It is also being actively promoted as a ‘Bastion’ toward conservatives and racists, the way New Hampshire… was… kind of still is? similarly seen by Libertarians.

Oh, and Idaho is attempting to become Greater Idaho, with many of the red, sparsely populated counties of Oregon passing referendums to leave Oregon and join Idaho, with Eastern Washington as the next phase of that plan.

Oh and also also, a huge amount of the 90s militia movement was concentrated in Idaho and around events that sparked there.

The Ruby Ridge standoff happened there in 92.

The Oklahoma City Bombings were done partly to avenge what happened in Ruby Ridge.

In 2020 the so called ‘Bundy Ranch Sniper’, leader of a 3%er ‘militia’ ran for Senate in Idaho.

etc, etc, basically, the Idaho militia movement never died, it just went underground and then came out very openly thanks to Trump.

Racism, religious extremism, gun rights fanaticism … that’s pretty much everywhere in Idaho.

They’re not going to be ‘doing better’ any time soon.

Fortunately I do not currently reside in Texas, I could use some marinara tho

Your analogy is confused good sir/madam, obviously patriotic American conservatives would never support an authoritarian culture of mass surveillance perpetuated by the state, they believe in laissez faire, minimal government!

… Its’s Big Whale Day!

Amazing.

Nothing to throw a hissssssssy fit over =P

I have despised twitter since basically its inception.

1. The character (original) character limit fundamentally means you are strongly encouraged to limit conversation to basically soundbites, slogans, and pithy comments. Even though this was changed later, it still created a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.

While its true that brevity is the soul of wit, wit is not the same thing as a detailed and nuanced discussion of a complex topic.

It thus lends itself to being an optimal tool for political slogans, celebrity gossip, and direct corporate advertisement.

2. Twitter is far, far, faaar too open ended, as in one to many kind of network connections. Its a dream come true also for narcissistic, attention seeking individuals who want to win Twitter.

3. Twitter blew up before Facebook completely shifted (enshittified?) their entire model from being focused on actually connecting friend groups, and directly pushed Facebook toward just being an unmitigated firehose of ‘content’ from every which way, which just became the norm for ‘social media’ design.

Of course X now is even fucking worse, but I am so glad its dying.

The way I see it, Twitter contributed heavily toward destroying the older, more personal formats of social media, it helped destroy the old forum culture of the net where people had communities and a measure of intellect, privacy and respect.

It took the sincerity out of online discourse, and was foundational in shifting the internet from a ‘place’ with lots of weird locales, into some kind of Eldritch god’s sick joke of a species level omni-mirror, reducing online humanity to a popularity contest of political slogans, narcissistic clout chasers, gossip mongers, and corporate sloganeering and brand worship… and giving all of this to us in an undifferentiated constant flow.

When the levee breaks, I’ll have no place to stay

Ok, so we are now at the performative ‘I have a family’ stage of our conservative politicians realizing they don’t actually have any meaningful, truthfully held values.

Republicans sure talk about hating post modernism, but they’ve done so, so much to prove that empty signifiers are the entirety of their politics.

Well, that and hurting people they don’t like.

…

Maybe when they say ‘think of the children’ they really do just mean it as an entirely solipsistic thought exercise.

QAnon and Trump taught Republicans that its totally ok to live in an alternate reality where they are always correct and never have to admit to being wrong, or if they do want to admit to being wrong, its because of a vast elaborate conspiracy.

They live in a delusional fantasy land. Its basically mass hallucination/psychosis in service of a cult leader, but because there’s a lot of them, its not seriously considered a mental illness.

1. God is punishing us all for allowing the gays and the trans and abortion to exist, and not mandating bible study in k-12.

2. General misdirect toward incompetent government bureaucracy being the culprit, therefore we should get rid of more of it and privatize more stuff.

3. Its all because of private and public DEI hires of illegal immigrants who also don’t work and get too many benefits thus bankrupting us

4. Secret deepstate illuminati cabal runs everything, we need more sweeping authoritarian powers to stop them

1 - 3 basically are the talking points they’ve used since the 80s, 4 has always been there but is now openly used for about a decade.

So, the goal here is to prevent ghosting by making ghosting minutely costly to the ghoster.

They pick from an array of multiple reasons why, and the app formulates an exceptionally kindly worded explanation to send to the ghosted person.

I don’t see this as dangerous to people who are ghosting potentially dangerous people.

Instead of getting nothing, and formulating whatever cockamamie explanation in their own minds (or maybe just going ‘sigh, oh well’), they at least get a facsimile of closure from a canned response.

Obviously this does not magically solve the many problems of dating apps, but I fail to see how this is more dangerous than just ghosting on its own.

The problem is that its minutely time consuming to provide a ghosting explanation.

