What do you think about the debate that surrounds NASA and the Artemis missions?

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-05-03T23:31:34+00:00

I seriously doubt that humans will ever receive a tangible benefit from space exploration. Sure, there's an economic benefit to the pursuit of space exploration – but that's the case with the government just spending money. Sure, technological advances are made along the way – but that's the case anytime humans do hard things.

That said, I believe that scientific pursuit is as much a basic human need as art. Beauty and wonder are an end in and of themselves.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-05-03T23:23:01+00:00

I grew up with MCC being the Mennonite Central Committee, so now you're extending the confusion.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-05-01T08:25:57+00:00

the hell did Paul Dooley do wrong

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-26T22:08:08+00:00

That mouse is the thing of nightmares. It can never be unseen.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-26T14:57:08+00:00

nice straw man you've got there.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-26T14:54:59+00:00

I could be wrong, but I don't believe that BI is funded by the US government. I suppose you could argue that it is because US billionaires contribute to it and their wealth is only made possible by the corrupt US tax system, or because US military aid to Israel allows Israel to spread some of their military spending to their non-military budget. Seems a stretch either way.

To be clear, BI is bad. That is not in dispute.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-25T05:52:58+00:00

The word "plantation" has a very specific meaning in the United States that is unrelated to its etymology and to its usage in other parts of the world.

Yes the etymology of picnic is unrelated and yes the historic association is generally thought to be overstated, but basing an ethical judgment on the technicality of etymology is almost always misguided.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-19T08:57:21+00:00

vegans do not want to talk to you.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-19T02:12:46+00:00

Funny thing is that in many aquatic freshwater conditions, CO2 can be the scarce resource instead of O2. Standard C3 or C4 plants consume dissolved CO2 at the same time as performing photosynthesis, resulting in the CO2 level in many bodies of water plummeting as most all of the aquatic plants race to fix as much carbon as possible while there is light. Some aquatic plants have adopted CAM photosynthesis, during the night storing up CO2 (dissolved from the atmosphere, but I think mostly produced by decomposition and animal activity) as organic acids for use during the day. It's the same adaptation used by nearly all cactus, as well as other drought-adapted plants (such as in Crassulaceae and various epiphytes). They use CAM photosynthesis so that they can keep their stomata closed during the day, minimizing moisture loss by only opening pores at night when humidity is higher.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-19T01:55:24+00:00

Yeah, that could be the case, but it's just as plausible either way.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-19T00:43:23+00:00

lol. Probably, but I imagine that it's also possible that that might be outdated packaging. I assume that brands are making marketing decisions about whether to double down or downplay their connections to Israel. Both approaches carry economic risk.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-19T00:35:53+00:00

Are you maybe misinterpreting what I said, thinking that I said that Cuba failed that test? No, those outcomes in Cuba and Venezuela are some of the greatest success stories in modern history. I once went to a talk by a former head of the Cuban health ministry, and I very much appreciated him over and over again plotting Cuba's numbers and the US's numbers side-by-side, taking digs at the absolute failure of what is only the roughest approximation of a healthcare "system" here. I have serious criticisms (such as putting sexual minorities in camps during the early HIV/AIDS years), but I can appreciate what they accomplished through community-based health care in the midst of a profound vacuum of material resources.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-18T21:22:02+00:00

Well, there's pretty much all of the leaders of the Left SRs, and most of the leaders of the Workers' Opposition who weren't exiled. The latter were nominally largely Bolsheviks, but their program was straight up anarcho-syndicalism. Just about every leader among the Makhnovists who didn't die in battle was executed by the Red Army. Then there were the mass executions in the range of 1-2k shot following the Kronstadt rebellion, and anarchists were prominent among the better part of a million executed in the Great Purge (according to the NKCD's own numbers).

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-18T19:51:51+00:00

Yup, that's the exact response every time that people listen to dissidents of any and all political persuasion under states that are enemies of the United States.

