I actually wondered the same thing while I was writing lol. Further research is clearly warranted 🧑‍🔬🔬

In his 1953 autobiography, Danish explorer Peter Freuchen claimed that in 1926, he became trapped in a blizzard while running a dog team and was forced to take shelter under his sled for 30 hours while snow built up and froze around him. When he tried to emerge, he found he was entombed in ice and unable to break free with his hands alone. Thinking quickly, he took a shit right there, shaped the turd into a chisel, and allowed it to freeze solid. He then claims he was able to use his newly made tool to chip his way free and make it back to camp. Peter was the only witness to his supposed escape. The study mentions it’s based on an Inuit ethnographic account, however. Maybe Peter, having spent much time in the Arctic with Inuit peoples simply took the story for himself. With the runners of the study finding that they were unable to replicate such a technique, it lends credibility to the claim that story may have been fabricated.

Good thing we also have more thylacines than ever before, right?

Nah, son. Thylacines have, in a way, become cryptids since their extinction, complete with cheesy travel shows where some bogan tells you all about how they totally saw one time and they’re 100% sure it was a thylacine they barely saw from a distance running away through the tall grass after sunset. I’ve seen similar shows about Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, and others. They don’t exist anymore, making your chances of seeing one alive no more likely than seeing Bigfoot, which is the point I was making. Animals thought to be extinct being officially rediscovered is a pretty rare occurrence; I assure you it doesn’t happen “regularly”. It’s a big deal when it happens because it’s quite rare. Yes, I’m familiar with the stories of all the other extinct species you mentioned as well. The ivory-billed woodpecker is still considered by most ornithologists to be extinct, and the last widely accepted sighting of any individual was in 1987, despite some supposed (but not universally accepted or entirely conclusive) sightings every once in a while. In 2020, a guy working for Fish and Wildlife claimed to have ID’d one in video footage, but it must not have been very compelling because the very next year Fish and Wildlife proposed declaring it officially extinct. People claim to have sighted the ivory-billed woodpecker not infrequently, much like the thylacine. What is infrequent is any compelling evidence whatsoever, however.

There have been many sightings and footprints found of Bigfoot, too. I live in the Bigfoot sighting capital of the world and new sightings are routinely reported. If the “Portland” in your name is in reference to the one in Oregon, you do too.

The last widely accepted sighting of a wild thylacine was in 1933, nearly a hundred years ago. Even if any tiny, isolated pockets had managed to escape extermination (which is unlikely on an island without much mountainous terrain or dense forest, especially when everyone and their grandma was out hunting them for the bounty the government put on their tails), they’d be in big trouble owing to genetic drift by now. You always hear people say “I know what I saw,” but do they really? It makes me circle back to the Bigfoot thing. At least some of the people who claim to have seen Bigfoot genuinely believe they really saw him.

Did you intend to link to an explicitly pro-Western, Zionist, neoconservative magazine? Not sure if I fully trust their framing, especially when it comes to someone so consistently critical of Western policy. The article is just the author (not even a member of the staff, it appears to be a letter to the editor) whining that Chomsky said the author couldn’t find certain quotes and that his stance on Vietnam was hawkish, not a whole lot mentioned on anything else. I’m aware of some of Chomsky’s more problematic positions, but how does this back that up what you’re saying? Sounds more like a petty personal spat between a couple academics.

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Interesting. Hey, Jamie, overlay a map of indigenous populations…

(Correlates less the further east and south you get, though)

“By precisely reflecting sunlight that is endlessly available in space to specific targets on the ground, we can create a world where sunlight powers solar farms for longer than just daytime, and in doing this, commoditize sunlight.”

Billionaires already own the police, which number over 700,000 in the US alone and the national police budget would be equivalent to the third most expensive army in the world. If this is already the state of things, how could we blame that on the anarchists? This argument effectively boils down to “we shouldn’t have a revolution because the rich would have a monopoly on violence”, which we already know to be the case in our current society. So in this way, nothing at all is holding us back. The worst case scenario would be a preservation of the status quo. Even if the Proud Boys, III%ers, Patriot Front, Oath Keepers, etc. all combined into a giant mercenary group, it wouldn’t be even close to how the cops already are. They’re one of the most militarized police forces in the world with access to heavy equipment such as assault rifles, chemical weapons, acoustic weaponry, MRAPs, and much more.

