Zinnia

@Zinnia

Babylon Bee #fundie #sexist

I told the ladies to leave their husbands and go corporate; that sounded like a fun time. But I didn't really think they'd take it all the way to killing their kids and celebrating baby murder.

It depends on the country, but generally abortion rights (“celebrating baby murder”) predated middle-class women commonly having careers (“going corporate”). One can argue that the former made the latter easier. I’m not sure about no-fault divorce (“leave their husbands”) in general, but in the US the various states gained that right anywhere from 1969 to 2010 (though the last one was actually New York, because the state had been ignoring the law for decades; nearly every other state legalized it by the 1990s). This is kind of backwards, making this version of Satan extra incompetent.

Rev. Andrew Wommack #fundie #homophobia #transphobia

Tatsuya Ishida #wingnut

For those who might be confused, I’m pretty sure his message is: 1.) The only true religion is the worship of your ancestral culture’s pagan Gods. 2.) Christianity (and Islam, though he only occasionally acknowledges it) is false religion created by Yahweh and spread by Jews to forcefully cut people off from true religion. 3.) Communism was created by Yahweh and spread by Jews for the purpose of force-converting Christians (and Muslims?) to atheism. Because Yaweh is a very jealous God, who wants only his people to have religion, and no one else.

Department of State #transphobia #wingnut

trope88 #conspiracy #crackpot #racist

Eventually there will be those who claim that there are no records of Donald Trump before the 2230s, and in reality he was a fictional character created by Glimp Therewold as a way to spread hatred against orange people. They will be just as wrong.

Mike King #homophobia #transphobia #racist

@Malingspann #263638

Given his poor state of health and slowly failing mind, if I were a betting person I would have put good money on Trump not surviving to see 2024. So I’m not that optimistic anymore. The ideal time for him to die would probably be late 2027 to early 2028. That way, if J.D. Vance is running in 2028, he’ll be too busy doing that to do too much damage, because he might turn out to be better at wielding all those fancy new powers and permissions that Trump was granted (which will of course mysteriously vanish if a Democrat is elected in 2028). Or if he’s not running, at least we would only need to endure about a year of him being worse, if such turns out to be the case, and it’s far enough away from the election to minimize the effect of any conspiracy-fueled outrages.

The second best time for him to die *might* be in the next month or so, assuming that it would demoralize a decent-enough chunk of MAGA into not voting in November. If it’s too close to the election, then it might actually backfire and drive more of them to the voting booth due to some conspiracy-fueled outrage. I have no idea how close to the election it would it would need to be before any outrage overwhelms any demoralization; for all I know we might be well past that point already. Not that it matters, Trump will die when he dies, and nobody but an assassin can control that. (Please no one assassinate him, we don’t need him to be a martyr.)

[Edited for consistency and clarity]

Tatsuya Ishida #wingnut #conspiracy #racist

In some of the other comics around this time, he portrayed the ordinary Russians as secretly worshiping the long-dead Tsar Nicholas II.

In the current comics, Perun finally shows up for the first time, and joins the “storyline” involving Veles which thus far has gone absolutely nowhere. More generally, he seems to be trying to avoid dealing with the later stages of the Battle of Stalingrad, due to having written himself into a corner, and the pointless Veles strips are one of the ways he’s stalling.

Miles W. Mathis #conspiracy #quack #wingnut

I wonder what it says that people are immediately jumping to the conclusion that the ones who are hating on Dolly Parton are mad because she’s receiving much more reverence than Charlie Kirk. I haven’t actually seen anyone who is hating on her stating that connection, though it’s certainly plausible.

If this is indeed at least part of the reason, I will point out that Dolly Parton died at age 80 after a full career, with a great many accomplishments to her name outside of her music… while Charlie Kirk died at age 31, still fairly early in his career and not nearly as accomplished or famous. People who weren’t deep in US politics or US culture wars were mostly like “Charlie who?” while the vast majority of Americans (and quite a lot of non-Americans) have at least a general idea who Dolly Parton is. That alone would make a big difference, regardless of anything else.

