Maybe DeSantis should spend a billion dollars building a wall, to keep out the immigrants from NYC!? :-P
He already effectively did that to keep out Disney it seems. :-|
When [NYC] sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
-Donald Trump
There is a whole entire universe of back-stories there - not just Han Solo as a kid & young adult (but that too!), but Boba Fett, Lando Calrissian & Vuffi Raa, and like you know Darth Vader but there is also Prince Xixor the head of the Black Sun organization that was his top rival for power underneath the Emperor, and all manner of "minor" characters like IG-88 that almost took over the universe:-), oh and we should not forget Anzat the nostril vampires.
Robots, magic, love, intrigue, pirates, death, honestly like any story it's more about the strength of the author to tell it than anything but the universe is there to work within, and that's solid.
You already mentioned some of the top highlights: the Thrawn series - b/c Timothy Zahn is really good - and the rogue series, are both good. I found Michael Stackpole to be a bit distracting to read b/c of all the action terms, but if you can either know or ignore what "pitch" and "yaw" mean, they are great regardless:-). Especially Wedge becoming a pirate - fantastic!:-P
I am guessing that you only think you know about Luke/Leia/Han - e.g. Luke was this old hermit sage in the wilderness in the more recent movies - but at one point he was abandoned by his mentors and had to sort of just figure out the entire Jedi thing all on his own. He went from child/tween to young man to middle-aged long before he pulled back to his role of "retired sage on a mountaintop", which is the journey of a literal lifetime.
I think you are right to avoid the Yuuzhan Vong - not necessarily forever but at least to start with, b/c it was written in a time when all the other stories had already been told, and people were waiting on George Lucas to expand the universe to be able to tell more, so they are just strange, and also meant to be interpreted in the context of flat being "different" than any that came before. Ngl, there are some interesting stories embedded in that arc, but you can come to them later if you want - they are not good to start your jouney with imho.
Basically I am confirming your existing plan: read what you are interested in, those you mentioned are good, and once you read them, you may have a better feel for what you would be more interested in knowing next. e.g. I always thought the whole back-story of the Noghri was somewhat interesting, especially Leia's involvement, but until you read the Thrawn series you may not even know what those are.
I guess I should add that it will be really weird to be shifting universes all the time: the Empire (Thrawn and X-Wing series) is a very different place than the Old Republic, the latter is full of entitled people who barely know the meaning of the word "hardship" (and who all think that their lifestyle will go on & on forever) while the former rarely if ever mentions someone who has a stable source of income & a home, instead everything is slavery, death, and freedom fighting. So I confirm that your plan to read whole entire series at once is a good one, as those transitions especially between pre- and post-TOR will be jarring.
So get in there, and enjoy!:-)
Trump's "just grab them by the pussy" quote was revealed to the public almost a decade ago, in October of 2016.
Trump's successful assassination attempt was in January of 2020, after his first impeachment but before his second one, and before the "excess deaths" from the pandemic killed more Americans than all wars combined.
Trump's conviction of rape was one year ago.
How long has it been since Trump even traveled to NYC, from Florida - didn't he even move his "home state" status there officially a couple years back?
Other places changed their names to remove the toxic Trump phrase multiple years ago in the past.
Click bait article seems to be dredging up click bait drama, about some rich folks who now (why NOW all of a sudden!?) worry about their property values being affected by the Trump name - as the article states, not bc of anything that he did, but bc he's currently under investigation and so due to the negative stigma attached to that, i.e. rich folks worry that they may be less rich soon. Sorry / not sorry if I don't care in the slightest.
Except "nobody listens". Well that's not entirely true: Obama's administration created an entire pandemic response team whose sole job was to prepare in advance for when something like that was bound to inevitably happen - like figure out what to do, how to do it, how to handle getting the complex messaging out to people who are not comfortable with a lot of details or the varying levels of uncertainty that was going to be inevitable, etc. But who would ever want anything that that man (cough of color cough - what?, I didn't say anything, I just coughed is all!) touched? I heard that he even has cooties, eww gross! From a reliable source even - a Stable Genius who uses all the best words!
Anyway, it's a good thing that the next inevitable pandemic (that will definitely 100% happen) is absolutely certain to need zero federal funding, bc it will never ever happen, so we can all just go back to our regular lives, safe in the knowledge that the top 0.1% will be fine no matter what. The Economy will go on and on... all praise be to The Economy.
Fwiw, I agree with most of your message - blaming migrants for a disease is a cop-out, etc. - it is just that it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what I wrote!:-P (one potential exception is that they knew about hygiene from whence they came, but transitioning between climates e.g. from a very warm jungle area to one with a bitterly cold winter, could introduce a barrier, plus do not underestimate how many are literal children, whose parents may have done something like literally and physically dropped their children over the fence, then turned around and went back home, or possibly rather simply died of covid or whatever, either way thereby leaving their child to face the new area "alone" i.e. at the mercy of the people in this country to take care of such literal orphans) The rest went downhill from there.