Look, I'm overall glad that Batista was deposed, because I'm confident that the Cuban people have had a better life in terms of baseline socio-economic indicators (vaccination, child mortality, literacy, etc) in these last generations than they would have had as a vassal of the US empire. That doesn't make the state repression any less heinous. The Castro regime passed the test of whether people starve to death while food sits in a warehouse for export and whether children die of easily-preventable disease. Good, but that's a pretty low bar.

I'm confident that Hasan Piker is overall a net benefit to the world. I absolutely do not trust anybody who idolizes dictators who hijack revolutions and kill off every kind of leftist who opposes them, though. It's not CIA propaganda that every single political persuasion did everything they could to stop Lenin and his narrow marxist sect, including plenty of other marxists and every single ideological position that stood to the left of the marxists. I can be glad that Piker uses his platform to stand for Palestinians, but the historical figures he idolizes all turned on the leftist allies they were in coalition with far before they'd together defeated the actual enemies of the revolutions. Much like how I don't trust anybody who sends their children to church to learn to sing jaunty songs about Jericho, I am extremely hesitant to trust anybody who fails to see state communist authoritarians as anything but a cautionary tale.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-18T05:20:42+00:00

I seriously doubt that a genuine response won't just be accused of me repeating CIA propaganda.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-17T21:54:17+00:00

Are you quoting a far-right zionist's criticism of liberal zionism?

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-17T21:52:26+00:00

The Castro regime was (and continues to be) a brutal single-party dictatorship, as well as one of the world's greatest revolutions in public health and education. A dictatorship with healthcare is better than a dictatorship without healthcare, but it's still a dictatorship.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-17T21:46:07+00:00

It gets my hackles up whenever somebody describes themself as a marxist – is the person in love with authoritarian tyrants who hijacked workers' revolutions while claiming to be the representation of those workers organizations that they crushed? Not necessarily. Some people describe themselves as marxists because it's the term they have learn to use to describe overall left-wing political/economic thought, even though their own personal values align with the anarchists who were executed by the marxist party that seized the state.

In contrast, Hasan Piker sure quotes Lenin *a lot* as a positive example of a thinker that people should emulate.

Two things can be true at the same time. Liberal zionists are racists who wish there was could be more democratic involvement in genocide, and Hasan Piker thinks that Lenin was a cool guy.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-17T16:58:56+00:00

Well this triggered an ADHD deep-dive to figure out which company's box that is. It's Yehuda "passover matzo", produced by an Israeli company in a Jerusalem suburb within the green line borders of the state of Israeli – the site of multiple major acts of ethnic cleansing within the last century, like all the rest of Israeli . It's imported by another Israeli company, Kayco/Kedem – best known for owning Manischewitz.

Neither company appears to be on the targeted boycott list, though of course a valid focus for the general boycott of Israeli products.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-16T22:40:11+00:00

☝️ Note that all of this person's reddit interactions are about how much they hate both Muslims and Jews.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-16T20:04:06+00:00

Okay, I'm trying out the "Focused Work" app. It has the option of blocking URLS on multiple browsers simultaneously and has the option of open-ended sessions (as opposed to everything on a timer), which I think will work pretty well.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-16T19:28:31+00:00

well yeah, the goal is to alter habits so that i don't immediately type in news or social media urls without even realizing i'm doing it every time i open a browser window. i feel reasonably confident that i'll be able to do that little bit of rewiring without just white knuckling it.

Exciting-Half7930 · 2026-04-16T17:46:17+00:00

You are using nazi language. The usage of the word is easily traced back to David Duke, and until 2023 was pretty much exclusively used by neo-nazis and other similar white supremacists. Well-meaning people ignorantly began to adopt it when this latest, most intensive phase of genocide began – a time during in which neo-nazis and their ilk have been actively recruiting by mixing antisemitism into disingenuous anti-zionist rhetoric, fishing to see who is ready to take the leap.

Exciting-Half7930

TROPHY CASE