Zinnia

@Zinnia

Florida State Board of Education #dunning-kruger #racist

They’ve been trying to portray antebellum chattel slavery as having been not significantly different from indentured servitude, with a heavy dose of “a silver lining justifies a dark cloud” mixed in, despite the two not being entirely compatible. The former is unhistorical; the latter is morally depraved.

Peachy Keenan #sexist #conspiracy

More people having fewer (or no) children isn’t primarily an effect of feminism, though it does have a minor overall effect in the cases where a husband decides he wants more kids than the wife does and the wife doesn’t really have a right to say no. It’s more of an effect of liberalism, which (among other things) focuses on improving the quality of life over the quantity of life.

GethN7 #transphobia #dunning-kruger

This argument mostly makes sense from the perspective that: 1.) Black people gained full social equality decades ago, perhaps not too long after the civil rights act of 1968, and racism is no longer a meaningful thing; 2.) Trans people only just popped into existence during the 2010s; and 3.) Trans people can totally be their AGAB without consequences, they just don’ wanna. That’s on top of the usual “sex = gender because I can’t imagine it being otherwise” and “it’s really important to me and a lot of others that no one should be allowed to cross/blur gender lines, so everyone is obliged to respect that”. Do I need to state just how wrong that all is?

Derek Gilbert #fundie #ufo #conspiracy

The problem with this “theory” is that Yaveh (YHWH) wasn’t the co-creator of existence associated with the sky. He was originally associated with Mars, at least according to the Yehudites (the forerunners of the Jews). He killed or banished his father El (associated with the Sky), claiming his powers and title, and forced his mother Asherah (varyingly associated with the Earth, Trees, and the Sea) to marry him. She then kind of disappeared after awhile, and the other Gods associated with planets/stars got associated with demons.

Geoffrey Grider #fundie #wingnut #conspiracy

They also generally think that the Chi Rho (☧) which is a symbolic abbreviation of “Christos” (Christ) is a demonic symbol, seemingly for no reason other than they’re not familiar with it. In reality it’s sometimes used as an anti-demon symbol.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene #wingnut #conspiracy

I can’t help but wonder if this counts as a variation of the Spiderman fallacy. Child trafficking is real, therefore conspiracy theories about child trafficking are also real.

Galactic Anthropology/Alex Collier #ufo #crackpot #quack

Molluscs have copper-based blood, which is actually more blue than it is green, yet molluscs in general are usually white or brown or some mix of the two. I’m not really sure what it would do to human coloration since blood does give a very slight pinkish-purple tone mixed in with the brown from melanin, maybe give a slight olive or grayish tint, the former of which some humans have already and no one calls that “green”.

Geoffrey Grider #fundie #wingnut #conspiracy

It’s the Mark of the Beast™ part MMMCLXXVII, isn’t it?

Look, this kind of tech potentially has serious privacy issues. I mean, you have to give Amazon (or whatever company) a lot of personally identifying information to confirm it’s really you, and then you have to trust that they will then delete everything but the bare minimum needed for the system to function, and that they will keep the data secure enough that there won’t be a breach and your bank account info won’t be stolen, and that your information won’t be sold to data brokers who might be able to use AI to determine your identity indirectly, etc. That’s a lot of trust.

But one issue you’re not going to have is one company gaining a global monopoly on payments and then forcing you to tattoo a barcode to your forehead. That’s just not a realistic thing to fear.

Henry Makow PhD #wingnut #racist #sexist #transphobia #quack #conspiracy

I feel like I’m missing something. Humanity becomes extinct, but the evil and presumably still human overlords and their human slaves are still alive and in evil overlord paradise?

Jennifer Bilek #transphobia

I’m reasonably certain that when people like this talk about “deconstructing gender” they don’t mean deconstruction in the sense of philosophical analysis, they mean it in the sense of gradual and careful demolishing. So when people talk about examining gender presentation, roles, stereotypes, etc. and the effect those have on society, they imagine those people are talking about something akin to gender abolition or postgenderism, just based on a misunderstanding of the term and not what anyone is actually saying.

