It’s very funny to me how much nonsense is in this article.
What I mean by that is that the satellite photos - they look like Cuban missile crisis photos. I understand why they would mask the capability of spy tech, but I can get clearer imagery of my house from google.
And they don’t know when the launch failure occurred? There are plenty of seismographs that would pick up a large explosion like that. Psh.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The republicans think the democrats picked Walz to appeal to rural voters?
If that’s the case then why are all my city friends the most genuinely excited they have been about a democratic politician since two weeks after Obama’s inauguration in 2009?
Pictures of Walz holding pigs, fixing cars, or coaching football aside, democrats picked him because he actually does what they’ve been telling their base they stand for.
It’s like Walz read the marketing material for the Democratic Party and then skipped the private meetings before getting to work. And that is what has my friends excited - that he’s doing something other than bloviating while circling the drain of irrelevance.
Their bread and butter has been to stigmatize other people.
In DEI terms, they consider themselves the ‘in group’ and for reasons ranging from media companies with agendas, conservative billionaires with think tanks and PACs waging influence campaigns, to voter inaction and gerrymandering, they’ve largely felt that they were ‘normal’ in their beliefs, morally correct, ‘mainstream’ and on the cusp of winning the culture war they insisting is being waged upon them. The assumption that they are normal, right, and justified in their whack beliefs allows them to live an unexamined life.
Trump has largely been their figurehead for the last 9ish years, and he’s so shameless that people calling him weird has no effect on him. I think people have idolized and embraced that shamelessness. Now JD Vance is up there sharing the spotlight and instead of being unmemorable like Pence, he’s not only weird like Trump and his followers, but also awkward and doesn’t steamroll his way through the weird stuff he says. I don’t stay up on conservative news, but whenever I see news about Vance on my feeds recently, it seems like he’s having a ‘please clap’ moment. He’s throwing water on their whole movement with his lack of charisma, and it’s breaking the illusion, so when folks get called weird, that armor just isn’t there.
MAGA folks being called weird in mass media confronts the illusion of normalcy and stigmatizes them as being part of an ‘out group.’
I don’t think they’re mad about being called weird, necessarily. I think they’re mad at being told their beliefs are abnormal by what seems like a majority. It’s a crap shoot on whether or not that results in self-reflection, or that folks will be whipped up into more hatred against others.
I think so long as the response is continued mockery of the figure heads (Trump, Vance, etc), or attacks are on the beliefs but not the regular people, even the hateful ones will exhaust themselves.
The article uses a thumbnail that does not appear in the article itself, so it doesn’t have any captions or other information around it. (Also possible that being on mobile or using a plethora of content blockers made that not appear for me, so don’t hurt me.) Pair that with, you know, not really knowing anything about SiegedSec, and I have no clue if the photos used here, or even in other articles depicts the fursonas of the hackers.
But I mean, furries are usually all in on their fursonas. Many who have splurged for a suit are usually pretty particular about specific details to ensure that their suit is custom to them. It’s basically their identity. It’s the equivalent of newspapers using photos of you to represent someone else, because one thing about you is similar.
If newspapers are grabbing random furry pictures to accompany these articles, can you imagine the horror and, well, amusement that would occur if some random furry starts becoming recognized as the guy who hacked the Heritage Foundation, when they had absolutely nothing to do with it?
(I know, completely random thought, but that’s what this brain do.)
You don’t have to die alone!
You can get sterilized then start (or join) an anarcho-communist polyamorous commune. If you find the right mix of traumas, it can function really well! Or end in fire. But it will be exciting, and you won’t be alone!
I’m cynically viewing this as not a positive. I assume this is so they can make pages 2, 3 and so on as spammy as page 1.
Not at first, obviously. You don’t boil that frog on high heat.
You throw out a second page with a cute little text ad off to the side, then 1 or 2 at the top, then a mid-page ad. Maybe some suggested content.
Instead of having to scroll through a page’s worth of ads to get to semi-relevant results with a gem hidden in them, it’ll be a pages worth of ads for your semi-relevant results per page, and maybe what you were looking for 4 or 5 pages in.
Google used to be good. They ‘know’ what people are looking for. So they’ll probably hire someone familiar with gambling to figure out a minimum dispersion of relevant results on the pages, to keep people using the service and scrolling past ads. … I used to remember this. Variable-ratio reward schedule?
Today I feel like telling you all some trauma because I’m avoiding work while I wait for Adderall and coffee to do their thing.
