• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I remember when gay people couldn’t get married. I remember when I never saw a fellow trans person on TV who wasn’t a fictional depiction of a serial murderer played by a cis guy. I remember when we almost never had cops caught on camera so their brutality was an open secret.

    But ‘steady’ is a bit inaccurate.

    I’ve seen actual people with family from Gaza online say that they want Biden re-elected because he may suck balls, but Trump will outright throw protestors into concentration camps.

    Like… Trump outright said he’s bringing the next Reich. And loves this murdering Palestine people business. So yeah, this is a trolley problem where on one track you run over some people, and on the next track you… run over those same people plus extra. So in this context, saying you’re going to refuse to switch tracks to save anyone whatsoever is indeed kinda demanding perfection in a situation where the only options are horrifically flawed and no one really wants to do them, but if we had wanted to really do something about it, we all shoulda fucking voted in the primaries.
    That, and also maybe this whole thing could have been avoided if Sanders hadn’t made some guffaws. I know he successfully pissed me off and all he needed to do was not go talk to a talk show host with known transphobia and that painful comment about Black southerners. Who knew it turned out that asking Sanders not to support transphobes was demanding perfection?111? /s




  • PugJesus wasn’t saying there would be no murders of minorities if Trump loses. They phrased things poorly, but what they meant was minorities are going to be thrown into concentration camps which is what the fascist nazis did.
    Sarcasm implies you mean the opposite of what you said, generally:
    ‘Fascism is when there are murders’
    Yes. That is not the sole thing about fascism, but murdering everyone not in your personal social group is kind of a big deal in fascism. You making this statement sarcastic does not reflect well on you or your ability to wield the English language. If you wanted it to come across the way you wanted it to come across, you should have said ‘Fascism is about when there are murders and nothing else’.
    However, this would have revealed a deep misunderstanding of what your opponent was actually implying, and, ironically, strawmanning them.




  • The thing about his movie is that he was like, almost okay. Iron Man I was about him learning that selling weapons = bad. He could have continued his moral development.
    Instead, we got him fighting Captain America over a very stupid implementation of ‘oversight’ (coming from the guy who refuses to let gov. oversee his iron man development), being creepy to some random boy he just met (actually twice - first Peter and then some kid I don’t remember; in a better set of movies I don’t think Peter would be very thrilled to realize Iron Man was advocating for Peter to get outed in a national registry), and having a snit fit about how he doesn’t want to help Unsnap people who died because he personally is OK with his future with his daughter who may or may not be a robot he built to mime having humanity.

    What makes him really insufferable for me is his fans who think Captain America is EVIL for daring to snub poor Tony, and that Tony should go date Loki (no I’m not kidding; while I am happy with Loki being queer, I really can’t see the Marvel Universe Tony being a good date for, well, anyone ever, nor Loki being a good date until he works out his genocidal tendency issues at which point he threatens to become alas a much less interesting character).


  • As someone who has actually tried to get government assistance, I suspect it was removed for being misleading, not because they actually believe there is ‘no healthcare in the US’. Don’t strawman people.
    Poor people often cannot get healthcare, such as via lack of documentation, lack of means to actually get to the places they need to go, etc. In my case, the government invented a completely fictional job for me that I did not have and declared it meant I was not eligible, and gave me a time limit to respond that expired before I had the actual chance to respond. The window for applications is a very short time period and I live with people who frequently do not give me my mail before winging it some place random, so it can take me a week to find my own mail.
    Someone living without a mailbox would have had zero opportunity: in that regard, I was ‘lucky’.






  • So, the Higgs is, if I recall right, sensitive to the masses of other particles, and I don’t think this has much to do with gravity per say (gravity just reacts to mass-energy to curve spacetime) but the fact that Higgs can decay to other particles and also feels the ‘Higgs’ effect/field of which the Higgs boson is kind of like a left over. The Higgs mass can thus ‘blow up’ from contributions from other particles, because in a quantum field a particle will potentially fluctuate to several particles and then back again, and of course, you can’t decay into something if you are less energetic than it. [edit: although that might not be important, if ‘virtual particles’ heavier than you vanish before anything can measure them. actually now that I recall I think it was mainly virtual particle contributions that mattered here.]

    I very hazily recall that it is possible to have some mass from non-Higgs effect sources, for instance quarks binding to each other contributes most of a proton’s mass rather than the Higgs effect, so the Higgs boson could have /some/ mass even if we turned off all the Higgs bits except for the boson itself, but my impression was that it was majority from Higgs interactions, from which the Higgs boson is relatively ‘unprotected’ from being ballooned up. A counterpart particle can provide counterterms to help keep mass low, like a seesaw, but the standard model Higgs has no such counterpart unless you introduce something extra.


  • Neutralinos and squarks are entirely theoretical counterparts as part of an extension to the standard model, which were expected to be observed at the LHC as ‘natural’ but weren’t and we have no concrete reason to think they exist; the Standard Model of normal matter still reigns supreme. However if there are really dark stars it does lend some actual support, and would be the first actual evidence.
    Basically the idea is there might be a symmetry between bosons (spin 1) and fermions (spin 1/2), a ‘supersymmetry’, so that every known (fundamental) particle has a secret doppleganger. I vaguely recall one motivation was providing counter-terms, as if you add more matter it can blow up the Higgs, but the irony is the Higgs is fine if you just… Don’t add any dark matter, like the asymptotic safety program pointed out and actually garnered a prediction of the Higgs mass with before anyone measured it. And everyone argued it would be more ‘natural’ if the new particles showed up at LHC energies. They didn’t.
    Personally I’m betting against it; supersymmetry has just actively had predictions working against it so far. The particles would end up introducing more parameters than they solve.


  • Extinguish the left is very much an attainable goal in their view. They almost stole the presidency in an insurrection. They were literately going to murder Mike Pence. The next time around we might have a more competent conservative president who manufactures an emergency and then we are literately fucked.
    Something like ‘murder a fuckton of people’ doesn’t need an easily definable goal post: that there are always more people to murder who don’t quite meet your standards is a FEATURE, not a bug.