If the revolution ever comes, we’ll just have to take all the billionaires to the Ipatiev House. A revolution would already have no recourse but to defeat any police opposition anyway, so there really is no difference whether the billionaires are around or not. Those billionaires, if they have any sense of self-preservation, would be smarter to take their money and simply flee abroad.

Not to mention too expensive. The base ticket prices have skyrocketed over 1600% since 1996. In just the seven years between 2015 and 2022, attendees with household incomes of less than $100k dropped from around 56% to 40% and attendees with household incomes of $100k-$300k+ have risen from 43% to 59%. Over the years, it’s seemed like the crowd has been increasingly yuppie and increasingly white collar; these numbers appear to back that notion up. I remember seeing a video from a few years ago where Andrew Callaghan was talking about how he paid $10k for an RV spot and 2 tickets. He also complained that a lot of the people there seemed like “weekend-warrior-types”. I can only hope that price is with an insane scalper markup or a super deluxe VIP package or something. $10k is an unthinkable price for a weeklong camping trip in the desert, even a really cool one.

That, the heat as you mentioned (I found a chart that demonstrates rising averages and most in the comments are saying the reported highs are far too low), and the floods last year I think have combined to scare a lot of the core demographic away. I dreamed of going to Burning Man for years, but I haven’t even thought of it in quite some time since I learned how prohibitively expensive it would be to go.

Also, lots of people will jump to say that a $250k household income is middle class and I’ve seen a few in this thread, but I personally don’t know how anyone could arrive at that conclusion. Median household income in the US is more like $105k. A household income of $155k is enough to put you in the top 20%. $200k will put you in the top 12%. $250k gets you to the top 8%. When 92% of people are able to make do with less, it really just seems like people such as the ones in the article don’t understand what it is to live within their means and don’t understand how much better off they are than most everyone else.

Don’t the lyrics in “In the Flesh” indicate that the nazis are actually a different band that had to be called in as substitutes because the lead singer of the band that was supposed to play is currently going through a mental breakdown in his hotel room (i.e. stuck behind the wall)? The main figure of the album might’ve just imagined the whole thing, though.

You’re right, my bad. My comment was directed at the actual OP, though, so you can rest assured the comment wasn’t for you

“You see them everywhere.” That’s it? This opinion feels way too specific for that to be the only thing on your mind lol. Maybe at least some context? Are you from somewhere where people are less tall on average? Is there something you don’t like about tall people? Like the other guy said, give us a rant! Let’s hear where this is going.

For real though, could you elaborate? Give us a few reasons why. Also, probably would have been a better post for the unpopular opinion community

When he tested the look at outdoor Los Angeles shopping mall The Grove, “Nobody recognized me,” Bacon said. But the tide evidently soon turned. “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a f***ing coffee or whatever. I was like, This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.”

Lmao this has to be a joke. Is this really what life is like for these people? No one said “I love you” to a stranger at the mall? He had to wait in lines? Maybe the most eye-opening thing about this is that Kevin seemed to expect to be treated more or less the same way he is as a celebrity, just without the selfies, which says to me that he thought everyone gets treated the same way famous people do. Sometimes it’s interesting to get a reminder of how out of touch these people really are.

Yeah, definitely not. “Tankie” isn’t some mostly meaningless word like “woke”, it’s a very specific belief in authoritarian self-declared, so-called “communist” states (USSR, China, North Korea, et al).

They claim to be for revolution and then turn around and give 100% blind obedience to the newly installed leaders. Pointing out their immense power or bad actions gets you called brainwashed, a reactionary, or counter-revolutionary. They win gold in mental gymnastics in regards to how the new ruling class totally doesn’t count as a ruling class, how the state doesn’t count as a state, how the money doesn’t count as money, and how it’s still communism even though not a single one of those prerequisites has ever been met.

They don’t take down systems of oppression, they replace them and refuse to believe it isn’t the greatest idea anyone’s ever had. Here’s a hint: if your “revolutionary” party demands absolute loyalty, they probably aren’t as great as they say.