Also I don’t get what some of these people think “sex-based rights” are. What exactly have women historically had that men didn’t, and how are they losing those “rights” now? I mean during some time periods upper-class women had a few specific privileges unavailable to anyone else, but those never applied to women as a whole.

ThyGeekdomCome #fundie #sexist

I am always weirded out by people who have a breeding fetish and either consider it to be a universal default, or think it should be one. Dude, just because you have a hard time getting off without imagining your sex act creating a baby doesn’t mean most people are like that.

various commenters #wingnut #racist

Before the federal income tax, the federal government funded itself with tariffs and excise taxes.

This was considered by some to be unfair, due to it affecting different industries to different degrees, and the costs were passed down unevenly to the consumer, with some sections of society hit more than others. Sure, you got to “keep all your wages”, but you might have to pay higher prices depending on where you lived and what you needed to spend those wages on. This rarely mattered for the rich, but screwed over a lot of the poor.

The income tax (and the payroll tax) may have some issues, but it’s more equitable and transparent than what existed before.

kodoku #crackpot

Steve Kirsch #conspiracy #dunning-kruger #wingnut

Also point out that there was a big spike in covid infections in some places during late 2021 - early 2022 due to holiday travel resuming.

David Lawn #wingnut #quack #conspiracy

If I had reason to believe that I was in a space which was being secretly monitored by actual humans - key word being “secretly” - and someone demanded that said monitors provided them answers, and someone actually did respond… I would suspect that it was 99.8% likely to be a troll, 0.1% likely to be a psyop, and 0.1% likely to be someone low-security and so bad at their job that we couldn’t fully trust what they said anyway. Spies don’t reveal themselves just because someone dared them to, that’s antithetical to their job.

Tatsuya Ishida #conspiracy #transphobia

Update for anyone who cares:

“Chestfeeding 4″ has the cis woman getting disgusted at the 911 operator for making it about gender identity. “How do you know they identify as a man? Did you ask for their pronouns?”

“Chestfeeding 5″ has a couple of rednecks commenting on how zombies are now forcing victims to feed on them. Also refers to the trans woman (?) as “him”.

@Yutolia #170601

- Tats seems to use the one-tooth thing as a symbolism of childishness or selfishness.

- I’m not sure if the “buying a baby” thing happened before (I seem to vaguely remember it did once under different circumstances, but might be wrong) but that’s totally what’s happening here, because in Sinfest world you can buy or steal whatever is needed for the ~~plot~~ latest screed.

- What’s even weirder is that babies are canonically brought by the stork, so either that’s a convincing fake baby, or Devil Corp can manufacture either baby-bots or real babies now, or Tats decided to have the stork go into retail for this strip because it’s ~~funny~~ stupid.

- I don’t think breastfeeding in public has been shown before, but if a ~~real~~ cis woman is doing it, then it’s currently acceptable in-world. At least until Devil Corp, The Church of Woke, Or Those Dang T-Slurs do something to shut it down on the grounds of it being offensive to someone or other, which probably won’t happen but you never know.

Some additional details / context

- The title of the strips (not shown here) are “Chestfeeding”, “Chestfeeding 2″, and “Chestfeeding 3″. This is a term commonly used by trans men and some nonbinary people, but not by trans women.

- The last frame of the second strip shows the trans woman (?) with an erection, not just a bulge. It’s not clear if he intended that she (?) has a nursing/lactation fetish and the arousal only just kicked in, or if she (?) has a humiliation fetish and got turned on by the verbal abuse.

