Zinnia

@Zinnia

Redeemed Zoomer #fundie

I mean, Trump isn’t really a conservative. He just plays one on TV. But he’s not a liberal either. He’s so all over the place that it’s hard to put him anywhere on a conventional political scale beyond “some sort of authoritarian, probably”. Still it’s weird that so many conservatives are suddenly going sour on the Republican Party as a whole mostly due to Trump’s weird antics, which aren’t that far removed from the stuff he pulled the first time around.

Dr. Schavi M. Ali #magick #ufo #conspiracy

Yet, even the space program uses certain “natural” substances unbeknownst to most of the human collective.

I checked the original site to see what this is referring to, and kind of regret doing so.

They’re talking about healing crystals. Specifically, they’re implying that NASA uses healing crystals (particularly amber) to protect themselves from the electromagnetic fields generated by electronic devices, and are hiding this secret from the public.

Kerry Cassidy #crackpot #ufo #wingnut #quack #conspiracy

“Humanoid” is a broad descriptive term, usually used in sci-fi and fantasy, to categorize bipedal beings with a human-like shape and physical traits; humans are a subset of humanoids. I think you’re looking more for “subhumanoid” or “posthuman” or “non-human”, depending on exactly what you meant.

Regardless, there is no “transhumanist agenda”, or even a unified, coherent agenda among any subset of transhumanists, except some of the extropians and longtermists, and their agendas do not look very much like “what someone who is ignorant about cyborgists would think an evil cyborgist faction infiltrated by aliens would want”.

Medeea Greere #crackpot #wingnut #mammon #conspiracy

a jaw-dropping quarter billion US dollars in precious metals, a sum so colossal it’s measured in 40 zeros.

A quarter-billion is 250,000,000. That’s way less than 40 digits.

A quadrillion, if that’s what was really meant, is 1,000,000,000,000,000. Still only 16 digits.

A quadrillion-billion, which would be a rather unusual linguistic construction, would only be 25 digits.

A quatturodecillion would be 46 digits (45 zeroes). Which I guess would be in the rough ballpark in terms of orders of magnitude?

Or if they meant a quarter-billion units of material worth of 40 digits of US dollars? Which would mean… um… let me calculate a few minutes here… 4 nonillion dollars per unit, however big that unit is. If you tried to price that in gold by current values, you’d need a lump of gold weighing 470 septillion kilograms, which is about 80% the mass of Saturn. If everyone could easily access a share of that lump, then the value of gold would collapse to be worth less than dirt.

I don’t think the OP has any sense of scale at all.

The Rev. Steven Roland #wingnut #fundie #conspiracy #homophobia #transphobia

There are definitely some things which a lot of the far right, particularly the religious right, would have objected to about Trump during his first term if they weren’t too busy forgetting that Mike Pence was supposed to be their messiah and ignoring a lot of what Trump was doing… in favor of assuming what a fictional Pence-flavored Trump was expected to be doing was what was really happening, with maybe a bit of Q-anonsense thrown in. But neither was he even remotely like some Trump-flavored far left strawman. This is just replacing “being disconnected from reality” with “becoming even further removed from reality”. (While also being mostly right about Gaetz, somehow.)

Catherine Viel #wingnut #crackpot #mammon #conspiracy

“Medbeds” are scams. They’re just regular medical beds with a couple of containers full of an inert cement-like substance attached to them. Of course they were tested and have the same effect as a placebo.

“Q-phone” and “QFS” (I had to look up the latter, it apparently stands for “Quantum Financial Systems”) are early experimental uses of quantum cryptography. Conventional cryptography can easily be broken by quantum computers, rendering much of the existing electronic security largely useless once quantum computing becomes more common and accessible, so they’re working on getting a jump on that before it happens. Note that this does not mean people’s phones will start containing quantum computers; the existing technology still needs to be kept supercooled in order to function. But for ordinary users, nothing much will actually change. Banking, finance, and phones will work the same… or if any of them don’t, it won’t be because of this.

