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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Nah, son. Thylacines have, in a way, become cryptids since their extinction, complete with cheesy travel shows where some bogan tells you all about how they totally saw one time and they’re 100% sure it was a thylacine they barely saw from a distance running away through the tall grass after sunset. I’ve seen similar shows about Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, and others. They don’t exist anymore, making your chances of seeing one alive no more likely than seeing Bigfoot, which is the point I was making. Animals thought to be extinct being officially rediscovered is a pretty rare occurrence; I assure you it doesn’t happen “regularly”. It’s a big deal when it happens because it’s quite rare. Yes, I’m familiar with the stories of all the other extinct species you mentioned as well. The ivory-billed woodpecker is still considered by most ornithologists to be extinct, and the last widely accepted sighting of any individual was in 1987, despite some supposed (but not universally accepted or entirely conclusive) sightings every once in a while. In 2020, a guy working for Fish and Wildlife claimed to have ID’d one in video footage, but it must not have been very compelling because the very next year Fish and Wildlife proposed declaring it officially extinct. People claim to have sighted the ivory-billed woodpecker not infrequently, much like the thylacine. What is infrequent is any compelling evidence whatsoever, however.


  • There have been many sightings and footprints found of Bigfoot, too. I live in the Bigfoot sighting capital of the world and new sightings are routinely reported. If the “Portland” in your name is in reference to the one in Oregon, you do too.

    The last widely accepted sighting of a wild thylacine was in 1933, nearly a hundred years ago. Even if any tiny, isolated pockets had managed to escape extermination (which is unlikely on an island without much mountainous terrain or dense forest, especially when everyone and their grandma was out hunting them for the bounty the government put on their tails), they’d be in big trouble owing to genetic drift by now. You always hear people say “I know what I saw,” but do they really? It makes me circle back to the Bigfoot thing. At least some of the people who claim to have seen Bigfoot genuinely believe they really saw him.


  • Did you intend to link to an explicitly pro-Western, Zionist, neoconservative magazine? Not sure if I fully trust their framing, especially when it comes to someone so consistently critical of Western policy. The article is just the author (not even a member of the staff, it appears to be a letter to the editor) whining that Chomsky said the author couldn’t find certain quotes and that his stance on Vietnam was hawkish, not a whole lot mentioned on anything else. I’m aware of some of Chomsky’s more problematic positions, but how does this back that up what you’re saying? Sounds more like a petty personal spat between a couple academics.

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  • Depress_Mode@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldWTF
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    1 month ago

    Billionaires already own the police, which number over 700,000 in the US alone and the national police budget would be equivalent to the third most expensive army in the world. If this is already the state of things, how could we blame that on the anarchists? This argument effectively boils down to “we shouldn’t have a revolution because the rich would have a monopoly on violence”, which we already know to be the case in our current society. So in this way, nothing at all is holding us back. The worst case scenario would be a preservation of the status quo. Even if the Proud Boys, III%ers, Patriot Front, Oath Keepers, etc. all combined into a giant mercenary group, it wouldn’t be even close to how the cops already are. They’re one of the most militarized police forces in the world with access to heavy equipment such as assault rifles, chemical weapons, acoustic weaponry, MRAPs, and much more.

    If the revolution ever comes, we’ll just have to take all the billionaires to the Ipatiev House. A revolution would already have no recourse but to defeat any police opposition anyway, so there really is no difference whether the billionaires are around or not. Those billionaires, if they have any sense of self-preservation, would be smarter to take their money and simply flee abroad.


  • Not to mention too expensive. The base ticket prices have skyrocketed over 1600% since 1996. In just the seven years between 2015 and 2022, attendees with household incomes of less than $100k dropped from around 56% to 40% and attendees with household incomes of $100k-$300k+ have risen from 43% to 59%. Over the years, it’s seemed like the crowd has been increasingly yuppie and increasingly white collar; these numbers appear to back that notion up. I remember seeing a video from a few years ago where Andrew Callaghan was talking about how he paid $10k for an RV spot and 2 tickets. He also complained that a lot of the people there seemed like “weekend-warrior-types”. I can only hope that price is with an insane scalper markup or a super deluxe VIP package or something. $10k is an unthinkable price for a weeklong camping trip in the desert, even a really cool one.

