Tzolk’in is my favorite game, I think. It is a board game that incorporates time in an interesting way for a worker-placement style game.

It looks similar to part of the cooling system on the back of my refrigerator.

If you could hum or record what you remember in some way, it would help a lot.

Those glasses are actually pretty cool.

💯

If you’re into metal music, Sons of Texas is an underrated band. They’re no longer together, but they put out a couple of good albums.

Also check out Cardinal Black, it’s a blues/rock outfit, and really good.

Sridhar based this rough calculation off of an estimate by public health researchers published in The Lancet in July regarding typical indirect death counts from previous conflicts, citing research hailed as the gold standard in the field.

This estimate includes people that haven’t died yet, but that die from causes that are attributable to the war.

Pop!_OS This was a good idea for a new game I have a few ideas on what I would do if it were a new one.

Source: military.

My kids used to bring home whatever pre-packaged food they didn’t eat at school, and one of those things was this whole wheat cake donut flavored with honey.

Why the school would think that 3rd graders would like that is beyond me… buuut the first time I tried one, lembas popped into my head. Not for the texture or its ability to fill my stomach with one small bite, though. As an adult, they were so tasty. I got real sad when the school figured out what’s what and stopped buying them.

Remember on TNG when Data got his emotion chip? This could get hairy…

I guess? I got a couple of emails from the VA that mentioned it and then I signed up. Don’t know how much it has changed in the meantime. I stopped using it after I kept getting messages from people I don’t/didn’t know about politics, and immediately ran into the problem of cancelling their paid service…

It all goes to spam now, but for about a month (I think) after unsubscribing the final time I had 8-10 squeak through every week.

I just checked my junk folder, and I’ve had 21 emails from them, despite being blocked and having unsubscribed, since the 1st of August.

Also, if anyone reading this is or knows a US Military veteran, PLEASE tell them to not sign up for Together We Served. It’s supposed to be like Facebook for veterans, but it sucks. The thing is, I tried their “premium” service and later could not cancel (I had to have my bank block their charges and get a new card) AND I get just as many or more emails from them too. They’ve gone to my junk folder for so long I’d completely forgot about it. Seriously, that site should not be allowed to operate like that, and it was even pushed to us in official Veterans Affairs emails.

I signed up for Nextdoor to see ONE MESSAGE, then I cancelled my account and unsubscribed multiple times. I still get at least 2 emails per day from them.

Incontinentia buttocks?

Could you name a country that would not qualify as an ethnostate by your definition? We’re clearly using different definitions of ethnostate, and I’m trying to understand yours, although the definition you linked includes a key word that I think supports my position: dominate. I also think that my definition isn’t absurd, but whatever you want to call it, any state that explicitly identifies one or more ethnic groups over others should not exist. America is flirting with this now, and probably every nation on earth has at least some tendency towards it, which is why we must be on guard and oppose it wherever it shows its ugly head.

I don’t see how merely having an ethnicity or culture as the predominant group in a country would qualify it as an ethnostate unless the government uses it as an excuse to oppress those that are not in that selected group(s).

When you agreed that “All ethnostates should be dismantled” which ones came to your mind?

If I said “all murder should be illegal”, do I have to have every conceivable instance in mind before I can make that declaration? We can whittle down my opinions through argument, for example to see if I think non-human animals should be included, or if killing in self-defense should be considered murder, but those kinds of things would not negate the original declaration, unless in doing so I changed my mind. And it’s fair that you’re trying to get me to do just that, but so far you haven’t been very persuasive.

I have not said anything that argues what is happening over their needs to continue. Just that I’d also take issue if you were arguing American Politics is immoral and so democracies need to be dismantled.

I think you’re conflating things a little bit here. I think a more apt analogy would be saying if the American government took the position that Mexico was US territory and invaded with the military, or settlements, or used its power to disenfranchise American citizens of Mexican heritage, I would agree that _that_ government should be abolished. That doesn’t mean democracy has failed, and the same form of government could be reinstated without the oppression, or even just voting out the people that put those measures in place. These kinds of things all have the same result, and all could be called dismantling the government, or the patriarchy, or whatever else is the problem.