Anon #homophobia

@Anon-e-moose #263610

Trump’s history with the LGBTQIA+ community, even before being elected the first time in 2016, seems to show that he’s actually rather indifferent. He’ll embrace them superficially or freely throw them under the bus, whichever he thinks will personally benefit himself in the short term. Of course, what he thinks will benefit him and what will actually benefit him don’t always match up, but that’s a separate issue.

This person seems to not be aware of the concept of “Lavender Marriage”. It’s when a gay man and a lesbian woman married for financial and domestic stability, but engaged in romantic and/or sexual relationships with their true partners, who may or may not themselves be in a Lavender Marriage. So clearly, not every gay man wanted to go around having sex with as many random men as possible. Hell, even some of the men who engaged in the “gay lifestyle” weren’t really happy with that, but either wanted to conform with their peers or didn’t really see any better options for themselves.

And those men who married straight women and saw other men “on the down low”? Usually ended up that way because they only came to terms with being gay after being married and having kids. And didn’t always engage in the “gay lifestyle” but sometimes had a single partner whom they cheated on their wife with.

Those gay men who really want to sleep around a lot can just not get married and still do this. It’s not like “now that the option exists, you’re forced to take it!” Especially since opposite-sex marriage is also down, and not just because same-sex marriage is an option now - straight people are also getting married a bit less than they used to. Also, Grindr exists.

It’s notable that this person doesn’t seem to take lesbians into account at all.

Dave Molony #wingnut

Well, the typical conservative doesn’t know or care about a lot of the problems Trump is causing, or in the case of ICE, see it as the opposite of a problem… but surely they’re aware of the Tariff chaos?

Mike King #homophobia #transphobia #racist

Translation: “Censorship is bad unless you’re censoring bad things” …dude, nobody censors things which they believe are good.

Janie Ofthefamily Walsh #ufo #wingnut #conspiracy

And while I’m at it, here are the current ages of everyone on the list:

Belinda Carlisle: 68
Alec Baldwin: 68
Jack Nicholson: 89
Donald Trump: 80
Barack Obama: 65
Robert De Niro: 83
Robert Downey Jr.: 61
Joe Pesci: 83
Cher: 80
King Charles III: 77
Taylor Swift: 36
Elton John: 79

I knew Taylor Swift was going to be an outlier on this list, but I was thinking she was going to be like early 40s or something. Everyone else is at roughly what would be end-of-career ages or end-of-life ages for most people.

@Citizen_Justin #263409

Last time I saw Jack Nicholson was in Mars Attacks (1996), and only vaguely remember him having been in a few movies since then, so I was curious if he still even had a movie career. According to Wikipedia and IMDB, his last films were “I’m Still Here” and “How Do You Know”, both in 2010. His only other media appearances since then were on Saturday Night Live. I don’t know if he’s prominent in the celebrity scene, I pay zero attention to that, but his movie career is long over.

Tatsuya Ishida #wingnut #racist #transphobia

@ShatteredGlassSkywarp #263418

He doesn’t really explain the Blitzkrieg, but claims that it stopped because Hitler could no longer stand the slaughter of White people. (In reality, it was logistical issues.) After that, he went on a “de-jewification” campaign throughout Western Europe, with no real explanation of what that involved. Before that, in the earliest WWII comics, mostly set before the war proper, he was sending Jews off to “vacation camps”, and then never touched on that again, other than to claim that the extermination happening in those camps were a hoax. There’s been plenty of extermination of Jews not in the camps who stand up to the Nazis, though. Make of that whatever you will.

Nick Fuentes #racist #wingnut #conspiracy

This isn’t the first I’ve heard of “race communism”. It makes a stupid sort of sense if all you know about communism is that it seeks to eliminate economic classes, making everyone more or less equal economically. And then if you think that anti-racists are trying to erase racial distinctions in order to make all of them equal, then it makes some sense to metaphorically call that “communism”.

