Schadrach

Choose people by being popular and saying the right things and you get salesmen types rather than experts.

I have a saying: “You can never trust salesmen or politicians, and to be fair politicians are just salesmen selling that they should be in charge.”

That’s why I never believed in the rhetoric of “it’s too late to consider 3rd party!” before the elections. Here it is just 6 months later and “we don’t have time for that”. Is it disingenuous then to just say there will never be time for that, like it is being implied here?

It takes years to get a new party off the ground and in a meaningful position to take federal offices at any significant rate. During that time, you are mostly helping your farthest opposition of the main parties win by splitting the vote.

This is literally why the Tea Party operated by internal change of the GOP and not by starting a third party. And love them or hate them, they were effective at shifting the GOP.

This case really isn’t. This is due to terrible Georgia state law, not a Trump EO. Every Republican in Georgia voted for precisely this to happen. Trump had no say.

They don’t campaign for child marriage in secret,

Wait, who is actively campaigning for child marriage? I mean, “child marriage” is already legal in a bunch of states (as in a large majority of them) so long as you understand we’re generally talking about 16 or 17 year olds marrying with consent of their parents, a court or both (depending on the state). The term tends to evoke imagery of kids much younger than that, which is why I’m clarifying. Why would they need to campaign for something that’s already legal in most of the country?

It does seem weird to blame Republicans for this one though, since the states with the broadest child marriage laws have been solidly blue states (Massachusetts eliminated under-18 marriage entirely in 2022, but prior to that had no hard minimum age of marriage with parental and judicial consent, and California still to date has no hard minimum marriage age but requires judicial consent for under-18s). I don’t think anyone is going to claim that California is a state controlled by Republicans.

It’s not like for example fucking animals where it’s only legal in one state, and that one state is a red state. Specifically: Fucking animals isn’t illegal in WV because WV repealed their “crimes against nature”-style law in 1976 for LGBT related reasons (and it wasn’t really enforced much anyways, 4 prosecutions in 46 years on the books, 3 of those overturned on appeal), and WV has just never passed a replacement ban on fucking animals. It typically gets proposed in the legislature every year, and typically never goes any farther than being proposed because the legislature usually has more important things to do than pass an embarrassing bill to legislate against a vanishingly small number of perverts who on the whole aren’t really hurting anyone (and if they were could be prosecuted under regular animal abuse laws).

It usually requires a competent and well-known politician storming out of their party for ideological differences, but being locally popular enough to win their seat as an independent or new party.

It also usually causes the party they broke off from to lose higher offices a few times because the two sides of the schism don’t have enough power individually to win the bigger contests. Until one of them swallows the other.

The right avoided this by doing their “reform” from within, aka the Tea Party.

Prior to 1974, it was legal for banks to require a man’s signature for a woman to open a credit card, and many banks chose to require this.

The requirement for women to provide a male co-sign for lines of credit was one of the last vestiges of coverture (the notion of the household as the primary legal unit, with the husband/father as the one ultimately responsible for the household owning all the assets but also holding all the debts and in some cases responsible for crimes done by family members) to go. Because under coverture, the only women who owned their own assets and were responsible for their own debts were femme sole (single women who are not under their father’s household, typically orphans, widows or spinsters) which meant loaning money to a woman who was or might feasibly become married within the terms of the loan created a scenario where the debt had to be collected from someone who was not a party to the debt being created which made things more difficult for the lender. The whole point of requiring a male co-sign was that way they had someone they could more easily enforce collection against than the debtors potential future husband who wasn’t himself a party to the loan. Once we tossed coverture, it took a bit for policy at private institutions to catch up unless/until they actually needed to.

I agree that the facts are very frequently misrepresented.

There’s a dichotomy to it you see in descriptions of other things, where unless all women could do the thing nationwide without exception then women couldn’t do the thing but if any men could do the thing, then men could do the thing. For example, some women in the US could vote since the founding, because voting rights were determined at the state level and not all of them restricted it by sex. At the same time, most men couldn’t vote either in most states until the mid-19th century with the push for so-called Jacksonian Democracy (ironically, women actually lost the right to vote in New Jersey when voting rights were expanded - the previous wealth requirement was not restricted by sex).