America, Belgium, Israel, Russia, the Vatican… anywhere people are oppressed with official backing for things that are out of their control, cannot be just, and those systems (be it the whole government, a department, a policy, etc.)

Again, I think our disagreements hinge on this definitional difference. I think your definition for ethnostate (as I understand it) is too broad to have bearing in the discussion. I think you’re conflating an ethnostate with an ethnicity. Having a nation made up of exclusively (for argument’s sake) one ethnicity isn’t necessarily an ethnostate, but a nation exclusively _for_ one ethnicity is.

That’s what I’m arguing against. Using “ethnostate” in the broader meaning you seem to be advocating for unnecessarily complicates the arguments and allows the potential for racism into a place it shouldn’t be.  It gives the people that would seek to use racism as a weapon a foothold into a discussion they should be excluded from.

People arguing against Israel’s government (or the government’s actions or whatever else) are not necessarily arguing against the concept of Israel (and if they were, I’d be against that), and using this broader definition allows bad actors to disrupt efforts to reduce the harm being perpetrated by interjecting a very emotionally charged element where it doesn’t belong. Racism may be (I think it is) the root of the problem, but focusing on the “ism” here is like fighting the idea of fire rather than the flames. We’re trying to stop people from being burned first, and then deal with the flames after.

I have other things I need to be doing, so I’m done here for now. Thanks for taking the time to engage with me.

You have not demonstrated that simply having citizens that live outside of the confines of their home state means that they come from an ethnostate, and even if it was, pointing that out doesn’t make the problems I (or anyone else) has with what the Israeli government is doing go away; hence the nuance of opposing ethnostates in general. If all the Jews in the world voluntarily moved to Israel, eliminating the diaspora, would that make Israel any less of an ethnostate?

In the case of the Israeli ethnostate, which I believe you are inferring things I have not implied, one can be opposed to the form of government in charge without being opposed to Jews having a country. Israel can exist without apartheid, without stealing land and other property from people of different ethnicities within (and without) their borders, and they can defend themselves without the wholesale slaughter and other human rights violations we’ve seen in the most recent conflict. One can call for a change in leadership positions, the leadership itself, dissolution of the current leadership party, dissolution of the existing governmental structure, anything in between or something else entirely, all while also calling for similar (or different) things from the Palestinian side as well, and in no way does holding one or more of those positions mean that one thinks what happened on October 7th or in any previous conflict between those parties is justified.

As an American, my opinions are obviously biased by our history of doing fucked up things to people that don’t look like those in power, and having participated in society for the last few decades drives home the importance of not including every citizen when condemning the actions of leadership.

What’s happening over there is wrong and it needs to stop, and an international coalition needs to be in charge of investigating everything that has happened and punishing the wrongdoers. Pretend I’m on whatever side you want, that’s what needs to happen.

Ethnostate Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more

noun

1. a sovereign state of which citizenship is restricted to members of a particular racial or ethnic group.

   “they actively promoted the concept of a white ethnostate”

Diaspora Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more

di·as·po·ra


noun

1. the dispersion or spread of a people from their original homeland.

   “the diaspora of boat people from Asia”

   • people who have spread or been dispersed from their homeland.

     “the Latin American diaspora has spread across the United States”

   • the dispersion of the Jewish people beyond Israel.

     "a secular interpretation of Jewish history in antiquity and during the Diaspora

Just going off of what the first google result for those two terms says, I don’t agree with your conclusion that some of those countries are ethnostates. If, however, any or all of them did have a ruling party that included an ethnic background in order to join, then I’d be against that government.

It’s also possible to have a nuanced take on the subject. For example, if ethnostate “A” oppresses and kills members of a different ethnicity, while ethnostate “B” merely oppresses a different ethnicity, one can be against both governments while only being vocal about their opposition to ethnostate “A”, and not necessarily be amoral or hypocritical.

Satan is Real by Kreator. I’ve just discovered them in the last couple of years, and they’re great, plus this video is very…something.