But even from that perspective, Nick still goes off the rails in the second half. He’s assuming that “race communists” would then import “third worlders” in order to create an equal proportion of all races, and then equally distribute them throughout all jobs and all levels of society, which is not something anyone is doing. He’s severely overextending the shallow-understanding-of-communism metaphor here.

Mark Tom #wingnut

I snorted in amusement at the complete disconnect from reality here, and then re-read it with wingnut-colored glasses. Aside from “alignment with Islam” which I’m baffled by, this whole thing relies on a form of conceptual equivocation, for lack of a better term. The entries on these lists are independently “correct from a certain point of view” (sort of correct but exaggerated or a bit off, or commonly believed by the far right but are false) but their counterparts on the other list are referring to something very different, and in some cases are essentially opposites to each other. This comparison is as superficial as it gets, to the point of being entirely meaningless.

Trump Administration #wingnut

Sometimes I wish that we could just, like, give him a little something now and then (with some show of resistance and feet-dragging as a distraction and to keep him from getting too much) so long as it’s temporary and can be used to buy time to deal with the big problems he and his cabinet cause. When there’s a new scandal every week, it’s more effective to keep some of the small fires controlled rather than constantly putting them out. Unfortunately, Congress is near-useless, the Supreme Court is too much of an enabler, and also Trump demands to get personally involved in ways which screw things up, so that doesn’t really help. Then again, it’s hard to imagine any situation where things could have gotten this far *and* it would be of some help.

Discreet Music #transphobia

I read the whole thing, and the entire argument is basically “trans narratives as created by the 1960s-1980s medical establishment don’t match the narratives as created by trans people on social media in the 2010s-2020s” and assuming that only the former is true, while the latter is social contagion. Well, okay, there’s also argument from incredulity, particularly the section on non-binary people.

And, more relevant to this post, there’s a general assumption that “the things which I (or the people I’m getting this stuff from) go out of my/their way to see, and the hypothetical horrors invented by conservative media, are all which exists”. It’s the sort of things which *could* mostly be dispelled by actually knowing a trans person… though more likely it would just get them labeled as “one of the good ones”. But since I note that this person appears to be associated with PITT, it’s extremely likely that their (seemingly reluctant) affirmation of the older concept of “transsexuals” would go out the window if it was someone they knew pre-transition.

The funniest part is the sole response to this essay, where someone claims that the label of “transphobe” is invalid because nobody identifies as one. [EDIT] I later went and looked at the link provided along with that assertion. And the essay in that link seems to be claiming that gender norms are not unreasonable and if you’re against people enforcing them, you’re “normophobic”. Meanwhile trans people aren’t reasonable so claiming anyone with an aversion to them is a transphobe is invalid. At least this one is aware that “-phobia” has long meant more than “fear”.

Josiah Patton #sexist #racist #psycho #conspiracy

Don’t dating sites normally require you to be 18+? I tried to check if this was true for WhiteDate, but apparently you can’t check anything about the site, not even the Terms of Use, without signing up first. Even if there’s no age limits, how likely is someone to find a 15-17 year old on there?

Also notable that based on what miniscule amount you can glean from the site, based on the selectable options and the front-page images, there seems to be a focus on white breeding, because of course. Also ick.

Discreet Music #transphobia #psycho

"Trans" began in 2011. There were transsexuals long before then but they are entirely different.

The reference to 2011 strongly suggests that this is blaming the increase of trans people on social media. Most of the major social media platforms got their start sometime between 2004-2007, and then became a widely-used global phenomenon around 2010 or so. And there was certainly a difference between “transsexual” and “transgender” - the former label was typically bestowed upon someone after surviving an arbitrary, patriarchal, and often cruel elimination process (for their own good, of course) while the latter is self-declared after a lot of introspection. This is basically outsiders declaring a small, atypical subset of the whole to be the only real members of the group.

Not that this matters, being PITT. I doubt any of them would have accepted their children being “transsexual” if they had been born and transitioned decades earlier.