- There was a recent strip where Clarence Thomas showed up on the holo-screens to stop the gender police from harassing Nana (who is still TERFy) only for Dark Brandon (Joe Biden, as seen in the last frame of the third strip) to also show up on the holo-screens and shut him (Thomas) down. Weirdly both seem to be able to force people to stand down just by speaking, as they’re not usually even present. But essentially, whether later shown in-comic or not, it’s the gender police who will likely show up, and they have Brandon’s backing, so…

Jennifer Bilek #transphobia #homophobia

@Sasha #170548

I have come to understand that while rights in general are not a limited resource, there are a couple which, in some respects, actually are. The more obvious one being social dominance hierarchies, which is a big thing in a lot of conservative circles. If you give people the right to opt out of them, then most other people will choose to do so, but it doesn’t work very well if people can just opt out. More so if the ones who opt in mostly don’t want to be on the bottom due to abusive behavior by everyone else. Even more so if you can’t tell at a glance who’s in and who’s out. And of course if it’s a religious or philosophical imperative that everyone must be part of it, then opting out can’t be allowed anyway. So the more rights someone has to not participate, the less ability others have to engage in it.

The other is more subtle and complex, and I’m not sure if there’s a good name for it, but it involves the “freedom” to choose between good and evil, according to narrow, black-and-white (and often religiously defined) concepts of good and evil. If you choose to do “evil” things because you believe doing them makes you a good person, or avoiding doing “good” things because you believe doing so would make you an evil person, then that “misinformation/deception” makes you “confused”, and thus not able to freely choose to be good or evil. It should be noted that doing things for reasons other than being good or evil don’t really compute to people deep in this mindset unless the action is fairly minor and has no particular value judgement. Anything which undermines this reduces people’s ability to enforce community and/or educational standards based on this mindset, while freeing other people to choose different standards. I would argue that a typical TERF’s insistence on enforcing gender and/or sex essentialism falls under this.

Those are both broad categories; bigotry seems to more of a common tool of enforcement than it is a “limited right” of its own. Without organization or popular support, most of the time bigotry is just being an asshole.

Sebastian Sicklinger #wingnut #conspiracy

I would be unsurprised if DeSantis ends up being the straw which broke the Republican party in it’s current form. I wouldn’t put high odds on it, far more likely he implodes and it ends up being someone/something else, but it wouldn’t be surprising.

Wonder who they’re going to focus on next once the usual scapegoats have kicked the bucket.

Anna Von Reitz #wingnut #crackpot #conspiracy

If I’m getting the timing right (and I may not be, as this was done with a very quick check) the 13th amendment was passed before any of the ex-Confederate states had anyone in congress, the 14th around the time when some of those states would have had members in congress but not others, and the 15th would likely have been missing Georgia at most. I would assume that the state governments would not have been able to vote on it either. [Edit: which even if true this matters little for the 14th and 15th, as Yutolia mentioned, there were enough votes by other states for them to pass anyway.] That doesn’t mean that they weren’t ratified, only that one could argue that they didn’t have the “full input and/or consent of the governed” at the time they were ratified - which isn’t much of an argument 155 years later. I’m also apparently not up to date on SovCit nonsense given that I can’t figure out how they would think a foreign government could have gotten them passed, or used them to run the country as a corporation, particularly since the 13th and 14th have been used to shackle corporate abuses.

The 16th feels like an odd inclusion here. While the 13th-15th were passed in the aftermath of the civil war and the issues they cover were interrelated, the 16th wasn’t passed until 1909 and is unrelated to the others - rather than citizen rights, it involves taxation. I can get why SovCits might hate it though.

Jennifer Bilek #transphobia #homophobia

Whenever there’s some minor advance in reproductive technology or genetic technology which has potential to contribute to reproductive technology, certain people get all panicky about the possibility of removing either men or women from the equation. What’s missing from their views is that this sort of thing is optional; unless we end up with some sort of dystopia where no one is allowed to breed and all children are artificially created or something similarly extreme, most people will continue to be straight and straight people can also take advantage of such technology if they wish to.

