Señor Small @SenorSmall

x.com/Adexsammy10/st…

@shaunvlog_ @NJMAGA88 Florida has two time zones. The western panhandle is central time.

@shaunvlog_ If you can make it work hit the Great Smoky Mountains. A national park and home to @DollyParton’s @Dollywood and absolutely beautiful.

@FreddyLA7 Vermont is one of the best beer producing regions in the world. Several locations in Burlington are noteworthy, but especially @FHTGburlington for its amazing beer selection (food is great too).

Americans love their Canadian brothers and sisters. They are the greatest allies, friends, and neighbors any country could have. So proud of Buffalo Sabres fans. 🇺🇸🇨🇦 #canada #sabres

@Uber @MassStatePolice Please do something for your disabled ride share passengers at @BostonLogan . Every last driver either refuses or is petrified of dropping off people curbside. Even when we have specifically requested it and have paperwork to prove it. Pickup is worse.

How not to do customer service from @jerseymikes When a confirmed online catering order for 26 people is not fulfilled and screws up your event, don’t bother with corporate for appropriate relief beyond a refund. Told to go to the offending franchise which I’ll never go to again

Emotions that don't exist in English: Sonder (German) The realization that every stranger you pass has a life as vivid and complex as your own Mono no aware (Japanese) The gentle sadness of knowing everything beautiful is temporary and loving it more because it will not last Merak (Serbian) A deep sense of contentment found in small moments. Shared laughter, warm light and feeling fully present Iktsuarpok (Inuit) The restless anticipation that makes you keep checking the door, waiting for someone who has not arrived yet Toska (Russian) A quiet heavy ache with no clear cause. A sadness that settles in and refuses to explain itself Forelsket (Norwegian) The euphoric rush of falling in love, before reality has a chance to interrupt it Kilig (Tagalog, Philippines) The sudden flutter in your chest when affection catches you off guard, a warmth that arrives before logic does Hiraeth (Welsh) A deep longing for a home that no longer exists, or maybe never did. A homesickness for a feeling rather than a place

Perfect example as to why we shouldn’t preserve buildings just because they are old. Most of the time it makes more sense to just demolish and start from scratch. This new build is better in every way.

Aaron Lubeck @aaron_lubeck

5 months ago

Sometimes, infill construction can make a neighborhood look MORE like itself. #architecture #infill #incrementaldevelopment #traditional #design

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Just think, we could have built two miles of high speed rail for what this is going to cost us

@sovietvisuals How did the story end?

@nickgillespie @kmele @RandPaul @mcmoynihan @wethefifth @SenRandPaul This post prompted an immediate subscription.