Tatsuya Ishida #conspiracy #racist

@TheKingOfRhye #263108
He’s strongly implied before that Christians and Muslims are just second-class Jews at best, and unknowing puppets at worst. As for Superman, maybe it’s in part because old-school superheroes punched Nazis? Though that’s more of a Captain America or Wonder Woman thing specifically AFAIK.

Donald J. Trump #wingnut #conspiracy

Well, if your agenda depends on your views being popular, then hearing the polls say otherwise can have a demoralizing effect. Likewise, if your agenda depends on making your unpopular views more popular and it’s not improving, same thing. I’m sure that there are some conservatives out there who are calling out “fake” for the purpose of countering any demoralization effect caused by the polls (and maybe even convincing themselves it’s true). But I doubt much of anyone calls them “demoralization operations”.

Jim #conspiracy #racist #homophobia #biphobia #transphobia

I haven’t heard anything even vaguely along these lines, so I suspect he made this up. Googling “Pablo Sanfras” only gets you Jim’s blog and an unrelated Instagram which uses “Pablo” and “Sanfras” separately. It’s not out of the question that the last name might be spelled wrong, but again, probably just made up.

There’s one sorta-exception: Pride went broke. Suddenly no one shows up. That’s something which I’ve heard being said in the wingnut-o-sphere, so I don’t think Jim himself made it up. But this is not in evidence. Pride attendance has been on a slight downward trend since its peak, seemingly because a bit fewer people feel the need for it and it’s become overly commercialized, but it’s still going quite strong, and there hasn’t been an abnormal drop following the USAID cuts. Maybe it could have had an effect in poor countries directly affected by the USAID cuts, I have no idea, but the wingnut-o-sphere blather is mostly focused on US pride events, and that part is at least definitely wrong.

John Luetzow #wingnut #transphobia #conspiracy #racist

1. DEFENDING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
9. SANCTUARY CITIES
11. ABOLISHING ICE
In reality, issues around immigrants are complicated. And while a lot of liberals currently want to either abolish ICE or radically transform it, I haven’t seen much so far about Democrats making any promises in that direction, though admittedly I haven’t been following everything. We might hear more about it once the general election kicks into high gear… or maybe not.

2. DEFUNDING THE POLICE
3. DEI
4. CRITICAL RACE THEORY
I doubt you even know what these things even mean. The propagandic bugaboo versions don’t match how the terms are actually used by people who talk about them seriously.

5. NO VOTER ID TO VOTE
You already need ID to vote. Creating an additional voter ID would make things harder on the youngest and oldest voters, while not doing a damn thing about the nonexistent problem it’s meant to solve.

6. ABORTION ON DEMAND
Mostly, yeah.

7. TRANSGENDER CHILDREN
8. MEN IN WOMEN'S SPORTS
Ignoring that trans women aren’t men, quite a lot of Democrats have been quiet about these, ambivalent, or occasionally throwing trans people under the bus.

10. DEFENDING FRAUD WASTE, AND ABUSE IN GOVERNMENT SPENDING
Opposing the malicious hack job which was DOGE isn’t the same as “defending” waste/fraud/abuse.

12. STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS
Joe Biden was all in on that, but it doesn’t seem to be on the radar anymore.

13. GUN GRABBING
No matter how many times you claim this, Democrats gave up on this decades ago. Closest it ever gets is occasional weak proposals meant to help keep guns out of the hands of criminals, which you’d think conservatives would be all for. Is there something they’re not telling us?

14. NO CASH FOR BAIL
The bail system has major issues which needs fixing, which Republicans are against because the primary benefactors would be poor people.

15. THE "NEW" DEMOCRAT PARTY IS A HORROR SHOW
This is extremely nonspecific, already covered by the previous 14 from your perspective, so you only have 14 points and this is a conclusion. Unless you’re claiming that the Democratic Party is specifically putting “being a horror show” on their official agenda, in which case… no.

