Zinnia

@Zinnia

Jinska #homophobia #sexist #wingnut

The original She-Ra existed entirely because market research showed that about ⅓ of the audience for He-Man were girls, but they (or their parents) mostly weren’t buying any of the toys. So they created a spin-off in order to capitalize on that potential market. There is no deeper meaning than that. I suspect that any “symbol of femininity” vibes you’re getting is just subtle 1980s-style sexism.

End Wokeness #wingnut

…In the imaginary reality where I could just redraw the maps myself, California would become 5 states, Texas 3, New York 2, Florida 2. Though the long-term habitability of Florida being in question throws a wrench into that¹. Then I’d scrap Wyoming and divide it among the adjacent states, and join the two Dakotas into just “Dakota”. Douglass Commonwealth would finally get proper representation, as would Puerto Rico unless they’d rather be cut loose. I could maybe see a few of the other states having their borders redrawn a bit to better reflect present-day travel/trade/culture zones, but I don’t know enough to propose any specifics. Also the House of Representatives needs at least a dozen more members, and more like a few dozen. And I would definitely not propose conquering anywhere else.

It would be more fair than what we have today, but completely unrealistic simply because this scheme benefits Democrats more than it does Republicans.

¹There’s also a long-term issue of potentially losing Louisiana to the sea. Either whatever scraps remain would need to be split among Mississippi and Arkansas, or someone would need to create a *lot* of seasteads and artificial islands, as even with a full icecap melt the sea would be pretty shallow in a lot of places.

Full list of map border changes, west to east:

the Philippines are split into “LZ” and “BR”.
British Columbia is split into “CD” and “CL”.
southern Oregon and northern California become “JF” (almost certainly stands for “Jefferson”)
Baja California and Baja California Sur become part of California.
eastern Washington and northern Idaho become “LN” (Lincoln?)
Alberta is split into “AT” and “AE”.
northern Wyoming and western South Dakota become “AB”. Also a small piece of northern Wyoming seems to have been given to Montana.
Saskatchewan is split into “SK” and “AO”.
Texas and Oklahoma were fused together and then split into seven states: “AU”, “EP”, “HS”, “RG”, “SQ”, “TX”, “WT”. The new “TX” consists of northern Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle.
Nunavut is split into “KW” and “FR”.
the border between Virginia and West Virginia was redrawn.
the Panama Canal Zone (“PCZ”) is split off from Panama and reclaimed.
Labrador and Newfoundland are separated, instead of being a single province.
NE Sicily becomes “MNS”. I’m wondering if someone used a map of the wrong island and it’s supposed to be somewhere else.
Not border-related, but Yukon Territory is supposed to be “YT” and not “YK”, while Northwest Territories is supposed to be “NT” and not “MK”.

I’m not sure where “POB” and “FO” are supposed to be. The Mexican States, aside from the two Bajas, seem to be unchanged. I’m also wondering how many of these places are expected to become full states and how many Puerto Rico style territories.

Donald Trump #wingnut #conspiracy #psycho #pratt #dunning-kruger

Bro. Eric Kalinowski #conspiracy #fundie #homophobia #transphobia #sexist #racist

import Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and other non-Christians to do our jobs,

In case anyone is wondering, this particular bit is almost certainly inspired Elon Musk saying, in effect, that he would love to hire more White people and fewer Asians, but Americans are just too damn lazy and unmotivated. (By which he seems to really mean that they won’t sacrifice their personal life to benefit his companies.)

Just yesterday he tried to backpedal by clarifying that it was a cultural issue, not a racial one, which doesn’t seem to be helping any.

John C. Wright #sexist

Geez, I’m not even into superhero comics or movies - okay, I watched the first Dr. Strange movie, because my boyfriend really wanted to see it - or Dr. Who, and okay I did see some of the early James Bond films because my father was a big fan of Sean Connery, and yet I apparently know more about *all* of those examples than this idiot does.

Hell, I even know about the gender-flipped counterpart of Wonder Woman (“Wonder Man”, obvs) which I suspect would confuse this …fan? Pop-culture ignorant? Though I would find the resulting outrage really funny if they started making female-gazey male counterparts of female superheroes who didn’t originate as a male one or a male tag-on like Batgirl. Admittedly, the selection is probably pretty limited, but there aren’t zero of them.

Tatsuya Ishida #racist #conspiracy #pratt

@Citizen_Justin #214244

Context for this one: This is the Elders of Zion ordering a retaliation against the angry mob who beat up a Jewish Judge and took his stuff, if that makes it a bit less basic.