Though I can understand why a lot of people might think that “quantum” is some mysterious thing, unknowable to anyone who hasn’t spent years on arcane research. Even among the legitimate uses of the term, it refers to a number of different things which are only sort of related, and then there’s a lot of crackpottery and spiritualism mixed in as well.

Parents With Inconvenient Truths about Trans #transphobia

There are a lot of people who believe in things or agree with things in the abstract, but when confronted with it or tested by it in real life, find themselves not living up to whatever standards they set (or at least implied) for themselves. Say, for example, a tough guy type who believes in standing up against bullying, and fancies himself a defender of the weak, but when he finally witnesses multiple incidents of bullying… does absolutely nothing.

When the disconnect is that obvious, you can only make excuses for so long before engaging in some serious self-reflection (or I guess you could spend the rest of your life drunk to avoid thinking about anything too much). In general, this is a good thing, as it allows one to realign one’s beliefs to better match one’s true self, or to understand that your beliefs are ideals which may not be realistic for you to live up to but they’re still worth having, or even to start a long, difficult journey to realign your true self to match your ideals. But it can also be a bad thing for people in your life, and in ways which are not necessarily good for you either, as illustrated here. “This is not the person I imagined them to be” should not become “This person is an alien being mostly disconnected from what I thought was someone familiar” as a result of self-reflection. Or in general, really.

Syndaballet #transphobia

The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.

If you've ever been an active member in leftist spaces, you know exactly what this feels like. To even entertain the idea that a TiM shouldn't be in some women's sports for example would be a heresy.

That kind of “observation” goes both ways, though. The idea that a person might not be what they appear to be, based on their external anatomy at birth, is unthinkable/heretical in transphobic communities. Thus it would be equally reasonable for an outsider to Ovarit to conclude that it is also a form of “crimestop”. Failing to understand why other people believe differently than you, or for that matter, failing to understand what they believe at all, is not evidence of self-brainwashing and/or reflexive avoidance of some “objective truth”.

Candace Owens #conspiracy #wingnut

There’s a potential silver lining, at least. If the US becomes a nation of disease factories but doesn’t become a banana republic, the next generation is likely going to see a renaissance in medicine towards fixing the permanent health damage and disabilities caused by preventable severe illnesses, which would incidentally provide some benefits to medicine as a whole which would otherwise take longer to develop. Shame about all the people who wouldn’t survive to see that, though.

(I am not intending to suggest that the dark cloud in any way justifies any incidental benefits.)

Alex Jones #wingnut #conspiracy

This particular broadcast was from the 7th, but the auction over ownership of Infowars didn’t conclude until early today (the 14th), so he probably still had hope that one of his rich friends would win the bid and let him continue as before. He’s now screaming that it’s fraudulent, an attack on free speech, and that the Onion won with “fake money”. (Apparently some of the money came from Sandy Hook plaintiffs from proceeds which they have already extracted from his estate.)

Unfortunately he’s probably not going to shut up and go away, any more than Tucker Carlson did when Fox News gave him the boot. He just won’t have anything like his former reach for a long time.

Lauren Boebert #conspiracy #crackpot #ufo

@Creativerealms #211425

Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, and Marco Rubio have all been tapped for roles in the Trump Administration. Things can change before January 20, but if they all do happen, Republicans will be down 3 seats in the House. Technically they’re already down 1, as Gaetz has resigned despite being reelected. If Trump taps even more members, this will likely result in the Democrats controlling the House until special elections replace them. (I say “likely” because, at time of writing, 9 House races are extremely close and either the last votes still aren’t in or they’re going into recount, so we don’t know exactly how many absences would be needed. Anywhere from 2 to 11, so those 3 could theoretically be enough, but probably not.) Trump has already been warned about this, but he’s very bad at listening, so there might be a silver lining if he taps even more idiots in the House for administrative roles. Also, since Trump appointees often don’t last very long, that might be a way to get rid of Boebert, in the off chance he does pick her for something…

[Edit] Four seats. Apparently I missed Mike Waltz, or he was only just picked.