However, given that this is more transphobic than it is anti-tech, and doesn’t mention anything new tech-wise, I suspect the actual inspiration for this rant is the CDC’s recently released advice for trans women who wish to breastfeed.

Saint Germain via Jahn J. Kassl #magick #ufo #conspiracy

So basically midlife crises are invisible ~~pink unicorns~~ cosmic web implants reaching the end of their lifespans?

Pierre Lescaudron #crackpot #conspiracy

“Electric Universe” is the name of a hypothesis (not even theory) that gravity is just a form of electromagnetism, something which was considered highly implausible when it was proposed and has been thoroughly debunked. Its creator said that “Electric Universe can not be peer reviewed, because we have no peers” which is obviously a sign of good science. 🙄 Only a small number of pseudoscience cranks believe in it, and they tend to throw even more crankery into the mix.

Gazetteller #wingnut #conspiracy

It’s a thing which happens a lot these days: someone claims to have acquired “astounding proof” of something, refuses to show it for “their own safety” (as if nobody would shut them down, arrest them, or assassinate them to keep them from talking, so long as they don’t actually talk), continues to hype it up for months, embellishing it more and more, to the point where it goes far outside of reality assuming it wasn’t already. And when they are finally forced to put up or shut up? One of the following happens:

1.) They shut up, disappear for awhile, return and pretend nothing happened.
2.) They are forced to admit/reveal that they have nothing.
3.) Pages and pages of rambling nonsense which they wrote themselves.
4.) Public (not secret) documents which don’t say what they think.
5.) They fell for a very stupid scam.
6.) They actually have something they’re not supposed to, in which case the authorities notice and arrest them. Also, whatever they end up revealing is very weak evidence at best, and evidence against their claims at worst.

Unfortunately there do exist people where repeated claims of evidence is all the proof they need, and the eventual letdown is largely or entirely forgotten. So it remains in their subconscious as one of the “facts” which they know.

Anxieyote #psycho

I mean, those are valid ideas within the frameworks of those philosophies/ideologies, but they don’t actually define them. Most people who believe in one or more of those things still don’t promote suicide.

various commenters #transphobia

Wake up, wipe off the make up and take off your skirt, and "magically" you are once again back in the oppressor class...

This is particular line is essentially repackaged biphobia. Bi people can just marry someone of the opposite sex, what do they even need with Gay Rights? (Note for any younger readers: “LGBTQIA+ Rights” used to be referred to almost exclusively as “Gay Rights” by the general public.) Even if there was an element of truth to that, why should people who can more easily hide (at the cost of self-denial) have to? And why does that make them inherently not allies? And arguably trans people who have significant dysphoria have things worse than the bisexual comparison suggests.

What’s even stupider is that, after a certain point, “identifying into your oppressor class” is no longer remotely as quick and easy as “wiping off the makeup” - not for trans people who have mostly or entirely transitioned, and similarly, not for a bisexual person who is in a long-term same-sex relationship.

unabombastic #sexist #psycho #crackpot

I’m all for making it possible for any two people to have children together. Only problem is that the extreme misandrists and extreme misogynists can’t really be trusted not to fuck up their kids… which on it’s own isn’t going to be any worse than anyone else who similarly can’t be trusted, it’s just that these people are also going to want their own isolated ~~cults~~ communities.

Racist Wookiepedia Editors #racist

@JM1234 #169869

While I haven’t seen the movies, what I heard was that the character of Rose Tico was a side character in Episode 8, but her appearance there was supposed to set up her having a major role in Episode 9… which didn’t happen. New director, heavily rewritten scripts, and while she still had a minor role initially there were multiple difficulties (apparently, as different people gave different reasons about what happened, and there’s little reason why they can’t all be true) and she was written out entirely in the final version.

What is clear is that Kelly Marie Tran got a lot of racist harassment for her role in Episode 8, and this was just one of those things. Wasn’t just her either; John Boyega (Finn) got a lot of harassment for his role in the sequels as well.

