I’m seeing a lot of comments taking this literally or saying why didn’t he do this before –

You all realise this is a very powerful symbolic gesture, right? This is a diplomatic move, not a literal one. The president of the US would never strike at this time in this kind of proxy war, and this is the closest ‘fuck you’ he can issue at Russia (which, again, would not be said aloud).

There’s nothing the US president could do to poke the Russian bear –other than escalate it to a hot war – other than this. This is an outgoing diplomatic move, and that is all.

You did it! Thanks so much, you’re the best! ❤️

Okay, your comments are clearly in bad faith and I’m done wasting time on you.

No, I’m old enough to know the difference.

If you’re suggesting people literally carrying Nazi flags aren’t Nazis, you’re delusional.

I’m a pacifist, but punching Nazis has been self defence for 80+ years.

Tagged. ;)

Oh hell yes.

Thank you! Voyager is awesome.

e: Ooh – I just noticed the user vote counts are colour coded, too. Nice touch!

Pence didn’t refuse trump because he’s principled – he explored everything he could think of to go along with trump, even calling Dan Quayle to ask for more options:

"Over and over, Pence asked if there was anything he could do.

"‘Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away,’ Quayle told him.

"Pence pressed again.

"‘You don’t know the position I’m in,’ he said, according to the authors.

“‘I do know the position you’re in,’ Quayle responded. ‘I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That’s all you do. You have no power.’”

Source: How Dan Quayle saved democracy. Yes, really.

It’s not necessarily too late. There’s a nonsurgical method to regrow your foreskin with a bit of time and patience, and several companies sell devices for the purpose.

Here’s a video showing the process. (NSFW content about 1/3 of the way through)

Aren’t prophets basically god using a VPN?

Next up: Congress and/or the Supreme Court overturns the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds it compromises national security and hurts their feelings.

Okay, but what the literal fuck.

Someone with a shred of ethics on this ethics committee better fucking leak this.

That’s not the reason, though. Imperfect witnesses are quite often at the heart of criminal cases – co-conspirators, jailhouse informants, etc. If that was an obstacle, no mobsters or drug lords would ever have been convicted.

The real reason is cronyism and political privilege.

Interesting thought, but there are a few problems with this:

• The antichrist was supposed to be a genius military tactician. Trump isn’t a genius anything.
• The biblical Armageddon wasn’t meant to be a prediction of the distant future, but was prophesied to happen within the lifetime of the original apostles, so 2,000 years ago.
• The general scholarly consensus is that the Nero was meant to be the antichrist, and that the whole story was descriptive rather than prescriptive.

It’s a fun theory, though.

What about caring for the elderly and disabled? We see anthropological evidence of many behaviours that can only be explained by compassion and empathy, some of which would have actually detracted from security.

The notion that the early formation of societies was based on security rather than empathy is outdated. Compassion has many evolutionary advantages, especially in primate species where offspring are born vulnerable. It’s clearly evident in other primates who live in groups (or ‘societies’), as a driving force of cooperation and group cohesion.

Here’s a recent paper (2022) by Penny Spikins, PhD at the University of York, Department of Archaeology, that explores how compassion shaped early human evolution and the formation of societies: The Evolutionary Basis for Human Empathy, Compassion and Generosity.

And here’s another from 2011 by Goetz et al that explores in detail the evolutionary advantages of compassion: Compassion: An Evolutionary Analysis and Empirical Review.

Those papers are both fascinating reads, and I highly recommend them for a deeper understanding of why and how empathy is crucial to our success as a species.

e: a word

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Millions of years, likely. The whole reason we’re successful is because our pre-human ancestors were empathetic and cooperative enough to build societies.

We see those same traits in many other primates, and they’re not something it makes sense to evolve, lose, and evolve again. Those traits predate us.

Language almost certainly predates us, since we see it not only in other primates, but in non-primate species, too. And based on the humour we see in many animals, you can bet we were making dick jokes nearly out of the gate.

That’s amazing! But fuck it for putting naked Alex Jones in my head. I was hoping to sleep peacefully tonight.

Kinky.