thou_dog ✡

This inside joke is so delightfully incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't have the requisite knowledge,

Put that on a flat-enough surface of a toy, and... well... would you get sued or charged, or would it pass as protected parody?

I'm pretty sure there's a law forbidding unauthorized use of government seals and crests on privately-created documents or products, but I wonder if the design I describe above would be sufficiently different from the USCG seal to be a clear parody.

Could even swap the anchors for... other things.

Serious question: if you took the seal, changed "United States Coast Guard, 1790" to the name of the toy company and its founding year, flipped the anchors upside down, changed the banner to have a pink bar with navy blue stripes descending, and changed the slogan to "Semper Lascivus", is it legal?

Hell yeah. 👍

Aw, not every bunch of humorous rhyming couplets comes from a machine learning algorithm.

I love the oversimplified version of the story of that epithet. "Jacob was crossing a stream when he was ambushed by an angel, and they fought evenly matched until the angel hit him with a groin shot that left him limping."

Society would improve if we invested less in Anthropic and more in Anthro Pics

On the contrary, I was told if Millennials stopped buying furry commissions maybe they could afford avocado toast.

Jewish ones, what you think and believe are almost entirely irrelevant, and you are said to be judged on how you act as an individual and a part of a community - whether or not there is a heavenly court, if a community acts virtuously, all else being equal, they'll be better off than otherwise.

inherently bad and should be avoided at all cost seems to me a particularly Christian idea, for as I understand Christianity, what you believe and how you think must comply with doctrine for personal salvation, often among other concerns like overt behavior.

In some other traditions, for example

They can turn into obsessions, and fear can also get stuck on and become anxiety or PTSD, but that doesn't mean they must be purged in favor of some mythical orthocognition. It means they must be managed, in all the ways modern science and technology allow.

The idea that hate, rage, and fear are

about things that don't threaten things or people you love, potentially including yourself.

Fear protects you from things you believe can hurt you. It's not perfect, hell, none of these are, but fear helps keep you from stumbling into danger too much. It's important.

All of these can go too far.

helps us remember our need and obligation to fight those people and their (and our collective) actions/inactions with passionate intensity.

Rage at what we've experienced helps us remember the need to protect others from the same. The flip side of rage, after all, is love - you can't get that mad

fought against with all our strength whenever, however we can. Genocide, for a classic example. Persecution of the stranger. Neglect of the poor. Abuse of the vulnerable. Falsehood and corruption in our courts and legislative bodies. Hatred of these & of the people who do them as easily as breathing

Posters responding to this image debated whether rage, fear, and hatred could become useful tools if properly harnessed and channelled (like fire) or would always be a harmful presence if not dispelled as soon as possible.

I'm in the first camp. There are things that are reasonable to hate, to be

This is beautiful as much as it aches.

The reason we have many of our emotions is that they're useful to keeping ourselves alive and functioning. We absolutely must control the ways we express them, but experiencing them, all else being equal, is not a problem, and definitely not a sin.

For added reference: I was a kid in 1991, and Trophy is an Israeli system for protecting ground vehicles by knocking down RPG rockets, missiles, low-flying antitank drones, and other weapons slower than high supersonic with a narrow cone of metal shot (more or less).

The benefit isn't one-sided. Whether it's balanced or how it should be reformed is a different issue

I suspect, though I don't know, that part of the policy agreements that lead to Israel being permitted to make their own custom conversions of US-built combat aircraft (like the F-15I, F-16I, & F-35I) includes US engineers learning about what the Israelis are installing in them.

The mixed performance of the Patriot system against Scud missiles led to Israel's determination to build up their own air defense tech base, which they've shared with US R&D, leading to both their own particular systems & joint projects with US firms. The US buys or license-builds Trophy from them.

I don't know how old you are (and when you were a kid), but I know in 1991 American air defenders were setting up Patriot batteries in Israel to protect them from Iraqi ballistic missiles which were thought armed with poison gas.

US Jews & Israelis were thankful.

An analogue of Fred Clark's law seems to apply here. "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" - if that's the case, the same should be true of negligence.

the kind of wisdom one would hope to find in anxient tomes 🩸

Does this make it 104-3?

Hah! Thanks.

I'm not familiar with King's one and Google didn't help, can you elaborate?

Interesting, thanks. I need to read more about him.

That's fair.

"That seems like an incredibly grotesque thing to share" might cut it. YMMV, though.