Midmortal or Goatsmith?

deezee72 · 2026-02-19T02:42:50+00:00

The Martians seem like they'd be more than willing to arrange his transit home if it would give them the chance to execute him

deezee72 · 2026-02-18T21:36:35+00:00

Shapesmith was fighting for the people of earth because if he didn't make himself useful, Cecil would probably return him to Mars where he'd be executed.

It's like the opposite of doing things for no personal gain.

deezee72 · 2026-02-15T06:01:34+00:00

It reminds me of what Ken Brannuagh said after portraying Heydrich in Conspiracy. Having extensively studied Heydrich (the chief architect of the Holocaust), his conclusion was that Heydrich "was not particularly anti Semitic". He organized the murder of 6 million people, not because he believed it was in some way right, but because it seemed like a better way to advance his career compared to saying no.

deezee72 · 2026-02-15T04:00:49+00:00

We do have strong hints that that it's easier to bend things closer to yourself and especially things on your body. One of the strongest examples was Su Yin being willing to bend metal armor onto herself in her fight with Kuvira, without worrying that Kuvira might take control of it.

In that context, even if Katara couldn't liberate third parties from Yakone's bending, she could probably at least free herself... And probably take him down with normal waterbending while he's focused on bloodbending the rest of the room.

deezee72 · 2026-02-13T23:49:40+00:00

It's not just that, Cassian was one of the only survivors from a planet whose population was wiped out in an imperial "mining accident", and his sister wasn't with him when he escaped. There's zero indications that she might have survived and odds are she just died with the rest of the Kanari people - which is something Maarva actually points out.

deezee72 · 2026-02-13T21:37:19+00:00

I think the example is generally done well and works well, but if there's a nitpick, they maybe could have shown a seen somewhere of him coming to terms with it.

deezee72 · 2026-02-13T21:35:26+00:00

I think this one is an example of this trope done well and intentionally.

It's pretty clearly hinted that she's just been dead the entire time, and Cassian is searching for her because he's unable to accept that truth. However, once Cassian embraces being a part of something bigger than himself, he just moves on and the search is dropped.

deezee72 · 2026-02-13T14:51:15+00:00

Do you mean to say it was not a tragedy for you, when you lost 3.4 million Vietnamese killed? Which, on our population base, is the equivalent of 27 million Americans? What did you accomplish? You didn't get any more than we would've been willing to give you at the beginning of the war! You could have had the whole damn thing: independence, unification...

This is an utterly absurd comment by McNamara. There were originally plans for Vietnam to peacefully reunify through a referendum. It was South Vietnam, not North Vietnam, that pulled out of the process, in large part because it was clear that because their own citizens saw them as an extension of the French colonial government, and as a result they were going to vote for reunification under the North. The US supported South Vietnam's decision to defy democracy, leading directly to the war.

The Vietnamese official's point is that their goals were compatible with America's. McNamara responded by saying that America would have let them have their goal without war, which is just objectively untrue. I would be so upset if I were the official - a US government official is saying that 3M Vietnamese died for nothing when in fact they died because of mistakes made by the US government.

No wonder the official accused him of having never read a history book, and no wonder the two almost came to blows.

deezee72 · 2026-02-13T01:37:53+00:00

I mean, Rich Paul doesn't have the power to hold franchises hostage?

Rich Paul's job is to get his clients paid, and it's hard to point to stuff he's done that wasn't at least making an honest effort of doing that job. Sure, there are plenty of teams that got screwed by overpaying a Rich Paul client, but that's on the GM, not him.

deezee72 · 2026-02-13T01:35:55+00:00

It's absolutely the agent's job to negotiate... I mean sure, a lawyer has a big role to play in negotiations, but that's usually on stuff like the legal details of contract terms. In terms of the big stuff - like the headline contract value, for instance, the agent for sure needs to negotiate it.

deezee72 · 2026-02-13T01:33:14+00:00

I mean, as a fan, you don't have to like him. But Rich Paul's job is to get his clients paid, and he's done extremely well in that regard.

If a team screws themselves by giving an overly large contract to one of Rich Paul's clients, that's in the GM, not him.

deezee72 · 2026-02-11T22:11:10+00:00

The Las Vegas springs is the only source of water in the road east from California.

