Pedantic Digressions

The conceptual disconnect which eludes most people is not that there can be labels for distinct regions of spacetime. It is that there is no simultaneous present moment.

The word “today” can be a “label for a distinct region of spacetime,” but also “there is no ‘today’ for every human to live in.”

Just for the record, and maybe spoiling a joke, but Malta became home to the Knights Hospitaller not their rivals the Templar.

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Well they’re not nearly as sinister, at first glance. We need to appoint a commission to correct that. I wonder how busy Alex Jones is these days.

A version of the cross of the Knights Hospitaller appears on the TARDIS. It is too symmetrical to be sinister but its appearance here is arguably eldritch.

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They are currently known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta:

Widely considered a sovereign subject of international law, the order maintains diplomatic relations with 106 states. It has United Nations permanent observer status, enters into treaties, and issues its own passports, coins, and postage stamps. Its two headquarters buildings in Rome enjoy extraterritoriality, similar to embassies, and it maintains embassies in other countries. The three principal officers are counted as citizens. Though its sovereignty is disputed by some legal scholars, it is often given as the only remaining example of a sovereign entity which entirely lacks territory.

It has its own armed forces, which formerly (and briefly) included an air force.

If you can’t make a conspiracy theory out of that, you’re not really trying.

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Make the Knights Hospitaller Sinister Again

I’ll print hats.

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It gets better - if I recall, Bush 41 was a member.

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Who in 1989 had a summit meeting with Gorbachev that is often taken to mark the “official” end of the Cold War. Guess where that meeting took place.

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To me anguish, angst, and anxiety look like the same word in different languages.

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You could? Well, how much less could you care?

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Kierkegaard bear started it, then Heidegger bear and Sartre bear had to copy him. I don’t know if Nietzsche bear thinks they are being inauthentic.

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Are those the villains in the Tom Hanks movies?

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Is that true?

Examples I can think of from real life don’t seem to match that pattern.

It seems like a narcissist wouldn’t feel comfortable competing with somebody else for the center of attention. In a double-narcissist relationship whichever partner was less successful in the competition would get bored, break it off, and move on.

Fun fact: another lesser-used term for codependence is “co-narcissism”. And yeah, it’s actually very common for them to hook up, but there’s something you should understand about narcissists: they all have their own flavor of “narcissistic food”, as some authors refer to it.

Have you ever heard of narcissists referred to as “emotional vampires”? Well, that’s the thing, any narcissist has a specific type of emotional “food” they crave, and will do practically anything to get it. For some it’s social status. For others its looking like they have a “perfect family”. For still others it’s having work status. Then there’s the ones that just crave generic praise from people (sometimes the origin is important, sometimes not; e.g. from a family member versus a stranger), and then there’s the ones that want to “be the best” at whatever it is they’re doing. And so on, ad infinitum.

Anyway, narcissists tend to have very, very sensitive “emotional radar”, and they’re good at giving people what they want. And who is the most sensitive to getting what they want from others? Right! Narcissists! So two that are capable of “feeding” the other tend to find each other, and you end up in a feedback cycle where they latch on hard initially, then go through phases where one slacks on the “feeding”, the other reacts to that, they have a blowup, then they sort of agree to “feed” each other again, and the cycle continues until/unless one partner finds someone better at “feeding” them than the last partner, and only then breaks away.

Once you recognize the pattern and the variations (like how you sometimes have an overt narcissist with a covert one, whose “food” is being “on the cross” for the other, and usually likes to tell you all about that, all the time, to make sure someone knows what a “saint” they are), it’s insane how obvious it is, and it becomes hard to watch so many people you know going through it.

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Those are actually rectified cubes. They have 14 sides each.

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The D&D nerd in me is deeply disappointed in Star Trek now.

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When you sense the readers are on the verge of exploding from an onslaught of annoying didacticism.

Otherwise, one could simply stick around and watch all the pretty sparks fly about.

:slight_smile:

Our first level manager here (and his wife) have ten cats. Ten. Either you or @orenwolf are right. Either way, our manager happens to be The Father of All A-Holes Since the Beginning of Time, so whatever approach you and @orenwolf take, a-hole-nishness should be considered therein, either as a forcing function, or as the result.