Answers In Genesis #transphobia

Speaking of “compassionate”, a few months ago I read a takedown of a Christian comic which tries to be “compassionate” about young trans people while also telling them that they are wrong. It was more patronizing than compassionate, basically concluding that whatever misery might be driving someone to transition, it can be fixed by getting Jesus even harder. Unusually, it focused more on trans boys and how their beautiful bodies might be ruined, but it had also had a really weird message for trans girls: “real girls are delicate and you might accidentally hurt them!” While probably not aimed at trans people, I would assume that this video isn’t any better.

Alex Newman #wingnut #fundie #transphobia #conspiracy

This reminds me of how pedophilia apologists used “adultophobia” to describe what they saw as a “sinister” anti-pedo agenda. This strikes me as basically the same thing, except for child abusers. I would also be very surprised to find that whatever “training material” they have misinterpreted (and perhaps not even read) actually uses the word “adultism”.

Donald John Trump #wingnut #psycho

Well, this aged badly. Vindman was expected to win the Primary, but he overwhelmingly lost to Angie Nixon. So it will be Nixon vs. Moody, not Vindman vs. Moody. I guess Trump can still be happy he suffered a humiliating loss?

[Edit] Wait, re-reading it, it sounds like Trump is acknowledging the loss, but he also expects him to move forward as the Democratic candidate anyway? Is his brain broken or is this just very badly written?

War On Us #quack #conspiracy

Is this related to the “Constitutional Sheriff” concept? That’s basically a bottom-up power concept where the power starts from the lowest-level authorities rather than ordinary citizens (more specifically where the police have the final say in interpreting the laws, not the courts and especially not the Supreme Court). Regardless, local police *really* do not have the authority nor the resources to investigate international conspiracies.

Washington Examiner #wingnut #racist #transphobia

The Democratic Party can, with a few exceptions, be divided into four groups: The Old Guard, who are stuck in the 1970s and 1980s in a lot of ways but have been (often reluctantly) dragged into the 2010s in others; The Neoliberals, who are corporate lackeys on economic issues but mostly go with the rest of the party on social issues; the Progressives, who keep up with the times but are mostly dedicated to working within the system as it currently exists; and the Democratic Socialists / Social Democrats (the names have nothing to do with the Democratic Party, they’d freely run as Republicans if the Repubs were the left-wing party) who hope to change the system and bring about European-style socialism lite.

Until recently, the Old Guard and the Neoliberals have been working together to keep the DS/SD types out of the party, though they’ve never been 100% successful. Now that the Old Guard are gradually retiring or dying out, and the DS/SDs have been gaining a lot of popularity and sometimes beating far better funded “establishment” candidates, we’re likely seeing the beginnings of a major intra-party political shift, for better or worse.

Which leads to conservative-run legacy media like the Washington Examiner engaging in hand-wringing, thinly-veiled scolding, concern trolling, and laughably bizarre takes. (The funniest ones basically read like “The Dems are doomed if they become too popular!”) The closest they have to a maybe-point is that if the Democrats have too many far-left members, centrists will sour towards the party as a whole; but that doesn’t matter much if you can keep the base sufficiently engaged, something which the Old Guard never really understood and the Neoliberals purposefully never pursued (their corporate masters don’t want a left-wing economy) but the Progressives and DS/SDs very much do understand.

cavemankarl #elitist

And if the effective wait list for the job you are “worth” is decades long, what then?

(Cue the pedantic scolding by people who either bypassed the metaphorical wait list or don’t understand metaphor)

David J. Stewart #fundie #crackpot #sexist

@Conscience #262444

Men can cheat all they want, so long as it’s with a woman. There’s very little (or even no) stain on him, it’s on the woman he’s cheating on and the woman he’s cheating with. That’s not a cause for divorce. Don’t ask for that to be explained, you’ll either get a non-answer, or some sort of demented pretzel-logic justification which either makes you despair for humanity or feel like slamming your head into a wall. If a woman cheats or is even suspected of cheating, then that’s not a cause for divorce either, but a cause for “behavioral correction” (abuse).

