Oh I do know about that, I’ve had a near death experience myself, your body/brain has an uncanny sense that says “you are dangling over the precipice right now.”
I just mean that until it actually happens, there is no true confirmation, and after, you can’t report back, that’s why it’s called a mystery.
In fact from the way that person is talking it sounds like they may have had such an experience, and maybe now they’re doubting that it’s real.
Every single person who ever lived could use this logic and they’d never see it disproven.
It’s also the smallest community unit that we can reasonably be broken up into whilst still reproducing labourers for the economy.
The more society is ground down and split apart the less we can help one another out of solidarity, and the more we have to spend on housing, transport, and every other appliance that needs to be duplicated for each separate dwelling, and the more dependent we are on money, capital and the state to provide for our needs. The lonelier we are, the more profitable we are and the less power we have.
You could argue that a lot of this was just a gradual evolution of society into a form that suits the ruling class, but also neoliberalism was a deliberate project to bring this about. Thatcher knew what she was doing when she said, “There is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families.”
I know right, people hold elaborate ceremonies that cost many thousands of dollars and invite all their family and friends for sometimes a week at a time just to announce, “Hey everybody, we’re fucking!” They even get small children to participate in these shameless sex rituals, they should all be locked up for child abuse.
Ban marriage.
“We’ll take our ball and go home, and you’ll all miss out on our fabulous AI products!”
“No. Wait. Don’t.”
Yeah, that scans for me. It breaks up “getting ready…for a night out”, but I think it works.
I think honestly it’s just a reality that, if brevity is the soul of wit, then a punchy sentence needs to be compact and that means you need to get a bit funky with the grammar, so maybe the audience has to do a little work.
Maybe also “at which” is fine too, and I was just overthinking it.
One thing I won’t bend on is that “to be starting to get ready” is objectively worse in every respect and is the main thing that throws people about the sentence.
This is a slightly wacky sentence. It’s not wrong - it does make sense and communicates the idea, it just forces you to do a bit of work to straighten it out in your head.
I think the biggest issue is the way they unnecessarily used present continuous tense with “be starting to get”.
It’s convoluted and adds syllables. You could eliminate the “be” and “to” entirely and change it to “start getting”. That starts with an active verb which feels stronger and more natural.
So then it would be:
“This can’t possibly be the same 9pm I used to start getting ready for a night out at”.
That preserves the flow & punch of the delivery but shortens & simplifies it a lot without losing anything imo.
Also ending a sentence with a preposition can be awkward. You read “at” and you need to refer it back to 9pm near the start of the sentence. Plus it comes after another preposition, which itself is not acting as a preposition but as part of the nouned phrase “night out”, so you end up with “out at”. Again, not wrong, but it can be awkward. I think using “at which” can move it closer to the noun it’s referring to but it’s not necessarily better that way.
Make that change and it’s, “This can’t possibly be the same 9pm at which I used to start getting ready for a night out”.
It’s a little easier to parse, but honestly I think it loses something, because it doesn’t have a casual delivery. “At which” is evidence that the sentence was very deliberately constructed. It adds a syllable and loses some punch. I’d stick with just the first change personally.
Maxwell immediately adopting an unexplained and unflappable admiration for Wealwell is such a Murph thing to do and I love it.
“Samwell, Blanewell, Roywell, Hatwell, Wealwell, Johnwell”
Thanks, I’ve wanted to do this for ages, but I got this current phone before I knew about grapheneos and the compatibility issue. Now all I need is to fully switch my main email and I’ll be significantly de-googled.
I was writing a comment that my device is unsupported and all the supported pixel phones are flagship priced. Then I decided to check my work and look it up.
Long story short I have a refurbished pixel 6 on the way, it was cheaper than my current phone was.
Also my mum brought me some costco hotdogs the other day. It’s hard to get good American food in grocery stores here in Australia but those delicious smokey dogs have me considering a membership. So good.
This has a similar energy to, “Lend me a dollar, but give me fifty cents. Then I’ll owe you fifty cents, and you’ll owe me fifty cents, and we’ll be even.”
Do you have a sauce for that claim?
“We are legion.”
You live in a different universe where talk matters more than actions and individual voters have more power than the systems and people that consistently screw them over.
That’s not a gap I can bridge.
If all of the people who stayed home would have been kamala voters then it sounds like she failed to inspire them to vote. It sounds like she lost an election.
Yes, if an unprecedented, impossible turnout occurred then dems might’ve won, but that’s not actually a strategy, that’s fantasy. Assuming there isn’t some level of divine intervention, then people are right that their vote doesn’t matter, because this is the real world where we already know a plurality of people don’t vote.
It’s almost like voter disenfranchisement works.
I don’t know why liberals can’t get this basic concept: if electoralism is meaningful at all, then the electorate cannot be wrong.
If the electorate voted “wrong” then your democracy doesn’t do what it claims to, it does not represent the people. <- this is actually the correct answer btw
Blaming the electorate achieves nothing.
The electorate didn’t fail the dems, the dems failed the electorate.
It’s hard to blame the people who stayed home when disenfranchisement is an intended feature of your electoral system. The vast majority of people know for a fact that their vote mathematically does not matter and a huge number cannot get time off on the weekday it is scheduled for.
If a full third of people stayed home, that’s a systemic problem, not an individual responsibility problem. Your electoral system is completely captured by capital and you are stuck blaming the electorate.
Folks please: US corruption is not a cultural or personal issue, it is systemic. Power corrupts, not just people, but systems. The US has been at the head of the global hegemon for most of the last century, they have most of the billionaires, of course they are corrupt. That’s where capitalists focus their efforts to get the most returns. It’s not an accident that the guy doing DOGE just happened to be the richest man on the planet.
Maybe focus your energy there instead of on the people who have literally no power.
Iran getting nuclear weapons would be an immense boon to peace and stability in the Middle East.
I think you just put your finger on exactly why the US doesn’t want that to ever happen.
Yeah, this seems like a case of “it’s not my job to interperet my boss’s incomprehensible behaviour on their behalf”.