This ghost explanation requirement requires people to actually explain themselves, and that’s gonna be very cumbersome to people who are not really looking for a serious, long term relationship.

It makes it very annoying to use the app in a scattershot approach for rapid fire hookups, with tons of potentials on deck, as you’ll be forced to consistently ‘tend’ to all of your simultaneous matches, or drop them…

…and for people who think they’re looking for a serious, monogamous relationship, but consistently ghost people, it will basically cause uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when they realize they don’t like having to do a modicum if effort to explain why no one seems to meet their standards or is due their attention, even though they previously thought they were interested.

Basically, the problem I see with this app is that it forces users toward being honest with themselves.

It could be a cool or lukewarm beverage with caffeine, and I have seen people drink and eat stuff their dentists tell them not to after an oral surgery, and tonsilectomies can leave open wounds if the dentist doesn’t fully cauterize them or bandage them properly… and I have also seen people remove bandages/gauze faster than they are instructed to for all kinds of wounds…

But southsamurai seems confident that the difference between absorption into exposed oral capillaries and just normally through your gums/mouth is negligible.

Could having open wounds in your mouth allow caffeine in a beverage to directly enter your blood stream much more quickly than when it is processed by your digestive system?

Just… taking a step back from the politics… all that…

Imagine attempting to explain the bare basics of this to an 8 year old.

The CEO… of the Anti Defamation League … publicly defamed a Congresswoman.

Assuming you aren’t a hoarder, and you properly clean it… well, yes, its weird by the modern standards of our consumeristic society, but in actuality no, this is recycling.

Landfills are full of things that, had they not been placed in a landfill, could likely have been repurposed and reused by someone, somewhere.

Once upon a time I used to get into arguments with people on the comments section of Paul Krugman’s articles, or with my Econ professor about how Iceland’s response to the 08 financial crash (jail all the corrupt bankers) did not infact destroy their entire economy and thus austerity is not actually mandatory.

But alas, those arguments are over and we now just live in the dullest corporate cyberpunk dystopia, without all the edgy style or superhuman abilities of the genre.

I… I remember when idiocracy came out, and the general response to it was that the future of utter morons it depicted was far, far too implausible, that it was just a goofy, half baked ‘dude bro’ comedy. Many more popular sci fi had done far more interesting and cerebral conceptions of possible futures.

But now, people look at idiocracy as… still flawed in many ways, but shockingly accurate in terms of the just total anti intellectualism, recourse to superstition and slogans, hypercharging of corporate control over everything and its rhetoric and slogans entirely being culture.

So, the reality of the situation is that Trump literally would not pass AP Econ in high school, or a first year of Econ in college.

The basics of tariffs are widely known, not just theoretically as much of more advanced Econ is, but literally through the evidence of history.

This is not the esoteric complexity of regulations on financial markets or determining how to best do taxes or subsidies to minimize or compensate for externalities.

This is like Week 2 of MacroEcon 101.

Maybe literally Week 1.

Trump seems to genuinely think that foreign food exporters have no choice other than exporting to the US, as if we are some kind of monopsony.

He seems to think that, like with his idea of somehow getting Mexico to pay for a border wall, that what he is doing is taxing another country’s GDP, directly.

No, just… no.

What happens is first domestic importers pay the import tariff, not the foreign exporters.

Then we get cost pass thru to consumers in the short run, to keep the show running.

Then in the medium term, various kinds of imported foods are just deemed too expensive to eat by consumers, and demand for those imports lessens or stops, they just stop being widely available.

Then in the long run, we might get an attempt to reorient some domestic farms to produce some of these no longer imported foods, but this means less farmland for what we were already making which drives up costs, and the newly domestically produced food is still going to cost more than when they were imported, because wages are higher here…

… unless we allow more migrant workers in to work for a pittance, but he’s against that.

And that’s assuming any food can be grown at the same cost in any location or climate, which is obviously false.

…

Trump’s brain is operating at a level of Mercantilism, a dunce of a mercantilist.

The only way it makes any sense is if you pair that with old school Imperial Colonialism.

We’d have to literally, militarily, boots on the ground, conquer and subjugate all these places we import food from to actually effectively tax those regions and countries directly.

But he also says he is against militarism!

Back when all that existed for online voicecomms was ventrilo, i took one of those boom mics and taped it to one of the ear muffs of an analog headset meant for cd players, as I could not actually afford a mic+headset combo.

Worked for years rofl.

True, but, turn that into ‘I’m cooking up a sandwich’, and now the phrase potentially expands its domain to basically mean any kind of food preparation.

The addition if ‘up’ makes it less literal, more jovial and less bounded.

I was going for Bones’ shuttle ride speech from the first JJ Abrams movie =p