Based on dress, I’d say:

Alpha: Private Equity Trader, Financier
Beta: Athlete, Footballer
Delta: Mechanic, Plumber
Gamma: Poet, Musician
Omega: Technician, coder
Sigma: Hitman, Organized Crime Goon

The wikipedia article on Hulme is in shambles. What exactly happened to him?

Jesus is a failed apocalyptic prophet from the iron age. He wasn’t resurrected, and the narratives written by the biblical authors had their own agendas. The scholarly consensus remains that the OT and NT are not univocal, not divinely inspired and not inerrant. It’s a historic work, but is not a strong chronicle of history but of mythology, like The Illiad.

But ministries are always going to take advantage of common mythologies and ideologies to manipulate the people. They are, after all, for-profit institutions in a capitalist market, or before were a nexus of political power. They remain places that serve themselves, not the people.

We can even note that the message of Christianity has changed with time to serve the ministries, to reflect the mores of the culture at the time, though in the 20th century, there was an active effort to shift Protestant Evangelical Christianity in the United States towards American Exceptionalism, far-right conservatism, anti-communism, pro-patriarchy and pro-hierarchy, resulting in the Christian nationalist movement we are facing today. The movement that wants to purge LGBT+ and non-Christians, and force women to become breeding mares is the product of decades of willful manipulation. As some sociologists and historians who are Evangelist, themselves have observed, this may well kill Christianity as we know it today, making it the de-facto bad-guy the way Nazis (the old German Reich ones) have been for the last century.

In the meantime, the poet is doing something different. In this case, it serves the same role as other internal mentors and heroes. In Dialectical Behavior Training (DBT, related to CBT – the other CBT) imagining what Wonder Woman, or Captain America, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Jesus Christ might say to you taps into that part of you that loves you unconditionally, beyond the fear that you don’t fit into mainstream society. Jay Hulme is seeing within himself someone that loves and regards him and accepts him for who he is, which is a critical step for all of us, especially those of us who didn’t have others to do the job.

(This can also be applied to other media that celebrates the love of Jesus or the love of a mentor, such as I Don’t Deserve You by Plumb or The Wind Beneath My Wings by… two songwriters – Jeff Silbar and Larry Henley – and performed a whole lot of artists)

Well, to be fair, everything is politics. But yes, the ownership class is looking to displace responsibility for mass scarcity and precarity away from them and are choosing the usual suspects of marginalized social groups. LGBT+ and uppity women are high up on the list along with immigrants.

Precarity (housing precarity, food precarity, job precarity, medical precarity, etc.) is a propaganda force multiplier.

I have a personal hypothesis that self-proclaimed alpha [males] may feel the same gender dysphoria that trans folk do, only it is the sensation that they present less masculine than they actually do, so in their effort to attaining a little bit of machismo they go way overboard.

It’s similar I think to the way Donald Trump can be President of the United States, and still feel fragile and unworthy.

Have you ever been to Gruyère?

???

I think the bases of the alien was written by Dan O’Bannon, so the sexual assault theme was built into the concept. The notion of sexual consent was only in the 1970s entering the discussion of morality. There was a lot of controversy about whether the sexual assault of a married woman by her husband should be regarded as a crime, and in redder regions of the US, it’s still a question.

So yes, stories meant to examine sexual assault, whether predators who use sexual lures or brood parasites and the body horror they invoke were running through the creative veins of Hollywood.

Not true that Giger never revealed such an experience on a talk show, or not true that his art is all about expressing that experience?

To be fair, it’d have to be a pretty liberal talk show for someone to discuss such an experience at all.

Georgian Communists, Trade Unionists and Jews are looking nervous.

The point of coming out for the pride movement is to represent for the rest of the community, to let them know they have allies and peers and are not alone. And when hate groups know we are legion, they are cowed and less inclined to harass.

That said, by all means do not come out until you are good and ready and it’s safe. Especially if you suspect your food, job and housing might be at risk or your region deals with a lot of hate crime.

What part of 'Eeepy Princess was hard to follow?

My understanding of what is going on is that they’re suffering from the same precarity (food, rent, housing, work, family, etc. all in a state of precarity) that the rest of us are, but rather they don’t challenge their own values. The don’t challenge the traditions or the decades of pro-capitalist, pro-nationalist, anti-communist propaganda they’ve been spoon fed. Instead, it’s much it’s easier to blame those in the society they already don’t like because they’re creepy or weird. (And it occurs to me, this may be instincts – called or related to Fixed Action Patterns – from migratory tribes to combat infectious disease. When things feel wrong, you shun or stay away from the members that are looking zombiesque.)

And the ownership class is fueling its propaganda engine (financing it directly, often) to continue to feed them hate rhetoric, the notion that their fellow citizens (or immigrants) are the enemy within causing them grief, and not the deep abuses of the ownership class.