Socrates #conspiracy #crackpot #wingnut

People who whine about “identity politics” are the ones who want to go back to the day when there were only two real political identities - “WASP” and “everyone else”. The former were heavily catered to by both liberal and conservative parties, the latter were thrown a bone every now and then to help keep them from revolting. Likewise, the media was fairly united in insuring that a WASP-specific information bubble existed. That’s not been practical or realistic for a very long time now; there are so many groups on both sides of the political spectrum with vastly different interests, and multiple information bubbles.

And even back then, the phrase “the personal is the political” existed.

Brian J. Ford #crackpot #dunning-kruger #pratt #god-complex

we discover that evolution was not Charles Darwin’s idea; there were many philosophers who published the theory before him.

One of the earliest proponents of the idea of “descent with modification” (what we now call “evolution”) was Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather. However, what natural philosophers, zoologists, and botanists lacked was proof. (Note: while the term “biology” dates from 1766, it didn’t meaningfully exist as a scientific discipline until the late 1800s, and Charles Darwin was among the first true biologists.) The earliest semi-hard data came from Darwin as well as Alfred Wallace, the former of which got credit due to publishing his findings earlier. Any earlier “publishings” would have been pure hypothesis, which is why they were not credited.

This is not some sort of secret, nor is it even all that obscure. While I don’t know nearly as much about geology, I would hardly be surprised if plate tectonics was an idea long before Wegener. It’s like how the idea that the universe was incredibly vast and ancient had been around for several decades before Lemaître used other scientists’ data to create the first coherent theory how that could be so. (Which was originally known as “Primeval Atom Theory”, later referred to as “Big Bang Theory”).

…And I know these because I studied *basic* biology and *basic* astronomy, and I’m sure that you’d learn an abbreviated history of geology pre-Wegener if one studied basic geology, so the idea that it’s some sort of hidden information which had to be ‘discovered’ through intensive research is laughable.

Raven #homophobia

I don’t go to these sorts of conventions, but I looked up Dragon Con rules… and it turns out that anyone under 16 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. So there aren’t going to be any little kids running around unless their parents are okay with them seeing semi-nudity. Or, I guess, because they have no idea what they’re getting into, which would be kind of weird and dumb. (Not that people showing up at places or events with weird and dumb expectations about them never happens, but it’s pretty rare and entirely on them.)

Now admittedly, 16-17 is legally still a minor, but seeing someone semi-naked (or even fully naked in some contexts) is not, in itself, porn, otherwise we’d have to do things like banning minors from beaches. Likewise, mildly sexualized costumes have never been considered porn in themselves either, regardless of how much skin is actually being covered. For that matter, neither is talking about a fictional F/F relationship.

I get that some people would prefer to live in a fantasy world where no one has any context to understand their sex drives or sexual attraction until they’re married, but that has never been remotely realistic.

mustbetheblood #moonbat #psycho

Sounds like someone trying to make “cisphobia” a thing, like “litterbox furries”, “Tide Pod challenge”, “reverse racism” or “freebleeding”, except “ironically”. It looks even weirder in conjunction with “c!s”, because I don’t think an actual rabid cisphobe, if any exist, would censor their own slurs, because that’s not how rabid bigotry normally does things. Or for that matter, use “cis” itself as a slur, but maybe something derived from that, like “cissy”.

Nick Fuentes and unnamed Internet trolls #sexist #forced-birth

“They can hate us out loud and lose nothing”

From what I’m hearing, that’s not always true, at least anecdotally. While they can freely say that in the public arena, that doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be any pushback in their private lives. There are some who are being disinvited from social and family gatherings (particularly Thanksgiving, which is in a bit over two weeks in the US), or being dumped/separated/divorced by their significant other if that sort of behavior is relatively new (or at least mild enough to be tolerable to some women up until now). However, this is just anecdotal, so time will tell if it’s happening often enough to cause some real pain on a collective level.

I will also note that some of the men saying shit like this are manospherian types who have few friends and serious trouble finding and keeping relationships to begin with, so while it won’t make things worse for them in an immediate and noticeable way, it likely won’t benefit them in the long run either.