I have no clue how Rose Tico is seen by the Star Wars fandom as a whole, not being a part of that, but I do know she does have some fans, despite her story being prematurely aborted. “Fan-favorite” sometimes gets used in the sense of “a favorite among a significant subset of the fans”, so isn’t necessarily an exaggeration if used in that sense. (It might still be, just pointing that out.)

@sbdc_7 #racist

Stalin did it in reverse - he attempted to break minority cultures by scattering their communities. That’s not multiculturalism, quite the opposite, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he used some similar term in Russian as an euphemism.

I’m not sure how they think this would work. Split the country into regions of former-minority-now-locally-majority cultures, and then scatter the white people, maybe? Without anybody but the conspiracy theorists noticing? Nobody can herd cats that well.

@GodlyPatriot #homophobia #transphobia #fundie #wingnut

Oh, I suppose if “Christianity” means “I must force other people to conform to my religious practices” then most people, including quite a lot of those who call themselves “Christian”, are trying to make putting that particular belief into practice illegal. Considering that most people, whether or not they call themselves Christian, don’t define Christianity that way, that sounds like a you problem.

kalkazar13 #transphobia

I’m not even sure what they think this would accomplish. So, invade trans spaces, act like obnoxious weirdos, presumably to send the message “this is what you look like when you go where you’re not welcome”, while also essentially admitting that what they’re acting like is, at best, a severe exaggeration, and thus not really “what you look like”? Also how would that message even get across without breaking character and giving an explanation speech? And what would you even expect the response to be, “oh I guess you have a point and should stay out of women’s groups forever”?

And considering that some women’s groups/events are openly welcoming to trans women, the whole “where you’re not welcome” thing is often moot, anyway.

David #psycho #biphobia #transphobia #homophobia

@Conscience #169164

“It was your fault for bringing children somewhere that people might napalm them!” …I wouldn’t put it above people like them to say that.

JonFreeman #wingnut #homophobia

@Conscience #169166

The more predatory ones don’t care about consent. The more religious ones consider consent irrelevant provided actions happen within a specific “moral” framework (so most consider marital rape to be okay, for example) and tend to get all victim-blamey when it doesn’t. A lot of libertarian types consider “consent” to merely mean “an agreement” and so coerced or deceptive or implied agreement (even if the implication wasn’t intended) generally counts as “consent”, so long as they’re not the ones being abused/coerced/deceived.

Regardless, teaching people about consent in general is a good thing, including non-sexual situations, but that’s not an argument which will work on everyone.

I mean, maybe if you made it so that no one knew about sex until they got, like, a marriage class or something, then you could reasonably make the argument that teenagers would be far less likely to have sex because the vast majority would be ignorant of its existence? But then you’d have to also remove any mention of sex from media and entertainment excepting porn and R-18/NC-17 movies (assuming those would even still exist) and also firewall the internet and make talking about sex illegal except in adult-restricted websites (ID needed), so… good luck with that.

Even that wouldn’t work as well as one might hope; some children figure out how to masturbate by accident, some adults don’t particularly care if their kids witness them fucking in the living room or talking about sex or otherwise engaging in adult-related activities, some parents are going to teach their kids anyway, some kids who found out or were taught are going to speak with other kids about it, and of course pedophiles, once they find out about sex, aren’t going to be much inhibited just because they got married.

It’s also a much worse situation for lesbian, gay, bi, and asexual people, but I suspect you don’t care about that or consider it a bonus.

Mike Stone #wingnut #conspiracy #racist

I’m going to point out that, with occasional exceptions, Trump appointees were white men, and that even without corruption, re-appointments happen all the time, especially during a new administration. So there’s going to be a lot of outgoing white men, regardless of who’s incoming. And a lot of them had limited to no experience with whatever position they held, with their primary qualification being “loyalty to Trump”. Which doesn’t really scream “merit” and isn’t particularly useful for a non-Trump administration.