And fwiw, you basically were telling me the opposite of what you yourself seemed to be doing: I am supposed to think hard about how my messages will be received, and adjust my words accordingly, so as to get a better response - and in particular to avoid even the tiniest spectre of a potential misunderstanding? Okay, true but... pot calling the kettle black there? Also, all those pejoratives sprinkled in there - that I made a "mistake", that I was putting forth a "cop-out" argument, that my idea is "racist", that my thoughts are "frivolous", etc. Except you did not even bother to verify that I even meant any of that in the first place - you basically triggered yourself, then reacted to that phantom in your head, the whole conversation having little to no involvement with my actual words, and then when that fact was revealed, rather than apologize you doubled down further and harder, as if the prior message did not exist, except also extending it further to say that was somehow still my fault that you went off like that.
Meh, it happens though:-). The important thing is to learn from it, if you want your words to be something worth paying attention to. And yes, btw, I do acknowledge that I could have done better in my initial, one-sentence comment, regardless. It was very off-the-cuff, not deeply thought out about how others might perceive it (as the article we should have more rights presuming should have done, seeing as how it was an actual article). We both would do well to pause for a moment prior to speaking, to let our words mull over in our heads before blurting them out:-). In my case I could added simply something like "not that I blame them or anything, just coming at this from a diagnostic perspective", or perhaps more along the lines of my later comments where I clarified that if I was to blame someone it would sooner be predatory landlords and the like. Although it is worth mentioning that there is zero possibility of avoiding ALL potential misunderstandings, especially on a topic such as this that generates such strong emotions in the readers of this article. Still, one more sentence (fragment) would definitely have helped.
Whereas in turn you could do well to listen to your own message about how easily words can be misconstrued. You basically read the article and high on those emotions, used me as a dumping ground, for a topic that I would have agreed with and actively upvoted if you had made it clear that the target was not what I had said, but instead tangentially launching off of that to some other topic entirely, e.g. about the clickbait media's inaccurate portrayal (except they never mentioned migrants iirc?). i.e. we could have been together on this rather than on opposing sides. It is something to think about, at any rate.
As for why I brought up the topic at all, it is literally the chief and often sole job of anyone at all who works in any of the STEM fields to first diagnose an issue, prior to fixing it. e.g. if the majority of the new disease victims were children, then the response would take a different form than if they were adults. Similarly for whether they speak English well or not, or like... have access to a phone - e.g. if the "solution" is some kind of hotline that people can call to report rat infestations, then would children who don't speak English and don't have easy access to a phone be able to take advantage of that, to avoid the horrible conseuences of this phenomena? But anyway, you chose not to care about the reasons why I said what I said, and skipping the investigation stage entirely just jumped into your diatribe of why what I really meant (except that I didn't mean that at all!) was bad. So perhaps I should modify what I said earlier: we both would do well to pause before speaking, but you also could add in a step to pause and listen. Well, you will do whatever you want, ofc, and I would not dream of trying to change you (b/c that's impossible), but since you asked, that is my thought:-).
Also, you are right to seriously question yourself, particularly if there is any way that you thought what you wrote was in any universe "non-confrontational"? Instead, I see that you have decided to now triple down on how this is all my fault, for failing to consider how you might interpret what I said inside your own head. Do you see...? Well, anyway, it's something to consider. You know, I actually do get that - heck, I have been that - but also, I moved on, and I am much happier now as a result. You'll find your way too, if you keep going (but since you asked, no, tripling down even harder even while making mouth-noises that you are apologetic does not come across as genuine, even if you actually were attempting to be thus).
Also, you are doing it again - e.g. when you say "it is... partly your responsibility to understand how your speech is interpreted by others", that is an obviously 100% statement, that once again has only the tiniest sliver of relevance to what we were actually discussing. I said ONE SENTENCE, obviously I did not put 20 minutes into composing an entire message about the topic. The context is completely different, b/t my comment about the article, vs. your reply to my too-brief comment.
If you truly get any of what I am saying, you will not reply again and instead spend DAYS thinking about it - I don't need to hear the entire back-and-forth of what goes on inside your head, it is not what I came to this article nor to the Fediverse for. It is probably too much for me to hope for, but I did at least offer a fully fleshed-out response to your questions, so my conscience is clear.