Mike Davis #conspiracy #crackpot #psycho #racist #wingnut

<@KeithInc.> #211211

The House Oversight Committee spent about a year and a half trying to find evidence of “Biden Crime Family”. They found a handful of small-potatoes things on Hunter Biden, with no real link to Joe. After a point they were just chasing their own tail, fruitlessly rehashing unproductive lines of inquiry because they had no idea what else to try. Eventually they just decided to go forward with the impeachment hearings in hopes that new evidence would just fall out of the woodwork.

Which did not actually end up happening because enough people in congress know that’s not what a “hearing” is. Not in the legal sense, and not in general. It’s when you put forward all the relevant information/evidence you have for consideration/evaluation/judgment, not a forum to declare what you hope to eventually find, in hopes that someone else will find it for you.

Too many Republicans just don’t understand what common legal terms mean or the basics of how law works. It’s one thing if you’re some working-class person just trying to get by and live your life. It’s quite another when your job is political or very politically-adjacent, it’s kind of necessary to do your job right.

Tucker Carlson #ableist #crackpot #forced-birth #fundie #sexist #wingnut

It’s like a Tuckerectomy. Extracting a 55-year-old man from society and tossing him out with the medical waste is, as a general rule, not a good thing to be happening, but if it’s a Tucker Carlson…

John C. Wright #fundie #pratt

So… you’re saying that all those Evangelicals and Baptists and Protestants (the latter of which are the majority religion in the US), the more conservative of whom claim that Catholics are false Christians, will just submit to a Catholic-run theocracy. Maybe some of them would pretend to do so because getting power now is more important, and backstabbing the heretics is something they can do later? Given where we are, who even knows.

Liz Wheeler #wingnut

They’ll probably claim that Roe v. Wade was Biden, because it happened early on under his administration, as if Trump’s Justices didn’t have anything to do with it. Also some of them will claim that abortion is not a “right”, so “nothing” was lost.

Tucker Carlson #fundie #crackpot

You know, assuming Tuckums has genuinely gone fundie and is not playacting for a new audience, I’m wondering if maybe he had heard about the “Demon Core” incidents during early nuclear testing (in the years immediately following WWII, so the first bombs had already been dropped) and only vaguely remembers that there is some sort of word association between nukes and demons. Or if he’s playacting, if he knows exactly what he’s saying and making a little joke his new audience wouldn’t get.

Rev. Andrew Isker #fundie #sexist #racist

I’m now reading that there were bomb threats on polling places in more states than just Georgia. Might be a rumor, since you’d think that would have been reported yesterday, but… if it’s not a rumor, then there was mass vote suppression… but that would mean the vote totals still stand, because as I said earlier, you can’t retroactively manifest votes which were never actually cast.

@Timjer #210930

even if Trump commited voter fraud or something,

Pedantry: Election fraud. That’s when you mess with the vote totals during or after the vote casting. Voter fraud is when you personally cast two or more votes. I don’t think even he would personally cast millions of votes, that’s too stupid even for him.

There’s also vote suppression. Regardless, if something was done, it wasn’t necessarily something he was responsible for, and it may be hard to prove his involvement even if he ordered it, and given the past 8 years it would be unlikely that it would be allowed to matter. Usually there’s nothing which can be done anyway; in the case of vote suppression, one cannot conjure up the votes which would otherwise have been cast… and in the case of election fraud, depending on what was done, it may not be possible to “repair” the situation before the deadline, if it’s possible at all. The vote total stands, maybe a few minions go to prison, and maybe it becomes a harder to do the exact same thing in that particular State next time. (If there is a next time… which isn’t normally a concern when this happens.)

I will mention that, at the time of writing, 1.) There’s a small chance Pennsylvania could flip back, but it requires about 2/3 of the remaining 4% of the votes. It depends on where those votes are. 2.) Failing that, if Trump wins Maine-2 (scoring 1 point) and Alaska (Scoring 3 points) as expected, that puts him at 270. If Harris wins the remaining swing states (Arizona 11, Nevada 6, New Hampshire 4, Michigan 15, Wisconsin 10) then she’ll also have 270. Which is when things start to get really complicated and messy. New Hampshire appears to be in the bag, Arizona is looking good, the others iffier.

