• 8 Posts
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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 21st, 2025

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  • That’s how I was taught to debate.

    Unless your positions are mutually exclusive, it’s often possible for both parties to justify their position.

    From my experience, the zero-sum I’m-right-you’re-wrong style of debate started when we started televising them. You may disagree, but I think debate was more productive when we weren’t incentivized to score points on each other.

    If that’s Hegelian dialectics, then I prefer that to what you call debate.


  • It was half-facetious, but I think a lot of conservatives hear the word “empathy” and think of means this. (Watch the first 60 seconds and tell me you didn’t cringe.)

    Empathize is a word. It means" to feel or experience empathy", or “to be understanding of”.

    When I say Charlie Kirk was arguing in bad faith, I’m saying he’s he was pretending only the first definition exists and that it sounds like the Jubilee video, when most people use the second definition in real life.





  • Hollow Knight rewards patience and learning. Most enemies and bosses have clear attack patterns. When you get hit, you’ll usually have a safe zone or period where you can heal.

    Except for Primal Aspids.

    Silksong rewards having more patience and faster learning. A lot of the frustrating areas in Silksong actively deny you safe zones and periods. A lot of the frustrating enemies in Silksong will remind you of the Primal Aspids.



  • On the one hand, I think everyone hates that person who pulls the “I’m an empath” card.

    On the other hand, “empathy isn’t real” is a bad faith attack on the concept of trying to emphasize or even understand people that are different from you.

    That’s what I got from every Charlie Kirk debate I ever saw: a machine gun of bad faith counterarguments.

    Debate is about understanding where the other person is coming from, identifying weaknesses in each other’s position, and working towards shared truths.

    Since he couldn’t empathize, Charlie couldn’t debate. So he went with the modern debate strategy: I only win when someone else is losing.












  • In this far-reaching foray into LGBTQ+ history, activists and academics McNeill, Valentine, and Buchanan fill every day of the year with factoids highlighting people and moments that have shaped the fight for queer liberation. Running from January 1 to December 31, each day features the anniversary of at least one historical event related to LGBTQ+ rights, described in varying lengths from one sentence to one page. The events traverse centuries, from a 1365 Italian man tortured to death for homosexuality to the Trump administration’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislative activity in the first quarter of 2025. They include snippets on births and deaths of queer activists and famous people rumored to be queer, passage and repeal of anti-LGBTQ+ laws, and publications of notable works of queer theory. Despite the “do crime” title, crimes committed against LGBTQ+ people end up more frequently represented. The nature of the historical record of queer lives makes this likely unavoidable, but the effect is nonetheless enervating, especially as the calendar structure loses any arc of progress or connection these queer narratives might otherwise create. Still, readers will find this engrossing enough for periodic perusal or daily reflection.

    Make it one of those tear-off calendars.