Synova

Compulsion is Compulsion, no matter who does it.  This is Brilliant Theft is Theft, no matter who does it. Freedom of Association has no room in it for *private* action   that takes that away Freedom of Association. If I have a business and have voluntary associations such that I choose to serve some people and to not serve others, that might make me a jerk and it might lose me business, it might make me smart and it might gain me business, but it's got to be my choice.  If I would normally serve the current disliked minority in my shop except for the fact that if I'm SEEN to serve them by the wrong people I'll have a private campaign against me as those people do everything possible to ruin me by preventing me from doing business physically or by attacking my customers or suppliers, then I am NOT free to make those choices. Does it really make a difference to losing my CHOICE to voluntarily associate if there's a law that says I may not serve "those people" o...

 

Take the case of "fascism". When you can see clear as day that the person who is accusing you of fascism is a fascist, they aren't projecting. They're talking about something ELSE. Basically, in the case of fascism, the basic set of fascist government controls are the default assumption of reality for a whole lot of people. The government is supposed to control every part of your life. The government is supposed to make you moral and good and reflect "justice". The government is supposed to do this by picking winners from the good people and losers from the bad people. The government is supposed to control the way people do business, how businesses (and farmers) function and what they produce. And people should be made to cooperate with this control because they are part of society and society is dependent on everyone being in compliance. This is simply the Truth. It's how the world works and how the world is supposed to work. The Socialist Nationalism, ...

https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856?s=20&t=l7ZUcv1g2h6PqZAeSSFdKA Click through and read. I'm mostly putting this here, hoping that it remains available on Twitter.  This thread is GOOD. MYTH: We don't have a solution to nuclear's "waste problem" REALITY: Nuclear waste isn't a problem. In fact, it’s the best solution we have to meeting our energy needs while protecting the natural environment! Here's what you need to know:

  The saying goes like this, It's not what you *don't* know that is going to trip you up, it's what you know that isn't so. I believe that the first lady might possibly have been feigning helplessness, just a little bit.  She already had concept art and visuals, so I think she'll be okay.   But someone might truly be so new that they know nothing about science fiction as a genre or how it works in the world.  That person, the truly "new" person, might not realize that the second lady, no matter how assured she seems to be that she's passing on vital Wisdom, is wrong. So lets unwrap her backpack a little (to steal a metaphor). Stories about space pirates are Space Opera, generally.  "Soft" science in science fiction usually refers to sociology or psychology, social "science".  A story about space pirates might be "soft".  But that's picking nits.  The first big boo-boo is this: "not as popular *because* it is women...

I had something to say about what happens if we lose our doubt, our suspicion, and our ability to look for a lie because we have been conditioned to expect that everything around us has been certified safe?   And then I clicked through to the article.  I'll link it here and I won't quote the whole thing, just representatives of the points made.  You can go read it all if you still maintain a skeptical nature. https://bookriot.com/let-these-publishing-trends-die/ First point:  "Publishers of nonfiction should have built-in, on top of the author’s fact-checking, a review process by people trained in fact-checking." The author begins with an example of a book suggesting that sunning your...butt hole every day was healthy.  I agree that this is utterly absurd.  I disagree that we need a ministry of truth to ensure that no one publishes such a silly health suggestion.  What we need is a developed and maintained skepticism, not an assurance that if some...

 Have you noticed what I've noticed? It's not really something new.  I started to notice way back in 2015-ish that protests seemed to be deliberately non-persuasive.  Note that this is well before Trump, possibly all the way back to the beginning of Obama's terms or farther.  And I'll admit that I've only noticed this as a left-wing phenomenon, possibly because I don't need to be persuaded of what my opinions already are.  (And right-wing arguments that I find stupid mostly elicit a rolling of my eyes.) I had a long conversation once with someone about the very poorly conceived practice of blocking freeways.  My argument was that anyone stuck on the freeway would be motivated negatively toward whatever the blockage was supposed to be about, and that furthermore, nothing about a freeway even began to indicate what cause the blockers were intending to highlight.  In fact, if I don't say here what the cause was, in future years no one will be able to figu...

Remember this: When we began with Covid 19 we were generally told that the goal was to slow the spread, to "flatten the curve", in order to dribble out covid cases in bits and drabs to reduce the burden on hospitals and staff. Everyone was still going to eventually get it, just not all at once. Think about when that message shifted. Think about when the rhetoric changed to "defeat" or "end" Covid 19. No flu or covid virus, not one of them, that has made the jump from animals to humans has ever been defeated. Not a single one has truly come to an end. They mutate. They become less prevalent. They all still exist and are still passed between people. Flatten the Curve. That made sense. Let us take away all of your freedom, emotionally and psychologically abuse your children, disregard those with mental difficulty, isolate the elderly and let them die alone because, BECAUSE, if you allow these utterly HORRIFIC things... we can DEFEAT Covid 19. Utter, au...

Time to talk about Strong Female Characters again. I actually saw that shortened to SFC. Time to talk about SFC's again. Why? Because there is a blow-up about a remake of a kid's cartoon and everyone is on about "Teela and the Masters of the Universe" and a couple of people have pointed out an element of the story that does seem rather odd as it's described: Does anyone care about spoilers? Prince Adam dies. According to what people are saying, Teela's "take away" on this is the need to berate his parents, fresh in their grief at the loss of their only child, that no one told her that he was He Man. She has a tantrum and leaves. She stays mad. She resists the call to be a hero when the universe is going to be destroyed. Later she treats Prince Adam badly. Or so I'm hearing. Tell me I've heard wrong. But the charge that her response when finding out that she'd been kept in the dark is self-absorbed, that tracks with the current tre...