Of course, by the time most people read this, it will be out of date.

And even if she wins, it’s hard not to be disappointed. It looks like racism and/or sexism beat out felony and espionage, in the end.

Even if that were a valid interpretation of that biblical passage, I will point out that “President of the United States” and “Kohein” (ancient Jewish priest) are very different roles.

Tatsuya Ishida #conspiracy #dunning-kruger #racist

Lately Tats has been doing a weird meta thing, where it’s ancient Greece, but it’s a metaphor for the modern world, but this “ancient Greece as a metaphor for the modern world” is actually a metaphor for an ahistorical Jewish takeover of Europe circa roughly that time period, which is mostly incomprehensible unless you’re very familiar with his personal brand of stupid. Now he’s dragging in the Romans to take a swipe at Trump just before the US election, and somehow manages to make it even stupider, because he clearly understands the Romans even less than he does the Greeks.

Incidentally the dancing thing in the last panel is because Tats misremembers that “Muslims danced in the streets after 9/11″ (they didn’t) as “Jews danced in the streets after 9/11″. I don’t know why YMCA specifically, might just be some random reference to gayness or diversity.

Liz Wheeler #forced-birth #fundie #wingnut

“Radical” is relative to the mainstream, the baseline, or the norm. You are the radicals now. Either you’re so deep in your religious bubble that you’re barely aware of the rest of the world, or you don’t know what the word means.

Jake Paul #wingnut

A wolf isn’t a phantom threat though. What exactly are you supposed to become in this metaphor? A cow? A wild forest animal? A human? To join him as a wolf? Or an abstract entity which steps out of the metaphor altogether?

Donald Trump #crackpot #dunning-kruger #wingnut

He’s still saying this?

This feels like one of those situations where it’s painfully obvious that you’re dealing with a person who doesn’t have even the most basic understanding of the situation or subject in question, and then when they get pushback they get pissed and claim to be a doctor/lawyer/scientist/whatever and know exactly what they’re doing/talking about. I’m not sure the Orange One even knows what IVF is.

I mean, I wouldn’t at all be surprised to find that he doesn’t personally have anything against it, even if he does know. But there are plenty in his orbit, including the Project 2025 ghouls, who very much do want to get rid of it, and I doubt he’d stand in their way.

Liz Wheeler #forced-birth #wingnut

My reactions, in order:

1. How does your brain even work?!

2. Sounds like you live in a reality with *huge* problems which can only be solved by exterminating most of the men but keeping a few around for breeding, and even then abortion would still be useful as a limited stopgap solution until that was accomplished, so you’re still wrong.

3. More seriously, you’re expecting us to believe that the options are “rape, promiscuity, and abortion” or “none of those” and getting rid of abortion will eliminate rape and promiscuity, as if the three were co-dependent to or contingent on each other. It’s hard to disentangle what subtle effects they might have on each other because they’re all tangled up on so many other things, but the key here being subtle. Whatever black-and-white thinking produced this tweet includes one or more premises which are not even remotely how humans work.

Tucker Carlson #crackpot #fundie #magick

@Timjer #210682

Seems like it’s much safer to NOT be a Christian then.

I’ve seen an explanation for that: Demons don’t go after non-Christians because those people already “belong” to Satan. Which still doesn’t explain what they hope to accomplish, because every Christian who claims to have been attacked by a Demon was supposedly not shaken in their faith?

Robert F Kennedy jr #ableist #conspiracy #crackpot #quack

In case anyone is wondering why “sunshine” specifically is on this list, it’s because he’s against sunscreen.

Bo French #wingnut #racist #ableist #homophobia #sexist #racist

“rid the earth of the white race.”

Well, ideally, yes, but not in the way you think - if people are allowed to love who they want to love, and live where they want to live, and racism is not a factor in those wants… there will be no clear or meaningful racial divisions, and a lot less wide-scale clustering of people who have superficially similar skin tones and facial features. In other words, by eliminating any useful or meaningful concept of “race”, the *concept* of “white race” will cease to exist except as a historical artifact.

