Republicans literally giving away free tacos at the Texas Democratic Convention which… I guess… make you want to support Open Borders?

The menu included Veggie Talarico (potato, egg and cheese), N.I.C.E. (bacon, egg and cheese), Open Border Brisket (smoked brisket), and Democrat Promises, described on the menu as an “empty tortilla.”

recession

Hahaha. No. Big Number Only Goes Up.

You will sit in the unemployment line and watch the stock ticker rise and know this economy is simply not for you anymore.

I mean, I don’t even mind that on its face. If you really feel like you need to pay $80 to get the roster on your FIFA soccer game updated… that’s between you and the business bros that run your local sports game sweetshop.

not productivity tools like coding assistance

Given how Microsoft has really jammed AI code-assist down the throats of developers whether they want it or not, it would be kinda crazy if they did. The “contains AI” tag would be on virtually everything that touches Visual Studio, hollowing out its value as an indicator.

With an attitude like this, you have to wonder how many EA development teams are simply going to lie when prompted.

Not that they’ve released a game worth playing in a long time, but this makes me suspect the entire studio is drowning in AI slop.

Literally, “you registered your account on the wrong instance so you’re the devil”.

There is no end to the bigotry in some people’s brains.

You don’t seem to understand the meaning of “worst”.

The “Worst Country” is the country that the US Media tells us is the worst, as measured by US Think Tanks and US Epsionage Agencies and US Propaganda Mills.

It’s Israel.

‘They used dogs’: New Al Jazeera film exposes Israel’s use of rape in jails

Former detainees detail systematic torture and sexual violence, including rape, while in Israeli custody.

he probably didn’t even do any crimes

Pretty sure even his friends admitted he pulled the poster off the wall.

21% of the population of Israel is Palestinian.

Not for long

the story running between this type of travel agencies at the time was that the guy refused to listen security instructions, got way more drunk and tried to go, multiple times, in place clearly mark « don’t go there ».

Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. Not unusual for someone to come into the country on a tourist visa and commit a nasty taboo.

It helps to remember that this is a country we are still functionally at war with. Imagine a Ukrainian taking a vacation in Moscow. Or a Palestinian touring Tel Aviv. That’s what these Americans are undertaking.

That is NINE separate LDS churches in that image, all within a 2 minute or less drive of each other.

Harris County has 3,031 churches in total, giving a church-to-population ratio of about 1:1,350. Salt Lake City is closer to 1:700. I suppose you could big-dick me and insist that Utah has more. But at some point, we’re just arguing a matter of degrees.

Indianapolis, Indiana comes in at 2,892 churches with a population of 830k, giving it 1:289. Here’s a street in Tuxedo park with five churches in walking distance that I found just googling around.

There is no such thing as an “independent” Mormon church, either, like the religions you are talking about.

No. The Mormons are much more like the Catholics in that regard. Abet, more in the style of an MLM than a horizontal monopoly. The proliferation of Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, and other denominational churches in Texas is much more free-lance. Throwing down churches like we throw down oil wells.

This is why Mormonism is completely different

It’s a variation on a very well-established theme.

a kid got years in North Korean prison for stealing a poster

The full story of this kid was far crazier than the post implies. (https://archive.is/kyR8h)

Firstly, he wasn’t in jail for years. He was in jail for 17 months, largely due to the chill relations between the Obama government and North Korea during that time. It is common for US expats to receive special release with a bit of glad handing and brown nosing from a US diplomat, and the fact that Bill Richardson wasn’t able to secure Otto’s release was the exception rather than the rule.

But secondly, and much more curiously, the story spun up after his release looked more and more like a fabrication the deeper journalists probed.

The previously unreported detail of when Otto was admitted to the Friendship Hospital changes the narrative of what could have happened to him. If Otto was “repeatedly beaten,” as the intel reports suggested, it would logically have been during the two to six weeks between his sentencing, when videos of him showed no signs of physical damage, and “April,” as the North Korean brain scan was dated. But Otto was apparently unconscious by the next morning. The coroner found no evidence of bludgeoning on Otto’s body. And when one takes into account that the entire sourced public case that Otto was beaten derives from that single anonymous official who spoke to The New York Times, the theory begins to crack.

It is for this paucity of evidence that, though the public discourse about Otto’s death has long been dominated by talk of beatings, there have been doubts among North Korea experts that the intelligence reports were correct. Of the dozen experts I spoke to, only a single one thought there was even a remote likelihood that he had been beaten. “I don’t believe Otto was physically tortured,” Andrei Lankov said in his office in Seoul. “The campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea’s cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.”

