Bi is the only completely certain sexual orientation—everything else is potentially contingent on the set of people we’ve met so far.

Do you continue being an idiot outside the context of the team?

I’d rather be surrounded by people more capable than me (at least if I care about the success of the task), but not at that cost.

They’re not selling gasoline, they’re selling the experience of living in an alternate reality.

I mean, the Whig party hasn’t lost an election in 100 years…

Given that birthright citizenship has been the rule since the Civil War, is he saying that all of subsequent American history is an example of these “grotesque results”?

The rest of its brood had already dissolved.

One dead baby duck was caught floating in the pool over the weekend, though the cause of death was unclear.

Did they charge it with vandalism too?

Trump just told his chief of staff to write down the nuclear launch codes somewhere where he wouldn’t keep losing them.

If I had to coin a term, I’d call it “aesthetic ergodicity”.

As in, a culture that keeps revisiting every combination of aesthetic parameters over and over with no long-term trend.

TASS is Russia’s state-owned news agency, so there’s no expectation of neutrality or journalistic best practices.

It can still be informative, as long as the stories are taken as the best plausible narrative they can construct to account for whatever it is that actually happened.

Confusion is a notification of prediction failure.

Your self is the private reservoir of knowledge and experience you draw on to interact with the world in a way that’s distinct from anyone else (and that couldn’t be predicted without access to that internal knowledge).

So he’d have deported Einstein, then?

I think machines have replaced the role of the chorus in classical Greek tragedies. Everyone knows they’re not supposed to represent individual people—they’re just the personification of social expectations and unconscious norms.

Crackers at nighttime’ll do that to ya.

The lion-and-sun flag is the flag of the old Safavid Empire.

If you want to use a historical flag, a more appropriate one might be the pre-Islamic Sassanid Standard of Kaveh—the flag of the legendary blacksmith who overthrew the tyrant Zahhak. (But that flag has also been used by Iranians protesting the current regime, which may not be the overtone you’re intending.)

I will avoid saying why I’m planning on doing it now only because it will color people’s interpretation of why I’m doing it.

Flags are symbolic—they exist to communicate, and the only criterion to judge their appropriateness is whether they communicate the intended message to the intended audience.

Without knowing your intended message, it’s impossible to say whether or not you should use one in a given context.

Section 1983 and Section 1985 of the Civil Rights Act stipulate that a person may be liable for violating constitutional rights, even if they’re not a state or local government employee, if they conspired with state or local employees.

So local law enforcement agencies assisting ICE may actually be setting them up for lawsuits?

Any group can be empowering for its members. If it’s a group that already has an unequal amount of power in society, exclusive meetings will tend to exacerbate the inequality. But if it’s a relatively powerless group, it can counter the imbalance.

The same way Holder responded to the Occupy Wall Street mass protests over his failure to prosecute the banks responsible for the 2008 financial crisis?