…At least among humans. The word “race” might still be retained as a rough equivalent to “species” among sapient beings, assuming civilization eventually goes there.

Rev. Joel Webbon and Wesley Todd #racist #sexist

That would require a very large swath of women and/or non-whites voting against their right to vote. Which wouldn’t be hypocritical, just ideologically paradoxical (as in, violating your principles in order to achieve them). Or an illegitimate total government takeover, I guess.

John Stossel/John Tierney #wingnut #homophobia #racist #conspiracy

In the US, a lot of things like those have improved, quite a bit. At least in terms of raw numbers. (And a few things have gotten a bit worse.) But there are (at least) three effects going on here which the OP may not have considered or been aware of.

One is the internet, which has made a lot of people more aware of specific issues which need to be dealt with. It’s one thing when you hear about statistics involving broad categories, quite another to see concrete examples.

Another is that, while individual bigots are fewer, other people are also less willing to accept that bigotry is everywhere and such a normal part of life that there’s nothing most people can do about it on a practical level. It’s basically, wait, we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, wasn’t racism (or whatever) supposed to have disappeared by now?

The third is that there is currently a lot of organized efforts to undo those improvements, and people don’t like that. You will pry my clean water, fresh air, safe food, and civil rights from my cold, dead body!

A possible fourth (and I’m just speculating here) is that many of these positive effects may be nowhere near evenly distributed, engendering a feeling of unfairness in some circles.

Elena Freeland #crackpot #wingnut #ufo #quack #conspiracy

Transhumanism is a wide spectrum of philosophies and practices, with the only common thread being a focus on improvements in society, improvements in humanity, or both. Where agendas exist, many are opposed to or incompatible with each other. There is no unified or coherent “transhumanist agenda”. I suspect that they’re just taking some of the worst ideas from certain subsets of transhumanism, some of the worst ideas from corporatists to come out of global forums, and mashing it all together to create a really bleak but unlikely vision of the future, and calling it an “agenda”.

People being people, there ~~probably~~ almost certainly exist individuals who want to force-cyborgize or force-upload everyone else “for their own good” (or just *say* that but really want to enslave everyone) because terrible humans exist in every community. Those are not going to be remotely realistic any time soon (though admittedly, unexpectedly fast breakthroughs in certain areas might change that), nor would those likely be the biggest threat by the time we get to that point, assuming they’re real threats at all.

Elon Musk might create the worst possible version of a company town on Mars and force people to implant neural laces or something (with maybe the added horror of said laces/whatever being designed to control people in crude ways, rather than being purely utilitarian) if he lives long enough, but you have to be really gullible or desperate to walk into that trap.

We have the technology to create equivalents of any “G” we want. If it follows the same pattern, 6G would require much more extensive infrastructure than 5G and is complete overkill right now (and probably will be for a long time to come). 7G would be too short-range to be useful and is also the frequency of a microwave oven, I really don’t think you’d want to be communicating using *that*.

Ladylucy & DurableBook #transphobia #enbyphobia

Assuming that they’re implying that any of this is common, this is the opposite of reality. Trans people, with occasional exceptions, don’t consider nonbinary people invalid, and most trans communities allow them to join due to common causes and shared interests.

I mean, there are a small number of enbyphobes among trans people, mostly older ones, but they’re not welcome in trans spaces. Most are also transmedicalists (AKA “truscum”) who have an extremely narrow and exclusionary idea what it means to be transgender, largely based on (highly inaccurate and outdated) 1960s and 1970s clinical ideas. It’s similar to how TERFs/GCs have a “cult of true womanhood” thing going on. I suspect that some of them think this because it’s an easy concept for them to grasp.

