(by @SarcasticRover On Twitter, I Think)

Why does the left - rather than the right - accuse even reasonable and nuanced moderates/classical liberals of #enlightenedcentrism and false equivalencies?

If in the middle of the Red Scare, you barged into the House Un-American Activities Committee and shouted “I THINK BOTH CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM HAVE SOME GOOD POINTS AND WE SHOULD TREAT BOTH OF THEM FAIRLY!”, Joe McCarthy would probably view you as an enemy, and any communists hidden in the audience would probably view you as a potential ally or at least as not their top problem right now. Shout the same thing in Red Square in Moscow, and you’d get the opposite results.

I think a better question is how scared we should be #enlightenedcentrism is an insult that people try to avoid. I think Sacred Principles As Exhaustible Resources remains an underappreciated point, and I think we’re already past the point where “reason”, “nuance”, “listening to both sides”, and “trying to be unbiased” are considered enemy tribal signals and automatic proof of bad faith by a big segment of the population. This was avoidable, but thanks to a bunch of bad actors poisoning the epistemic commons, we failed to avoid it.

WHAT

I can’t stop watching this 😂

Our civilisation will be known to future archaeologists as the “Little Plastic Piece People”.

i typed “horg” into the search bar and found this site which taxonomically categorizes those little plastic clips you find on bread bags

honestly I wish I could dedicate myself to being a giant fucking inconvenience as much as the phantom of the opera did

A GUIDE FOR YOUNG LADIES ENTERING THE SERVICE OF THE FAIRIES, by Rosamund Hodge

I.

This is the lie they will use to break you: no one else has ever loved this way before.

II.

Choose wisely which court you serve. Light or Dark, Summer or Winter, Seelie or Unseelie: they have many names, but the pith of the choice is this: a poisoned flower or a knife in the dark?

(The difference is less and more than you might think.)

Of course, this is only if you go to them for the granting of a wish: to save your father, sister, lover, dearest friend. If you go to get someone back from them, or—most foolish of all—because you fell in love with one of them, you will have no choice at all. You must go to the ones that chose you.

III.

Be kind to the creature that guards your door. Do not mock its broken, bleeding face.

It will never help you in return. But I assure you, someday you will be glad to know that you were kind to something once.

IV.

Do not be surprised how many other mortal girls are there within the halls. The world is full of wishing and of wanting, and the fairies love to play with human hearts.

You will meet all kinds: the terrified ones, who used all their courage just getting there. The hopeful ones, who think that love or cleverness is enough to get them home. The angry ones, who see only one way out. The cold ones, who are already half-fairy.

I would tell you, Do not try to make friends with any of them, but you will anyway.

V.

Sooner or later (if you serve well, if you do not open the forbidden door and let the monster eat you), they will tell you about the game.

Summer battles Winter, Light battles Dark. This is the law of the world. And on the chessboard of the fairies, White battles Black.

In the glory of this battle, the pieces that are brave and strong may win their heart’s desire.

VI.

You already have forgotten how the mortal sun felt upon your face. You already know the bargain that brought you here was a lie.

If you came to save your sick mother, you fear she is dead already. If you came to free your captive sister, your fear she will be sent to Hell for the next tithe. If you came for love of an elf-knight, you are broken with wanting him, and yet he does not seem to know you.

Say yes.

Keep reading

Miss this dear soul so much

𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘺 𝘣𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘩𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘻𝘺 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘻! (𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝟸𝟶𝘵𝘩, 𝟷𝟿𝟽𝟼)❤️🎂

Continuation from this post: some other “these events happened at about the same time or close together in history” things:

- The French Revolution happened shortly after the American Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution happened shortly after the French Revolution, and the big wave of revolution that freed Latin America from Spanish control happened shortly after the Haitian Revolution. I think this wasn’t a coincidence: these revolutions were connected!

- The first civilizations arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia at the end of the great drying of the Sahara and Arabia. Again, I think this wasn’t a coincidence! The drying climate meant people had to rely more on big labor-intensive irrigation works, which meant that cooperation and coordination on a large scale became more important. The great drying probably drove refugees into the Nile valley and the lands around the Tigris and Euphrates, increasing the population density of those regions. This would have meant even more reliance on labor-intensive large-scale irrigation, and also those extra people would have helped staff the work-gangs, work-shops, and armies of the new kings. The influx of refugees probably also meant a mixing of cultures, which probably stimulated technological, cultural, and institutional innovation.

