Notices by Jae (considermycat@eldritch.cafe)

@aral @grrlscientist Well, we could forgive him the half-million dead children if he’d hit his economic targets

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Edent/116367891507649986

The bit that boils the blood here is the way they specifically say "14 to 18 years after their initial launches", like they're reproaching customers for hanging onto their old kit for so long, when what they're actually doing is intentionally breaking products that were still working, to force people to buy new ones

Trump saying that "a whole civilisation will die tonight" reminds me of the Greek king who attacked Persia after being told by the oracle at Delphi that he would destroy a mighty empire by doing so – only to find it was *his* empire that was destroyed

RE: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116227366176852440

Yes. Same for those of us living in vassal states. The whole point of empire is that it makes you feel safe while others outside and on the empire’s periphery are suffering from its actions. The shocking thing that Trump has done is to strip away that feeling of safety from the imperial homeland and heartlands

(A feeling of safety that was always confined to a privileged subset of the population even within the empire, of course) @aral

RE: https://mas.to/@skeletor/116188678255691223

Hmph! Going to unfollow @skeletor if they engage in any more of these highly personal attacks!

Statement from Quakers in Britain about tonight's police raid on Westminster Meeting House. Guys, I don't think they're buying the Met's line about the nonviolent direct action training being a cover for plotting "mass shoplifting"

@Nickiquote @ASprinkleofSage A classic example of the old saying: “fiction needs to be plausible; reality only needs to be possible.”

@fabio @aral This is encouraging to see, though I suspect the UK and Germany will be pretty immovable on this

I’m going to go with, “It depends on whether or not you’re rich”

@cwebber Seems pretty clear they will block people with X markers from entering or leaving the United States. The booking details *must* match the passport, but the booking details can only have an M or F. So if your passport has an X: new passport or no transit

*Loved* this Religion for Breakfast video on the features of almost every real-world religion that fictional religions overlook – such as the gulf between official doctrine and popular practice, and the importance of ritual and material objects rather than just sacred texts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjrrUZeJMSo

I especially liked the distinction RtB described (citing anthropologist Catherine Bell) between “ritual” and “ritualisation”. “Rituals” are too disparate to be a useful category, Bell argues. Instead, we need to consider the *process* of *ritualisation*: the ways in which everyday actions – walking, eating, drinking, washing and so on – become invested with religious significance

Even religions which claim to be almost entirely without “ritual” – such as the Quakers – still practise plenty of *ritualisation*. What is Quaker worship if not the ritualisation of sitting quietly with others and of speaking within that context?

Was wondering what the evolutionary purpose is of hair going grey as you get older, until I realised my thoughts were drifting into the territory of evolutionary psychology, with its eternal question: “How can we reify 1950s gender relations within a framework of evolutionary biology?”

A very happy 30th birthday to bisexuality, born this day in 1995 🎂

@cwebber #goals

The marriage vows spoken by each spouse are the only prescribed words in the Quaker marriage ceremony. So excluding gendered terminology there means it can be avoided in the whole ceremony

Even after the introduction of same-sex marriage, most secular and Christian wedding ceremonies impose gendered terms like “husband” and “wife”, as does (I believe) the marriage certificate. It would seem the Quakers have carved out something of an exception to this

(And yes, it *is* quite impressive, isn’t it, how I can manage to be a liturgy nerd even when it comes to the least liturgical tradition in Christendom…)