Even if “diversity” were a purely negative reason for choosing someone (and most of Biden’s appointments had a lot more going for them than that), I’m not sure how that’s worse than “white man loyal to Trump”.

Medeea Greere #wingnut #conspiracy

There are a lot of rumors flying around. Like Putin secretly ordering the execution of Prigozhim but it was leaked to him, the Wagner Group not being paid and/or being given suicidal orders, Prigozhim being bribed for any number of reasons, the Wagner Group being forced to disband and be mixed in with the regular Russian forces, probably a few more I haven’t heard of. It’s all speculation at this point, and we may never know the full story.

Anything that the conspiracy theorists come up with is likely to be complete nonsense.

Very stupid anonymous Wendy’s “customer” #transphobia #wingnut #psycho

It does sound kind of like the fake story where there was a highway crash and some helium-filled human-shaped balloons escaped from a truck which was transporting them, and some woman was hysterical because she didn’t get raptured with everyone else. On the other hand, very little is off the table when it comes to human behavior, so who knows?

Marsha Blackburn #conspiracy #wingnut

@Sasha #169136

Government agencies are *supposed* to not prioritize rescues by the presumed wealth and power of the victims, yes, but some countries (the US included) tend not to make efforts which involve great expense and/or risk unless they’re wealthy and/or powerful or the media get involved (and the media is much more likely to get involved when the people are wealthy and/or powerful or are children of such people, anyway). See “missing white girl syndrome”. This is why I said “might not have bothered”. They might have anyway, but it’s not a sure thing.

Helen Joyce #transphobia

I would put very good odds that this is inspired by or in response to a video which has been circulating conservative circles.

Basically, it shows 3 trans women and 1 detransitioner talking about complications with their vaginoplasties. The segments with the trans women were taken from their own videos and used without permission; they’re carefully edited to make it sound like horror stories, but in reality they were short-term and no worse than is typical for major surgeries. The detransitioner segments seem to have been created specifically for this video, and carefully edited and/or crafted to imply that all 4 of them regret it without directly saying so. It’s a deliberately deceptive piece which is meant to portray trans people as needing to be prevented from transitioning for their own good.

If not from that, then this certainly comes from the same kind of place.

[Edit] Oh, fucking hell. I just saw the version of the video which appeared on Alex Jones’s Infowars… unlike the original it was dubbed over, and it was nothing but blatant lies. “My vagina was infested with maggots” on top of the not-how-anything-works nonsense - fuck you.

Marsha Blackburn #conspiracy #wingnut

why did the Coast Guard wait until Thursday—[…]—to make their announcement to the public?

Because they weren’t sure. Technology isn’t magic, they needed time to examine the data and rule out likely alternatives. Even if they could immediately determine “sub implosion” as by far the most likely possibility, it would have been demanded that they search anyway, to be absolutely sure. Of course if they weren’t rich, nobody would have been paying attention, and the Coast Guard might not have bothered.

Also the general goings-on of the US and the world mostly do not revolve around the Republican party.

Bennett Lee Ross #crackpot #magick #ufo #conspiracy

Quartz crystals are made of silicon and carbon atoms

Silicon Dioxide. Where is the carbon?

That are arranged in a precise lattice formation

Mostly precise, crystals have flaws. Also yes, because that is the definition of “crystal”.

They vibrate at hundreds of thousands of pulses per second

Not under normal conditions, only under significant pressure or while electrically charged. Also I looked up the number and it’s 32,768. Which is a lot but not quite “hundreds of thousands”.

Most of the rest of it isn’t so much wrong as it is nonsensical.

Ben Garrison #conspiracy #wingnut

For most people, the charges are dropped if you just pay the taxes with appropriate penalties. As he did. Punishment usually only happens if you continue to refuse or you’re a repeat offender.