Yes, it is true - and extremely sad - that people on social media often immediately jump to the exact & opposite conclusion as is warranted from what I said, intentionally choosing to first misunderstand me and second to act upon that misunderstanding. But that is not fully on me, especially when I said one single sentence, that could have easily meant several possible things, and is thus at worst ambiguous and therefore neutral. You yourself did this, when you said that "your idea is not realy plausible" - i.e., not "if I understand you correctly, then I think that...", but your idea, singular, as in one, single, interpretation, with none other possible. This is, if I am not mistaken, known as the "fallacy of extremes" where if X is true then surely there is no possible way that Y could not also be true, where Y is the absolute most extreme version of X, e.g. I dislike X, therefore X is like unto Hitler.
And this is why conservatives dominate the internet. With liberals choosing to eat their own, we have to watch out for attacks from both sides, rather than merely the opposition.
But if you truly were curious what I meant... you could have simply asked? Instead, you told, and despite being wrong, doubled down on it again, shifting the topic ever so slightly so as to maintain a righteous-sounding tone. Well, congrats I suppose, b/c your response did get the same number of upvotes with fewer downvotes (btw I never downvoted you) so... I guess you "won"? But let's face facts shall we? We both lost here, by allowing the conversation to devolve to this level. I mean that somehow what is - or rather, at least might be - happening to immigrants has been entirely lost from our back-and-forth exchange.
Kudos for at least caring about their plight though, that much I do applaud. I hope you think about this exchange and how you can improve your end, and I will promise to do the same.
I never said anything at all about "blaming" them, even if they did happen to be found at the center of this horrible situation. There are a lot of people who while sitting in the comfort of their mansions are very free to make a lot of choices - e.g. the Texas governor who sent them there under false pretenses - but recent immigrants, especially those fleeing persecution at home, are typically those least free and capable to avoid e.g. scams from a scummy landlord who may receive rent money in return for substandard housing where rats might be found.
Also the article talked about a change after 2020, and the influx of immigrants who were promised to go one place but then somehow ended up in a city not of their choosing seems to fit that criteria of something different than the two decades prior to that where infection rates were low.
Just like all the other Americans, right? (meme reference)
(but more seriously) The migrants are not used to that environment, and especially may fall into such traps more than people who know the area.
I wonder how many are the migrants bussed there from Texas.
Edit: the article mentions that it is at least partly due to climate change as well.
Thank you for helping put my mind at ease:-). Sadly, I think there are quack doctors, especially in the USA, but as you say the entire issue is so super-charged b/c on the other side you have things like those literally torture camps where they electroshock little children, often leading to their actual death. I think multiple of the latter have been created and directed over by someone who a decade or two later in life came out as gay themselves, and one or perhaps two even killed themselves - i.e. they hated themselves, b/c of their pseudo-religious bullshit treating Christianity not as "love one another" but rather as "do as I say" aka Might Equals Right and Conformity Is All. So then hurting the children sprung forth from their own mental illness, but in the process they created a panic among parents who wanted to "beat out the gay" from their children, who they ended up killing instead:-(.
The parallels between those stories and the anti-vax movement are profound: each relates to ignorance, and each results in a huge risk and often death to the most innocent among us:-(. And THAT is why I keep saying that I am losing hope for democracy: why should "citizens" have a say, in such INORDINANTLY COMPLEX matters, that require specialist knowledge, especially when there is (often Russian-derived, intentional) misinformation polluting the whole topic?! Except how else could be done - the State (e.g. China) decides, and everyone just has to follow its lead? Which brings us back to: the only solution forward would be to ensure that people receive a basic edumacashiun, so that we are better prepared to deal with such attacks on our system(s), even as we try to move forward into the future. But Christofascists on the one side, and corporate-backed liberals on the other, do seem a daunting pair of adversaries.
How are we supposed to tell people how things actually are for us if nobody even listens to us in the first place.
Amen, sistah! That is the really odd thing I find about most aspects of life - like "Evangelical" Christianity in particular, isn't the goal there to "save" people, so then why go extremely out of your way to alienate them, via let's say passing anti-abortion laws? All that on top of the fact that the Bible not only never says that Christians are meant to regulate non-Christians, but in fact it says the polar opposite of that! Christians are to judge "Christians" - e.g. when a priest diddles a child, THAT is something that should be judged! And also, Christians are specifically never ever to judge "non-Christians", who have been granted freedom to live however they wish. The only grace I can manage to come up with for people who think like that - even though it included me for many of my early years - is that sheeple aren't known for their ability to perform acts of higher thought. They are vulnerable. As are we all, just differently, is all.:-|
That said, there really is a line there, and that is when you step up to take away the rights of other people - properly warn them, yeah, maybe go so far as to require an extra consent form or some such, but when you actively prevent someone from doing as they please, that generates resentment. How the hell are people supposed to "evangelize" to someone who has just e.g. been tortured, perhaps to literal death? (successfully anyway) It makes them a hypocrite.
