Oh I just wanted to add. Nbd.

For me Doctor Who is a fun campy show. It’s got some heart that serves as it’s basic message and occasionally more directly deals with contemporary politics, but it’s so silly that it’s hard to take that seriously most of the time.

It’s not really about defending the bad stuff. It’s about trying to get some more nuance on perhaps the most propagandized topic of the 20th century.

There are all sorts of interesting discussions to have about the various failings of these countries amongst other leftists who have the relevant context as a starting point for a reasonable discussion.

But when talking to libs/conservatives, they’re coming into the conversation with an already extremely warped, un-nuanced perspective. “These are all evil dictatorships that were also super incompetent and that shows why communism is bad.”

Some of the stuff they base this on is either exaggerated or just straight up wrong. Some of it is completely valid criticism, but without the context to understand the issue or provide a useful critique.

How do you have any meaningful conversation about these countries without acknowledging things like:

• All of these countries were previously agrarian, un-democratic societies.
• Most of them were formerly exploited colonies who had to fight fairly brutal wars for their independence.
• Even after leaving, the imperialists kept messing with them through economic and diplomatic isolation and espionage including supporting right wing coups.

We don’t have the counterfactual where we see what these countries would have turned out like without these challenges, but it’s an incomplete analysis to not at least consider the ways which they impacted both their economic success and their political developments. Maybe you could argue there were better ways to respond to all of this, but hindsight is 20-20.

No actual leftists want to have to argue “authoritarianism was good actually.” But it’s hard for the conversation not to appear that way when we’re arguing with people who’ve been conditioned to think they’re somehow as bad or worse than Nazis and ending the thought there.

Even if it would, how would it ever get passed when the people who would need to pass it are the ones who are only in office because the system works the way it currently does?

This is just a recurring theme I’ve found when talking with liberals. They like to think about and suggest all sorts of policy ideas as though all we’re missing are some smart ideas nobody has thought of. It’s one thing to say we should have this, but it’s another to have any idea of how it’d be possible to do. Since they have no actual analysis of the system, they’ll just turn around and tell you to vote or call your representative. “We should get money out of politics!” “Yeah, well we checked with the people giving us money and they said no. So…”

Yeah wouldn’t it be crazy if we created a super weapon which destroys entire cities planets and then demonstrated it on a civilian population? That sure would be a step too far for this beacon of peace, freedom, and democracy!

Eh. Without the economic incentive, we wouldn’t be getting a sea of slop. The energy concerns are very real though.

I’ve watched a few older original movies here and there on streaming at home, but I guess the last time I went to the theater for one was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I don’t really go to the theater much in general anymore. Last time I went was for Dune 2 (mostly because I like the director more so than I’m interested in the franchise) and it was so loud I thought it was going to damage my eardrums.

That aside, if I’m gonna go see something, I want some reason that isn’t just brand recognition. A director I like, some good reviews, maybe an interesting premise, etc.

Oh god. I was reading through the page and this gem was down in the section on the response from healthcare companies:

Another executive was quoted saying “What’s most disturbing is the ability of people to hide behind their keyboards and lose their humanity.”

Says the people who hide behind keyboards, phone calls, employees, doctors, guards, police as they hurt people they don’t know. Talk about losing your humanity.

None of these people have shed a single tear for the people hurt or killed by the healthcare system and people like him.

Goddammit.

“I know, I know, but it was this or we’d have to stop bombing brown people and tell the poors we’d give them food. It was the politically responsible thing to do.”

One of us always tells lies. One of us only tells the truth.

Because President’s Day is for buying stuff. Clearly what we need is to allow stores to set up in polling places to get it to be a holiday. /s

I know you’re joking and that there’s a lot of garbage videos out there, but what possible value would there be in sending a novel per second? Can anyone read a novel per second? It only makes sense to use the higher bandwidth to send higher density information like video, audio, or interactive media like games.

Tis the season for floating stuff in drinks. Summer by contrast is the season for putting stuff on the glass of your drink.

Wars are plenty profitable if you’re a lot bigger than your opponents and can force them to be subservient to your business interests. It’s not a fluke that the richest country on earth is also the one with the most frequent wars.

Similarly, Rick Rolling is eternal. It’s kind of got a negative feedback loop. If it gets overused, people stop using it for a while, which just makes people more susceptible to it when it pops up again.

“Spends more on groceries than on other categories” so they’re poor. You can just say that. It turns out your money needs to go to keeping you alive before it goes to other things, and if you don’t have much money left after that, you can’t exactly spend more than you spent on food on other things.

Imagine being a consultant and get paid to write completely pointless things like that.

Ok, sorry about that. I’m more than happy to update it if you want to give me some constructive feedback on what was confusing about it. Note though that this was the 3rd part in the series, and maybe you didn’t go back and read the previous 2 parts? They start here

NP. I’m not really great at giving writing advice, so can’t really help there. Something about it just didn’t click when I read it. The extra context you linked did help a bit.

As far as the issue: After reading it I think it does just seem to be a matter of terminology mixed with problems that arise with when you need to write math expressions inline in text. If you can write things out on paper or use a markdown language, it’s really easy to see how a fractional expression is structured.

8

2(1+3)

is a lot easier to read than 8/2(1+3) even if they technically are meant to be evaluated the same. There’s no room for confusion.

And as for distributive law vs multiplication, maybe this is just taking for granted a thing that I learned a long time ago, but to me they’re just the same thing in practice. When I see a(x+1) I know that in order to multiply these I need to distribute. And if we fill in the algebraic symbols for numbers, you don’t even need to distribute to get the answer since you can just evaluate the parentheses then use the result to multiply by the outside.

Conversely, if I was factoring something, I would need to do division.

ax + a

a

= x+1, thus: a(x+1)

I think we’re basically talking about the same thing, I’m just being a bit lose with the terminology.

And while we’re at it, the best way to make sure there’s no misunderstanding is to just use parenthesis for EVERYTHING! I’m mostly kidding, this can rapidly get unreadable once you nest more than a few parens, although for these toy expressions, it would have the desired effect.

(8)/(2(1+3)) is obviously different than (8/2)(1+3)

This is why there’s that trope where the bad guy gets killed in the process of, or just after, getting redeemed. So the story can have its cake and not have to deal with any of the icky justice afterwards. How jarring would it be to have the bad guy turn around, save the day, and then the heroes still kill them or drag them off to a trial for their crimes? So justice has to be meted out by fate rather than having to complicate our heroes.