Oh boy, Gabby is going to have a field day with this.

If you know, you know.

A sock doesn’t need a brain to be a puppet, just a hand shoved inside it.

Though that’s not a fair comparison; a sock has more functioning braincells.

Cons: cause a global pandemic.

Pros: free dinner.

I see no problem with this.

Having the Courage™ to employ human workers.

Those all sound delicious, I’ll have to give them a try 😋

Yeah I do and they are sold under that name here in the UK because English will just adopt words from other language or slang terms if they’re used enough. Also in English words for farm animals are Germanic in origin and words for the meat of those same animals are Norman (northern France) in origin because after the Norman Conquest in 1066, the nobility were all Norman French and were the ones to refer to cuts of meat whereas the peasantry didn’t eat the meat of the farm animals.

So here in the UK they sell these fresh in Lidl: a cheap supermarket but it has an amazing bakery where they make these and other items.

I often go to Lidl at lunchtime to buy two of these and something simple to fill them with into sandwiches, usually cheese and ham, (insert bland UK food joke here).

My question for you, in the spirit of international culinary collaboration, what Brazilian fillings would you stuff one of these with to make a great sandwich?

I believe those are called Petit Pain. And strongly agree, much better than standard white bread by a mile.

Pinky and the brain

As someone from the UK, please avoid Dyson.

He supported Brexit saying that he’d invest in more UK manufacturing then as soon as it happened, moved even more manufacturing overseas.

On top of that he’s a massive cunt to his workers and the quality of Dysons have gone downhill so much they break as soon as they’re out of warranty.

Numatic international (Henry) on the other hand are top quality, built to last, keep manufacturing in Europe and the UK, and aren’t lead by a dickhead.

Seriously, you’ll move house a dozen times before a Henry hoover gives out on you, every single professional cleaner in the UK uses a Henry or other Numatic International model (if they’re not using an industrial cleaning brand) because they’re built more robust than a bastard child of a Panasonic Toughbook and a Nokia 3310.

Hey now, you show my girl some respect, and I hope you at least her paid for it!

Jesus Christ Sharif, someone told you that he’s going to come after people who literally just want to go about existing unbothered, ya know like you want to do, and out of fear you thought “hell yeah, hurt the thing I don’t understand, you got my vote!”

The fuck?! Does it tax your brain remembering to breathe?

Clearly, Sharif, you lack the mental capacity to empathise with anything outside of your immediate experience, so perhaps a shared lived experience is your only route to empathy with people outside your immediate circles.

I wish you all the best on your journey to growing and hope, once your empathetic abilities are developed, you’re able to be readmitted into humanity, but I don’t wish for that journey to be a pleasant experience for you; may it be filled with fear, pain, and persecution.

Dozens!

If you’re just after sex and can’t get any via casual hook ups from bars / dating apps / fetish groups then just pay a consenting adult for sex.

If you’re after genuine human connection and a relationship then you should work on yourself to be someone you’d like to be in a relationship with.

Have a read of Transmetropolitan.

There’s no reason Canada can’t make its own cars. Or computer chips.

Sure if you’re talking at least a 10x on the price of equivalent consumer goods, which isn’t going to drive prices down whatsoever. China both subsidises manufacturing AND devalues their currency to keep manufacturing costs low and exports high. There’s no way to do that in the Canadian economy or any single western economy without either tanking it (huge deflation) or saddling the country with so much debt to invest into the industries and then subsidise long enough to be cost competitive that it would never be able to make the credit repayments.

I think there is value to a culture, we don’t want Japan to disappear, we don’t want Italy as a culture to disappear, we don’t want France as a culture to disappear, I think we have to have to maintain the sort of reasonable cultural identity of the various countries or they simply will not be those countries. You know, Italy is the people of Italy. The buildings are there, but really what is Italy? Italy is the people of Italy.

That’s what he actually said in the video.

So I have two issues with this:

1. He, and every other conservative, assumes that current culture is the default for a region and must be “conserved” because otherwise the norms, practices, and language is risking going extinct.

Aside from the fact this is clearly trying to give credence to the “great replacement” bullshit, trying to hold a culture from changing and evolving overtime is impossible.

No matter how much someone like Meloni might harp on about it, Italy isn’t the Roman Empire anymore, nor is it Mussolini Italy anymore; those eras shaped today’s Italy and it’s every generations job to add new chapters to the country’s story.