This is a rare one which is easy to understand, out of context. Most of the others require you to understand esoteric Nazi mysticism and/or be aware of obscure anti-zionist conspiracy theories, to have read the last several comics despite his inability to keep the plot consistent over that timeframe, and to be familiar with his particular personal symbolism and brainworms. When something this basic shows up, it’s almost a refreshing change of pace.

The latest comics, as of time of writing, imply that the Elders of Zion and the Order of Hermes (the latter of whom are sewer-dwelling wizards who can control rats, and also Jews who engage in child trafficking) are both controlling the Jews who rule over Greek society, but neither seem to be aware of the other’s existence, nor do the ones in power seem to realize they’re being controlled. I have no fucking clue where he’s going with this, and I’m not sure he does either.

Parents With Inconvenient Truths about Trans #transphobia

The local trans group steals your child’s possessions to sell them themselves. They show that the group cares nothing for your child and is busy going on to indoctrinate the next victim.

Deconstructing this to the best of my ability: The (adult) child is miserable and the family is really not helping, so they leave (or occasionally, get kicked out). The family assumes that the child identifies as trans due to social contagion or grooming or whatever, and that’s the real reason why they’re miserable, and now the evil transes have drawn them into their crab bucket to become one of them. Due to very limited (or no) contact, the family assumes that things are only getting worse for them, and even if the child says otherwise they don’t believe it. If the child dies in an untimely matter (something seen as nearly inevitable, which made a bit more sense back when murder or suicide was a higher risk for trans people, ignoring that it probably wouldn’t have been any lower if they hadn’t left) then whatever they own will go to their chosen family, not their bio family - those absolute vultures.

This narrative is pretty-self consistent. Too bad it’s disconnected from reality.

psychip #elitist

A lot of teens and some early twenty-somethings can be a bit conversationally shallow, due to not having fully developed social skills or lacking more than the most basic knowledge about some subjects… or because they find engaging in brainrot on purpose fun, for whatever reason. Not all of them do, and most of them grow out of it, eventually. It’s rather unfair, and at least a little dehumanizing, to equate them with NPCs or chatbots.

I suspect this goes a bit further than that. People with Main Character Energy™ often see conversations which hold no interest to them as superficial. Because if it doesn’t matter to them, then it’s an unimportant waste of time. Given the pop-cultural disconnect between the older and younger generations, as has always been thus, it can contribute to the whole “young people in particular are weird and shallow” attitude which people like this often have.

Tim Sheets #fundie

“billion-soul harvest”

The “Harvest” and “Shepherd” metaphors always struck me as deeply weird, as if souls were food or resources for someone to consume. How does anyone either not notice that or think it’s a good thing? I guess it’s supposed to mean cultivation and/or protection in a more abstract and generally positive sense, but I’ve never seen any clarifications to that effect.

Also, in this context, it sounds like he’s advocating for a mass suicide or massacre on a truly vast scale. I’m hoping that’s not what it’s supposed to suggest, but if so it’s another example of a confusing message which sounds really bad regardless of what they meant.

Enrique #wingnut

There’s the idea floating around that we should start saying “President Musk” whenever reasonable in order to provoke Trump into getting rid of him. I’m not surprised that there would be someone who thinks reducing Trump to a figurehead and putting Elno in charge is actually a good idea.

MaryDyer & PrincessCharming1983 #transphobia

Giving an infant of any species the (unmodified) milk of a different species is generally not recommended, as it’s likely to result in health issues and/or malnutrition. Baby formula exists because human infants can’t survive on just cow milk. I’ve also heard that baby seal rescues have to add a lot of fish oil to cow milk, and even that is a bit less than ideal.

The very rare occasions where animals tried to raise members of other species, have only been known to work in cases where they were already weaned. Assuming that dog milk is unsuitable for human infants (I don’t know if that’s so, just that it’s very likely) anyone who chose that over a viable alternative, no matter how disgusting they personally found it, would be liable for the consequences.

James W. Lee #crackpot #wingnut #conspiracy

yet leave the trees alone.

Some trees have fairly fireproof bark. A few species actually need to be burned in order to reproduce. This hardly counts as being “left alone”, as the bark is still damaged and leaves are still largely destroyed in the process. It simply means they don’t die, and typically recover within weeks to months. Anywhere there are a lot of wildfires, you’ll see a lot of fire-resistant trees.

I saw a tree being struck by lightning once. It didn’t die, but it looked in bad shape for awhile. Trees can be pretty resilient, in general. They kind of have to be, since they have very long lifespans and a poor rate of reproduction.