Many years ago I was a highly ignored, heavily traumatized kid. Despite living in a fairly big metro area, I lived on a long dead end street that was accessed via a 4-lane road that was technically a highway. The side near to the highway had several businesses with no close homes along the highway, and the 7 houses on the street were deeper in. There were some kids my age and they also were mostly ignored and heavily traumatized.
The neighbors parents were interesting. They were sort of like mine. Dad was blue color, an addict/drunk. Mom was a nurse. They weren’t financially okay as us. My dad had been given a successful plumbing business by my mom’s dad, but their dad drove a dump truck for a construction company. Their mom was an LPN (licensed practical nurse/lower paid nurse), and my mom was an RN (registered nurse - higher pay).
Weirdly, our parents didn’t seem to get along.
I always regarded their mom as being a better mom. She loved having kids, and really cared about her boys. And me, too, when I stayed with them. When she went to work, she packed lunches for us. At my house it was ‘find what you can.’ Anyway - their dad, though. He would spend his entire paycheck the day he got paid. Sometimes he’d buy something dumb - a new TV to set on top of the TV he’d bought just 6 months before, a bunch of fishing gear he’d use once before realizing he didn’t like fishing, shitty plastic chrome ‘upgrades’ for his car. But mostly, he spent it on booze. He even sometimes took us to the bar with him. We loved it - ordering virgin daiquiris at the American Legion and poorly playing pool at a table we could barely see over while he got intensely drunk. Then he’d careen down side streets to take us back home. He came across as jolly and even happy to most folks, but when his guard was down he was intensely angry, and very emotionally abusive. Once, and only once, in my teens, he even attempted to become sexually abusive, but apparently it is possible for two 14 year olds and a 13 year old to topple and hog tie a 500lb man.
I’d already started to fall out with the boys by then. My life path had taken my different places. My parents split up when I was 6, and by the time I was 8, we lost the house, and my mom had moved across the country to escape my dad, who died maybe a year and a half later. We came back to the area and I resumed my friendship, but from a different part of the city, and different schools. The older brother, who I’d always been friends with had changed. He got mean. He started picking on people for fun. Started thinking being an asshole was funny. The younger brother became more of my friend. He was kind, but always tried to please folks. He kept getting traumatized by now not only his dad, but his brother.
We hung out a few more times, but really, the last time I hung out with them was when I was 17ish. I drove over intending to hang out for a bit, but ate something that triggered an allergic reaction and wound up taking a bunch of Benadryl and staying the night. Their mom out to work a double overnight - I think I saw her in the morning before I left. At that point their dad had stopped working due to health issues. They had a girl there - 15-16ish, and apparently the dad was giving her his Vicodin, presumably in exchange for money (god, I hope it was money). She was gone in the morning before mom came home, but apparently she just hung out there while mom was at work and went into the nearby woods while she was home.
Their dad died about 5 years later, and at the funeral, I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. I had nothing nice to say. There’s a lot more that I cannot convey in this comment to you, reader, nor that I can even fully recall, but I remember looking at this family with that deep well of experience and emotion. They were my childhood best friends. Two damaged people that really, really didn’t get a fair shake. Both boys wearing stained T-shirts because they didn’t have nicer clothes. Didn’t finish high school. Didn’t have jobs. And the mom, who loved them all, and never got supported.
Leaving, I talked to the oldest. He said he was ‘working with’ a cousin that was showing him how to drive a big truck on the sly, so that maybe he could start driving dump trucks.
We stopped at his car, and he asked me if I wanted to go drinking with him - he told me he was gonna get shiftfaced. It was a Tuesday at 11 AM.
I politely declined as I read his bumper sticker - the first time I’d ever seen one - “Ass, Grass, or Cash, no one rides for free.”
It struck me as really sad and appropriate.
Only when it’s traumatizing.
Things that seem to go well and then later need intervention are the worst.
Suddenly I’m Gandalf: “I have no memory of this place.”
Do you normally misjudge jokes as sincere statements, and assume a narrative based on that misunderstanding?
A sort of charming and self deprecating statement about one’s disability (ADHD) is often more socially acceptable than, well… what you said.
If you find yourself missing social cues often, such as the fact that the above post is clearly in jest - perhaps you should work on figuring that out.
Squirrels don’t remember where they hide their nuts.
They rely on heuristics to find them! (A fancy word that roughly means “it seems like something I’d do”)
When trying to find nuts, they look at a spot and think “that would make a good place to hide a nut” so they go looking for one there.
Genuinely chuckling at this and imagining his hair dye dripping off while it happens.