woodenghost [comrade/them]

Do they offer that much for information on any murder? Or does it depend on your class? (rhetorical questions)

There is one right there?

It sounds similar to [citation needed], which is often used on Wikipedia.

Because they are old. Ghosts are just the anthropomorphic manifestation of people’s fear of growing old. Religious framings are just an add on.

Trauma and grief can’t run their course if your mind is so senile and your short term memory so feeble, that you’re basically forced to live in the past. Forever repeating old arguments, reliving past trauma and never overcoming old fears. With your mind so set in it’s tracks, that you can’t even imagine leaving the place where you lived all your live — your “old haunt” so to speak. How could you live in the present, if you can’t even recognize your own children half of the time? But the long term memory often still works. Ghosts are real and if you’re lucky enough to live that long you might well become one. Of course aging isn’t always like this, it can be graceful and dignified but when it isn’t, that’s what people are afraid of.

People are scared, when they see older relatives acting stranger every day, especially in times before any way to diagnose Alzheimer’s and other forms of neural degradation. They might seem like they are not quite here anymore, like the person they were had long since died and yet, something lingers. Ghost stories are a socially acceptable way to express those fears.

Just observe the effects ghosts have on their victims: first, they are reminded of their own mortality. Then their hair suddenly turns white or gray or falls out, they lose sleep, wake up tired or grow old over night. They might lose their mind or die themselves. That’s all just normal aging.

Here is a handy key to select monsters and their meaning:

• ghosts 👻: aging, death, old people
• vampires(folk believe): plague, infection
• vampires(literature): landlords, feudalism
• zombies(modern): alienation, capitalism
• witches: women who stand up to patriarchy
• Frankenstein’s monster: the proletariat gaining class consciousness (no seriously)

I recommend the podcast “the horror vanguard” for details.

Chimpanzee Capitalism - Existential Comics

Ah, that makes sense, thanks for taking the time!

Good effort comment, thanks! Are you sure about merit based evaluation for MJ? Wouldn’t people just strategically exaggerate their grades?

MJ encourages honest evaluation because exaggerating grades can backfire if too many others don’t follow suit.

I guess I don’t quite understand this point. Why wouldn’t everyone exaggerate grades?

Dolphin liberals would just tell all the dolphins to give dolphin Harris an excellent grade, insisting she was excellent in comparison to dolphin Trump. (Sorry to break out of the thought experiment.) So this:

This can help identify when all candidates are weak

wouldn’t happen when all the dolphins try to game the system. Did I misunderstand?

It’s just that normal gravity on earth feels exactly like being in an accelerating elevator in space. So you can’t tell the difference from the inside. Like in the elevator you can ask them, whether you’re still on earth or accelerating in space. Einstein used this thought experiment to develop the general theory of relativity.

Basically Einstein thinking about that weird feeling you get in your gut when an elevator starts upwards led to him concluding that mass bends spacetime making light from distant stars go in curves around the sun, which was confirmed during the next available solar eclipse.

I just checked, Polaris is about ten times younger than sharks. The other two stars of its ternary star system are older, but not visible to the naked eye, so early sharks would not have been able to use them for purposes of navigation.

The reason is that all those other things create actual value, thus cutting into profits of capitalists if publicly funded. If you’re a capitalist state that wants to steal massive amounts of wealth from the people and redistribute them to the rich by funding an Industry, then war really is the industry you want because it only destroys value.

For example, if you cancelled the Pentagons budget and funded centrally planned healthcare instead, no private healthcare provider could compete. It would completely close down a huge market. Same with education, infrastructure, etc. War doesn’t have this problem of closing down a market, but has the advantage of opening up new markets (resources, cheap labour, more consumers, even rebuilding after the war, etc.) via imperialism.

Edit: In short, imperialism is in part a reaction to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and offers an opportunity to renew primitive accumulation.

Yes! Finally someone else who is amazed by this! It’s crazy to think, that magnetism can be understood as nothing more than a relativistic phenomenon.

Really? The one in the entrance hall or the one in the whale exhibit?

This would work inverted as well: “Yeah, I’m running a quick vibe check on the data to find out where the noise is coming from.”