Donald Trump, Tony Hinchcliffe, Tucker Carlson, David Rem and Sid Rosenberg #racist #wingnut #conspiracy #fundie

It’s notable that the “immigrants rape America” joak didn’t provoke nearly as strong of a reaction compared to the Puerto Rico joak. (I will not dignify them by calling them “jokes”.) I suspect that this is because “immigrants” isn’t a coherent group of people, while Puerto Ricans are, and they’re American citizens by birth to boot. Something which conservatives seem to keep forgetting.

Donald Trump #conspiracy #wingnut #crackpot #god-complex #dunning-kruger

His real complaint is that he turned down his chance for a 60 Minutes interview, which was probably going to hurt him a little regardless of whether he showed up or not, but Kamala Harris didn’t and it appeared to help her a little. This is absolutely unfair, Trump must be allowed all the advantages and Kamala none of them. He can’t really say that because even he (or at least whatever advisors he actually listens to) isn’t that stupid, so instead he says stuff which is *slightly* more likely to be taken seriously by the legal system (it still won’t be).

Michael Voris #wingnut

Weird how they keep claiming that liberals hate guns, that an armed takeover will be easy because most liberals don’t have guns, yet they’re worried that liberals are going to come after them with guns. (Excepting the ones who welcome it so they can enact their righteous murder fantasies.)

I mean, there’s a bit of wiggle room there. I don’t think any of them would claim that *all* of us are unarmed, just most, so it’s not a contradiction. It’s just weird.

Jesse Kelly #racist #fundie

I note that the scenario presented (a non-citizen grandmother who has lived in the US for 30 years) doesn’t mention the citizenship status of the children’s father. If the father was a citizen, then even their fantasy of repealing birthright citizenship doesn’t apply here, unless they plan to do it under a more extreme version than is usually implied. Regardless, you can’t act under laws you wish you had, that’s sovcit-level nonsense.

Tatsuya Ishida #conspiracy #fundie

@Bastethotep #210077: Because Jews and Catholics hate art because they cannot create it, so Shabbatman avenges them by calling all art “graven images” and destroying it. No, seriously, that was his origin. I guess in this one he’s also forcing Ancient Greeks to become Catholics so they can’t create any more pagan statues?

Paul Bury #fundie #dunning-kruger #crackpot

Isn’t it arrogant to decide what God wants? Given how un-self-aware some of you people are, how can you even tell the difference?

Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 #wingnut

I’m pretty sure Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t have a place in the Republican party either, except maybe as a token or a useful idiot. But then again she’s always been a very strange one.

Ben Shapiro #dunning-kruger #wingnut

So… Trump was being authentic… by not pretending that he was anything other than an out-of-touch rich dude LARPing as a common service worker at a staged event? Okay, I’ll grant you that. What I don’t get is why I should be even the slightest bit impressed by it.

Urine Therapy Guide #quack #crackpot #conspiracy

Even if it worked as described, there’d be a limit. Your urine does not contain an infinite amount of “wasted” nutrients and hormones. Unless something strange is going on, there won’t be all that much, anyway. And for that matter, while you were doing it, you’d have a deficit of nutrients which you didn’t have an excess of to begin with. Oh, and metabolic waste products will rise with each time you do it, as the body doesn’t stop burning calories just because you aren’t consuming any, it just burns stored fats and unused muscles (at first), and those will eventually rise to toxic levels.

I’m not even sure how to test the efficacy of this. What is this even supposed to work better than? It’d be slightly better than completely starving at least, likely for a very short time anyway, but that’s about as low of a bar as you can get.

Clif High #crackpot #ufo #magick #dunning-kruger

This reminds me of a thought experiment I did once. What would happen, ignoring that it’s impossible to create such a thing under known physics, if you had a one-way portal: step through one side, immediately end up in the other, but going back is impossible. For visual purposes: unless it was transparent to light, the “enter” side would be pitch black, and the “exit” side would show a (possibly distorted) bright image that would be the overlap of the entry site and a mirror image of the exit site. (If it was transparent to light it would just be invisible.)