When a religious fundie claims that a wife must be absolutely obedient to her husband no matter what, occasionally someone asks them in response “well, what should she do if he forces her to commit crimes or worship Satan or something?” and the usual response is some non-answer, like “marriage is not a suicide pact”. They can’t give an answer which would imply that a woman has any meaningful agency, but they also don’t want to give an answer which would imply “just do Satan’s will and God will rescue you, eventually” so the only option is to be vague. Or even imply that any man who would do such a thing isn’t really a Christian, which really doesn’t answer “what should she do in that situation”.

People like Davey J are why it gets asked.

Brother Nathanael #racist #homophobia #magick #fundie #conspiracy

I admit to not knowing much about Kabbalism/Qabalism, other than it does have a more mystical/magical aspect compared to normal Judaism, but this strikes me as one of those transparently ridiculous claims like “as a child, I was a Jew, but then I saw somebody baking cookies which oozed red, and then I knew that it must be the blood of Christian children! So I left the cult as soon as I possibly could. It was totally not strawberry jam or something.”

Tatsuya Ishida #pratt #conspiracy #racist

This is actually really screwy.

Tats portrayed the invasion of Poland as Germany liberating the country from the Soviets. But here, Japan is not liberating China from anyone. The Japanese occupation of China is simply not shown and is barely mentioned, we’re just meant to assume that it’s benign based on absolutely nothing. Up to this point¹ in-story, there’s not been any mention of China being “jewed” or under any sort of outside control or malign influences. There’s also no mention in-story when the occupation started, other than it was almost certainly² before Hitler helped “wake up” the spirit of Japan and overthrow the Tengu, which incidentally, doesn’t seem to be complete yet, as the ‘Gu influences are still there. Even completely ignoring real history and focusing solely on what’s presented-in story, there’s been nothing to suggest that the situations involving China and Poland are meaningfully comparable, or that this message is in any way coherent.

I guess if you tried to sanewash it, perhaps the “you” in question refers to the Allies in general and not the US specifically, whose intentions towards China are the same as Soviet intentions towards Poland, because the whole is as bad as its worst members, so China is better off under the thumb of the semi-unJewed Japan rather than the fully-Jewed allies. But this requires some presumptions about what Tats is thinking (assuming he even is thinking) which are thus far not confirmed by the comic itself.

¹There’s a reason why I said “up to this point” - in a very recent comic a young Mao Zedong is shown receiving a “Bolshevik starter kit”.
²Tats jumps around in time a bit, so it can be difficult to tell what the exact chronological order is meant to be in-universe.

Blutstein #sexist #psycho

@Skybison #262267
A man. It’s derived from “foid” (a general slur for woman) which is short for “femoid” which I assume was originally meant to imply that some women aren’t properly feminine, making them a “feminine-oid”.

Jim #wingnut #conspiracy #sexist #racist

What a mess. So any political squabbles between the Democrats and Republicans are just a distraction from the real story, which is an invisible three-way war between libertarian technocrats, socialists, and the imaginary “deep state”. Except some of the Democrats are also socialists or members of the deep state. Also there is something called “postmodern capitalism” and I’m not in the mood to figure out WTF that might even mean since it’s probably total nonsense anyway. (You could reasonably describe NFTs and maybe Cryptocurrency as “postmodern capitalism” but given that he thinks the libertarian technocrats are opposed to it, it’s probably not about those.) Also White Genocide totally does real, he’s just throwing that out there without directly tying it into this conflict. All this is somehow going to trigger Civil War II eventually, maybe in the near future.

Okaaaayy. I’m guessing that it makes some sort of vague sense if you’re deep in conspiracy-theory land, but I’m not entirely sure about that given that there seems to be a lot of disagreement in the comments.