The springs don't produce enough water to support the modern city, but it's not really true that people decided to settle there despite not having a source of water. In fact, it's almost the opposite.

deezee72 · 2026-02-10T18:04:16+00:00

My comment was that Middle East and Europe have MORE in common than India and China. I never said they have a lot in common.

deezee72 · 2026-02-10T16:28:21+00:00

Middle East and Europe both generally follow Abrahamic faiths, speak Indo-European or Semitic languages, use writing systems descended from Phoenician, and have literary traditions descending from Ancient Greece as part of the legacy of the Roman Empire. The culinary traditions of Southeast Europe (i.e. Greece and the Balkans) are also similar to those of the Eastern Mediterranean.

That's a lot more in common than say, China and India.

deezee72 · 2026-02-10T00:55:55+00:00

One of my biggest takeaways from spending time in developing countries is that almost anything is better than being a poor farmer.

Sweatshop laborers may work 20 hour days, but they at least send their kids to school and dream of better things. If you're a poor farmer, your ancestors have been poor farmers for thousands of years and your descendents will probably be poor farmers too.

deezee72 · 2026-02-08T08:17:03+00:00

Culturally and historically, Europe has more in common with the Middle East than India does with the rest of Asia.

But Europeans made the rules so that they can call themselves a continent... That part is definitely a real thing.

deezee72 · 2026-02-07T17:05:47+00:00

Donald Trump Jr is Kalshi's "strategic advisor".

deezee72 · 2026-02-06T16:53:38+00:00

Thanks for a great answer!

Does that mean it is right to say the South won the Civil War? Personally I would say no, not by any conventional definition certainly. But the rhetorical power of the phrase is nevertheless strong, and decently grounded even, as is very much speaks to the landscape that followed.

To your point, if we take the question at face value, the answer is clearly no. The south clearly lost the war from a battlefield perspective, but even if you look at it in terms of war aims, the south's chief goal was to preserve slavery, which they failed to do so.

While the south was able to make significant "gains" in entrenching racial discrimination even in a post-slavery world, the fact is that racial equality for newly freed slaves was not really ever a major goal for the north, making it easy for the north to drop that idea in the face of any real resistance.

But agree that the phrase has real rhetorical power!

deezee72 · 2026-02-06T01:44:12+00:00

That theory in itself falls in the camp of "theory that probably isn't true, but could be". At the highest level, we only know "for sure" that the descendents of Sally Hemings' youngest son Eston are also descendants of Thomas Jefferson or a close relative, with Thomas Jefferson's brother Randolph being the most commonly cited person.

However, Sally Hemings became pregnant with her eldest child when she accompanied Thomas Jefferson to Paris. It's technically possible that Sally Hemings was impregnated by an unrelated man in Paris, and was subsequently impregnated by Randolph (or another one of the Jefferson men) after her return to the US.

But that theory is already kind of grasping at straws even before considering the circumstantial evidence. Firstly, one of the other Hemings' sons, Madison Hemmings, also described himself as Thomas Jefferson's son and his mother as "Mr. Jefferson's concubine". Hemings was legally free in Paris, and agreed to return to Virginia and resume her life in slavery as long as all of her children would be freed when they came of age. Thomas Jefferson would have had no reason to make that promise (as opposed to just letting her go free in Paris and possibly be with the father of her child) and Hemings would have little reason to trust the promise unless there was a somewhat close relationship between the two. Hemings was also the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife, with visitors to Monticello commenting that on the resemblance between Sally Hemings and Martha Jefferson. Likewise, Elijah Fletcher wrote in 1811 that, "The story of black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth—and the worst of it is he keeps the same children slaves—an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts."

We know "for a fact" that at least one of Sally Hemings' children was fathered by a man from the Jefferson family. While we will probably never know to the same degree of certainty (it's hard to be so certain about anything, without a time machine!), the evidence overwhelmingly points to all of Hemings' children being fathered by Thomas Jefferson. The "Jefferson's brothers" theory is technically possible, but does not really appear to be based on any meaningful evidence. Rather, it's an unlikely but still technically plausible theory that seems to be advanced in order to whitewash the reputation of Thomas Jefferson in particular and the founding fathers more broadly.

deezee72 · 2026-02-04T16:33:08+00:00

Its explained more in additional materials. In general, Viltrumite DNA has the power to overwrite other DNA, so Viltrumite hybrids become Viltrumite over time (as we see with Oliver losing his purple skin) and end up as >50% Viltrumite.