 Call me Mary Sue. Writers have all heard of a Mary Sue.  In truth, these days even non-writers have probably heard of a Mary Sue. In short, a Mary Sue is a character who doesn't have to try very hard.  She is talented and loved by all without having paid her dues.  Mary Sue might be an orphan, but she's secretly a princess.  She's unusual and beautiful. She seems to inspire love and loyalty for no reason. She never faces the possibility of failure when it comes to the stakes of the story. And it's a fine line. One of my favorite novels, Perilous Waif by E. William Brown, seems to be a deliberate send up of the idea of a Mary Sue, complete with the violet eyes, the orphan condition, the inexplicable love and loyalty, and the secret princess. Everything. And yet, the character works because she makes mistakes that have weight and you know that she may fail at the stakes of the story at any point.  So the definition of a Mary Sue is not just being overpowered...

 This was fun and interesting.  Thinking with Mike Episode 13 A woman of STEAM Julie Pascal

  Maybe we should talk about what cancel culture isn't. It's not a boycott.  It's not deciding to no longer go to a business. It's not giving a bad review for bad service. It generally involves two things. First, the offense is a matter of opinion. Second, secondary or even tertiary targets are threatened. Cancellation does not need to be successful, and often with very famous and wealthy people it is not successful. But it serves as a warning to vulnerable people who are not in a position to weather that kind of attack. The goal is terroristic in that it's about forcing social behavior in people who are not currently the subject of the attack. The message is always, this could happen to you. And the tactic invariably includes seeking out vulnerable people to threaten in order to put pressure on businesses or on the target of the attack. So it works like this: JK Rowling is invulnerable. But they can try, right? So what they do is they find out who works for the pub...

 

 My blog description says "with chickens!" but it's been a long time since I posted any chicken pictures. So here are some roosters. 

 

  This comic is far more calm than I feel. Lets be real.  If I won the lottery I'd sit on my butt, preferably on a beach, and hire other people to do my work for me. Wait, hire other people to do my work for me?  But isn't "work" bad?  Isn't work a lie created by Capitalism? We only work because we've been lied to and told that we have to work. We only work because someone lied to us and told us that we needed things. So I'd hire other people to DO MY WORK?  Yes.  Because I'll still need to eat.  I'll still need to have a roof over my head. I'll still make a mess just by living and it will have to be cleaned up.   Because not working just means that someone else has to do that work for you. You're an adult and presumably at least somewhat able bodied and more or less mentally stable. You get to decide what you need and how to define success.  You get to decide how much "stuff" you need beyond a roof, clothes and food. You decide i...

  Some things sound so obviously good that they don't need to be examined.  One of those things is the idea of Representation in fiction; movies, television or books.  Entertainment where some people are conspicuously absent would seem to be an obvious problem, right?  A person doesn't have to be "woke" or any sort of feminist to occasionally watch an old television show and realize (for example) that all the scientists and astronauts in an old movie are men. It's as glaring an anachronism these days as watching a show where everyone is chain smoking cigarettes. Entertainment should reflect the diverse nature of real life and society because, in the end, fiction has to be even more real than real life.  If nothing else, it makes that entertainment more interesting to introduce characters with a variety of backgrounds and challenges. And so we're told that diverse fiction is BETTER fiction. The way that this rather obvious truth is often framed, often discussed...

  I originally drew this comic right after Trump was elected and people had to talk their friends down because they were terrified.  I had to talk my own kids down because they'd been exposed to so much outrageous fear mongering that they thought something bad would happen to them...from a President who was the first one EVER to support gay marriage before he was elected and expressed support for letting trans people be, years and years earlier. The profound evil present in people deliberately instilling extreme fear in the most vulnerable people in our communities for something as twisted as political benefit and then having the gall to turn around and answer exactly as this comic shows made me so angry that the original comic was a mess of rage-coloring. Still, I find myself in situations where I want to pull this out and post it so often that I needed to redraw and recolor.  The other was so bad that it would have distracted from the point I wanted to make. Preaching f...

  Trump didn't divide the country. Let's get that out of the way first. There's several things that have divided us but the people who get elected are only the symptoms. Collective Identity is why we can't have Unity.  Don't believe me? 1) Dealing with groups is tempting because it's a force multiplier, and we've had "group politics" forever, but it's reached a tipping point. Everyone is considered primarily their group identity. 2) A failure to buy into this group identity ideology has been framed as racism. So we're told to believe that people with ideological differences or who question dividing everyone into group identities are not just people with different opinions, they are evil. Even arguing against the focus on group identity will get you called a racist. 3) Group identity defines nearly everything. Racism, right and wrong are no longer defined by actions or attitudes, at least by a critical percentage of the population. Right, wr...

 From a Face Book post by Thomas Eastmond. Thinking about this: (Note after unpacking thoughts: “TL/DR seems inadequate here. Start your own blog, guy.”) The Western liberal tradition, with its principles of tolerance and freedom of thought and conscience, is almost four centuries old. It first developed as, basically, “Thirty Years War insurance.”* The West didn’t invent tolerance (something new and revolutionary in human history, whose rule ever since we were roaming the prehistoric plains had been “whatever you do, don’t talk back to the alpha male/headman/king” or he’ll get mad and smack you with a club”) because a bunch of unusually decent and smart people sat down and decided to reinvent the world. It happened because the particular social, cultural, geographical (Jared Diamond isn’t *all* wrong) and technological circumstances of seventeenth-century Europe has gotten people recognizing that continuing with the old model posed a real risk of actual, not rhetorical civilizati...