PITT Parents #crackpot #elitist #transphobia

You know, regardless of any other factors… attempting to repair a broken relationship by demanding that the other person return to you, declaring that you will pretend nothing happened and demanding they must also pretend nothing happened, and expecting that everything will go back the way things were before… it shows deep disrespect and/or entitlement, that soothing your own ego is the most important issue here, and depending on the specifics it may also show that you can’t easily engage in or keep a relationship without bullying someone into it (and/or being bullied into it yourself). And if “the way things were before” was largely imaginary or what caused the rift in the first place, then that makes your doomed attempt extra doomed.

This is true even if the other person was entirely in the wrong. This is true even if the other person was stolen away by an abuser or a cult. This is true even if “trans don’t real” (and it does real). It seldom works, it seldom lasts if it works, and the very rare situation where it both works and lasts is a deeply abusive and dysfunctional one.

DepravedAndDeprived #elitist #racist #sexist #crackpot #psycho

This is what you get when you cross a narcissist’s warped concept of empathy with the “some/most people are NPCs” meme, and add a some incel flavoring into the mix.

Though I might have had a bit of an epiphany here. Do incels typically make their entitlement towards women’s bodies a foundation of their identity? If so, then they would unconsciously perceive any rejection of that entitlement as a personal attack. And why would anyone constantly attack them? Because the attackers have no empathy. Of course the fundamental lack of understanding why anyone would reject that entitlement (or in some cases, the refusal to acknowledge that deep down, you really do know, because acknowledging it would be counterproductive to feeding your misery addiction) is itself a lack of empathy, so even if there was any truth there they’re still not in any position to object.

Cherie Zaslawsky #wingnut #racist #conspiracy

I was pretty sure that I read somewhere that California’s current population total is pretty stable, there’s a lot of people leaving, but also a lot of people entering, so the state has a high degree of “demographic churn”. A quick bit of research seems to confirm that this is the case. But more importantly, like most other places, the gradual, decades-long loss of population in rural and exurban areas and the inflow to urban and suburban areas is still very much ongoing. That alone would be driving a demand for more housing. It’s just that in the case of California, a very large chunk of that inflow/outflow is to/from other States.

But then there’s the issue where a lot of housing is being taken off the market and being used as a store of wealth rather than a residence, and most of the newer luxury condominiums were never used as housing at all. That’s just exacerbating the problem. That’s also not specifically a California issue; it’s something which crops up anywhere which can claim to an abundance of areas with high property values.

So it’s technically correct that “people are leaving California in droves”. It even might be correct that significant numbers of Hispanic immigrants (legal or otherwise) are moving into the cities - because they’re mostly staying in-state and have fewer job opportunities in rural areas, while rural whites are mostly moving to Texas or wherever [note: this is speculation, I did not research it]. It probably even is true that some people are genuinely confused over this… because they’re missing the big picture. But in the end, there’s no weird conspiracy going on, city development plans are long-term projects and are mostly reality-based with a big-picture focus, so they can’t be held hostage to the ignorance of the moment.

Hugo Knott #fundie #wingnut #forced-birth

I could see The Satanic Temple trying to do this, in a reaction to something fairly extreme which religious fundamentalists were doing, and it was much more appropriate of a response than their usual Baphomet symbolism. But I still wouldn’t bet on it ever happening, and TST isn’t “Democratic leaders” in any sense. And who else even would?

Of course, there’s a good chance that focusing on all the ways that “Democratic leaders” putting up a religious statue of a Demon wouldn’t make sense is missing the point of this “satire”. In which case we’re left with something like “Christian libs are too dumb to notice that they’re not real Christians and would openly worship demons if they were more self-aware” or something similarly unhinged, and went with Molech/Moloch due to some anti-abortionists associating it/them with abortion rights, and abortion rights associated with the Democratic Party (despite some Republicans supporting it as well). It’s not like most conservatives really know of any other options, anyway. Baphomet? Mammon? Maybe Pazuzu?

Nullsrc #wingnut #racist

In a vacuum, this sounds like “I want to be racist consequence-free”. In context, this appears to be mocking the idea of a liberal-run surveillance state, while also being gratuitously racist.

