Vintage Lego battle: Space Police vs. ragtag anarchist protester fleet
Who will win??
"ACAB!!!" the anarchists shout over the subspace network as they bravely dive their homemade fighter craft at the massive police battlecruiser
The Space Police have bulked up their armaments, due to years of surplus military equipment getting dumped on the market after the war against the Star Wars Lego sets
Independent investigations have caught the Space Police keeping prisoners in highly inhumane conditions, in flagrant violation of interstellar conventions
This is Steve, from the planet New Portland. He built his fighter with spare parts from his dad's out-of-business service station. In his spare time he enjoys hoverbiking, asteroid climbing, and campaigning for robots' rights.
This is Janice, Steve's sort-of-ex (it's complicated). When she's not battling interstellar fascism, she enjoys making holograms of her cat, earning money as a zero-G burlesque dancer, and discussing YA literature online.
This is Space Police Sergeant Jim Jackendorf. He loves his job, even though he believes the government has been taken over by slug-beings from the Magellanic Clouds. He's definitely not species-ist, BUT
The anarchists unfortunately lost this ship when it turned out that a design flaw led to a zeon missile being mounted directly in the path of the ship's main laser cannon... 😫
But despite setbacks, the nimble anarchists eventually outmaneuver the slower, bulkier Space Police cruisers.
It helps that the Space Police are only given 45 minutes of training before starting on the job.
Even the Space Police's hideously expensive battlecruiser is outmatched when the anarchists receive timely reinforcements from the Blacktron Bloc
But the thrill of the anarchist victory is short-lived, after they fall to infighting over whether using robots in space combat represents uncompensated extraction of their labor...
And despite their humiliating defeat, the Space Police have the last laugh, when New Portland elects Baron Konrad von Dethkampe as their new prelate, and he raises the Space Police budget by 1200%!
(end)
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Feel like Blu*sky is a microcosm for all of American liberalism right now. The entire left-of-center became defined by cancel culture. Now the spaces where that culture exists are shrinking under external attack, but everyone on the left just stays within those shrinking spaces.
There was this big idea that social media was this infinitely powerful tool that allowed a small # of progressives to shame a huge number of Americans into accepting their values. For a decade it seemed to be working. But it overreached and collapsed.
But progressives got addicted to that seemingly infinite power. They forgot everything else. They forgot how to persuade. They forgot how to organize. They forgot how to compromise. They thought the only tool they would ever need again was heckling and shunning on social media.
2/Most of the discourse around China in Western media these days is about U.S.-China competition (e.g. this podcast by @DKThomp and @RushDoshi). But I thought I'd write about something a little more positive -- the idea that China is building The Future.
2/After Covid, there was a general sense that America needed to be REBUILT -- not just from the pandemic, but from the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Rust Belt, and decades of institutional decay.
3/People argued about HOW to rebuild America. Naturally, progressives thought it would be more government-directed, while conservatives thought it would come from the private sector and from defense spending.
This is a very subtle and interesting question. It seems clear that right-wing interest in personal health is a response to the terrible health of non-college Americans. And the rightists are trying to invent an alternative approach that resists the hegemony of academia.
The fact is, college-educated Americans tend to be hypocritical about health. They watch what they eat, get lots of exercise, and try to eat "organic", but they preach fat acceptance and a disability-based approach to poor health. Rightists don't know how to deal with that.
In fact, this is representative of a broader pattern. College-educated progressives get married and stay marriage, but denigrate the idea of marriage. They work hard but denigrate the idea of hard work. Their personal success is based on rampant, galloping hypocrisy.
1/Here's something a lot of people I talk to don't understand about Japanese urbanism, and why Japanese cities are so special.
2/Japanese cities feel different than big, dense cities elsewhere -- NYC, London, and Paris, but also other Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore.
There are many reasons for this, but today I'll focus on one: Zakkyo buildings.
3/When many people think of "mixed-use development", they think of stores on the first floor, apartments on the higher floors. This is sometimes called "shop-top housing" or "over-store apartments".
This is how most cities in the world do mixed-use development.