Let's talk about the opening part of this statement: "nobody is illegal on stolen land." We can break it down, but we should also know what it is. What we are looking at is Chinese-style political sloganeering called "tifa" (提法). Communist communications ever since Mao took over China (and the CCP before that) almost always follow this kind of formulation, called 提法 (tífǎ), which literally translates as "watchwords" or "slogans." Literally, it means to lift up or present or highlight the core message or political principle in play through a charged slogan. The purpose of the sloganeering is actually to do a kind of political engineering through carefully selected and weaponized words that are easily memorable and that hijack the critical thinking faculties of the people who both hear and repeat them so they'll advance the Party line. You can think of tifa quite literally as a form of "discourse engineering" with the intent of doing political engineering or political warfare more or less by hijacking people's brains through mystifying slogans. (Mystification is like a more powerful form of confusion, akin to having been put under a spell.) In his amazing analysis of the CCP in the early 1950s, just after Mao took power (in October 1949), psychologist Robert Jay Lifton referred to what amounts to tifa as "thought-terminating clichés." That is, they're slogans (or clichés) that have the power to turn off your ability to think clearly about what's being said and implied and to just go along with the political messaging rather than to question it. The mechanisms of these political warfare tools are mystification and rhetorical entrapment. Mystification is overriding critical thinking with carefully constructed falsehoods and framing. Rhetorical entrapment occurs when there's no easy way to disagree with the framing (think, "black lives matter" or "Christ is king" (as the Groypers use it), both of which are examples of tifa). The mystification part is a process of using carefully constructed falsehoods presented as truisms that undermine the critical thinking process. That is, the statements can be seen as "obviously" true in a particular way that disguises how they are false in another way. For example, black lives obviously matter, but supporting the organization is something people should not do. The statement "nobody is illegal on stolen land" is very sophisticated as tifa because it contains three mystifications in just six words: 1) "Nobody is illegal" confuses the distinction between being a human being of basic human dignity and being a citizen of a country or legal visitor there; 2) "Stolen land" confuses the legitimacy of the country in question; 3) The idea of being able to be legal or illegal if the country itself is not legal because it is "stolen land." This is distinct from the idea of the land itself being stolen because it conceptually bridges the concept of legality and legitimacy of the country. As you can tell, breaking down and explaining the failures of all three parts of this mystification (demystification) is both challenging and exhausting, and it takes so much space that most people will not engage with it due to its length (which will be three orders of magnitude greater (5000-6000 words) than the tifa itself (6 words) to explicate fully and two orders of magnitude greater (600-800 words) just to barely articulate). Raise these by another order of magnitude of effort or two for the argument that will follow the attempt to demystify. The point is that to fully engage a six-word tifa through explanation, discussion, and argument to try to break someone free of it might take 50-100 thousand words worth of effort by the time all is said and done. (Another example: "trans women are women"; look how much effort that one has taken!) This example of tifa also contains two rhetorical traps that derive from the first two mystifications: A) It dares critics to say that people themselves are illegal (illegitimate) because of a political circumstance, thus replacing a legalistic fact with a moral assertion, one that is difficult to litigate without considerable expertise and that might still lose on emotional appeal ("empathy"); B) It lures critics into litigating the legality of the establishment of the nation in question, which undermines the justified presumption of authority in the national concept. These rhetorical traps not only put critics in a bad, weak, and likely losing position from the start, but they also invite adopting a reactionary or chauvinistic stance as the only possible reply (e.g., "we aren't colonizers; we're conquerors" or "illegals are illegitimate"). This feeds the strategic principle of "your target's reaction is your real action" upon which these manipulative movements gain the most ground. In short, tifa like this hijacks the capacity to understand the situation correctly in a succinct, repeatable phrase even Billie Eilish can repeat in about a second and a half (confuses and mystifies) while arranging a sophisticated psychological and public opinion trap that is mostly lose-lose-lose for those who would object. Notice that through the application of tifa as a form of political warfare (public opinion warfare, specifically), any idiot (including the average Billie Eilish fan) can ensnare any good-faith actor in this very sophisticated political warfare device even without understanding in the slightest how it works, dragging them into either confusion or arguments meant to be fought on losing ground for the good-faith critic. You don't need a sophisticated political warfare operator to make this happen. Furthermore, notice that any idiot who falls for the tifa here will actually repeat it, making the slogan campaign viral so that it is mostly being fought out not by experts but by masses of laypeople who know there's a fight but who aren't properly equipped to deal with it. This is why it is an example of "public opinion warfare" as one of the CCP's "three warfares" doctrine styles. As summarized by the RAND Corporation: "Tifa have four identifying characteristics: (1) They are politically laden and stated verbatim, (2) they extend along a clear line of authority, (3) they are distributed to official party organs, and (4) they characterize or resolve a dialectical contradiction between competing ideas in the CCP." Engaging with this kind of slogan, as we must, brings critics into a "dialectical space" that's roughly on the level of the average idiot who can argue emotively or even just repeat the slogan as a kind of verbal cudgel (for those watching) rather than genuinely engaging. We might call this the "Reeeeee! Effect," and we all know it works very well. Tifa creates the "Reeeeee! Effect." Since the late 1960s, almost all "New Leftist" activism in the West runs on a Maoist-Marxist engine, including the heavy use of tifa sloganeering as a form of rhetorical and political warfare. Most of what we engage in today with their B.S. rhetoric is tifa. So these "thought-terminating clichés" (tifa) are very powerful and sophisticated political warfare tools that we all encounter every day. The only way to beat them is to identify them for the manipulations they are and explain them as best we can so that people are more likely to identify them and less likely to fall for them, and also to help people out of the ones they're already caught in and under the spell of.

Breaking911 @Breaking911

6 months ago

Billie Eilish at the Grammys: "Nobody is illegal on stolen land. We need to keep fighting and speaking up. Our voices do matter...f*ck ICE."

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This strip literally happened to me today. Kids asked me to play in the snow with them, I was warm and comfortable and busy doing something that needed doing, so I said no. I actually remembered the strip and said "You know what? Let's go out and play!" No regrets

@farhip @TinaRafa65 @washingtonpost He could fund a doubling of staff. Should he do that? How about 3x?

You stupid, arrogant, foolish man. All it takes is one azzwhole like that to destroy your life.

@mattyglesias Do tell.

@justindross @roelofbotha @rabois Playbook

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explains the U.S. Constitution. 🇺🇸 🦅 ⚖️