I agree, it’s one of my favourite internet things.

You may already be aware of this, but on the off chance that you’re not, here’s a cool thing: https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/

"Its one of the reasons its hard to have political discussion online. You have to determine what the words your using mean, before you can start arguing the points. "

This notion isn’t one that’s new to me, but for some reason, the way you’ve phrased it here is evoking some interesting reflection for me: I think that some of my most productive online arguments have been when the contention is what words mean. For example, when a transphobic statement is made by someone who is actually just an oblivious cis person, I’ve found that a “semantic calibration” can get at the root cause of their problematic statement (the hard part is discerning whether a person is genuinely engaging in good faith vs. being an asshole with plausible deniability. I don’t always get it right, but people usually reveal quite quickly whether they’re worth engaging with).

There have also been times when I have had the outsider’s view of someone else’s discussion as involving people talking past each other by using the same words to mean different things. Sometimes, I’ve found it possible to wade into an ongoing discussion and diffused a lot of tension by clarifying these definitional problems.

On the flip side, it’s often not worth it to engage in political discussions online if it’s apparent from the outset that it would just be too much work to clarify everything because you recognise that you’re coming at the topic from a completely different direction than the person you’re considering talking to.

Yeah, that’s often the result (and like you, I also find this to be worthwhile nonetheless), but it depends on the context. Sometimes it plays out like this though (image below) and the trolling potential is glorious

This is well articulated. This dynamic is something I think of a lot, because as a cis woman, I often have a disproportionate level of social power in scenarios similar to this

If this was a joke, it wasn’t a very good one

Sometimes I find music can be a way to motivate me to get out of the house, in a “silly human needs her silly rituals” kind of way. I wonder whether this may be the case for OP (whether that’s the OP of this post, or the original OP of the meme)

“All Swedes are basically fluent in English already and there’s no point keeping tiny little language around in a global world.”

I find this perspective interesting, because to me, this same justification would make me less inclined to support kids learning Swedish (if I were Swedish). This is a purely abstract question for me though, as I am English, and salty that I didn’t get a chance to learn a foreign language in school.

Edit: just seen your comment about Scanian, which gives additional context to your viewpoint

A friend asked me the other day “do we think that ‘trans glow-up’ is due to someone coming into their own style post transition, or actually just due to being happier and this shining through?”. My reply was basically that “both. Both is good” meme

Bluey in general is pretty great. I wish that kids TV had been this enjoyable the last time I spent time around a child

Edit: the above is a lie, because whilst it may be for an older age bracket than Bluey, I wouldn’t have watched Phineas & Ferb if not for my significantly younger-than-me brother, and that was pretty fun

I actually read some very recently because I heard that the recent PhilosophyTube had a bunch of bad takes. He’s actually far more fun to read than I realised

France have made this law, I think. More countries should follow their example

My experience is actually in the UK, but based on anecdotes from friends, it’s similar in the US.

In my case, in one of the years, I could apply to stay in university accommodation over the Summer, but the room I was allocated for that was tiny, so I needed to get some storage anyway. It’s annoying as hell

International students often use it because it’s not feasible to take their stuff home over the summer. I also used Summer storage, because I was estranged from my family, so didn’t have a “home” to go back to and would have to spend the Summer in sublets or couch-surfing (the only accommodation that would accept me as a tenant were student properties, which is why I typically had to be out over the Summer).

I’m unskilled at economics, so I may well be missing something, but this explanation doesn’t sit well with me. I think it’s because I’m not sure how well Marxian economics applies to the current conditions; As part of a university scholarship, I had to do an internship somewhere exceedingly corporate, and I was aghast at how there were entire divisions whose functions seemed to produce nothing of real value, just more metrics and dashboards and spreadsheets. I imagine people more learned than I have applied Marxian economics to problems like that, but trying to reconcile that situation with any notion of “value” makes my head hurt.

To be clear, I’m a big fan of Marx, even if I haven’t the patience for parsing economics definitions.

This is well articulated. Like many, I am also frustrated by the “They go low, we go high” strategy in which Democrat politicians hamstring themselves, but on the wider scale, it is useful to bear in mind that we are fighting for a fundamentally different world than what our opponents are (though certainly it would be great if elected officials could be a little less pathetic)

“Discord just last week shut down a server that was my main local friend group, and we had to scramble to reconstitute it.”