The saddest part is that in reality we all want the same thing but “They” have us fighting about manufactured issues and differences that don’t actually matter at all.
I agree so hard I can't even throw in a nice phrase here about it, maybe I'll just say "gulp". Among well-meaning individuals, we can discuss ANYTHING at all, no matter how difficult, and if there's something we don't quite "get", we can look it up. Maybe put our money where our mouths are and hire an expert to explain it to us. But we can get it done. However, among people who are not well-meaning, we can discuss NOTHING, b/c every single topic is merely being used as another avenue to preach their belief at someone, not merely virtue-signalling b/c they actually do mean it (sometimes), but still not all the way over to the other side in terms of being actually authentic. They must be quite lonely I imagine, and not comfortable in their own skin/heads, to need to resort to borrowing the actual thoughts of others rather than stare bravely at their own, following wherever they may lead. Take pity on them, but don't let them be in charge!
It is not my place to tell you what to do, but I do hope that you get a chance to rest before replying to me - as much as I enjoy hearing from you, I want you to be happy even more:-).
I gave up on iOS entirely - I still love Mac OSX but I hate iOS, especially if I am constrained, b/c of work reasons, to still have to use a Google or Microsoft account. Apple just flat does not care what our needs are, out there irl, only what they want to provide. Now I am aware: if you sell your soul to them (by using exclusively their products), then they do take extremely good care of you. So long as you never even so much as dare to dream of venturing outside of their walled garden... you will be fine. But I just cannot live that way:-(. So I put up with the mess of Android, b/c it is still far better than the 1984-style "security" that iOS offers imho:-P.
Then again, I desperately do want a fairly stable daily driver, not an adventurous linux "experiment":-D.
it could be more about personally losing something than it not being fair.
Oh yeah 100% agree there - all of humanity, and most especially children, use justification rather than purely logical reasoning.
my answer to the question “How can we help people?” is to just help people.
NO, I very much disagree, at least in my own sense. Then again, you did mention that it may not be phrased well, and your actual actions I 100% agree with so... there is that:-P. In general I think that such selfless act tend (even if not fully guaranteed) to be the better way, as in you help yourself and them at the same time - subject to your capacity ofc. A big issue there that I have agonized over in my mind is trans children. Since we know that younger humans use "justification" rather than pure "logic", is it really helpful then to allow them access to surgeries that are not designed for that, not well-tested, and have an enormous failure rate (isn't it like 50%?), where they can become crippled for life? Then again, I have no skin in that game really, and while I am mostly an ally in the sense that I think like "dare to be different" is a good thing, still I do wonder if those children are being taken advantage of by predatory doctors who are pushing expensive surgeries (like $100k USD a pop!), more than acting to help them be who they truly are. And some I believe truly are, but how do we know the difference b/t when it is helpful vs. harmful, and isn't that related to age, or at least some measure of emotional maturity? I have read (on Reddit) in trans forums that even older trans people (who I trust more than myself to be cognizent of the issues involved?) are themselves against allowing literal children to go through that. To clarify, in case I am sounding "conservative" here myself (dErP), I am talking solely about children here, whatever that cutoff might be, like 15-18 or some such, and the goal is how to help them, not how to tell them what they can or cannot do (maybe the surgery could be allowed but not like federally approved for safety, or worse yet have some label attached to it, like those warnings on cigarettes? Anyway, I don't mean to go deep into that issue per se, but rather to use it as an exemplar: "How can we help people?", for me, requires some knowledge as to what, exactly, that is.
But ofc I am probably over-thinking it.:-D And yet even in doing so, I am offering my love to society in terms of trying to find that "correct" path. Not that I would tell much of anyone, so I don't even know why really myself, except that it is in me to do so.
Anyway, when the answer seems more simple I just go for it - like I like to tip well, even putting in a dollar when I pick up food where no server is involved so it is not usual, and even if that could be 10-20% of the order cost. Those workers deserve their wages, and I need to be generous and that is one way to help support people who really are needing, wanting, and deserving of it!:-)
I feel like that’s just because those stories don’t sell as well and/or they get immediately buried by ragebait.
Sigh... yeah, everything seems to come back to money. There's probably a morality/philosophy point in there somehow, like it tends to reflect what we value the most, as a society. Truth isn't something we really care about, nor children, and for the most part we (the USA I mean) mostly care about healthcare when there are expensive drugs available for purchase, not so much at any other time.:-(
I applaud your efforts to remain open to experiences, possibilities, and loving one another - stay awesome gurl!:-D
To be clear, not of himself, but rather when Trump assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani - whatever else he may have been, he was employed in that capacity by a foreign power, and Trump killed him with a "precision strike", aka assassination. I thought that event might have literally started WWIII, but instead Iran was like "naw, we're cool bro", and that was it.