Well, they’re separated by the Panama canal, so by the same token that Africa and Asia aren’t the same land mass, neither are the Americas.

“If you want to restore this, like, ‘primordial’ forest, don’t you also want to restore our relationship with that forest?” he asked. “Like — what’s your relationship to a transgenic chestnut?”

This is a quote by Patterson in the article, and it basically sums up this whole article.

No, no one is trying to restore a “primordial forest”, they’re trying to restore a tree that was the most common tree in America 50 years ago, which produces nutritious food that anyone can eat.

People don’t need to have an indigenous relationship with a plant to benefit from it or want to see it in place; you do not have to be Georgian or Armenian to love apple trees.

This story was such nonsense, because of how hard it tried to make this a story about indigenous peoples.

Every town I’ve ever visited on the eastern seaboard has chestnut streets and chestnut lanes because these trees were everywhere. My dad grew up when the blight had finally reached a tipping point and was quickly changing that; it wasn’t that long ago.

I respect everything Patterson is saying in this article, but not reintroducing the American Chestnut because it fails to right colonial wrongs is like not brushing your teeth because it doesn’t stop you from getting cancer.

In any event, if they’re reintroducing chestnuts I’m getting a couple for my property. I ate my first chestnut in my 40s (in Spain) and I’d love to have some in my retirement.

I’d recommend it! I have a lovely Japanese chestnut in my yard that I harvest every fall, I make chestnut puree and that shit is to die for.

For some of us at some times in our lives, having a relationship with two people is less work. It requires much more communication, better scheduling, and much more attention to your partners’ feelings … but that might be a good investment of time anyhow, and often gets overlooked.

I find that having multiple partners helps me appreciate each partner much more, for themselves – it’s easy to mix up how much you love just having a partner and being loved, with how you actually feel about that person. Poly gives you the distance and contrast to see your partners clearly, and that can be really special.

Yeah, this is my dynamic as well. My partner and I have been together for a decade and poly from the beginning. It’s not at all a secret, but people are so used to monogamy as a norm that they often just think our other partners are super close friends that hang out at our house a lot.

I’ve been in poly relationships most of my adult life, around 15 years now. I’m certainly familiar with the type of relationship you describe, but the long term, stable poly relationships are the ones that have been poly from the get go.

I don’t tend to date people who are “opening things up” in a previously monogamous relationship, because being someone’s learning experience is a bummer.

I’ve been in poly relationships for years. They work really well for me and my significant others, but we are pretty discreet about it because folks tend to be huge assholes about it.

Generally, you don’t see the poly relationships that work great; mostly, people see the type of scenario one of your other commenters described because the stable relationships are less visible.

We don’t! That’s the joy of it, just like people do, our algorithm will constantly waffle back and forth and argue with itself over whether these things are salads

I know, I was being humorous but it is in fact the way most categorization works. Very seldom is it a taxonomy; the way we recognize faces, voices, shapes, etc … it’s all probabilistic.

What we need is a salad categorizing multilayer neural network

So teeeeechnically, a salad is a dish composed of mixed ingredients. You could make the argument that you mix any two set of chopped ingredients and bingo bongo, it’s a salad.

However, I like to think that dishes’ ingredients aren’t a taxonomic thing, they’re a probabilistic thing. In other words, there’s no such thing as “not salad” or “salad”, only shades of saladness.

• Serve it cold? Ok it’s saladier

• It’s made up of chopped ingredients? Saladier still

• Those ingredients are mostly vegetables? Getting pretty saladish

• They’re mixed together? Even more salad like

• They’ve got some sort of dressing mixed in? Now it’s very likely a salad!

… and so on. To me, your SO’a dish has a pretty high Salad Probability^tm

For reference, nowhere in Western Europe is even close to the much of the west coast of the Americas in terms of seismic activity.

The definition of what “good coffee” is vary from place to place. The northeast has absolutely phenomenal American style coffee (focus on drip coffee and long pours), a lot of Europeans are after a really good espresso for €1.5.

Am an executive… agree with you on all fronts

It’s potentially worse than useful and actively confusing.

Welcome to philosophy! I’d recommend reading Spinoza, he lays it out very intelligently.

It’s simultaneously a way of disproving the existence of God (he was kicked out of his Jewish community and hounded around Europe by the Catholics for his atheism), and a way of replacing it with the concept of the infinite / of the universe. Lends itself to meditation and contemplation, but not to any kind of religious dogma.

BTW, the concept has nothing to do with love, or the fundamental aspect of humanity, etc. It’s just infinite extension, which encompasses every aspect of humanity, and of everything else.

I have a more complicated answer these days than I used to… the short answer is “no,” but the caveats make it longer.

I don’t believe in a god in the sense of an all knowing human type being that has thoughts and wishes and passes down commandments – basically, not the religious kind of God.

At the same time, I appreciate a lot of the Jewish traditions I grew up with, and Judaism has a lot more lassitude around what “God” means to you. To me, it’s Baruch Spinoza’s conception of God … basically, just “the universe,” of which each person is an integral part.

So in a “college freshman on acid feeling one with the universe,” kind of way, sure I believe in God. In a, “He got upset I masturbated way,” then no, not at all.

It became the de jure culture war issue. People who didn’t care before, do now – because now it’s a team sport.

I mean look, it’s cool that they’re doing this and all, and the idea or a trans Atlantic flight in 3 hours is neat for sure … but air travel is already really damn fast, could we focus on making it less shit in other ways?

• Can we get the carbon footprint down so it doesn’t contribute so much to the end of the world?

• Can we cut fuel costs significantly so it doesn’t have to be so miserably expensive?

Not any of the materials I’ve received until recently, and those folks have been spamming me for the better part of 20 years.

So like… yeah, sure, that’s true. At the same time overturning a judicial precedent this well established is an absolute first, and public support for Roe v Wade started relatively low and has been steadily growing since then.

So when you’ve got all kinds of immediate, pressing issues, why waste a narrow political margin on alienating a big swathe of voters by publicly confirming a right that everyone already has?

I can’t fault any individual administration for not focusing on this… I can fault the voters, though.