happybadger [he/him]

Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your #1 trusted source for patriotic facts.

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2020

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  • Three things stand out to me:

    1. The disparity between military and civilian certifications. If you’re a mechanic on a specialised machine, it’s easy to become a DOD contractor on that same platform. If you’re an officer, you can say you’ve managed X people. If you’re a medic, your scope of practice is command-by-command. You might work above an LPN level but leave the military with an NREMT EMT-B certification at most which qualifies you for a minimum wage job way below your scope of practice. There are only a handful of slots for advanced schools that give you any worthwhile certification, and the paperwork required to become an LPN ($55k/year~) is very difficult to amass. If you’re a machine gunner, you spent 4+ years mastering a skill that doesn’t transfer to any civilian job and you can only sell yourself as a whipped horse with a broken back.

    2. Military culture itself is traumatic. It’s closer to feudalism than it is anything in the civilian world. There’s a rigid hierarchy and set of standards for every aspect of your life. You have a pathological obsession with being 15 minutes early because your lord can have you arrested if you don’t do everything perfectly. You’re supposed to embrace the toxicity of every part of your day, much less being a cog in the demon machine that hates you as much as it does its victims, and tie your self-worth to that scripted performance. The outlet for dealing with any of that is alcoholism and/or smoking. You can’t afford or make the time for civilian therapy, while military therapists are inquisitors that can have you arrested or end your career.

    3. There’s no blueprint for civilian life. The allure of military life is that you know exactly what every expectation is. You can turn your brain off because you know what to wear and how to wear it, what to do and how to do it, and how doing A will result in B for your career. Your chain of command is a line of narcissistic older siblings and parents strictly directing you down that path. You have that stick incentive of being arrested if you violate any part of the carrot plan. All of a sudden you’re removed from that very traumatic environment and it’s replaced by a much more abstract system where nobody follows the rules you’re conditioned into.

    Maybe you make that deal with the devil knowing you’re a good fiddler and you get a golden fiddle for it. If you didn’t explicitly do that for that reason and get the right paperwork for that goal, you leave with nothing and probably hate the field you were trained for but not meaningfully certified in.



  • https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16. Myth of Sisyphus.pdf

    All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

    I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

    The gods cursed us to roll a rock up a hill. We don’t know why and they probably don’t either by now. I push the rock because doing so makes me hate them more effectively and at some point I might become strong enough to kill them for that. If I was arbitrarily born into 18th century France and my rock was to starve for the aristocracy, I’d push it because there’s a guillotine over the horizon. I’m arbitrarily born into the late 20th century and my rock is to starve for the corporate aristocracy, I push it because I or someone like me will get to turn their bunkers into brazen bulls. At no point in history could I have been born without some rock to push and it’d always mean existential damnation for me, but I’d purify my hate pushing it.








  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlRemade for clarity
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    4 months ago

    In Marxism, the base (material/economic conditions) is what the superstructure (social/cultural/political conditions) is generated by. Societies organise themselves around the resources available and the division of labour required to utilise them. Marxism’s social observations are all rooted in that mediation of the material environment.




  • Describe “Marx’s theorem” without paraphrasing wikipedia. This is nonsensical and as an adult you’re supposed to read about the things you choose to talk about. Linnaeus lived three centuries ago, but would you throw out taxonomy? Is the scientific method outdated because Francis Bacon wouldn’t know a thing about modern science? People build on the epistomological and ontological frameworks to make a living tradition.







  • …I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

    https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/teagle/texts/martin-luther-king-jr-letter-from-birmingham-jail-1963/

    That’s where you are right now. You can hopefully do better if you challenge yourself, but I wouldn’t consider you anything different from the most milquetoast liberal hiding behind rhetorical civility while you support the violence of the state. Your progressive politics are at best redistributing the loot of that violence while perpetuating the system causing it, either out of cowardice or malice or apathy. All of them would make you the same judas goat for the imperial slaughterhouse.


  • The temperature of LHS 1140 is 3,096 K (2,823 °C; 5,113 °F), and it has a luminosity of 0.0038 times that of the Sun

    For comparison, the Sun is 1 solar mass and radius, has a temperature of 5778 K with 1 solar luminosity

    The orbit of LHS 1140 b takes 24.737 days to complete, much quicker than Earth’s year of 365 days. Its orbital radius is at 0.0946 AU, or 9.46% the distance between Earth and the Sun. While this is quite close, the star LHS 1140 is so dim that the planet only gets 0.43 times the incident flux of Earth at this distance.[2] Assuming an albedo of 0, LHS 1140 b has an equilibrium temperature of 230 K (−43 °C; −46 °F), compared to Earth’s at 255 K (−18 °C; −1 °F). If LHS 1140 b has an albedo similar to that of Earth, the equilibrium temperature would be even lower, at 201 K (−72 °C; −98 °F). However, with a greenhouse effect at least as strong as Earth’s LHS 1140 b would have a surface temperature greater than 266 K (−7 °C; 19 °F) for an albedo of 0. Due to the high mass of the planet, it likely has a thicker atmosphere with a more powerful greenhouse effect.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHS_1140_b

    It’s neat that it’s still potentially habitable with such different solar conditions.