Many experts pointed out that though North Korea is often portrayed as irrational, the Kim family had to be “both brutal and smart,” as Lankov said, to maintain its relative power on the world stage, especially for such a small, impoverished country. What incentive would they have to lose a valuable bargaining chip, especially when they had never been so thoughtless before? To these experts, it made much more sense that Otto was treated like all other detained Americans and that an unexpected catastrophe occurred. But despite the experts’ doubts, none of them could disprove the intelligence reports indicating that Otto had been beaten. However, a senior-level American official who reviewed the reports told me, “In general, the intel reports were wrong, as the medical examinations have shown. They were apparently not even correct about where Otto was or when he was beaten, for God’s sake. Likely, the reports were just hearsay. Someone heard third- or fourth-hand that Otto was sick, and that person decided he was beaten. The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically. Never.” The official said he did not know of the Trump administration having other sources of information about Otto being beaten.

So you had a US expat detained for an extended period, only to be released into US custody as an attempt by the NK government to curry favor with Trump. But in the process of being released, Otto falls into a vegetative state with no evidence of physical violence perpetrated against him. The poor state of his health is conveyed to the Trump administration and immediately poisons relations with the new administration.

And over the next several months, Trump begins to ratchet tensions with North Korea as a potential prelude to war.

How did this happen? Who did it benefit?

I am saying that Utah is a completely different animal than those states.

It’s insular because it’s Mormons giving the reach around to other Mormons. But you see the same social dynamic replicated in other religious groups in other states. You just don’t see the bright dividing lines, because the religious organizations transcend state boundaries in other areas of the country. There’s not some hard stop between the Kansas and Missouri state lines, where being a Southern Baptist begins and ends.

Again, I do genuinely believe that you’d have to live there (and thus deal with the Utah government) to understand what I mean.

I’ve lived a number of places, some of them very deeply religious and others much more plural. I can’t speak to Utah specifically, but I can speak to a few places that were functionally operating as Jonestown minus the kool-aid. If you give the history of these states a hard look, you can see the same patterns and the same social structures. “First Colony” got its name for a reason, and it echoes through the community in a way you wouldn’t understand unless you lived there.

But the Mormon church quite literally is the government in Utah.

And the Southern Baptist Convention run Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi. Meanwhile, Opus Dei Catholics have their hooks deep into Missouri and Louisiana. Churches are a common way to organize a political vanguard in order to manage an ostensibly democratic institution. The Mormons have a ton of influence in neighboring Arizona, Nevada, California, and across the border in Sonora, Mexico.

Utah is a huge bubble.

I grew up in a town outside of Houston, Texas called Sugar Land. We also used to jokingly refer to it as “The Bubble”, as it was a Planned Community that resulted from a collaboration of the O&G industry, the D.R. Horton Home Builders, and the Sugar Creek Baptist Church under Tom DeLay. Then the Catholic Church moved in and blew the whole thing up by flooding the district with the perfidious Irish and the nefarious Taiwanese.

But yes, being one of half a dozen Jewish kids in a sea of Southerners was certainly an experience.

my point is that Utah is about as close as you can get to a fully theocratic state in the US

US Theocracies are more common than you’d first guess. Louisiana is fully co-opted by southern Catholics. Check out the Veiled Prophet Society in St. Louis (half a zillion podcasts on the subject). Texas has its share of outright cult towns, the Branch Davidians being an iconic but hardly idiosyncratic example. And then you’ve got the various Black Baptist church tentpole institutions from Harlem to Oakland (marginally less toxic than the whites, but no less influential nor dogmatic).

The fastest way to get a large number of people to vote for you is to appeal to a member of the clergy. So quite a bit of US democratic power springs from a comparatively small but vocal set of religious hubs.

I’m from Texas. From my experience, it could apply to anyone over here or east straight on to Florida. Nevermind the nightmare politics of the upper midwest or the fascist fuckwit colony of Idaho.

Two of the most despicable libertarian oil pushing fuck nuts

Technically only one fucknut left from the original four. They Ayn Rand’d themselves sequentially and now the organization they run is mostly burning cash on vanity shit for libertarian baby-brains. But at its height, they were a terror.

Revisiting my old hobbies and - by turns - finding out some of this stuff was dumb shit for babies and some of this stuff was absolutely fucking impossible how did I ever get it to work at all when I was twelve?!

• Lands on Mars

• Attempts to turn Martian sand into glass panes

• It doesn’t work

Omg. On Mars we will never experience Windows.

My point is, it won’t happen to everyone

Sure. Nothing happens to everyone (except the one big thing).

But it happens to enough people such that it shapes general public perceptions and vibes.

I grew up in a conservative hellhole, one that may or may not have one of the most corrupt and theocratic governments of any state, if that gives you any hints.

But I agree, it cuts both ways. I wasn’t a raging leftist in high school. I flirted with Republicans, because they were in the majority. I flirted with Libertarianism, because it seemed like they agreed me on a few things at least. I flirted with the local liberal establishments, because it at least looked like a runway towards progressive policies.

You can only see so much corruption, insincerity, and complicity before it drives you to the fringes. If I wasn’t a fire-breathing leftist tankie wumao third-worlder Bookchin afficianado, I guess I would have ended up doing QAnon shit from the strain of it all.