Should Elvis really be vilified for liking blues and rock music and playing it himself? How does that hurt anyone?

Like should we be pissed at Django Reihnhardt? Or R.A The Rugged Man? What about Japanese bagpipe players?

This should be higher up

This is very cool. My partner works on documenting and preserving languages and I spent a bunch of time recently learning how to create xkbd layouts to get that shit working on Linux. Like the fonts are important but so are the keyboard mappings.

Unicode is a really cool thing.

Solid puns but this is actually a problem. Beehives are quite valuable, like $500 per hive or so to just straight up sell them, or obviously they can also be incorporated into an apiary for long-term production.

Theft of beehives is really not unheard of. Similar to how people steal cows and shit. Beekeepers will sometimes brand or otherwise mark their hives in an attempt to deter such thievery.

Personally I keep my beehives in huge steel cages, though that is primarily to protect them from bears.

The question of who gets to decide and what is and isn’t a “News outlet” is seriously problematic. I also think that journalists ought to maintain an adversarial posture towards government and now we’re creating a system in which “approved” journalists are dependent upon official recognition to receive legislated funding.

Indeed. The hyper-consolidated legacy media empires were unsatisfied with the free advertising they were getting and convinced Pablo Rodriguez and the Liberals that they should in fact be paid for visibility they were being given.

Yeah and so do the companies that are lining up at the feeding trough. Look at the pathetic state of the Canadian newspaper and TV news empires. They shouldn’t be entitled to advertising dollars if they don’t have a sufficiently enticing product to sell to advertisers.

Plenty of small-scale and digital independent news companies were doing fine. It’s the Postmedias and the Torstars that are complaining, as they cannibalize journalism to feed their corporate acquisitions and stock buybacks.

I’m no big fan of the tech monopolies but this whole Liberal thing has been so fucking Liberal, it’s like a parable.

If you’re able to find time to do a 10 day vipassana retreat, I highly recommend it. It’s free and they provide good food, run entirely by volunteers and donations and they have centers all over the world. I’ve done it a couple times and I know several other folks who have and it is a very compelling experience. I really think the technique they teach is a real cognitive skill, it’s taught from a buddhist perspective but there is no requirement that you adhere to any particular spiritual beliefs.

I’m sure there are other forms of meditation that may or may not be helpful, this is just the one I’ve had positive experiences with.

I hope this doesn’t come across as patronizing but have you tried vipassana or a similar style of meditation? My wife had really severe anxiety and she found this to be the thing that helped her the most.

The entire genre of Drum N Bass is a cover of the Amen break.

Greetings fellow 35 year old.

Many of the songs Nirvana recorded for MTV Unplugged were covers. Love their rendition of In the Pines.

And since you brought up Nine Inch Nails, I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Johnny Cash’s Hurt being a cover. That’s the paradigm example for me.

There’s so much more that bees do, too. Managing hive temperature (as to be exactly 36c), collecting pollen, nectar, propolis, and water, cleaning the cells, removing dead bees, dealing with infections, raising drones…

Bees are cool.

I don’t believe the only options are to do nothing or to use horrific weapons which primary kill civilians and which have been banned by over 100 countries, including major U.S allies who, unlike almost everyone in this thread, are quite critical of the United States for sending these munitions to the battlefield.

If the logic of supporting Ukraine and ending the conflict as quickly as possible supports the use of cluster bombs, why not chemical weapons? Why not nuclear weapons? Where do you draw the line with this logic of escalation?

What I said was that Western nations funneling increasingly deadly weapons into a brutal war might not be the best of all options, and that maybe, maybe, working towards a negotiated settlement that ends the war, even if it means territorial losses for Ukraine, would be better. That is not “saving lives at all costs”, that is not “blaming the victims for not giving up quicker”. The idea that the only options are complete and unambiguous Ukrainian victory or the extermination of everyone in Ukraine, (an argument being made here by people, incidentally, who clearly have no skin in the game), is the logic of armageddon.

The logical gymnastics here are just astonishing. To suggest an alternative to military escalation makes me a tanky. To suggest negotiations makes me an authoritarian. To advocate for peace is to advocate for “might makes right”. This is the logic of nationalism.

I’m sorry, did you just accuse me of being a far-right tanky for suggesting that a negotiated peace might be the best of bad options?

What exactly do you think the word “tanky” means?

It’s interesting how everyone is anti-war until there’s a war, then everyone is suddenly a nationalist. This isn’t a video game, this isn’t a movie.

There is a very real possibility that Ukraine is going to lose this war, and I’ve not heard realistically say this war will be over soon. In which case a plausible argument could be made on humanitarian grounds that a negotiated settlement as quickly as possible is the best of the bad options. But seems not to be what the United States or Ukraine wants, so. It’s really quite fucked up.

Like I don’t know how I would feel if I were Ukrainian. I absolutely think they are on the right side of this. What the Russian soldiers have been doing to Ukraine is despicable. But with cities being destroyed, nuclear power plants at risk, massive oil pipelines being bombed in the ocean, millions of people displaced…

if dropping ten of these prevents the Russians from dropping one of theirs you are coming out ahead in terms of UXO

Hmm. However justified one feels Ukraine’s struggle is, it’s hard to understand how sending more weapons into a brutal war will result in less violence. NATO supplying Ukraine with weapons is not having the effect of shortening the conflict, it’s having the exact opposite effect. You can make an argument that the U.S and its allies should continue to support Ukraine so that Ukraine can hopefully win this conflict, but that’s a different argument than the humanitarian angle of shortening the conflict.

This is a very, very dangerous game that is being played. Russia has nuclear weapons. It’s a real tragedy what’s happening one way or another.

People will always use this logic to justify whatever horrendous crime their “side” is committing.