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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More from @Noahpinion

22 Dec
Development stories that I'm especially enthusiastic/optimistic about right now:

1. Bangladesh
2. Dominican Republic
3. Vietnam
4. Indonesia
Look at those beautiful curves! Image
If fast-growing Asian economies are "tigers" and fast-growing African economies are "lions", what are fast-growing Caribbean economies? Jaguars?
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21 Dec
An overview of Jamaica's industrial development situation, and what it might do to bring about an economic miracle:

noahpinion.substack.com/p/jamaica-is-d…
Here's Jamaica compared to some other countries in the region... Image
And here it is compared to exponentially-growing countries like the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. Image
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17 Dec
The thing is, while I think activists, intellectuals, media figures and politicians would benefit from crafting patriotic narratives that fit the middle option in this poll, I myself am not sure which I would pick.
Eight years ago I was very sure that America was one of the best countries in the world. I couldn't say THE best, having been to countries that were in their own way just as good. But definitely one of the best.

Now, I am not sure anymore.
Our culture has become far less gentle, tolerant, and accepting - and, possibly as a result, less creative. Our institutions haven't collapsed as much as some believe, but many are cleaely dysfunctional in a way most other rich countries' institutions are not.
Read 8 tweets
16 Dec
This thread illustrates what always, to me, seemed like the fundamental problem with the BBB bill. No one could ever really decide what it was *about*. I had my own ideas for what it should be about, but everyone else had their own ideas.
For a long time the bill's main selling point was "it's big". That seemingly allowed every progressive to sort of graft their dreams onto the idea of the bill, even though it only really had the potential to be transformative in a couple of areas.
I feel like BBB has become a symbolic stand-in for the fact that a lot of progressives want America to change in a lot of different ways, all at once.

And the bill was just never going to be able to do that.
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These reports paint Xi Jinping as a mercurial, arrogant micromanager -- the kind of leader who is good at scaring everyone into saying he's a great leader, but who is bad at actually managing an organization.
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I feel like I called this one.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-if-xi-j…
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Instead of canceling math because we think Americans don't have the IQ to handle it, how about we copy the math education systems of countries who do it better than we do?

usatoday.com/story/news/edu…
The frustrating thing about these math education debates is that the people trying to cancel math (yes, this is a loose figure of speech) seem to believe deeply and instinctively that American kids are dum-dums who can't learn math, so we should give up...
...But trying to convince these education policy people that IQ isn't the most important thing when it comes to math education (which is true) isn't super effective, because they already seem to spend all their time trying and failing to convince *themselves* of this very thing.
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