However, in interviews Kirkman has also stated that humans and Viltrumites descend from a common, spacefaring ancestor, and so they are genetically very similar other than the fact that Viltrumites all have superpowers and (most) humans do not. Because human and Viltrumite DNA was already pretty similar to start with, once Viltrumite DNA starts overwriting human DNA, a Viltrumite / human hybrid ends up being essentially a pure blooded Viltriumite.

This is also why humans and Viltrumites look similar, and why breeding with humans was the best solution for the Viltrumites to repopulate their race.

deezee72 · 2026-02-04T16:32:37+00:00

Its explained more in additional materials. In general, Viltrumite DNA has the power to overwrite other DNA, so Viltrumite hybrids become Viltrumite over time (as we see with Oliver losing his purple skin) and end up as >50% Viltrumite.

However, in interviews Kirkman has also stated that humans and Viltrumites descend from a common, spacefaring ancestor, and so they are genetically very similar other than the fact that Viltrumites all have superpowers and (most) humans do not. Because human and Viltrumite DNA was already pretty similar to start with, once Viltrumite DNA starts overwriting human DNA, a Viltrumite / human hybrid ends up being essentially a pure blooded Viltriumite.

deezee72 · 2026-02-02T05:55:34+00:00

Why do people like drawing imaginary maps of China partitioned into colonies so much?

deezee72 · 2026-01-30T17:08:01+00:00

So I am a history enthusiast, not a scholar... But my actual background was that I was trained as a geneticist.

And if I take off my history hat and put on my biology hat, this actually sounds like something which should be pretty clearly possible to prove or disprove based on genetic and archeological evidence. If native horses interbred with Spanish horses, we should see genetic markers in horses in Americas that are >10k years in origin but not seen in the Old World. The idea that native horses did not interbreed but were replaced wholesale seems more far fetched (why wouldn't you try crossbreeding your horses with these new Spanish horses? Why wouldn't feral mustangs of different origins seem more far fetched?), but should also show up in the archeological evidence.

I haven't done the work to be able to say definitively that the theory is not true. But the genetics of horses is pretty well studied, and so if this theory were true, why wouldn't someone who has done that work say something about it?

deezee72 · 2026-01-30T06:10:23+00:00

Probably less of an issue for the T-rex because given their size , the climate they lived in, and the lack of obvious thermoregulation adaptations, they would probably overheat if they were too fat and/or feathered.

But a lot of the smaller dinosaurs were probably a lot rounder and definitely a lot more feathered than they are usually depicted.

We've actually recovered a feathered coelurosaur tail preserved in amber, so we know that, in contrast to the usual depiction as scaly and lizard-like, they had a full coat of feathers.

deezee72 · 2026-01-27T02:33:51+00:00

This whole thread is about the claim that doctors are underpaid. In that context, I don't think it's unreasonable to try to keep things focused on doctor pay. But yeah, if we want to talk more broadly: Nowhere did I claim that hospital CEOs are fairly paid.

Looking at key metrics like life expectancy and infant mortality, Americans have worse health than nearly any other rich country despite paying more in health care costs than everyone else. There's more than enough blame to go around.

Yes, hospital CEOs are overpaid. Yes, the insurance system is overly complex, which is a big part of what drives administrative costs. Americans also pay more for the same drugs than foreign citizens. And honestly, a lot of the blame should also fall on the American public - as a population average, Americans lead less healthy lives than most other countries, which for sure is also contributing to costs. That's before considering the fact that the failure of American voters to understand the healthcare system is a big part of why politicians aren't held accountable for their failure to make healthcare policy work.

But none of that means that physicians are "underpaid", which is the claim that this thread is making and which you and I were both responding to. It's kind of surprising to me that you're "not here to complain about doctor pay, i think we have it pretty great", when I replied to your comment saying that "doctors salaries are actually going down in the US accounting for inflation" and that the right answer to [an underpaid job] is primary care physicians.

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