What’s bizarre is that I see both the right AND the left doing this kind of thing when it comes to blaming Democrats…

Sigh.

The history of the War on Some Drugs has been terrible. People like Leary who had a 10 year sentence for…possession of two roaches. And that was a relatively wealthy white guy…

Has “doge” eliminated FEMA yet?

I seem to recall how much the radical right thought that offering “helicopter rides” to people they deemed their enemies was the very height of comedy. They even wore t-shirts. I wonder if they think it’s just as hilarious in the case of actual enemies of the state.

The assholes in charge are going to work as hard and as fast as possible to re-write that history. They keep saying that have a small window to “fix” the national debt and that is their excuse for much of this bullshit.

What they really want to do is to radically remake America. Very, very extremist. The “fiscal responsibility”/“debt” thing is nonsense and used as cover. They are acting fast and reckless, but it is not to balance the budget.

Remember how they kept hyperventilating about how Obama said he was going to go about “fundamentally transforming” the country? Yeah, every single accusation is a confession with these people.

Only have to go back a few decades on measles:

The author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory lost his daughter to measles just before it was available as a vaccine…

https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2025/03/05/roald-dahls-heartbreaking-letter-about-losing-his-daughter-in-1962/

The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.

He wrote this back in 1988 to address those that were hesitant to get vaccinated back then…I doubt he could have thought that Wakefield would come along later and help to completely fuck up everything.

Oh, that was just perfect. Thank you.

Even the first 5 commandments seem to be coming from a place of narcissism for an omnipotent being - you worship me and only me, don’t worship anything else, including idols and graven images, and don’t use my name the wrong way. Oh, and make sure you keep my special day…this has what to do with any kind of morality?

The rest are reasonable things that could be derived w/o any appeal to mythology - don’t kill, steal, lie, cheat on your spouse and covet another’s possessions.

I will never understand when someone from one of the Abrahamic religions tells me that without religion, people have no foundation in morality [1]. The very core set they most reference are about 50% irrelevant to morality, the other 50% are something every society puts in place and they don’t need Jehovah to derive these rules; they are rather obviously necessary to a functioning society - although that last one our entire system is set up to almost force people to covet things and other people all the time, so that’s rather ironic.

As for all the other stuff - the various rules and rituals - that people tend to build up around the three main Abrahamic religions…a lot of it truly does make me scratch my head.

[1] I just saw one of those magamaniacs arguing for that with Sam Seder. That video was excruciating by the way, but I did power through most of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg

Haha, never heard that one, and I grew up in an area that had a lot of both. 🤣

I was always amused by some of the stuff that Amish would do - like buying a freezer for an “English” neighbor, as an example. Or sometimes borrowing/renting someone else’s tractor and then running them at night? Are you hiding these behaviors from your god, or just from other people?

Lots of crazy beliefs out there. Look into eruvs for Orthodox Jews or how they pay “gentiles” to do things for them on holy days, or the timers that are set up…I think Religulous showed this last one. Seems like if you are going to go to these lengths to supposedly stay within compliance on some arbitrarily-determined rules from centuries ago, you might consider just, uh, discarding and revising some of these things? Because an omniscient being is going to see right through these clever legalisms…

In a logical world, but in a country that gives religious woo a lot of privilege, I somehow doubt it.

This is just so horrifying. Don’t trust? Holy shit, his child is dead!

And what is this “stuff” that he’s talking about? Midi-chlorians?

/facepalm

You know, back in the early days of the Internet, before it allowed commercial content, and before the Eternal September, I was excited at the notion of the democratization of information, and it being a multi-way conversation, not just top-down.

Say what you will about the days of having a few corporations gatekeeping virtually all info, at least back in those days I didn’t see them spreading anti-vaccine horseshit.

Carlin:

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your f**kin’ retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

Very prescient, except for the fact that they’ll soon be skipping over the worker part right to automation all up and down the line and there will not be any UBI for the “useless eaters”.

I agree with that last part, but I do think the notion that people should not learn that they won’t be offended is not a great life lesson. I also don’t think anyone should be messaging that bullies are right or that they are given a free pass and so on.

But I think instilling a certain amount of resilience in everyone would be beneficial, long term. Life throws a lot of shit at you, including a barrage of offensive things.

Ironically, it actually turns out that the cons are weaponizing this sort of thing by demanding the signs come down, because they are claiming they are “offended”.

Also, isn’t it the Republicans that love to plaster on a big punchable smirk and tell everyone they don’t have a right to not be offended? I mean, in this, they are actually correct - people do have a free speech right to be absolute assholes in what they do and say, for the most part. Free speech does have its limits, yes, but if someone else gets offended, well…too bad. Free speech is there to protect speech others do not like and yes, that includes speech that will offend liberals.

But wow, the very second the right might have the least bit of offense - they think the government should step in.

See for example the actual political correctness they try to enforce around the rituals when a song plays at a sportsball event, or forcing kids to say “under god” while they force them to say the pledge at schools. Or about burning flags in protest, or a president they support being burned in effigy. Or trying to get their book club smuggled into schools. Or not genuflecting for “the troops”, but only when there is a profitable war of aggression on the table, and so on. Or people not going out of their way to say, pointedly, “MERRY XMAS” (vs. the easy shorthand of Happy Holidays to cover both xmas and New Years, FFS. GD these babies are such whiners. Saying Happy Holidays was never a problem until these assholes had to act like it was some personal insult to them, even if they were just jagoffs that were only nominal xtians anyway. ) to these special snowflakes.

Apparently, they think they have the right to not be offended their entire fucking lives.

Well, I mean, clearly you can see that these posters are terrifying to anyone who isn’t onboard for the radical Marxist Communist woke liberal antifa agenda?

Also, this teacher is just advertising that she’s a GROOMER.

/s

Too late, the DP killed their comment section so who knows where that troll skipped off to.

Sadly, DP killed off their forums. DP maybe 20 years ago had a pretty vibrant online comment section. They switched the platforms a few times and the paper itself was getting hollowed out like so many others [1]. I think most corporations don’t really want to be hearing from anyone, least of all their own customers. Seems many, many outlets have closed their comment sections. I’m sure more than a few qons cheered at that fact, because they were regularly made to look QUITE stupid on such forums, if the moderation was even the least bit fair.

Turns out there was at least one magat moderator on there, and you could almost tell when they were on-duty - making a magat commenter look too stupid resulted in your post getting deleted. Oddly, many of the “free speech absolutists” would get a tingle up their leg when that happened, which is so weird because they were crying about how they were being “censored” and “shadow-banned” on other platforms, as well as DP, LOL.

In any case, once it was announced that DP was shutting them down, the usual suspects were positively giddy about it. I know more than a few of the extremists were trying to get them shut down via various means (some of them bragged about this and whether they were lying about it or were not, you get some real insight into the types we are dealing with here). This, from the “free speech absolutists”, naturally.

[1] The idiots on the right think it’s because papers were “too liberal”, lol, and either completely ignorant of, or lying about, how the advertisement model was nuked by things like Craig’s list and so on.

Let’s suppose for a second that their god Yahweh/Allah/Jehovah is real, and that the end-times bullshit they added onto their fairy tales extra-biblically was true. Let’s also suppose that petitioning a supreme being with prayer was something that was heard.

Don’t you think this supreme being would get annoyed with the lesser being essentially kicking the back of the seat on the way to the end-times and asking “are we there yet? are we there yet?” Would an all-knowing supreme being know when the right time is for it without some lesser being begging for it to be sooner?

Even in their fictional universe, it makes no sense to be praying for the end of the world…aren’t they broadcasting that their god doesn’t know what it is doing?