The main reason why he’s getting anything at all is due to “possessing firearms while being an illegal drug user” (he’s already been in rehab for the drugs, it’s the possessing a gun which is the issue) which is the sort of thing which you only get charged with if you were caught at a different crime, otherwise prisons would be way more full. Which is kind of weird since this happened years ago and has nothing whatsoever to do with failing to pay taxes, but it’s also hardly uncommon for well-off white people to get a slap on the wrist for that sort of thing.

The real issue here is that Republicans get pissy when Democrats or people associated with them aren’t charged with crimes nearly as often and almost never get charged with anything really major. Unequal treatment, they cry. If we get punished, our enemies must be punished equally. Stop_Breaking_The_Law_Asshole.gif is the appropriate response to that.

Wayne Allyn Root #dunning-kruger

Before he was a politician, RFK jr was a lawyer. He’s no more an expert at medicine or medical science than you.

Ever since the Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debates, too many idiots think that they can just humiliate the scientist of their choice on stage. They seem to forget that Bill Nye is also a showman and the two of them reached a fairly respectful agreement, none of this “debate me or it’s proof you’re a coward!” idiocy.

Mike Stone #fundie #homophobia #transphobia #wingnut #conspiracy

Because what they do is not indoctrination, they’re good people and “indoctrination” is what bad people do. They are “truth-spreading”. Of course, since most of them have religious motivations and are presenting their religious doctrine as absolute truth, that would absolutely be “indoctrin[e]ation” in the most literal sense even if it *was* the absolute truth. Because they use a lot of words in a subtly (and occasionally not-so-subtly) different fashion than most people do.

cousinanger, neonbandit & IrishTheFrenchie #transphobia

If womanhood were a country, GCs/TERFs would mostly be living in flyover provinces where they whine about ther immergrents ber terkin er jerbz, but there are hardly any actual immigrants there.

@AthenasWrench #transphobia

Let’s put the transphobia aside for a moment, and address it from the lens of sexism: why shouldn’t a man be able to wear a dress? I mean, a lot (not all) of these people claim they have no issue with GNC (Gender Non-Conforming) people so long as they don’t identify as anything other than their birth sex. (And then some of them go on to dump on cis GNC people in other conversations because their feigned tolerance is a sham to excuse dumping on trans and non-binary people, but I’m addressing the ones which at least seem sincere.) Why is “sexual fetish” the only possible reason why a man would want to wear one?

Doug Manning #sexist

I should also point out: Martha Stewart in a swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. At age 80. Granted that SI sometimes picks controversial choices to drum up sales, and Martha Stewart doesn’t look anything like a typical 80-year-old, but they wouldn’t have gone with her if some people didn’t find her still sexy.

Amir Khan Muttaqi #fundie #psycho

On one hand, a brain drain can make it difficult to economically compete with other countries.

On another hand, if you’re not actually giving your talented people opportunities to be effective, or you’re actively putting some of their lives in danger and/or forcing them into hiding due to bigotry, then you’re not going to be making good use of their talents anyway.

On third hand… Afghanistan? International recognition aside, more like a few allied city-states and dozens of largely autonomous clan-holds than a fully coherent country. That seems like a bigger barrier to economic competition than a brain drain.

Michael Knowles #wingnut #psycho #crackpot

@Pizzamaster98 #168736

I checked and it seems that while burning people at the stake (as distinct from general execution by burning) originated some time during the late 700s or early 800s, it didn’t start becoming common until the 1270s. So not quite yet. (I was checking to make sure because I had the vague impression that it wasn’t common until the 1400s.) There doesn’t seem to have been a favored method for executing heretics in Europe during 1220, it varied by region. Still good a point because execution for heresy was a thing back then. (Not for witchcraft though. Believing that witchcraft is real was heresy during medieval times, the witch hunts didn’t really become a thing until the 1600s.)

Doug Manning #sexist

I’m in my late 40s and still have no issue finding partners. Your assertion is almost certainly invalid, and at the very least, irrelevant.