To absolutely no one’s surprise, Senator Tim Sheehy is also credibly accused of a form of stolen valor: he discharged a gun in a National Park in 2015 and paid a fine for it, but then claimed in his later memoir that he got that bullet wound in Afghanistan. When challenged, he refused to release any of the medical records that would prove it.

Sheehy also claims that he was discharged from the military because of injuries he sustained on duty, but then some reporter dug up the discharge records and nope, he actually just resigned.

Oh, and he apparently plagiarized several sections of his memoir.

Just another lying GOP coward.

Oh my fucking god.

The woman audibly losing her shit was the only one with a visible conscience; the whole thing is like a demonstration of the banality of evil.

At least there was one sentient human left in the room after they removed the (also sentient) marine.

I’d far rather be the guy with the broken arm and intact honor than one of the ones who couldn’t even be bothered to turn around and who just sat there silently listening, even to his arm snap, as they waited for it to be over.

You’re right, I misunderstood. Thanks for the correction.

Just so you know, Christian fundamentalism is not at all defined by an individual believer’s stance in regard to the Free Exercise Clause. Someone being a “Christian fundamentalist” simply means they believe in Biblical literalism. It may or may not coincide with other beliefs, political or religious. And even then the purely religious definition tends to shift over time.

It’s really just the faux-fundamentalists who don’t actually believe in their book at all, and who have hijacked religious belief to shore up failing hold on political power, that don’t like separation of church and state.

I’m not a fan of Talarico, I think he’s an unknown quantity at this point, but I offer this clarification in defense of the many non-political and apolitical fundies I have known in my time. Please do not confuse them with the hyper-politicized neofascist version of “Christianity” now popular in right-wing power grabs.

As for Talarico, he has personally been a critic of “Christian nationalism” and doesn’t identify as anything even close to Christian fundamentalism but rather as a Presbyterian. It’s about as vanilla as you can get these days and leans liberal: they’re the kind of Christians uber-conservative Christians love to hate.

The benefits of just listening to music I think gets overlooked.

Hard agree. And it’s a shame because we have more music at our fingertips now than ever before, from every possible time and place in history. I’m from an era (70s) when just putting a record on and listening to it all the way through was a thing, but I’m not sure how many folks realize today that music can be an event in itself: not as background, but as foreground. Putting it on, sitting in a chair, and just listening while doing little to nothing else.

It’s hard to get time to do it, but when I do it’s heaven. And it absolutely resets my brain in positive ways: afterward, I just feel good. I actually think it might qualify as an ersatz form of meditation, in that a person is not mentally attending anything else while doing this, just listening and letting the auditory experience wash over them. It’s difficult to quantify, but the benefits are very real.

Yeah, it’s technically free and unlocked, but prompting me for a NYT account to actually read it.

Here’s the archive.world link. I’m aware of problems with that site but is there actually a decent alternative? If anyone knows of a quick and easy replacement to archive.world, tell me and I’ll switch.

“I’m team blood clot.”

Yes! Team DVT here. I’m genuinely sorry Reddit couldn’t see the charm in that, because I sure as fuck do.

Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about the safety of the extension, though. I have a lot of extensions going already, and this is not the first one to go bonkers as a later addition. So chances are excellent it will work for others just fine.

Excellent post. I look forward to diving into all the links later. Really great work. Thank you for taking the trouble to write this.

AI is pretty much a large portion of reddit posts right now

Yeah, I meant in general and the overwhelming public revulsion to AI overall, not specifically the AI- and bot-ridden shithole that is Reddit. I could have written that more clearly, thanks for setting it straight.

I think you’re right about the purpose of getting rid of r/all, as well as the timing of the astroturfing, but everything I saw was what we would now call proto-fascist, I would think in response to Biden’s presidency as opposed to being in support of it. But either way, I left during the APIocalypse, and the obvious astroturfing had already become intolerable for me.

The governor of every state has the right to call out that state’s National Guard in the event of emergencies, and it is my sincere hope the states start to do it pre-emptively, NOW, even via state legislation, so that the NG are already under orders to protect the polls by the time November rolls around.

Without the NG, he has nothing tested and true but ICE, and their numbers are shit compared to the National Guard.

Huh, I was just writing that I wished Firefox would do this, so thanks! I’ll check it out. Much appreciated.

EDITED to add: unfortunately it’s not for me. I tried it out in automatic mode (recommended) and while it worked perfectly, as soon as I enabled it my browser started to get unstable, pages would lock, mouse pointer would disappear, etc. And then as soon as I disabled the extension all went back to normal. So it’s a no-go for now. But thanks for letting us know it’s there.

Floorp, a Firefox fork, containerizes also. Floorp does it in the same manner, meaning you create the containers and assign sites, and only after that does that site automatically get containerized. I do something similar to what you’re doing, but it’s between Firefox and Floorp. I wish they’d start containerizing sites by default, but for now this is what I do.

The fact that the Dems went along with him winning in '24 and didn’t contest it at all despite the statistical anomalies in swing states is just fucking unbelievable.

THANK YOU. I was starting to think I was the only one still incandescent with rage over this.

With /all, niche communities were able to reach wide audiences… From the perspective of someone who is trying to push an agenda, that is a nightmare scenario.

That’s the heart of it. US midterm elections are coming (or not) and the billionaires are desperate to control not only the outcome, but what and how things are discussed. AI hasn’t worked out as planned, the peasants are getting uppity, so r/all has to go.

That is my own experience as well. It took a while, but my eyes started to open in similar ways. Thank you for taking the time and putting words to it; you’re braver than I am to do so.

The only thing I would add is that Trump has gone out of his way to inflame differences, like in his first term when he moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem knowing it would reignite what had long been settled by truce: something like 50 people died the day it opened. And that wasn’t the only thing; I’m just going off the top of my head. It’s been thousands of small and large insults, aggressions, injustices directed at the Palestinians all along. And now look at what it’s become. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain of the Palestinian people.

For me anymore, it’s not even just about Israel. It’s about the utter corruption of both Bibi and Trump, and for me personally, a suspicion I can’t kick that they and a few others literally planned this genocide together so as to make a couple miles of highly-desirable waterfront property available for development. Last I heard, even Tony Blair was helping them plan it out.

So it makes sense now, to me anyway, why pro-Palestine protests and protesters have been met with such intense, personal, over-the-top hostility and even legislative action in both the UK and the US: it’s because they were pointing directly at the large scale murder-theft of their people and land openly taking place before all our eyes and interrupting the age-old move along, nothing to see here charade put on by corrupt leaders only playacting at peace.

Watch Saló by Pier Paolo Passolini.

You’re not wrong, but . . . jfc that is a hard movie to watch if you have a soul.

Which is, of course, why Pasolini made it the way he did.

That stache addon is gold. “When you care enough to send the very best.”

In the end, these facilities are not for immigrants, any more than Cop City is about training regular cops for public service.

I could just fuck a petri dish and still enjoy a similar bacterial adventure.