- The peopling of the Americas and the first experiments with grain farming in the Middle East might have been happening at about the same time.

- The Norman conquest of England was within living memory at the time of the First Crusade.

- The Classical Maya period was 250-900 CE, roughly coinciding with the late Roman Empire and the Dark Ages in Europe. The collapse of the Classical Maya centers was during the 900s, about a century or two after Charlemagne’s time (IIRC the 900s CE is around the end of the Danelaw period in England).

- The moai (the big heads) of Easter Island aren’t ancient; they were built during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period.

- New Zealand was peopled during the Middle Ages, IIRC some centuries after the peopling of Iceland. New Zealand was one of the last lands on Earth to be peopled.

- Lady Murasaki lived in the late 900s and early 1000s CE; a little before the Norman conquest of England. To me Heian-period and pre-Heian Japan feels like the Bronze Age, but it’s from a completely different period of history; it existed in the same world as Vikings and Charlemagne and the Tang Dynasty; I think that’s interesting. Speaking of Japanese history, the Japanese warring states period and the height of classic samurai feudalism was the 1400s and 1500s.

- Australia was peopled at least 30,000 years before the Americas, and Homo sapiens expansion into northern Eurasia seems to have taken much longer than Homo sapiens peopling of Australia. There’s a lesson in this: cold seems to have been a more daunting barrier than ocean. That makes sense in a way: the Homo sapiens out-of-Africa migrants were likely tropical/subtropical coast-dwellers, and they could have just followed the tropical/subtropical southern coast of Asia all the way to Java (which you could have walked to from Asia back then because sea levels were lower), never leaving warm coastal regions. After that they would have needed just one big innovation to reach Australia: sea-worthy boats. Adapting to the cold northern regions of ice age Eurasia would have required more radical changes to their tool-kit and lifestyle. I think something similar happened in the Americas: there are surprisingly old signs of human presence in South America, and I suspect what happened is the first Americans were fisher-whaler-beachcomber people who lived on a stretch of ice-free coast between the Pacific and the ice age North American glaciers, and as they expanded they mostly just followed the coast south, and they kept doing that until some of them reached Tierra del Fuego within maybe a few centuries. If an alien visited Earth around 13,500 BCE I think they might have found a few tens of thousands of people living along the west coast of the Americas from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego and the rest of the Americas still almost uninhabited (maybe there’d be a few thousand people living in the inland hills of California and the inland jungles of Central America, but that’d be about it). Only the most adventurous early Americans moved inland, where they’d have to survive without the resources of the sea and the beach, and became the Clovis People and other inland early American hunter-gatherer cultures. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were humans living along the shores of the Straight of Magellan before there were humans living in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

A somewhat different but related thing: communicating the sheer length of ancient Egyptian history:

- Sargon the Great gets called the first empire-builder, but I think that title really should belong to Narmer, or whoever the first Pharaoh of a unified Egypt was. We often don’t think of Narmer as an empire-builder for the same reason we often don’t think of Qin Shi Huangdi’s great empire as an empire: the empire was so successful and enduring that it eventually started to look like a natural fact of human cultural geography. You know your empire has really succeeded when most people don’t think of it as an empire! Sargon the Great lived about 800 years after Narmer, so the difference in time between them is similar to the difference in time between Julius Caesar and Charlemagne.

- The Great Pyramids were built in the 2500s and early 2400s BCE, about 500 years after Narmer’s reign. This was early in Egyptian history! I think it’s interesting that the Egyptians did this huge construction project early in their history and never did anything like that again. I really wonder what happened there. Did building the Great Pyramids ruin the economy? Did the mobilization of the huge workforce needed to build the Great Pyramids stir up the disease pool and cause plagues (did something similar happen when Amarna was built and populated and did that contribute to the failure of the Atenist reformation?)? Anyway, like I said, the Great Pyramids were built relatively early in Egyptian history … though the time difference between Narmer and the builders of the great pyramid was comparable to the difference in time between us and Columbus and Henry VIII!