This probably stems from the common error where people burn wood, so it is seen as especially burnable, therefore trees auto-die to fire. It really isn’t like that. The reason why wood is a common form of fuel is because it burns slow and steady, but that comes at the cost of being difficult to ignite. If it ignited easily, and burned fast and superhot (like straw, for example) then it would be less useful, at least for general purposes. And that’s *dry* wood, which has been dead for awhile, living wood is full of water and even less vulnerable to burning.

Autocorrect 2.0 #fundie #dunning-kruger

Let’s say, for the sake of an argument, that this is how anything works or how anyone thinks.

That certainly makes this an unusual position, in that it appears to put Theism and Atheism on equal footing, and no good reason to choose between them - absent any other context or reasoning, anyway. But as this person doesn’t seem to be an agnostic, the deeper, unspoken argument here seems to be “the theist knows they have faith, while the atheist has equal faith but incorrectly believes they do not, therefore the atheist is wrong, therefore God exists.” Which would be a non-sequitur and probably an equivocation¹ as well. Or alternately, they might not really be thinking and just be unconsciously considering Christianity to be a privileged default position.

¹Specifically, treating “wrong” in the sense of “wrong about this one thing” as if it meant “wrong about everything”.

AirWinn Oli #conspiracy

WTF is this supposed to represent, exactly. I mean, we have the worst version of the Joker sending “truth” towards, in order, anti-chemtrail conspiracists, what I assume is either the Illuminati or the Federal Reserve, NASA, the United Nations, and anti-vaxxers. But because this is a Newton’s Cradle, “truth” will cause “anti-vaxxers” to swing away, only to come crashing back and knock away “truth”, leaving the others largely undisturbed? At least that’s what it looks like.

I’m guessing that the anti-chemtrail sign is actually supposed to stand in for whatever unnamed government organization supposedly does chemtrails, and the anti-vaxxer sign is supposed to stand in for the pharmaceutical industry, and “truth” is supposed to disrupt the other things. Which utterly fails as a metaphor for anyone who has a decent knowledge of physics or has actually seen a Newton’s Cradle. Par for the course for these idiots, really. Also, the Joker? Are you seriously going to use him as a metaphor for a truth-bringer? I’m going to be generous and assume that they got lazy and just re-edited a different meme which I haven’t seen, which would again be par for the course.

Donald Trump #wingnut

Tatsuya Ishida #racist #conspiracy

His more recent stuff is an even stupider take on this, though you really have to read multiple comics to get the full impact. In a nutshell, Jews are lying about being persecuted, so ~~peaceful protesters~~ violent mobs hunt them down in order to ~~murder them as Zeus commands~~ ~~citizen’s arrest them~~ beat them up and take their stuff, which does not itself count as persecution because reasons. “We will stop persecuting you as soon as you stop lying by saying that we’re persecuting you” and somehow the faux-Greeks are in the right for doing this.

I’m not sure that’s Tatsi’s intended message. On one hand, his Nazi brain rot has gotten so severe that he wouldn’t even notice it was a contradiction. On the other hand, as the crossed-out things hint at, he can’t even keep the plot consistent between strips.

various commenters #transphobia

The stereotype of a trans woman among a lot of ‘phobes looks like this: Tall, muscular, exceptionally hairy, often bearded, wears drag queen makeup and an ill-fitting dress, no breasts (occasionally with porn-sized falsies), and cuts off their penis to gain an even bigger penis, which they demand to flash at every woman in sight but only when there are no “other men” around. Somehow this is seen as a “rational women’s fear”.

Rep. Nancy Mace #fundie #transphobia

Apparently feeling obligated to shake hands with someone you’d rather not counts as “assault” now.

Gaybullyingitisreal #homophobia #conspiracy

Gay people: Openly exist

Homophobes: You are doing a violence to me by existing in my awareness, therefore you are fascist

various commenters #transphobia

I get annoyed at “sex-based rights”. That implies that men and women have different rights, which also implies that the people saying this either don’t want real equality or don’t quite grasp the concept.

About The Sky #conspiracy #crackpot

I never noticed / hadn’t heard of it until now, therefore it’s new, part really big number.

I bet you’re one of those customers who insists that nobody ever reads the signs posted all over the store.

Vox Day #conspiracy #pratt #ableist #fundie

@Passerby #212124

I’m assuming that you’re referring to Andrew Wakefield… because it turns out that Steve Kirsch has been doing something similar, except that he’s been promoting fluvoxamine as a covid cure and claimed that covid vaccines cause infertility. And that the CDC has been suppressing the truth. I guess he’s also claiming autism now too? He did actually fund medical research into the possibility of off-label uses for existing drugs in fighting certain diseases, including using fluvoxamine to treat covid, but the evidence was very weak and later disproven by further research. He didn’t take that well.