    That, the heat as you mentioned (I found a chart that demonstrates rising averages and most in the comments are saying the reported highs are far too low), and the floods last year I think have combined to scare a lot of the core demographic away. I dreamed of going to Burning Man for years, but I haven’t even thought of it in quite some time since I learned how prohibitively expensive it would be to go.



  • Don’t the lyrics in “In the Flesh” indicate that the nazis are actually a different band that had to be called in as substitutes because the lead singer of the band that was supposed to play is currently going through a mental breakdown in his hotel room (i.e. stuck behind the wall)? The main figure of the album might’ve just imagined the whole thing, though.






  • Thank you for immediately and so willingly proving my point lmao. Sounds like this guy’s only “crime” (thanks, SCOTUS! You must have been over the moon with that one) is being homeless. Even the sheriff said he wasn’t a danger and his only crime is homelessness. You read “homeless” though, and that was enough for you to say “lock him up!” Then, based on nothing at all, you assume he must be a murderer and inherently dangerous or something. Yet another indication of your feelings towards the homeless in general for no reason. It truly speaks volumes. You’re complaining the homeless aren’t being thrown in jail just because they didn’t want to be forced to stay in some shitty, privatized adult daycare. That’s positively ghoulish.

    Once again you make the misleading argument about empty beds/shelters when there isn’t enough of either for all the homeless people in Portland and the vast majority are filled each night anyway, so even with 100% acceptance of help, Portland would still have lots of homeless people. What then? Portland only has like 250 of these tiny homes in total and much fewer actively available at any given time. Should all the homeless people be thrown in jail when the villages fill up? This all-too-common stance of “you will accept my help or you will be punished, because only I can decide what’s best for you,” is just shameful. Ironically, the widespread moralism of homelessness is maybe one of the biggest barriers to getting homeless people real, meaningful help. In short, your justifications are lacking in number and relevance, you blame the homeless themselves at every opportunity while ignoring any outside factors, you allow yourself to be swept up by media cherry-picking such as this, and you also treat the homeless as a monolith. So, yeah… I think I stand by what I said.

    Did you know between 40-60% of homeless people have jobs? Did you know that only about 25% of homeless people are addicts? Did you know only about 30% of them have severe mental health issues? Homeless people are just like you and me, it’s just they simply can’t afford rent. Considering how high rents are in most places, it’s really not that hard to imagine. And when you consider that most people live paycheck to paycheck, all it takes is one unexpected medical expense, one lost job, one setback to fail to make rent and end up in the streets. Even when they don’t have jobs, or are addicts, or are severely mentally ill, that doesn’t mean they deserve to be thrown in prison and are no less deserving of care and compassion.





  • You went out of your way just to tell everyone that you think former drug addicts aren’t deserving of medical care? Not even people who currently do drugs (who are also all 100% deserving of medical treatment btw), anyone who used to do drugs is disqualified, too? It’s an absolutely insane take to say “they used to do drugs, so they don’t deserve to have teeth.” And what of all those people who didn’t do drugs, but still need and can’t afford dentures or implants? If you can’t afford reliable access to dental care from the start, you’ll likely be stuck with preventable problems down the line that then become even more expensive to fix. The situations of these people aren’t different from former addicts in any meaningful way; they need dental work, but can’t afford it. You’re ignoring the core issue that important and completely necessary dental work (and medical treatment of all kinds) is too expensive for almost everyone, not just current or former addicts. As a result, many are forced to go without that treatment. That’s a bad thing. You saw someone complaining that dental work is unaffordable, and all you could think to say was “Yeah, but they’re druggies, so there’s no problem here.” You’ve justified a terrible system to yourself because you view the people who were quoted as being beneath you. What’s truly dystopian is both that medical care would be out of reach of so many, but also that people would be ok with that as long as it means the “undesirables” don’t get to have any. The societal disdain for marginalized human life and the moral superiority complex that fuels it are both absolutely appalling.