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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Large margin for Harris: “this is absurd, we should have won, look how much they cheated”

    Small margin for Harris: “They cheated, we need to send electoral votes for Trump anyway. Stop the steal!”

    Small margin victory for Trump: “we won even though they cheated! Big changes coming to prevent their cheating in future”

    Huge victory for Trump: “we have a mandate to eradicate the wetbacks”









  • I think there’s some useful context, if not a good defence of this story.

    It’s one of the original stories told by Reverend Awdry told to his 2 year old, measles-ridden child in 1942 war-era England (Wait, is this making it worse?).

    Awdry would sing/recite old poems to Christopher, who then pressed him for further details that turned into a story.

    For example, the opening of that episode of Thomas features the Limerick that prompted the story, which was around at least since 1902:

    In the original story by Awdry, there is only a single tunnel, and the train is completely blocking the line and essentially ruining a business. So stubborn is the engine, that they have to dig a new tunnel beside the old one. The rails are removed and “a wall” are placed in front of the tunnel, for safety - to prevent trains literally running into the wrong tunnel and crashing. The Fat Director/Controller is also pretty unsympathetic deliberately - he commands people to push and pull the train out without success, but doesn’t himself help - “My doctor has forbidden me to push”. However the original books follow the realities of steam engine and railway operation far more closely than the TV series did (and as a result, the original series, closer to the books, were far more realistic than the later ones).

    As portrayed in the TV show it definitely comes off more villainous. But in the original telling we have to take away 70 years of Thomas trains having faces, personalities, relationships and familiarity. When originally told, the Henry story didn’t even take place in the same “universe” - there was just 3 abstract stories about trains, loosely based on old rhymes and news stories.







  • Too cowardly to do anything useful to make amends. Just let another conscript fill his space.

    Brave enough to drive over Palestinians and call them “terrorists in their hundreds”. Not brave enough to stand up to criticism from his countrymen. This is what spending billions of dollars on an asymmetrical war gets you: a system in which the weakest people can still take the lives of hundreds before being thrown away themselves.



  • Stop making violence the only thing you’ll react to in any way? Or indeed, stop responding to peaceful resistance with violence (eg the civil rights marches in Northern Ireland).

    It might seem like Palestine has been a hopeless mire forever, but there was a point in the 90s where the last reasonable leaders of both sides were coming together for a peaceful solution. Hamas and the Israeli right wing - the “both sides” of today - were on the fringe.

    Then Yitzhak Rabin was killed by an Israeli right-winger, Israel inexplicably responded by killing a Hamas leader, Arab civilians were massacred at the Cave of Patriarchs by an American Israeli, and Hamas responded with more bombings, Yassar Arafat died under siege by the IDF, Hamas took control of Gaza, and well, here we are.

    The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin is probably as impactful to history of that of Archduke Ferdinand, but seems to be being forgotten.