This mythology runs deep, it’s why all our stories point to ramblers, gamblers, adulterers and thieves as sinners and criminals, rather than war profiteers, pharmaceutical companies and tobacco moguls pushing their respective addiction epidemics, or fossil-fuel billionaires pushing an automotive culture while burying data about the climate crisis. Even though all of the former category cause only a tiny fraction of the death, destruction and economic cost that the latter category does.

If we investigated and prosecuted white collar criminals and set all serial killers and bank robbers free, we’d have a lot more people living and a lot more money. And so decades of copaganda have absolutely figured into redirecting that outrage towards the marginalized.

And yes, the ownership class would rather see human extinction than give up their money and power. So I don’t know how we’re going to navigate through this great filter.

Just a small pedantic note, depending on what we want to emphasize is going on, the government they’re going for is either theocratic autocracy or one-party autocracy. Fascism just describes the strategy of using hatemongering, mythical history and enemy within propaganda to distract the Republican base from noticing that they’re not personally gaining anything from the abuses of the ownership class.

(Fascism depends on a myth that all the undesirables are at fault for the misery of the general population, that once they are removed from the population, the government can get right back to serving the public and fixing all the failing infrastructure and making sure everyone that remains prospers. But there are always new people added to the bottom of the undesirables-to-be-purged list. Eventually the nation will have to go to war to continue to push solidarity among the people.)

From the perspective of the Christian Nationalist movement, the goal is theocratic autocracy in which all the whims of the government are justified by the bible. (The bible, or any sacred scripture, can be used to justify anything, no matter how dire, conspicuous or indulgent. In fact, the Church is notorious for its extremes.) The establishment of a state religion also means the establishment of state positions on dogmatic minutiae, so it’s not enough to be Christian but also to adhere to the specific position of the state. Anyone who doesn’t will end up on that undesirables list to be purged.

From the position of the Republican Party, the goal is one-party autocracy The only thing that keeps the Republican party from completely going unhinged is that it has to continue to negotiate with the other party (the Democratic party for now), but once it no longer has to compete for votes, our legislators are enabled to do whatever they want (or whatever is dictated to them by the leaders of the party, currently Donald J. Trump and his handlers). This is why the Texas GOP is trying to reshape how elections are counted, essentially making a Texas electoral college, so Democrats are locked out. This is not for the benefit of Republican voters, but for the benefit of consolidating all power in their party.

Anyhow, autocracy is the endgame. Fascism is used to keep the public frightened and in line and accepting that atrocity may be necessary to keep the enemys at bay. (Otherwise, they might actually realize this is all bullshit and violently revolt.)

Godless Groomers

Um, we totally have way more gods than they do, from My orgies are purely chaste Artemis, to Anything that moves, NO EXCEPTIONS Zeus.

Our new pupper was ~twenty weeks around Easter and our uncle gave him a bunny which he promptly grabbed and gave the neckbreaker shake. So far its the only toy (out of dozens, mostly teething bones) that he shakes like that.

Awoo?

As the bodies on Mount Everest shows us, it’s easy to not be prepared for the levels of cold it can get in some places on earth such as the poles.

Fun trivia: In To Build A Fire which takes place in the Yukon, Jack London notes that it’s -70°

This is to say, the secret ending is that the dog didn’t make it (or did only by a miracle of probability).

My evidence is anecdotal, such as videos of people lounging with a tiger in their living room. There’s also the weird thing in the…90s? Where driving around in a large car with a tiger was a dare-sport thing (which is why it appears as an activity in Saints Row: The Third )

I believe it’s not exactly legal to keep tigers or large cats as pets in industrialized parts of the world (at least not without proper holding cells) but there are huge parts of the world that are less industrialized and are not sufficiently policed to stop symbiotic social relationships between humans and wild animals.

On a similar thread, cheetahs are notoriously easy to domesticate, to the point that they’re a problem. If you go out to cheetah territory, say in Kenya, and feed one, it may decide you’re their buddy for life and follow you home. Unlike black bears in Montana or Wyoming that assault tourists for food when they learn that’s a source, it’s for the protection of the currently endangered cheetah population.

As for other large cats, I don’t know how often they companion up. Here in the states, we have mountain lions, but we also have ranger services to police both the lions and the tourists. I suspect in places like Nepal where there are human settlements removed enough from industry there also may be negotiations between leopards and humans with positive outcomes. But that is speculation. I haven’t seen videos of that.

ETA: Scanning news, apparently in 2024 there are a lot of tigers-as-pets in Texas of all places, which is a lot more contrived since it’s not adopting and befriending the beastie from the nearby jungle, but importing them in to be domesticated.

Oh, if you’re particular to the white ones, it’s the -40° that’ll kill you. Not the bear.