Aurora Not Roaring

Turn on subtitles. Interview, but no performance. I’ve never listened to much spoken Norwegian but a lot of words are obviously related to English ones. Pitch-accent language!

She has the same attitude towards death that I do. The other dude on the show is completely fascinated with her. It’s kind of cute.

Not Free Agent

This is what feminism has been moving towards, though, in the last decade or so — the idea that women do not have agency and must be treated like recalcitrant adolescents. Note that this treatment is all by feminists, not non-feminists.

The “protection from harm” canard is of late trotted out at every opportunity to justify a neo-Victorian assertion of the complete fragility of women. It’s really demeaning and insulting. At least, I would be insulted and feel demeaned and devalued were I a woman.

Shut The Fridge

Despite all the propaganda you hear, most British, Canadians, French are very happy with their health care systems and are absolutely appalled when they hear how the American health care system “works.” Like, they think you are lying about it, or at least joshing them.

Then they realize it’s all real and react about how the woman (and others) in the video does.

Compy Not 386

Same, but it looks like that’ll never change. Computers are strange as for a while we had a common, nearly-necessary device that more than half the population was cognitively incapable of using. We’re getting away from general purpose computers now, though that’s not the main reason. But it does mean that the droolers don’t have to deal with their complexity any longer.

Debt Is Money And Vice Versa

I will ask a question someone once asked that is still relevant: “Who the fuck does the world owe all that debt to, Jupiter?”

Debt and money are tools. We can choose how to use them — or to break them. There is no natural law here; merely what humans have created.

Pola

Many technologies are getting worse now: the internet, operating systems, browsers, even basic infrastructure tech. There is no one explanation, but a lot of it is monopoly and pretend “free” markets.

Fictive

Figuring out which fictions to most ardently adopt and believe in will occupy the next 20-30 years of the human experience. Humans can’t exist without the irrational, without guiding narratives, and most of these are not and cannot be based in fact.

I hope we choose wisely.

Fire and Remember

True. They are the only ones with any valid battlefield tactics and awareness. “Just charging in” might look cool on the screen but that’s not how real battles are fought.

Even in books this happens. For instance, a milfic book I am reading now has an armored train as part of the plot. Some combat aircraft attack it directly, despite it having extensive and effective air defense, instead of doing the logical fucking thing of blowing the tracks all to hell in front of and behind the train. Do that, it’s not going anywhere, and then you send a few JDAMs its way at your leisure without risking valuable low-flying aircraft.

But it’s way more dramatic to have the A-10s attack it directly.

In another scene in the novel, three A-10s engage in a dogfight with two SU-57s and win (destroying one and causing the other to flee). No, just no. That would never happen. Never. First of all, there’s basically no dogfighting anymore. Second, an A-10 against an SU-57 is like a kindergartner fighting Bruce Lee. The kindergartner would get punted into the sun. (The A-10 is a great combat aircraft, probably the best ground-attack aircraft ever made, but it is not a dogfighter.)

Also in the same book the author has the A-10 using afterburners. The A-10 uses the General Electric TF34 engine which has zero afterburner capability.

The book, overall, isn’t bad but it’s full of clichรฉs and it sacrifices accuracy for drama a bit too often.

Empire Of None

Oh, you don’t know “progressives,” then. A lot of them believe that dating anyone outside your race (if you are white) is “imperialism” and bad because of some notional power imbalance.

We used to call that belief “racism” but the progs have made racism great again by re-branding it as protection from harm and resisting imperialism.