No doubt that either Kirsch is lying to Vox Day, or he got a hold of some publicly-accessible documents which don’t say what he thinks they do.

various commenters #transphobia

@Vgal #212065

No, I’ve had to call out a few people (on other sites) for being sexist or dehumanizing towards MTG lately. I’ve seen worse, but I agree that this crosses the line.

Heather Mac Donald #wingnut

Even back in 2021 a lot of you were calling at least half of the population “not real Americans”, so it’s not like you were very big on “unity” either.

The Rev. Steven Roland #fundie #homophobia #transphobia

I haven’t seen this series (it’s been a long time since I watched animé and I’m not really into the harem stuff) and based entirely on this description, it does sound like a 16+ title and not a 14+ one. But I suspect the description is somewhat exaggerated. For example, most people have gotten used to seeing showering/bathing/onsen scenes and no longer consider them inherently sexual - it’s not like animé never shows sexual things happening during those scenes, but the (usually lightly obstructed) casual nudity inherent to them doesn’t feel out of place even in a 7+ title. I’d have to see the show itself to judge if maybe it does go a little over the line at times, but I suspect it’s more out-of-touch prudishness than anything else.

Kevin D. Roberts, PhD #crackpot #forced-birth #racist #sexist #wingnut

I’m thinking that the reason why people like this think that language they don’t like is a free speech violation is because there are situations where they feel like they’re compelled to say things which they’d rather not say. Or be compelled to use “acceptable language” in order to avoid unpleasant consequences when they’d rather use “unacceptable language” consequence-free. And also, what is acceptable or unacceptable may be perversely backwards, from their perspective. I can even imagine that there could be occasions where some of them feel they must utter absolute blasphemies to avoid getting in trouble, but other people hear something very different and normal being communicated because they have a very different idea what the words mean than the general public does.

In which case, too fucking bad. Welcome to everyone else’s world, except maybe a bit worse, because you’ve decided to make up your own definitions of words instead of learning how everyone else uses them.

various commenters #transphobia

I will point out that the handful of Democrats who threw trans people under the bus all lost their elections, the small number of ones who made trans rights part of their campaign platform all won, and the majority who downplayed, waffled, or avoided had mixed success.

Now that’s not necessarily a cause and effect relationship. It’s likely that both things were at least partly reflected by the nature of their electorates. In addition, the Republican anti-trans ads were damn near everywhere, only being largely absent in the more liberal parts of blue states, so it’s hard to say how much effect they actually had relative to other factors. The narrative that “Democrats lost because trans rights” (both the liberal and conservative versions of this) isn’t well-supported at present.

Mehri Talebi Darestani #fundie #sexist #quack

Eric Hovind #fundie

SailorJojoOzfan2401 #homophobia #fundie

That’s not really the argument you want to make though, is it? If you believe children can’t handle the concept of romantic relationships because it’s “sexual”, then you wouldn’t be focused on the genders of the participants. I mean, if heterosexual relationships were all about inserting penises in vaginas and popping out babies, then that might be a good reason to avoid any direct mention of hetero romance in children’s shows.

No, your real objection is that people like you consider same-gender relationships as “abnormal” and/or “wrong” but your kids might get “confused” when you say one thing and pop culture says another. But you can’t say it like that because it sounds like you’re asking for special cultural privileges.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 #transphobia #wingnut

That’s not quite the flex you think it is.

The numbers will change a bit in 2025 once the new congress takes office, but as of now, there are 156 women serving in congress, including 4 non-voting delegates from US territories. This breaks down to 110 Democrats, 45 Republicans, and 1 Independent. Only 29% - less than a third - are Republicans. So they’d be the ones with the “special” room, because they got excluded from the broader group.

I_dont_know2030 #racist #wingnut

Well, if you’re racist, they’re probably not going to be *your* friends for long.

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

@Yutolia #211872

I went back and checked again and they called amber a “gemstone” at one point, but not specifically a “crystal”. Not sure if that’s a clear distinction or not.

Medeea Greere #crackpot #wingnut #mammon #conspiracy

@Conscience #211833

I saved a link to Mike Adams the Health Ranger’s ridiculous predictions for 2023. There’s never been a good time to bring it up that I’ve noticed, unfortunately. If you care, it’s here: https://fstdt.com/MC6PDWX669P9C#comments

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

@DarkPhoenix #211860

FYI, Venus and Pluto are the ones which do not have detectable magnetic fields. (Mars and Mercury barely have anything, but it’s technically detectable.) Uranus has a highly variable magnetic field, which ranges from a third of Earth’s to quadruple Earth’s. Still, at 19 AU out, even at 4×, that field would have less effect on Earth than a refrigerator magnet.

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.