Schadrach

Of all the social media popular in the US, only one of them is doing that tracking and is under the thumb of a foreign adversary. That is specifically the line drawn in the law. I’m actually curious if WeChat shouldn’t fall under it too?

He isn’t anti-establishment though

He’s not, but that’s his brand. And one of the few things he’s good at is selling his brand.

What you’ve got is a bunch of people fed up with the system in some pretty fundamental ways, many of which don’t even know how to voice their problems accurately. One side sells itself as anti-establishment (even though it’s not) and the other side is nakedly as establishment as can be (to the point that they’ll ratfuck primaries against anyone who rocks the boat even a little) but is very vocally progressive when they don’t have to actually do anything about it or when doing so won’t rock the boat even a little.

No, no, they should only be required to provide life insurance for deaths related to refused treatments, but the amount should be massive and punitive. Whoops, you died because we denied your treatment, your next of kin gets several times more than we could have hypothetically saved by denying the treatment.

You can’t make it a massive punitive amount of it’s general life insurance because everyone dies eventually. But you can if it’s for deaths related to a denied treatment, and you can make it high enough that the financial incentive is always in favor of approving necessary treatments.

Only when they start costing more than they’re expected to produce in future profits. So less like a parasite and more like a soulless corporate leech, because actual parasites at least want the host to survive until they can reproduce.

She can tell a decent story. But she’s awful at world building beyond the “what would be cool to have” step and the moment she has to consider the ramifications of things she introduced coming up again. Like she can tell a story just fine, but the moment she needs to care about continuity it all goes out the window.

I’d be shocked if he wasn’t, depending on one’s definition of dickhead. Everyone is a dickhead for some definition of dickhead.

UNSONG is still a great fantasy story and a master class in foreshadowing, regardless of how one feels about the author.

I was just assuming it was just Power Word: Shit and would effect anyone up to however many hit dice.

To be fair, the president elected two months ago is the oldest asshole to have ever won the office.

I’m only proud of the one, and only because of how weirdly out of sync with what you’d expect the given reason was.

Basically every other sub I’ve ever been banned from was a “you commented on a post on a sub we’ve since decided we don’t like, so we’ve summarily banned you with a bot just in case”.

The majority of reddit subs I’ve been banned from were for posting in other unrelated subs in violation of sadly unenforced moderation rules.

Then there’s being banned from r/atheism for “egregious immorality” - I look at it as a badge of pride to be banned from an atheism sub on grounds that sound like ones only a religious sub would use.

At least in countries that charge patients money for their healthcare, these religious hospitals are free, right?

A few, but not remotely all. It’s really up to the individual hospital.

Then you’ve got the weird case of St. Jude’s which is somehow not a Catholic hospital despite literally being built as a shrine to St. Jude Thaddeus (patron saint of hopeless causes) by a Catholic man to fulfill a promise he made to build a shrine to St. Jude. St. Jude’s also does not charge patients for treatment, travel, housing, or food though they will bill insurance where possible.

Let’s be fair, if I told you that a UFO cult led by a sci-fi writer performed a massive infiltration of the US government (the largest ever detected) in order to whitewash itself in official records you’d have thought I was wacko before Operation: Snow White came to light. The same UFO cult also had a number of their agents insert themselves into the life of a journalist who had written negative things about them in an attempt to get her to either off herself or be institutionalized, dubbed Operation: Freakout which was only uncovered in the aftermath of the discovery of Operation: Snow White.

The UFO cult in question is Scientology.

I mean it sounds like it could be video from the charging facility

I mean that’s what I assumed. I can’t imagine a reason one would want a camera watching you charge - like that’s an expense for little if any benefit. And if it was charged at a charging station owned by Tesla, I would be shocked if there wasn’t camera footage or if Tesla didn’t have access to it.

but what the actual fuck they can unlock your car.

I would imagine any car with keyless entry can be unlocked by the manufacturer if they have your VIN. They build the system and pair the keyfobs and locks, they’re bound to have that ability in case something happens to your keys.

Azov never would have existed if russia didn’t start a war against Ukraine in 2014… eat me

OK. But nobody invoking them now is all that concerned with that.

Personally I got a kick out of Gravel Institute posting a video about Nazis in the Ukraine military talking about Azov shortly before Russia attacked in 2022, and then pulling it down shortly afterward because more or less their exact point was now considered to be Russian far right propaganda. Just such a beautiful example of how things like that can change.

Maybe there’s a greater purpose for what we call “evil” that results in more good.

A work of fiction I very much enjoy called UNSONG uses a variant of this as the answer to the question of evil. The basic notion being that at the level of abstraction that God operates at two identical things are essentially one thing and so in order to maximize the total net good he creates universe upon universe, all slightly different but each ultimately resulting in more good than bad in net. The universe the story takes place in is recognizably similar to ours until the Nixon administration, and it is explicitly said to be “far from the center of the garden”. IOW in a region of possibility space in which few potential universes are good on net.

The story is also an absolute master class in foreshadowing to the point that if you just listen as the story repeatedly tells you how one should interpret text, you can derive the ending from like the first paragraph of chapter 1 by just digging deep enough. And it goes a lot deeper than that. It’s not just an aesthetic choice that every chapter name is a Blake reference, or that the story is arranged into groupings of four, ten, twenty two and seventy two. It also manages to analogize itself to both the works of William Blake and the song American Pie because why not?

Yeah pornhub seems pretty legitimate and safe these days.

Yeah, they got threatened a few years ago with essentially banking cutting them off if they didn’t make a concerted effort to purge anything shady, which they achieved by purging basically all end-user uploads that weren’t verified models or studios.

Too bad there aren’t other porn sites with massive libraries of content that apparently no one in power has noticed.

The states aren’t banning PornHub from being accessed there, PornHub are blocking themselves from being accessed from those states so as to not need to comply with new state laws requiring ID proof of age to access because they don’t want to handle personally identifying information of end users. So basically you’re just waiting for law enforcement to notice and charge them, and then find out if they’re run out of somewhere the state can reasonably do anything about it.

Wikipedia is one of the last, best sources of information on the Internet that isn’t biased, corporate-sponsored bullsh*t.

Instead it’s bullshit built upon elaborate bureaucracy which has it’s own layers of issues depending on exactly what topic/field we’re talking about.

The biggest and most obvious flaw being that it’s more or less explicitly designed to fail spectacularly as regards any topic that the media doesn’t want to talk about (for example, anything that might make the media look bad) because there’s going to be an intentional lack of “reliable sources” on those topics.

The definition of a “reliable source” is another - there’s a fair bit of jockeying on that which functionally biases WP. Especially when you start looking at what disqualified a given source from being “reliable” and start to notice that the bar seems to be set very unevenly depending on the particular source and how well liked it is by certain power-editors.

It’s good enough for anything that’s not politically contentious to anyone, but I would never use it for anything other than a vague overview and starting point for other sources to dig into.

Being serious, it seems like he picked his people from a couple of pools.

1. Republicans with a lot of social media clout.
2. People plausibly accused of being Russian agents.

Every couple of years Chinese make a new Sun Wukong move, TV show, or videogame.

Let’s not forget that in the same way you can trace a huge amount of things you see in Western stories to the Greek epics and Gilgamesh you can trace a huge amount of things you see in anime/manga to the Journey to the West.