You can find podcasts called “slow news” or something like that where they present the days news in the language your learning but take care to speak slowly and enunciate.

There are workarounds to almost every issue you may have. You can run Windows in a VM for software that requires it, or dual boot. M$ Office can be ran in a browser now. There is no reason to buy a license, just DL windows10 direct from M$ and never register, all they do is lock you out of some display options and add a watermark to your desktop.

It’s not her fault.

The Nazis, upon whom the empire borrows much, have an interesting management style. The theory was that leaders set goals and allowed subordinates a free hand in achieving these goals. Some of you may find that attractive, but there is a fatal catch. The subordinate is only “Free to Obey”, to achieve goals, never to set them. Even worse, responsibility is delegated with the tasks, so failure is the subordinates’ fault. It’s never a bad objective, scarce resources, or bad information; the people making the decisions are shielded from responsibility.

Now back to Dedra. In her exit interview with Krennic, she explained how the ridged order and information control caused her to digg into places where she was not allowed, just to get the information she needed to pursue Axis. Nobody would have faulted her for arresting Luthin if he had survived.

Had all of her misdeeds come to light under the auspices of success, she would have been praised for her cunning. She was constantly stymied and blocked by different organs of the Empire, set to cross purposes by pride, ambition, or stupidity. Decisions made by the likes of the Emporer or Director Krennic are what made Luthen’s long anonymity possible.

Dedra didn’t doom the Death Star, she was on the verge of saving it. And she was fighting the Empire as much as the Rebellion.

Living proof that fascists don’t work food-service. Or maybe food-service workers are immunized against fascist ideology. Either way I hope 47 gets 86’ed.

It’s so discouraging that the big controversy isn’t what’s happening, but what to call it. We can’t defeat colonialism with semantics.

The attack on Gaza needs to stop, IDFAF if they call it a pumkin pie, just stop the goddamn pie.

Media literacy issue.

He was still a one-man rebellion fighting for himself. It wasn’t until the funeral that he decided to throw his will to life into the furnace and give himself to rebellion.

He made a decision on Fraxis to either die by Luthens hand or by the Emperor’s. The loss of Maarva made him so ashamed and angry that in the desire to make up for it, he made a suicide pact. That’s not the same man who jumped into the water and swam for his life.

If you remember the first season. Andor was a merc who did the Aldani job for payment. That’s why Luthin wanted to kill him; he wasn’t a rebel, but he had a head full of rebel intel.

Maarva refused to go with him into his comfortable retirement and he basically abandoned her and the fight. He ran.

His subsequent imprisonment was a direct result of him turning his back and choosing the easy path. He didn’t fail Maarva when she died, he failed her when he gave up the fight.

EDIT: this is a big part of his development. He didn’t get radicalized in prison. He got radicalized by his guilt and grief for Maarva.

Just a reminder, like the Soviet premier in “Dr Strangelove”, the Death Star isn’t a secret to keep it safe from rebels or to use in a surprise attack. Palpatine wants to make a show of using it and doesn’t want any spoilers.

But I’m so happy that Dedra survived the show. Because she’s going to find out that the Death Star got wrecked and she was this close to stopping it. I suppose she may get released after the Battle of Endor, a thoroughly broken person.

monocausal explanations are always bullshit.

Knowing that pharmaceutical companies have undue influence on public policy and public health is useful for understanding the world. Thinking that Big Pharma controls everything makes you RFKjr.

It’s called Andor, not Alabandor

I don’t find Nebula to be an adequate replacement for youtube, but if they ever figure out how to keep me from blocking ads, Ima gonna change my mind.

The authors of this describe the situation accurately enough. Even though a Netflix show is presented as evidence of, … something.

They lost me with the “begging the question” prescription for censorship and online control. I also don’t like the aesthetics of arguing that boys are dangerous without putting into context how much young men suffer under modern material conditions.

What you won’t find in the dictionary difference between dialects or creoles is historically racialized. A good example is Louisiana. Technically, Cajun is a subset of creole. But in practice Cajuns are white and Creoles are black.

https://hnoc.org/publishing/first-draft/whats-difference-between-cajun-and-creole-or-there-one

Black dialects (In America) have historically been treated as bastardizations, pollution, or just plan ignorance of proper grammar and syntax. I witnessed the short life of “Ebonics” until it was ridiculed into oblivion. I can remember plenty of people who spoke a Southern dialect only loosely associated with English mercilessly mocking and doing impressions of AAVE.

Common parlance like “They don’t think it be that way, but it do” is a contemporary example of black dialect with syntax and rules as complex as any language being mocked as as stupidity, ignorance, and an inability to speak English.

I’m not the racist police. If you’ve laughed at these jokes or told them, I don’t think your a bad person. I’ve laughed and spread them myself. This is just an FYI.

I’ve never engaged with the story in any GTA game. I just boot it up once in a moon, massacre as many cops as possible before they overwhelm me.

Qatar’s whole society works on this. They’re one of the richest countries because almost all citizens are the aristocracy, while everything is run with migrant labor. They outlawed slavery, in 1952. They replaced that with the Kafala system, which is as you describe. Don’t worry though, they outlawed Kafala in 2016.

hereditary lawmaker

It’s pretty bad when an American looks at your government and thinks, damn that’s backward AF.

I eat toast with cream cheese and a poached egg almost every morning and there’s some synergy between the unctuous yolk, the sour cheese, and my hot sauce that is just about mana from heaven.

You cannot read Western coverage of Palestine without learning about Ermon and Chomsky’s “five filters of media”. It’s like a decoder ring.