[kdppnzsr] Connoisseur addicts

When do addicts become connoisseurs of the substance or service they are addicted to?  And when not?

Inspired by coffee addicts, though many other examples exist: alcohol, video games.

Simplest answer might be when they have disposable income.  But it seems there might be something more going on.

Obviously, it helps if the addicted-to item is legal, allowing producers to differentiate.

Is all connoisseur behavior a symptom of an underlying addiction?  What otherwise would incentivize caring enough to learn to distinguish among items?

[dnbruxxa] No one wants transparency in government

Those who want big government know that big government will often function poorly, so don't want to make it easy to gather evidence that it is functioning poorly, as it will reflect badly on themselves as proponents of big government.

Those who want small government want to abuse the freedoms of small government to do sleazy things, so don't want to make it easy to gather evidence of that, as it will reflect badly on themselves as proponents of small government.

This is especially sad because transparency is kind of a panacea.  If people know what is going on, they can respond optimally.  More optimistically, if people know what is going wrong, they can work to fix it.

Inspired by several consecutive recent Presidential administrations of seemingly diametrically opposed political views, but transparency hasn't increased in any of them.

[bfqllxax] Alpha Centauri before public domain

Which will happen first: a song that came out this year becoming public domain, or humans colonizing Alpha Centauri?

Original thought: will Alpha Centaurian colonists need a license from Disney to copy "Let it Go"?

It's conceivable humans will get to Alpha Centauri in the next 95 years, and that optimistically assumes copyright will not get retroactively extended again.  It's inconceivable that Congress will decrease copyright.  It's depressingly conceivable that Congress might increase copyright to perpetuity.

Don't think you can escape the long arm of copyright enforcement by heading out to the stars.  Copyright lawyers can wait, then chase you down in a faster starship.

[nwasgdxx] Meta identity politics

Malcolm X: Identity politics is the way to get shit done.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Identity politics will lead us into a frightening racial nightmare.

Both are correct.  (Previously.)  What should be done?

Given its downsides, it seems identity politics ought to be used as a political weapon of last resort.  Is that what people are doing in practice?  It seems not.

Or descriptively instead of normatively, if people are resorting to identity politics, there are bigger things wrong with society.

Or maybe there's nothing wrong; maybe identity politics is expected behavior, a rational strategy, for (iterated) zero-sum games.  And if we've reached a point such that things a zero-sum game, it's expected to see being used weapons of last resort.  Is reaching a point that things are a zero-sum game a sign of bigger things wrong with society?  In a positive-sum game, one still needs to distribute (or redistribute) the surplus somehow, and that subtask is zero-sum.

[hnisimlu] Fat Mystique

The premise "society will not accept seeing me in my mutant form" for Mystique in the X-Men universe would have been more effective, reflecting the prejudices of today's society, if Mystique's un-shapeshifted form were a very fat woman (blue of course), not Rebecca Romijn or Jennifer Lawrence.

The audience's experience of the scene from First Class which became the template for the Perfection meme might change a lot.  The scene is a series of cuts, so fan-made derivative videos are easily possible, though playing with the meme with static images and captions is even easier, as many have done.

(Incidentally, Mystique's turn to the Dark Side is a straightforward example of identity politics being used for evil.)

Though maybe the depiction of the real Raven (as was chosen through casting, and as originally drawn in comic books) is an important part of making the story entertaining: it is a fantasy universe in which even the supposedly ugly characters are incredibly good looking.  Perhaps that makes it easier for the reader to identify with the character.

It would be funny if Mystique's real form were a puddle of liquid like Odo, though that would beg the question of what the blue humanoid form is.