To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand South Park. The humor is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of pop culture satire, most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer’s head. There’s also Stan’s nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation — his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realize that they’re not just funny—they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike South Park truly ARE idiots—of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in Cartman’s existential catchphrase “Screw you guys, I’m going home,” which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev’s Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Trey Parker’s genius unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools… how I pity them. 😂 And yes by the way, I DO have a South Park tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It’s for the ladies’ eyes only—and even they have to demonstrate that they’re within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.

Probably here before the author redacted it for being too embarrassing.

wtf I love Trump now

This is probably not the most comprehensive view of the subject, but here: https://archive.org/stream/HumanRightsInTheSovietUnion/page/n84/mode/1up

Oh wow, that is awful. That reminds me of a time when I was having a walk through my neighborhood and I touched the rusty top of somebody’s mailbox out of boredom. As I was walking away, I heard somebody yelling at me and telling me to get back there. He asked me if I took something, then he looked inside of his mailbox, asked me if I understood that that was a felony, and yelled at me to never do that again. When I angrily arrived home, I yelled the hardest that I ever had in my entire life in front of everybody.

This very costly underestimination sounds oddly familiar…

The turning point? Not really. The Axis’s fate was already sealed in December 1941, when it failed the Battle of Moscow and the highly anticipated blitzsieg never happened. The Axis’s defeat at Stalingrad certainly helped the Soviets, but the decisive battle was earlier than that.

I’ve really been slacking off lately with /c/capitalismindecay. The main reason for that is that I have been focused on teaching myself Judezmo, which was easier for me to do from my smartphone than accessing writings on history was. I know that there is no ‘rule’ saying that I need to update that subcommunity daily, but I managed to keep at that for so long that I don’t want to disappoint somebody by taking another break despite having a working computer now.

Seeing the title I thought that you meant to write ‘$770 million’ or ‘$770 thousand’. Boy was I wrong.

Having no university or college experience, I cannot say to much on this. Nevertheless…

I don’t know how to use semicolons

Using semicola is actually really easy. Most of the time, you just use them to replace (coordinating) conjunctions such as ‘and’, ‘because’, ‘but’, and ‘so’. So instead of writing

The syllabus lists a final exam on the grading portion but it was not detailed in class whatsoever nor in the syllabus itself so I might have to ask him about it.

You can also write

The syllabus lists a final exam on the grading portion; it was not detailed in class whatsoever nor in the syllabus itself; I might have to ask him about it.

Another use is separating items in descriptive lists, when a regular comma might cause confusion. A basic list looks like this:

The three main Axis powers were Germany, Italy, and Japan.

A descriptive list looks like this:

The three main Axis powers were Germany, which was called the German Reich; Italy, which was called the Kingdom of Italy; and Japan, which was called the Empire of Japan.

I hope that this helps!

The idea of national unity was reinforced by the attitude of U.S. imperialism. Once they had entered the war, the U.S. government had the intention of becoming the dominant power in the world. They became the dominant partner in an alliance with the British empire in exchange for their economic aid in the dark days following the fall of France and the massive defeat at Dunkirk. A cheaply purchased servility that survives to this day.

The demand for the unconditional surrender of Germany, which was the official position of the Allies, was also born out of the U.S. government’s desire for global hegemony. One reason for the interminable delay in organising the second front in Normandy was the possibility of exhausting the USSR so that it would not be a competitor in the post-war world. In the event, when the Normandy landings took place, the Soviet advance into Germany made the U.S. government fearful that the Russians could win by themselves and that this would give Stalin too much influence in Europe.

In these circumstances, the last thing that the U.S. government wanted was a re-emergent French imperialism. Of course, de Gaulle and Roosevelt mutually detested each other, but this feeling was largely based in their imperialist rivalry. So, de Gaulle needed the resistance to give him a place at the table among the victorious allies, but at the same time had to make sure that the national rebellion did not flow over into a social revolution. This explains the reluctance to send arms drops to the FTP while endeavouring to maintain friendly relations.

The intention of the U.S. government to impose a military administration on France proved not to be possible in the face of the reality of the resistance. One can imagine the reaction in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, after four years of [Axis] occupation, if they had been confronted with an attempt to assert U.S. control.

(Source.)

Is it just me, or is pinball an overpriced hobby?

Doing a brief search online, it looks like the average pinball table is more than twice the cost of a gaming PC, and even simulators like Pinball XF and Pinball Arcade have DLC that is overpriced for what you get: typically $10 for a handful of tables, which sounds trivial until you notice that purchasing the entire DLC library can cost hundreds of dollars, which is just obscene for one computer game.

