Even books read for pleasure shouldn’t have to dumb down their grammar and writing style. There are plenty of comic books/graphic novels with better writing than the Twilight Saga (for example). By “learning something” I don’t mean you have to read non-fiction books to learn about history and what not. But books like Twilight, which are written with no sense of story structure, word usage, or proper grammar in some places, are beyond harmful.

She’s a shit writer whose style appeals to people who people who can’t tell the difference because they barely paid attention in English class and don’t care to.

If you want an example of the other direction, Harry Potter is a series that appeals to young people, but are well written and actually inspire kids to read because it challenges them to get better at handling good writing.

I’m not “gate keeping” anything. I’m saying the writer has an obligation to enrich people, regardless of whether it’s reading for fun or reading for learning.

Ah yes. Nothing like a little gross oversimplification to generate headlines.

If the shuttle didn’t exist, there are still a thousand things that would have had to go in a different direction to get a viable Mars program in the 80s and 90s. Not the least of which being that without the shuttle, and before the ISS, we would have no CLUE how to actually live in space for long periods of time.

So if we take it that we can’t go to Mars without learning how to live in space for extended durations. And we take it that in order to learn how to live in space we need to have a long duration presence there, like the ISS.

What exactly do people think was necessary to build the ISS…

You’re right boys and girls…it was the SPACE SHUTTLE.

Fucking hell, I hate having to upvote this…so much…

Twilight is everything that is wrong with modern literature. It’s dumbing down your art in order to cater to a population whose reading levels have declined to the low grade school level over the years.

Good books increase your literacy. You learn new things from reading them; new words, new phrases, etc… an author is supposed to add to the collective intelligence of the world, not debase themselves to write at a fourth grade level so that their books are more popular to incurious illiterates.

I often make things like pancakes, or fried eggs with bacon for supper/dinner. My ex wife would look at me like I was crazy.

But I just asked her, what makes a breakfast food a “breakfast” food other than social convention? Eat whatever you want whenever you want. It’s quite literally in the who cares category of let people live their lives.

• Children of Men

• Gattaca

Both feel like extremely realistic portrayals of possible near futures.

Wouldn’t even know where to begin. Suffice it to say I have a long history of seeing how Apple does things via selling their products in various places.

Is that even a question?

I doubt they even know, or care, where he is anymore.

Once they got him off that plane and into that prison, they stopped keeping track.

I’m going to be pedantic here, because it’s sometimes my favourite thing to be. But “Vegan Meat” is an oxymoron.

Meat is specifically defined as the flesh or edible parts of animals.

These aren’t Vegan Meat brands, they’re Meat Substitute brands.

“Absolute truth no matter what” people are freakin exhausting.

They also don’t exist outside of their own inflated egos.

It’s almost comically easy to catch one of these “I always tell the truth” people in their hypocrisy.

Yes.

Anyone who says otherwise is (ironically) lying.

That’s why privacy laws are so important and why the old “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you shouldn’t care about your data being collected by literally everyone” argument is bullshit. Because it’s not about breaking the law, or lying about some big secret. It’s about presenting to the world the you that you want to present to the world.

The most basic fundamental right is to be seen as we want to be seen.

Everyone…and I mean EVERYONE…has something that, if it were public, would change the way that others look at them. Maybe for the good, maybe for the worse. It doesn’t matter. It could be that you’re into midget porn. It could be that you anonymously donate a quarter of your paycheque to charity and you want it to remain anonymous for whatever reason. The point is, THAT IS YOUR RIGHT to keep that to yourself.

We get to show the world who we want them to see, either good or bad. And we all do it.

So yes, to circle back around. Anyone who says that they don’t actively have any lies is lying.

The Donald Trump effect seems to be the opposite of what Far Right leaders were hoping for.

Every country other than the U.S has seen what Trump is doing and decided “fuck that…let’s nip this shit in the bud before it can spread.”

• Canada’s Pollievre has tanked in popularity.

• France’s LePen guilty of embezzlement.

• Argentina’s Meili blocked by the supreme court.

• Far right, hateful politicians in Germany potentially barred from running for office.

• Connor Macgregor in Ireland being told to fuck off.

• Nigel Farage being treated like slightly more of am embarrasement than he usually is.

Around the world people look at the United States and say “keep that shit away from us by any means necessary”

Yes. But carefully. And with eyes wide open.

True. But I’m going to give America some credit here. When they came in, they came in hard. Two of the hardest beaches in Normandy with the highest losses of any allied force during the landings. Front line in pretty much every major engagement from the moment they entered. I am anti-american in general, and no…I don’t think Germany would have won if they hadn’t gotten involved (the soviets bought our victory at the cost of 11,000,000 casualties…)

They committed more troops than any other country except the soviet union and germany itself. I’ll criticise a LOT of what the United States has become, but I would never ever in a million years claim that they had “barely taken any damage”, and in fact kind of take offence to the statement even though I’m not American.

I could see Oregon and Washington State throwing in with Cali, giving all of them a direct line to nice fresh Canadian Rocky BC Springs because we up here in Canada would be an instant ally of any states that broke off.

Half of Paris would already be ash.

And the U.S. got all the money to build up their industrial base by the fact that they were they only country able to give out loans to the European nations fighting in the First World War since every european country spent everything they had and then some fighting each other.

World War One represented the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. It was bigger than the economic exploitation by the British Empire of Africa, India and Asia combined. In four years, the U.S. basically held all the cards and (I know this is controversial) only ended up getting involved militarily when it seemed possible that the allies would lose and therefore be unable to pay off their loans.

And you know what…all credit to the Americans; they took that new found wealth and built up the strongest, most powerful industrial base the world had ever seen; an industrial base that, without which, the second world war would have been nearly impossible to win (Russian blood, British Strategy, American Industry…isn’t that the saying?)

It’s what they proceeded to do with that industrial base afterwards that lead us to where we are now.

In reality, “Democracy” as invented by the Greeks was never intended to be held by the uneducated. Ever citizen got a vote, but frankly not everyone was a citizen.

The rights of a citizen came with certain expectations, and that included knowledge of the Ars Liberalis, or “Liberal Arts”, which…far from today’s demonized meaning created in order to attack higher learning, literally translated in the greek world as “the exercise of freedom”.

In other words, citizenship and voting rights obligated a person to be knowledgeable of things like Logic, History, Rhetoric, etc… You TRAINED to partake in the affairs of state just like you would prepare for any other task that requires skill and THAT was what granted you the priviledge of citizenship. (Well…that an being part of the wealthy class…)

Modern “Democracy” is predicated on the opposite; not just citizens that are ill-informed, but citizens that are so intellectually incurious that they can’t be bothered to exercise their right properly.

Admitting your country has problems is “woke”, though. /s

It’s not the corporations, it’s the billionaires that run them. Every time Trump does something that makes the stock market drop, they get richer by scooping up more for less. Than sell them when Trump says “Just kidding” and the stock market rises again.

Not to mention that all of their companies get to raise prices and blame “tariffs” in order to increase their profit margin.

It’s the entire reason they paid to get him into the white house.