2. He’s correct in that the people make the country, but not because they’re born there or because they have some genealogical link to the land, but because the people of France CHOOSE to be French every day.

The people of France choose to partake in café and restaurant culture, they choose to enjoy wine regularly, they choose to buy fresh bread from a local bakery, and they choose to make their voices heard very loudly when discontent with the government.

They are French because they choose to partake in the culture of the place they live, they buy into the shared story that is France.

Let’s give an example:

Person A is born and raised in France until they are 16 and then go on a foreign exchange program to the UK. After coming back, finishing their “high-school”, they decided they liked the UK enough to go to university there and meet a romantic partner on campus. After finishing their university degree, they get a job, rent a place with their university sweetheart, and socialise with British friends regularly.

Person B is born in France, but moves to the UK with their parents when they’re young (5 years old or under), they grow up in a duel language household learning both French and English, go to primary school in the UK, make childhood friends, and halfway through secondary school (high-school) the parents move back to France, they finish high-school level education, then go onto university in France, and go to the UK to do a year abroad during their degree.

Now which person identifies as French and which person identifies as British?

The answer is, you don’t know until you ASK THEM which culture they choose to identify with.

Person A could have utterly hated growing up in France so much that when they experienced a different culture they liked that they felt compelled to make living that culture the one they wanted to participate in for the rest of their lives and reject their place of birth.

Equally, Person A could still strongly identify as being French but chooses to live in the UK for a multitude of other reasons: it’s better for their career, they chose to stay in the UK as a compromise with their partner, they prefer the lower income taxes, etc. They also choose to practice their culture in a foreign land such as going to a café for a long lunch during the work week, booking off most of August for their annual holiday, and having a keen fashion sense making sure they look good in public.

Person B could identify as both because they’ve lived a good portion of their lives in both countries OR could prefer the country of their birth OR the one where they had a happy childhood in an idyllic setting.

You never know, maybe overtime Person A convinces their co-workers to come with them to a café for lunch instead of just quickly eating sandwiches at their desks, so they can unwind for a little while before getting back to work. Maybe the whole small company starts doing it because they start to appreciate that way of living, and voilà the (company) culture has evolved to take long lunches at a café because their co-workers appreciate the midday reprieve and find they work better in the afternoon because of it. Though they’re still not willing to book off the whole of August for a holiday.

Culture is not meant to stagnate and people, wherever they go, will bring different culture with them. Overtime cultures change and grow as they adopt new ideas and ways they like leaving out those they don’t like and discarding old and tired traditions they’d rather leave in the past.

Also write to your government representatives about removing copyright anti-circumvention laws saying that they hurt the local economy and only benefit big tech companies from the US.

This is important because US big-tech backed Trump into taking office and Trump is beholden to these companies who have the US economy purse strings.

Individual countries removing these laws will make the money holders VERY nervous and they in turn will pull the strings the US government officials dance with.

I’ve got first session booked for next week, I’m just trying to hang on until then.

Yeah I know that sentiment is utilitarian bullshit, but I genuinely can’t shift it out of my head because it’s the only way I’ve found any positivity in my life: solving a problem at work, being a listening ear to friends for their problems or just showing up to their events so they feel appreciated, or the odd bit of volunteer work I’ve done.

I can’t just sit down or go out and do a thing for myself because:

1. I don’t know what I like doing, it just feels like random guess work, I start doing a thing, get really into it, then the spark just fades after a month or two and I don’t want to do it again.

2. It feels futile to go and do these things because I won’t spend enough time to get good at it before I give up.

3. I feel I could be doing something more productive with that time but I’m too lazy to do that either so I just default to the easiest way to skip time, usually watching something, then feel guilty for wasting that time not being productive or happy, then remembering I don’t know how to make myself actually happy just performatively happy, go numb, and just try to sleep it off until the next obligation which is usually work.

Sorry if this is too much for this community, let me know and I’ll delete and unfollow this community.

So I’m not in a good place mentally right now and genuinely believe my life has no inherent value: i.e. if I’m not being useful to someone or supporting someone else or doing something worthwhile then I’m a waste of resources both material and emotional.

How can I change that perspective? Nothing I’ve watched or read has changed my mind about this yet but it remains open for someone or something to do so and I remain hopeful and patient that something will but that’ll run out at some point.

Un-blue-es their passport