JourneyDog Tales #wingnut #racist

Well, if it gets far right-wing people to leave others alone, then it would actually be an improvement. It’s not like they’re ever going to stop making up nonsense about people unlike themselves, and then acting on said nonsense.

Unfortunately I suspect that this won’t become a common attitude, nor would it change things much for liberal members of conservative-majority families if it did.

furtherglory #wingnut #pratt #conspiracy #dunning-kruger

I don’t know German, but when I grew up it was common to use “murder” or “kill” in English in an exaggerated, non-literal, and occasionally humorous fashion. Such as “I’m going to murder you for that” as an exclamation of anger or displeasure. Or “my parents are gonna kill me!” I don’t hear that much anymore, maybe it’s just my social circles, but it is/was a thing, and I’ll leave it to any German speakers to clarify if something similar exists in that language.

Dinesh D'Souza #fundie #pratt #elitist #mammon

This is sometimes referred to as the Spider-man Fallacy.

Spider-man lives in New York City. You going to claim New York City isn’t real? Spider-man met Barack Obama in The Amazing Spider-man© #583. You going to claim Barack Obama isn’t real? So obviously, Spider-man is just as real as NYC and Obama.

JE Aggas #crackpot #fundie #wingnut #racist

If you spend enough time at it, you can find some phrase which communicates a close-enough version of a particular message which gives the results you want/expect in at least one of the various numerology systems. You can also do that to get a slightly different but meaning-wise similar-enough which gives something very different than you want/expect, but nobody does that. It’s just a particularly complicated and extra-meaningless form of confirmation bias.

Whiplash347 #wingnut #crackpot #conspiracy

History will remember the week of August 9-15, 2026 because that was when some anonymous rando announced on Twitter/X that God will cause something vague but sweeping to happen during the following month?

Tatsuya Ishida #racist #conspiracy #wingnut

During the Biden administration, Tats had a running “gag” where a poorly-disguised FBI agent would be all “how do you do fellow kids” and then try to get MAGA types to do something morally/legally questionable, and the “punchline” would be the MAGAs calling out “Fed!”. This was based on actual paranoia which was going around at the time, which was that Biden’s FBI was infiltrating MAGA in order to spy on them and maybe destroy them from the inside. He only did that “gag” straight a few times, but after that he did increasingly questionable variations of it, including a Star Wars “parody”. Ever since Trump was re-elected, he’s stopped doing that… until this strip. It doesn’t work very well as either a continuation of a running gag or as its own thing, even ignoring that it was never funny to begin with.

Chris Fox #homophobia #transphobia

As a mostly-straight woman, I take offense to the idea that the sex I have with men is 100% breeding and 0% hedonism.

Tatsuya Ishida #conspiracy #elitist #psycho #racist

…Here’s what I think Tats is intending with this, but I might be wrong. There’s a very broad concept, sometimes called “Who you are in the dark”, which has many different versions.

The original (or at least I think it’s the original) is “What would you do, if you knew you would never be found out?” which is usually intended to be a philosophical self-reflection. What the answer you come up with might say about the parts of you that you don’t usually examine. I don’t think this one applies here, as it seems that the people being portrayed as doing this aren’t making it about themselves and wish it to be known that they did it.

Another version is “How far would you go, if survival is on the line?” which may be used the same way as the above, but is more often used to point out that you can’t know for sure until you face such a situation, particularly if your life has always been relatively comfortable and safe. Clearly, this woman went very far (or was very lucky) and is willing to do even more, so there’s an element of that here.

And then there’s “Who would you be, if all illusions were stripped bare?” This has many different variations, depending on what the questioner thinks are the “illusions” which society, or civilization, or malign forces, or aliens, forces upon everyone. Some variations of this are used by awful people to try to make the point that everyone is as rotten as them, they’re just honest about it in a way most people aren’t. Tats seems to be portraying Marx et al as being these sorts of awful people, attempting to make their point in the worst possible way… and perhaps by extension, that all Jews would try to do the same, given the chance.