I don’t think it’s idiocy. I think it’s cruel people who delight in doing cruel things. And when a guy like Trump, who has managed to use cruelty to get rich and powerful, comes along and gives them permission to fully indulge their cruellest instincts, makes them feel like it’s right and good, they’ll follow that person straight into hell. They’re so excited to finally be able to go out and hurt all the people they don’t like that there really isn’t any line they’re not willing to cross anymore, no moral they’re not willing to betray, to finally get that.

I don’t even refer to Evangelicals as Christians anymore. They are two different things at this point. If you look at modern Evangelical doctrine and compare it to the ministry Jesus laid down in the Gospels, they are just about as polar opposite as you can get while still name-checking Jesus. I don’t think it’s useful to conflate them anymore because real Christianity, using the actual words of Jesus, might be one of the few effective ways left to argue against all this Evangelical nonsense. I’m honestly surprised that the Christians with real faith aren’t already out there doing it.

The thing I’ve always loved about the Labor party is how they really set themselves apart from the Tories. I mean, it’s just night and day. Really makes you feel like things are going to change for the better. So inspiring.

))<>(( Back and forth forever.

34 felonies so far.

No, that’s what they’re doing. If you’ve ever heard it said of conservatives, “every accusation is a confession,” this is a pretty prime example. It’s a lot easier to convince people to do some gnarly shit if you can pretend that the same gnarly shit is already being done to them.

Like, running a successful grift isn’t about convincing your mark that your dubious proposition is above board. They can pretty much always tell something shady is going on. To con someone successfully you convince them that, yes, something shady is going on, but that shady thing is actually working in their favor. You have to convince them that shadiness is the trick that’s going to let them get one over on everyone else.

Nobody wants to live under a dictatorship. Literally nobody. But if you can trick them into believing they’re already living in one, well then installing your own suddenly gets a lot easier. “Look, you’re already getting grifted. But if you put us in power and let us run our grift, our grift is going to benefit you this time. We promise.”

It won’t, though. It never does.

It might finally give conservatives clear permission to go out and hurt the people they don’t like, though. And that might be enough for a lot of them.

Huh, my money would have been on syphilis-related brain disease.

Same for me too. Reddit, for all its other faults, is still just about the only place you can still get candid opinions on products in a place where it’s discussed by a large group with a deep knowledge base. Especially with niche things like fountain pens, goodyear-welted boots, and stuff like that.

Not sure how long that’s going to last though. The search engines are already hip to that trick, and even in just the last few months I’ve noticed a change in how many Reddit links I get vs product links when I add Reddit to my search query. Reddit is hip to it too, and with recently becoming a publicly traded corporation they’re probably going to wring every last cent out of that until every post mentioning a product is a bot-infested sewage fire like everything else.

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My main takeaway from this article is that “Austrian Economist” is apparently the new euphemism fascists are using to try and trick people into thinking they’re doing something other than fascism.

Depends on which map you look at.

Yeah, for people with hemochromatosis (too much iron in the blood) the main treatment is still bloodletting.

The privilege is being able to choose to eat that way out of a sense of morality or fashion rather for the reason that it’s literally all there is to eat. The privilege is being able to turn your nose up at perfectly edible food for no other reason than that it’s got a bit of egg, honey, or butter in it without having to worry about starving to death. The privilege is also having access to such an abundance and variety of food that you can maintain a vegan diet year round and not have to fear that you won’t meet all the calorie, protein, and vitamin requirements you need to stay alive and healthy while much of the world is in a constant struggle to scrape together enough calories of any kind to stay alive.

There’s really only one choice .

It’s so crazy to me that they throw this word around and they haven’t come up with a shared definition.

That’s actually kind of the point. It’s like how they use the words “communism” and “socialism.” It’s a word they’ve made wholly synonymous with “unquestionably bad,” and it’s defined by what it isn’t rather than what it is so it can be whatever they point at when they say it. Keeping the meaning vague and amorphous is a way to self-police their own thoughts, and short circuit any meaningful discussion or debate before it even starts. It creates a boundaryless field of discomfort they only experience as a gut feeling. As soon as a conversation starts to stray into the territory of acknowledging that people who are different than them might nevertheless be full human beings they get that bad feeling in their gut and say, “I don’t know… That sounds kinda woke.” And everyone knows that anything “woke” is unquestionably bad. Ta-dah!: uncomfortable thought successfully avoided. Thought that may have led to a change of the status quo successfully avoided.

Even when we’re talking about the thought influencers on the Right who are consciously aware of the above, they can’t be seen to define it publicly because that would mean they would have to be honest about the seed of hatefulness they’re dancing around when they use euphemisms like this. When someone asks them how they define “woke,” they can’t answer, “You know… N*gger stuff.” That would instantly discredit them in the eyes of just about everybody, and they wouldn’t be able to pretend to be a serious person making a serious point anymore.

Also, by pinning its meaning down with a definition it would lose much of its power as a propaganda tool. It would lose its universality. It would mean something specific rather than whatever that thing is that you don’t like.

As noted biblical historian Andrew Zaltzman has often pointed out, Pontius Pilate was a law-and-order administrator and Jesus was absolutely guilty under the law at the time.

Nobody has made a serious attempt to overthrow the government this year

…Yet

Laws, international or otherwise, don’t mean shit unless someone with the power to enforce them is also willing to enforce them.

I’ve noticed a lot of conservatives don’t have the same full-throated support for Trump this time that they did in 2016. For instance, he lost a ton of gun owner support when he started talking about “taking the guns first, and letting the courts sort it out later,” and then going on to sign the bump-stock ban. I’ve seen some of those people go from rabid Trump fan-boys to kind of sneering whenever they hear his name. I suspect a lot of them are going to end up falling in line come November, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there were a fair few people casting protest votes as well.

There was a story going around yesterday about Wendy’s supposedly trying it. It sounds like the kind of headline that’s going to turn out to be BS, but I also didn’t really look into it so I don’t know any of the details. Seems like the kind of thing you’d have to be an idiot to actually attempt. Hard to imagine a universe where that goes over well.