Women who had “hysteria” is also why vibrators were invented, because the 19th century treatment for hysteria was hysterical paroxysm through manual stimulation - aka giving her an orgasm by playing with her bits. The vibrator was originally a labor-saving device for doctors.

Used to have an office that was an addition to the building, with no room to connect it to the main HVAC. I had one of these to myself. The window on my office door fogged up frequently because I set the thing to give-visitors-frostbite-cold.

Yeah, the thing a lot of people seem to miss is just how major of a geographic barrier the Sahara is. As a consequence, northern Africans weren’t generally very black for most of history.

hey want to drag the nation back about a century. Women without a vote, black people again as slaves,

Neither of those was the case a century ago. Literally closer to two centuries than one for black folks since slavery (160 years since the 13th Amendment to be more exact) and women’s suffrage is also over a century old if you count it starting at the 19th Amendment as opposed to any period where it was up to the states.

Yeah, but despite being diabetic I can’t live without apple butter. To be fair that’s why I get the “no granulated sugar added” stuff from Amish country. Depending on the brand, no more than four ingredients (apples, apple cider, lemon juice, spices), though my preferred brand only has three (no lemon juice). Way better quality than most other kinds too - you get more of the tartness of the apples because the only sweetener is more apple and they use less of the apple cider to sweeten than they otherwise might because you can only take it so far before it messes with the texture or flavor too much (which isn’t as much a problem for most other sweeteners) and it costs more.

Amish Wedding, Jake & Amos and Yoder’s all have good ones. The jar I finished off with my breakfast this morning was 5g carb/tablespoon, which is pretty low for apple butter.

Same idea for jams and jellies - particularly fond of Mrs. Miller’s no granulated sugar added jams, which get sweetened with fruit juice (which in turn has price/flavor/texture limits on how much you can use and still have a good product). Whereas actual sugar free jams by the major brands tend to be godawful with entirely the wrong texture and flavor - Smucker’s sugar free jams are an insult to the fruit they were at some point walked past during their production.

Related is that things that use unusual or expensive sugar sources (think agave nectar or honey as the primary or only sweetener as opposed to cane sugar, HFCS or something like that) tend to use less for price reasons and so tend to be slightly less horrific on the added sugar front.

So yeah … that’s the story of how my supposedly healthy friend gave himself diabetes by drinking a metric fuckton of OJ.

Worth noting that drinking all that OJ also essentially means his blood sugar could not be properly measured by some of the testing methods used, because high levels of vitamin C interfere. I wear a CGM and it warns me every time I put on a new sensor not to consume more than 500mg of vitamin C per day if I want it to work, which is much less than a gallon of OJ. Same applies to most common glucometers. Unless they checked his blood sugar using a lab test that didn’t involve a redox reaction, it’s good odds that his blood sugar was not actually whatever it tested as. They likely had to make him swear off the OJ for a day or so and then rerun it to get a real number.

For reference, type I, was at 421 when diagnosed back in the 90s, blood sugar has never been higher than that though I did have one serious hypoglycemic incident where it managed to get low enough that it wasn’t measurable, after they started a glucose IV I came to when it got up to about 35. Closest I’ve ever been to dying.

I have about 2 hours of lost time from that incident, during which I drove a total of about 20 miles between at least two trips. No coherent memory of that period, just a few flashes - I remember the steering wheel in my hands and the pressure of the pedal against my foot, I remember the Sheriff’s Department logo sideways, I remember someone in medium blue, like a work uniform or maybe scrubs or something similar said something to me and I said something back (I don’t remember what either of us said) and then it was two hours after my last coherent memories and I’m in the back of an ambulance with a glucose IV in one arm, an EMT on that side pricking my finger to check my blood sugar and it coming up 35, and EMT on the other side squeezing a tube of glucose paste into my mouth that tasted like a tin can in all the worst ways. The EMT noticed me looking at him and started asking general awareness questions, seemed a bit worried that my answer to where I was was “in the back of a parked ambulance, but I’m not sure where the ambulance is.” Car was totaled, thankfully no one was hurt. I think whatever part of me was still capable of decision making was trying to get help, since I wrecked very close to a hospital ER that would require me to drive out of my usual way to get to.

Chris-chan is a person who got targeted literal decades ago and has been persistently doxed and harassed ever since. The constant doxing, harassment and scrutiny has really messed them up, overall and they weren’t in a great mental place to start with.