I guess that somebody can excuse the physical tables by saying that they’re made for establishments in mind, not ordinary households. I can accept that. Although you have to travel pretty far if there are specific tables that you want to try, and public tables can come with other inconveniences such as waiting for your turn.

There are some low-budget alternatives besides simulators and public tables, such as portable pinball tables (I had one based on Small Soldiers when I was little), though I am guessing that those are unpopular with adults. In any case, it’s hard for me to imagine a low-income person being passionate about pinball in general. Even collecting LEGO sets would be a cheaper hobby.

Am I the only one who assumed that it exploded just because it was a Cybertruck?

This is what I wrote to them several hours ago:

A friend is interested in donating to you, but they want to know what exactly you are doing to the money, asking me ‘how can i find out if they’re not just using donating to line their pockets or spending it ineffectively like the [U.S. Democratic Party does]?’ What should I tell my friend?

The reply:

Thank you and your friend for all your support and willingness to continue supporting us. We really appreciate your message and understand the concern of your friend. We are a very small team of only 4 people who work part time. All of us are refusers and together we spent around 3 years in prison for the cause, so we are a very dedicated team that the cause is very close to our hearts. Because we are a small organization, we are evaluating our work continuously and making changes if needed in order to make sure that we make the most impact with the donation that we receive. I would love to have a meeting with you and your friend, get to know each other, discuss your friend’s concerns and our work. I can also make sure that if your friend would like to donate for a specific part of our work, it will go to that. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Best,
Mattan

I finally have a working computer. Now I can return to making high-quality articles on modern history.

Modern Hebrew is essentially a Herzlian invention, with the grammar and other aspects modified to look more European, and according to Jewish tradition Hebrew is a sacred language that is no longer to be employed for casual purposes (otherwise it loses its specialty). The Herzlians threw this rule out the window, probably because it was the only language that all Jews had in common, and now it’s become something that many Palestinians associate with their oppressors. It is especially infuriating for anticolonial Jews to see their literary language used as hate speech against the innocent.

Speaking Modern Hebrew does not make anyone a Herzlian, especially if you want to understand what the settlers are saying, but personally I would prefer that it be retired in favor of other Jewish languages and dialects. They could really use the attention. Hebrew should stay a ceremonial and literary language, more or less analogous to Latin.

@[email protected] is a good person to consult on this subject.

If someone told me that the thumbnail was a porcupine, I’d believe them.

I had forgotten just how severe the government interference was. (Somewhat odd, too, given Wales’s propertarianism.)

In 2020, it was discovered that the Scots language Wikipedia was almost solely edited and managed by a 19-year-old US citizen who did not speak a word of Scots from the time he was 12. He also used his administrative powers to block others from correcting his vandalism.[18]

Holy cow, that is almost upsetting to me since I think that Scots is a very interesting language.

a group of committed Wikipedia editors on the English instancce have been promoting a skewed version of the history of the Holocaust that is touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust, and bolsters stereotypes about Jews.

This is a sad reminder that my work on informing others about Fascism remains necessary, as very few people in general talk about the Polish anticommunists’ collaboration with the Fascist empires. I can understand why many of us are uncomfortable approaching a topic where the subject is simultaneously a victim as well as a victimizer (like the Jewish Kapos), but this sort of evasion is motivated by something less innocent than that.

Wikipedia blocks the IP addresses of VPNs and other proxies, preventing users from mainland China from editing. […] Wikipedia often deletes articles about topics outside of the West. For example, Chinese Wikipedia deleted an article about the Xuzhou urban expressway while keeping an article about a 200-meter-long street in Hong Kong.

The hypocrisy is almost palpable.

The Wikimedia Foundation collects over $100 million per year even though only $10 million is needed to keep Wikipedia running. It raises money by lying that Wikipedia needs more money to avoid shutting down.[10]

Okay, now I definitely don’t feel guilty about ignoring their begging. These paskudnyaks are almost as disgusting as common scammers.

Should I feel guilty for refusing to donate to Wikipedia?

The regular contributors tend to be jerks and the quality of content is notoriously variable, but the main reason that I keep ignoring their begging is that I suspect that Wikipedia already receives substantial donations from government agencies, since they’ve meddled in it before. There is no way that they’d let it go without a fight. So I think that the Wikimedia Foundation is only begging for donations so that government agencies don’t have to bail it out.

Connect peripherals. Connect remaining wires like lego and send it.

Oh. I never thought about that before.