The portal would need to pull you through, otherwise anything pushed through would emerge as raw energy. Thing is, though, I’m not sure if there’s any safe speed for any living things to pass through it. There will be a buildup of blood, body fluids, and nerve signals on the exit side and nothing returning to the entry side. Too slow, and this buildup could be fatal. Too fast, and the G-forces could kill you, not to mention that you’d go flying across the exit area. Depending on exactly how it works and the energies involved, there’s the possibility that some forms of disruption (potentially including someone grabbing you too late to prevent you from entering) could split someone in two. Even if there’s a safe speed and no real risk of something going wrong, you’re going to lose consciousness regardless, and your breathing and heartbeat will stop as the hindbrain and spine passes through… though whether these are momentary, permanently until medically revived, or somewhere in between, is something that can only be guessed at, since brains and nervous systems are not at all designed to be forced through a one-way portal.

It’s not the same as what OP is suggesting is possible in their sci-fi fantasy (essentially, that reality is a simulation which can be hacked in a very limited and specific way), but since they’re seriously entertaining fantasy physics, I figured I might as well do it too.

NeoGrendizer #pratt #dunning-kruger

Re: A repeat of Jan 6 - on one hand, a lot of the originals are in jail (or served their sentence) and thus aren’t likely to be doing it again this time, and also serves as likely discouragement for anyone new who might try it.

On another hand, there’s a lot of tension on both sides, more so than before. The left fears the end of meaningful democracy in favor of a one-party Republican rule; the right fears the final nail in the coffin of their loss of cultural relevancy, and forever losing their children to “immorality”, with the only way of arresting this being ending democracy as we know it. On top of this, a non-white woman is likely to provoke a stronger reaction than an old white man. So there’s likely to be some sort of big negative reaction by one side or the other regardless of who wins (remember the Women’s march in Jan 2017 in response to Trump winning?), it just won’t necessarily manifest anything like Jan 6.

On third hand, Biden and the city of DC will be ready for a repeat or something similar, which in a reasonable world should serve as a deterrent, but probably won’t have that much effect… because the kind of people who would do this aren’t the sort to pay attention to or to think too deeply about that. If it does have a big effect, my guess is that it will be “bring lots of guns this time”. Regardless, it won’t play out the same way.

various commenters #transphobia #enbyphobia

If it helps to make sense of this, the usual TERF/GC concept of “enby” is that they’re AFAB (Assigned Female At Birth) people who don’t fit in with patriarchal gender norms. This is, in their view, “normal”, because such norms were created by men for men’s benefit and are largely disconnected from “true womanhood”. (Never mind that TERF/GC ideas about “true womanhood” don’t mesh well with a lot of other womens’ ideas about womanhood.) AMAB enbies are rarely acknowledged, and when they are, the usual concept is that they’re attention-whoring gay men.

manifest teen suicides

In the past, the reasons behind younger suicides (typically in the 15-24 age range) were generally unknown. Social media didn’t exist, bullying and abuse were less visible, and people who were “just different” usually didn’t have the language to express how they were different. I checked a few different sources (CDC, NIMH, Wikipedia) for the suicide rates in the US from 1981-2021… and what was interesting to note was that while the reported suicide rate has been gradually increasing in general (there was a temporary drop during the late 1990s, don’t ask why) the majority of that increase has been in women in their 40s and older, for whatever reason. Also note that I said “reported”, which suggests that, aside from maybe the notable increase in suicide among older women, the incremental rise over time might be due more to better reporting than anything else.

Regardless, that doesn’t prove anything (for all we know, there could be an increase in suicide among trans and non-binary teens and a drop in cis teens, unlikely as that may seem to anyone not a transphobe), I’m not even sure how you’d prove that, given the unavailability of hard data which could be used to make a reasonable estimate until the last few years. So you’re just left with “feelings”, I guess.

Subhuman Niceguy et al. #sexist #racist #psycho

I have a hard time believing that anyone who is as entitled and misery-addicted as a typical incel could ever become accomplished enough to become an astronaut.

But that’s not really what they’re talking about, are they? No, astronauts are Chads, and Chads live only for their constant supply of sex with hot young women… which they won’t get in space whether or not any women are present. Hmm, seems to be a bit of a flaw there…