- There were three most ancient centers of civilization that emerged at about the same time: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley Civilization. The Indus Valley Civilization collapsed around 2000 BCE and we don’t know much about it; we can’t read their writing. I think it’d be fascinating if we could learn more about the Indus Valley Civilization! Were they politically fragmented, like Mesopotamia, or were they a single state, like Egypt? There’s some evidence that might suggest the latter, but it’s impossible to know! So many unanswered questions!

- The Thera eruption that might have contributed to the decline of Minoan civilization happened around 1600 BCE. This was around the same time as the Hyksos rule in northern Egypt; if I’m reading my Wikipedia skimming right there’s a record of the Thera eruption recorded on a stelae set up by the Pharaoh who reconquered northern Egypt from the Hyksos!

- Tutankhamun lived in the mid-1300s BCE. Tutankhamun lived more than a thousand years after the Great Pyramids were built! The builders of the Great Pyramids were as distant from Tutankhamun as the Vikings are from us!

- And Cleopatra (the famous one, Cleopatra VII) lived about 1300 years after Tutankhamun! Tutankhamun was as distant from Cleopatra as Charlemagne is from us! And the Great Pyramids were about 2500 years old in Cleopatra’s time; their construction was about as distant from her as Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates are from us! As that meme says: Cleopatra lived closer to the construction of the moon rockets than the construction of the Great Pyramids.

Remember when I said Pharaonic Egypt and the US kind of remind me of each other? Well, the US is less than 250 years from its founding. 250 years from the founding of the unified Egyptian state they’d just recently stopped doing human sacrifice (the earliest Pharaohs were buried with human retainer sacrifices, about a century or so into the Pharaonic period they stopped doing that and switched to burying the Pharaohs with little dolls that were supposed to substitute for the servants) and they were just building the Step Pyramid of Djoser, just beginning the pyramid-building tradition that would culminate in the Great Pyramids centuries later.

Alternately, the other culture that really reminds me of Pharaonic Egypt is China, and its Narmer-equivalent lived after Alexander the Great. The Chinese still have about 800 years to go before they can say their civilization-state is as enduring as Pharaonic Egypt!

I really wonder if the Pharaonic Egyptian religion would still be going strong if Christianity and Islam hadn’t come along. It survived for so long!

I’ve been seeing incorrect information about lightsabers and their colors / meanings so as a Star Wars nerd of 15 years, I would like to provide accurate information for oc creators or people who are just interested in knowing about lightsabers!

Blue Lightsabers -These are the Jedi Guardians -They focused on practical application of the Force -Highly skilled in combat -They were the first to leave the Temple to take an active role in conflicts -Their recommended training was 3 hours a day -Training consisted of running, lightsaber practice, and unarmed combat 

Red Lightsabers -These are the Sith -Consumed by the Dark Force of the Force -Ferocious and unyielding in combat -Kyber Crystals are either synthetic or turned red by causing a fallen Jedi’s crystal to bleed by pouring their malice and anger into it

Green Lightsabers  -These are Jedi Consulars  -Exceptionally powerful in the Force -Often found in the Temple waging battle through mediation  -Will fight when absolutely necessary -They were Healers, researchers, and seers 

Yellow Lightsabers -These are the Jedi Sentinel -They’re extremely rare -Known to develop valuable skills outside the purview of the Force -Exhibits traits of both Guardian and Consular -They’re not often seen or used because the wielder of a yellow blade is so strong and skilled they don’t need to deploy it

White Lightsabers -White blades occurs when a bleeding Kyber Crystal is purified -They denote no affliction to Jedi or Sith, but signifies a pure Light Side Force user -Exceedingly rare  -Only two are known to exist, and Ahsoka wields them both. 

Orange Lightsabers -Very rare -Negotiators, selfless, and are opposed to violence  -The Kyber Crystal isn’t actually a Kyber, but is known as a Kohlen Crystal / a Fools Kyber (as stated in the Star Wars novel Master & Apprentice)  -It possessed the same heft as a Kyber, and even some vibration with the Force -They were ostensibly referred to in an ancient prophecy made by a Jedi mystic which stated that “When the Kyber which is not Kyber shines forth, the time of prophecy will be at hand.”

Purple / Violet Lightsabers -These were originally introduced at the request of Samuel L. Jackson who didn’t want to blend in at the Battle of Geonosis -Known to use Dark Side techniques in battle while serving the Light Side of the Force -In Legends, sometimes the lightsaber was used by a former Sith who has turned to the Light Side