not urgent enough to get to right now, but it’s too interesting to ignore entirely. When the time is right for a tab, I will return to it. Sometimes I scroll through them to jog my memory. Sometimes I’ll decide it wasn’t as interesting as I thought and delete it.

Oh man, haven’t thought about the Llama Song in a long time.

I think some burritos have entirely too much rice content, but I think a minor rice component is acceptable.

The difference between persuasion and manipulation is largely subjective.

If this is for personal interest, go into it with relatively concrete questions, and then try to answer them.

Right, what I’m saying is where do you draw the line at where “in the sun” ends?

What? You didn’t verify anything, you just said you remember being told once. It’s not an obvious fact because it isn’t true, you made it up. It’s not foolish to believe a word means what it means, you can just look up the definition. Are you high or something?

Whoever told you that was incorrect. Literally means the plain textbook definition of the words written, as opposed to euphemism or metaphor. If I say “I would literally die on this hill”, it means that there is an actual large mound of dirt that I am willing to lose my life on.

Any other interpretation is literally incorrect.

I’m thinking about it, and I think they might be right. Sunbeams are a part of the sun, albeit mingled with atmosphere. If they were in direct line of the sun, i could consider them technically, literally, correct.

It all depends on whether you consider an object bathed in the radiance of something to be “in” that thing, but I’m kinda inclined to consider that.

Starship Troopers is not misunderstood satire

I’ve read a lot of Heinlein, and while I don’t think “satire” is quite the right word, I’d consider it more of a thought experiment than sincere belief.

As long as they stay to the right I don’t care that much

I’m fine with language evolving over time, but I reject “literally” being used to mean “figuratively”. Distinguishing figurative from literal is, literally, the word’s one job. Take that away, and the word literally doesn’t mean anything but a generic intensifier. There literally isn’t another word that fulfills that disambiguating purpose, this semantic drift only decreases clarity.

Not really, no. A lot of the major ones, like the Flood, but there’s plenty of original content in every religion. It’s silly to suggest otherwise.

And my point is that if all these same stories keep popping up, maybe there’s some significance to them.

Like pwnd, which is something like pünd or /pʊnd/

The typical therapist advice about focusing only on the things you can personally change does not work well on macro issues. Issues that were created by lots of people working together like climate change require a bunch of people working together to fix.

But collaborating with others to address macro problems is something you can personally do.

The justification I’ve heard is that these guys have knives on their feet. If you didn’t have an approved fight process, you’d have unapproved fights that turn out way worse for the participants.

There are centuries of religious thought by mystics developing upon the texts inspired in part by those stories. The parts based on common ancient legends comprise a relatively small part of religious texts.

And still, if anything that’s supportive evidence. The ancient legends that pop up again and again, that survive centuries of canonical revision, probably reflect deep and spiritually apparent features of reality.