Damn, that sucks. How big was the server? Do you know why it was shut down?

I wonder if this might have been why they shared it. Sort of like “We’ve got an idea that we think is good, but it also clearly needs work”

Sad news. fivethirtyeight made one of my favourite things on the internet. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/

It’s an excellent piece of science communication and dynamic data visualisation. I say this as a scientist who is increasingly drifting towards the science-comm side of research.

They did incredible work, and I hope that the people behind the work can find stability and fulfillment in whatever work they seek after this.

I had a wee look at DUI laws in Tennessee, where this happened, and a DUI has far more severe penalties than reckless driving. Plus, based on the info on the article, I don’t even know if what was described would count as reckless driving (one of the examples given was doing a wheelie on a motor cycle), so I am wondering whether the DUI charge was because the level of driving wasn’t to the level that they could be charged for reckless driving, so he went for a DUI instead. This is speculation though, because we know that the officer wrote that “[the driver] crossed over lanes twice”, and that could describe a wide range of driving.

It could, for example, describe someone who drifts a tire’s width out of their lane, on a road where road markings are poor and there is little other traffic. Doing that twice wouldn’t be great (and may be indicative of driver fatigue), but it certainly wouldn’t warrant an arrest. Like I say, insufficient info means that this is speculation, but it is striking to me that they didn’t try to charge her with reckless driving after the blood test came up clear. If this driver was driving badly, but not dangerously, then they shouldn’t have been arrested.

I think you make a few undue assumptions in your comment that are unreasonable and possibly why so many have downvoted you (and I hope that said downvotes won’t cause you to ignore people replying with good faith criticism): 1.) You assume that the level of driving she was pulled over for was dangerous enough to be at risk of harming someone, but we don’t know that. In addition to the point I made above about her driving seemingly not being enough to count as “reckless driving”, I also want to highlight that bad or dangerous driving isn’t a prerequisite for a DUI; where I live, police occasionally do spot checks of drivers at night time in high-DUI areas (I’ve been pulled over and breathalysed a few times on a particular stretch of road, just for driving late at night), and if someone was driving perfectly but was above the legal limit for alcohol, then that’s enough to arrest them. I make this point to emphasise that DUI != Dangerous driving, and that we shouldn’t conflate the two. If she was driving dangerously whilst not intoxicated, then there are laws intended to penalise that, and so she shouldn’t have been charged with a DUI regardless. Penalties for DUIs are typically harsher too, which is why the article highlights the mandatory loss of license for what should have probably just been a slap on the wrist, if that.

2.) You make assumptions about the nature of the medication being prescribed. Xanax is indeed, a medication that is prescribed for anxiety, and it can be (depending on the dose and the person) be quite highly sedating, but by the sounds of your comment, you haven’t considered the possibility that the medication(s) she was prescribed may not be sedating at all. For example, atomoxetine is an ADHD medication that’s an SNRI, a class of medications that are used to medicate depression and/or anxiety; I know a few people who have been prescribed it due to having comorbid anxiety and ADHD. That’s just one example of medication that may have been detected but would be unlikely to impact a person’s ability to drive safely. Even if the driver were prescribed a benzodiazepine (such as Xanax), that doesn’t mean it was sedating enough to affect her driving. Whether a medication is likely to affect your driving is a discussion between you and your doctor, and even if we assume the person was driving dangerously, we have no reason to assume her medication is at all relevant.

I also take medication for ADHD and anxiety, and they’re not the kind of meds that impact ability to drive. If I were driving dangerously (to the degree that I was a risk to other road users), I hope I would be pulled over before I could cause harm, and that would likely warrant me being arrested, but I don’t think I should be charged with a DUI in that scenario — not least of all because if we cast too wide a net for what counts as DUI, then it sort of depowers the category. Morally speaking, people tend to view driving under the influence far more harshly than other kinds of bad or irresponsible driving, and rightly so, in my view. It’s a hard line that I have always been cautious to never cross, and I would be disgusted if someone I knew had. Unequivocally, the person in the article should not have been charged with DUI, even if they had been driving recklessly (which again, we don’t know whether they were).

I hope my comment doesn’t come across like I’m hating on you, because whilst I was shocked at your comment, I only wrote all this because I hoped we could have a productive discussion. I’d be interested to hear if you have any thoughts in response to my comment, even if I haven’t changed your opinion.

Hot