Just imagine the single most elaborate doxing and cyber bullying campaign ever devised, enacted over years going back to at least 2009 and ongoing to this day. Every detail of the poor person documented because they became kind of an obsession for some folks.

The notorious KiwiFarms doxing and harassment forum was literally born from Chris-chans stalkers expanding their target roster.

EDIT: Fucking autocorrect turning doxing into dozing on my phone, but not even consistently.

It’s an internet forum that picks targets they think it would be funny to harass (dubbed “lolcows”) and then doxes, tracks and harasses them.

It started life as people following, doxing and harassing Chris-chan (as a consequence Chris-chan is probably the single most documented human in history because of internet weirdos). Chris-chan did eventually come out as trans, but that didn’t happen until they’d already been obsessively watching them for over a decade so they clearly didn’t start targeting them because of trans status.

It usually gets painted as being a primarily anti-trans site, but they don’t limit themselves to trans people, though they do have a board for trans targets. They have an entire board dedicated to furries, another dedicated fat activists, etc. If you’re internet-famous and kinda weird or controversial, they’ve probably started a thread to at least start obsessively gooning over you if not worse than that. Their thread on Musk has the blurb “Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter owner + ex-paypal CEO. Manchild, sexual deviant, spergy autist with access to space travel .”

The site most recently made news headlines when CloudFlare decided to cut them off, being the first time that CF has ever behaved in the fashion of a content moderator. This took them down for a couple of days until they found an alternate anti-DDOS solution.

For clarity, I am going to use man/woman in reference to gender and male/female in reference to sex.

Always said this is exactly the way to protest those laws. Get the burliest, most masculine trans men you can find and engage in malicious compliance.

The conservatives and the TERFs are totally aligned on this one - and their thinking boils down to a few points:

1. You cannot change your sex.
2. Male persons are evil, dangerous predators.
3. Predators will do whatever they need to to get better access to prey.
4. Sex-segregated spaces are segregated by sex, not gender and exist in order to protect female persons from predators by limiting access to them by male persons while in a vulnerable position. …and that’s really it. You might notice that trans men are totally irrelevant to all of that, since they only really care about women’s spaces. To them a trans man using the men’s room is only putting themself at risk and doing so by their own choice, while a trans woman is endangering the cis women in the space against their will by existing.

I may be wrong, but I was thinking the Machinarium with 8 gear rooms was the solution to something, and was being vague about it. So Workshop, Security, Utility Closet, Laboratory, Pump Room, Boiler Room, Hall of Mirrors to duplicate one of the above then Machinarium.

As for the drafting studio, that might be a solution. I’ve had bad luck getting it to pull too, only having seen it twice. Been holding off on picking an outer room in recent runs so that if I see the drafting studio again I can burn rerolls to force a shrine to get maximum use out of it.

As for a trophy for drafting 9 of one room, I hope that room is either aquarium or tunnel. I can’t think of another room it might be reasonable to draft that many of in one run.

I mean, they will pay them. And then charge more for product to cover the additional cost. It’s a lot easier to tolerate that in the short term if you’re bigger.

I find it amusing they though they’d be safe from the increased tariffs under a de minimis limit. That’s a thing that could have happened, but that tends to benefit small purchasers over large ones which is the opposite of GOP thinking and is also no something Trump et al had ever mentioned, so I don’t know why they would expect it?

For anyone that doesn’t know, de minimis is a tariff exception for small purchases, basically that it’s not worth the administrative cost of levying the tariff for fiddling small change, so if it’s a small enough shipment they won’t bother.

workers,…not white Americans!

None of them include workers in that list, because most of them are white Americans, but are also workers. The whole point is “I want them to hurt people who are not like me, not people who are me!”

Shit even my in laws say they are centrist, they don’t hold a single view that’s centrist. They vote down ticket republican their whole lives. This is a thing republicans do.

I voted a mixed ticket until 2016. Then straight blue until 2024, and only one exception in 2024 and she was was a city seat that I knew and could knock on her door and yell at in person if she did something I didn’t like.

Or to pick more immediately pertinent examples, RFK is a an idiot, but he supports banning some food additives that are already banned elsewhere for good reasons, Trump is an idiot, but he wants to end daylight savings time. Both are good ideas, despite support from terrible people and being supported by those terrible people doesn’t make them suddenly terrible ideas.