A lot of the early (1789) revolutionaries were from the nobility and even the clergy. Many of the reactionaries were up and coming bourgeois who were about to make their way into the nobility. Sorry Marx, you got a few things right, but that one was an oversimplification.

The vast majority of the victims of the reign of terror were commoners. The nobility were underrepresented at the guillotine, besides a few obvious high-profile cases.

It appears as though Robespierre legitimately lost his mind at some point. He attempted to introduce a “cult of the supreme being” with himself as high priest that focused on adhering to his own idea of virtue. Anyone not virtuous enough, which was effectively literally everyone else, was liable to be executed.

Early in the revolutionary wars, the revolutionaries had arrested so many people that the Paris jails were super overcrowded. Some people didn’t want the armies to leave Paris for the front lines because maybe all those jailed people would break out and cause trouble. So Marat proposed that they reduce the incarcerated population… by killing them all. September 1789 was a bad month to have been a petty thief in Paris.

So many of the popular notions about the revolution are distorted or just ass-backwards.

This sounds great! Except nowhere do they say how much one will cost, they’re currently in the “drive demand before campaign launch” phase.

I bet it’s gonna be like five hundred bucks. That’ll suck.

These double-lobed asteroids always look so cool. Like, not that long ago if this image was in a science fiction movie I would have said ehhhh unlikely but here we are looking at them

When I worked at a kilo-scale chemical manufacturing job, some of our labs weren’t really air conditioned and/or were partially outside. It got up to 110F in the summer. The trick was to drop a little chunk of dry ice in each of your lab coat pockets. Kept me alive, at least.

Yeah. The trouble is that pretty much only humans get Alzheimer’s. In order to make a mouse model, we have to induce a disease state that looks like Alzheimer’s, at least to our best understanding. It’s not unreasonable that our mouse model is just not really representative of the actual disease in humans.

The trouble with string theory is that plenty can be explained given its axioms and what comes out of the resulting math, but those axioms are completely unproven and unprovable and I haven’t seen anything come out of it that have turned into real world results.

Ultimately, a lot of the ideas you’re talking about are just models. Models are useful insofar as they can explain data and make predictions. “Believing” in a model isn’t something that scientists do. We use models as long as they’re useful, update them with new information, and abandon them if they stop being useful.

One important thing about hypotheses and the models they feed into is that they are falsifiable. If there’s nothing that could prove an idea wrong, it’s not really science. String Theory is a good example of this. It’s totally internally consistent but it’s almost perfectly designed such that any measurement that could be made to prove it wrong is completely impossible. To me, that’s not science anymore, it’s some sort of mathematical philosophy.

The “universe is a black hole” idea fits into this not-quite-science frame. Any data that could prove it wrong would only be gathered from outside the observable universe, which is impossible. So, unfortunately, it’s not quite science.

As with all terrorism, the lasting damage is self-inflicted by the overreacting victim.

Turning every airport into the thin end of the fascist wedge, all the rampant surveillance stuff, and perpetual war in the middle east did quite a lot of structural damage to American democracy. I’m not sure we’d have elected the current dipshit-in-chief without 9/11 fifteen years earlier. We’d have kept electing publicly mostly boring and privately kinda shitty people for another few decades.

They went on, however, to question the ethics and judgment of the potentially destructive payload.

Goodness me, the brain-rotted slop fans suddenly care about ethics?

My grandpa’s name is Donald. I was gonna name my kid after him.

Sorry, grandpa.

New goal: nine fives of uptime

Okay, these two in particular feel like the pots calling the kettle black.

Don’t get me wrong, the foreign policy of the US is beyond a train wreck right now and we’re doing damage that will take decades to undo.

But the US being terrible doesn’t mean these guys are good.

“No” would have been a shorter response.

Can you give me an example of a currently-running democratic candidate for national office that is saying what you’re claiming they’re saying?

That’s not what this meme is about.

This meme says “if you vote for them, they will not do what you want. Probably best to sit this election out.” It is an attempt to convince people not to vote. How do you not understand this?

Man, like they could have kept a big part of the government shut down to avoid funding more DHS stuff and negotiate to reopen without that funding. That would have been what you wanted.

THEY DID THAT. So how far do you want to move the goalposts this time?

I genuinely think these people fall into three categories:

1. People who are justifiably frustrated with the electoral system but don’t understand the consequences of what they’re advocating for
2. People who want the system to die, and incorrectly assume that it’ll be really bad for a while but their chosen ideology will emerge victorious
3. People who want the system to die and stay dead forever so their favorite geopolitical power can rise to the top of the food chain

It’s ridiculous that you think this image isn’t weaponized voter suppression

Can’t wait to stay home for an election and let people win who are actively destroying the institutions that keep people alive. I am so smart! Take that, people that I mostly agree with!

Boy I wish Joanne didn’t want people I care about to die