Curl up in a ball and weep a salty creek.

Yeah, everyone dreams multiple times every night. I’m sure these days most people mean ‘don’t remember dreams’ when they say ‘don’t dream’, but when I grew up so many people honestly thought they did not dream and wouldn’t believe me when I tried to explain how that’s biologically impossible.

Jealous! My sister lived in that area and we went squirrel walking a few times on visits but I was never so lucky as to have one crawl over me.

That walking up to you and standing up behavior - I’ve started to see that at a cemetery here in Portland that we walk around, but so far all the squirrels have waited a short distance away for food to be thrown to them.

Squirrels are just the best. If anyone goes to visit Taiwan - which I certainly recommend as strongly as possible - there’s a park in the capital Taipei called 2/28 Memorial Peace Park (二二八和平紀念公園).

There are these gorgeous squirrels with red bellies that will eat nuts right out of your hand. They’ll come up to you, take a nut and then run off about midway up a tree. Using their back legs to hold onto the bark, they dangle head-down against the trunk, eating with their front paws. Then you look around and all the trees have these vertical furry tree-slug looking squirrels dangling against them. Just cuting it up cutefully.

Red-bellied plumpers is what my wife and I called them. They’re just the best.

I personally believe that preserving a false and misleading picture of reality designed to trumpet a deranged cult that is working to make the world objectively worse for everyone including themselves is not acceptable.

I would say, “Look mum I love you more than anything in the world but preserving some of these movies crosses an ethical line for me.”

Of course I grew up in a house of atheist jewish academics, so making and justifying personal ethical stances that contravene wider group stances is expected behavior in my family. And we take document preservation fairly seriously.

I agree with you pretty much everything you said, I just think that drawing a strong distinction between any one species and every other one mischaracterizes the situation. Evil is a human construct that applies as poorly to human behaviour as to the behaviour of every other animal, for the same reasons.

If you’ll excuse me simplifying your point, “They’re animals of course they do that, evil doesn’t come into it” is not quite as accurate as “We’re all animals, evil doesn’t come into it”, to my mind at least. Because OP didn’t just misunderstand an aspect of non-human animals, they misunderstood an aspect of how life works.

They can do those things because they’ve been beneficial

That describes human behavior just as well.

We’re animals. Like all social animals we have behavioral norms and individuals who violate them in circumstances that benefit them.

Many animals display empathy, both in their behavior and neurology. Many animals understand, remember and display reciprocity. Many animals mourn. Many animals show strong evidence of forming assessments of individuals from other species.

Our actions are determined by the sum total of our genetics, experience and social expectations, same as any other social animal.

I vaguely remember hearing that you can know whether someone was born before or after a specific year, depending on whether they use by or on accident.

I find that liberals are much more dismissive of US atrocities. Most communists I speak to know a wealth of details about the failings of mao and stalin.

Ask a US conservative about our 20th and 21st century atrocities - torture, massacres, coups, support for genocidal regimes and ecocidal companies, etc. - and they’ll proudly defend our brutality. Ask a liberal and they’ll hedge, deny and justify like an internet tankie who’s never opened a history book.

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People with poor risk management skills probably serve some useful purpose because we still have them, but they are not the cause of all human progress.

Specifically:

We’d still be living naked in the savanna if it weren’t for people like this.

Processing skins of kills has nothing to do with risk taking behavior, nor do the host of incremental adjustments that lead from skinning to tailored clothing.

Similarly our expansion into areas beyond the savannah has nothing to do with unnecessary risk taking, it’s just the result of favourable conditions that increased the birth rate.

floated off to sea… They settled lands

Permanent human settlements aren’t founded by rugged loners washing up on a new shore. It takes at minimum ~20 people and new sites are scouted well in advance to make sure they have sufficient resources to support a growing population.

Bear with me: Beiguan music.

It’s traditional Chinese music with tinny horns, drums and symbols. Close your eyes and imagine a temple procession slowly and loudly passing by, puppets, costumes, dancers, musicians, firecrackers, the smell of street food and general din of human enjoyment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iohWrjSVnb4

If you want something less chaotic, a gamelan orchestra is like rain decided to hold a soiree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEWCCSuHsuQ

And then when you’re ready to feel the waves break over your soul, it’s time for Taiko drumming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZagsLrNzg3I

I was gonna say Ys rather than Have One on Me

Traditionally it should be a kick to the groin but in these less formal times a middle finger or simple “fuck off” is perfectly acceptable.

4.5 hours to reschedule a cancelled connecting flight, which was then also cancelled and required another 3 hours in line the next morning, after a couple hours sleep on the floor. This was at Seattle airport during the bad holiday delays like 2 years back

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Fertilizer is what I’ve heard.

Long after the weight of ages has ground our works and bones to scattered dust, the changes we’ve made to the nitrogen cycle will stick out in the geologic record.

The jump from base levels of nitrogen to the obviously unnaturally higher amounts that would remain in layers from our time just wouldn’t have any explanation other than something did it on purpose. There’s basically no way for that level of increase to occur in what is geologically the blink of an eye without industrial capacity. Or that’s what I’ve heard.

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Last one for me was Batman something something. Arkham something maybe. Don’t really care about batman, didn’t enjoy the mechanics, don’t remember if there was a story, no idea why I bought it.

I’ve since realized that if you just wait a year or two games usually a) work properly and b) cost less. Haven’t had buyers remorse in a long while.