Even better, add emotions!

Season with salt until it tastes angry.

I prefer milligallons myself.

Microacres^(3/2)

Because it’s clearly being banned, not because of privacy violations, not because of the nefarious impact of a foreign government, but because of the content that is shared on it. It is the only major social media platform with a strong pro-Palestinian viewpoint on it. And the people in Congress have been caught on camera explicitly stating this is why they want to ban it.

I hate Tiktok. I don’t use it. Never have. But I still don’t want to see the US turn its internet into the Great Firewall of China 2.0.

The leaders in Congress cannot stand the idea of there being a social media platform that is popular in the US that isn’t hosted in the US. Why? The answer is simple - control. All the US social media platforms are heavily influenced by the US government. Hell, most of them openly contract with the NSA. Facebook is an NSA contractor. These platforms get a ton of money from the US government. And despite what conservatives bitch at in regards to “being censored,” the real censorship is against anything that doesn’t advance US power and influence. Outside of Tiktok, the major platforms heavily censor pro-Palestinian messages and stories. Go to r/worldnews and post anything other than “Palestinians deserve to be vaporized,” and you’ll be banned within 5 minutes. It’s literally that bad. Even when outright bans aren’t in place, the platforms will severely down shift any pro-Palestinian content and keep it out of peoples’ feeds.

“Beware of he would would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.”

New Trump conspiracy just dropped:

It turns out Trump actually does have a superpower. He can Groundhog Day himself at will. He can create a save state of reality and load it at will. Or he can set up time loop of up to say, 6 months in length. He won the election because he literally ran that campaign hundreds, perhaps thousands or tens thouands of times before finally getting it right. He’s save scumming reality. Though, this is also the reason he talks so oddly and is all screwed up. Thousands of subjective years giving political speeches just fries your brain.

A third term really isn’t that much of a stretch. The 22nd Amendment was poorly drafted. Or perhaps more specifically, poorly drafted for our political era.

In order to approve a Trump third term, SCOTUS really wouldn’t need to come to an incredibly stretched conclusion. According to the letter of the Constitution, the requirements to be president such as term limits only apply to being elected president. Read from a strict literalist perspective, these requirements don’t apply to achieving the powers of Acting President through the line of succession.

So Trump could get a third term through being appointed Acting President through the line of presidential succession. He would have two flunkies run for President and Vice President. They run promising to immediately resign after being sworn in. MAGA arranges to have Trump appointed Speaker of the House. When the two flunkies resign, Trump would immediately become Acting President and serve the remainder of the flunky president’s term. In terms of actual powers, there is virtually no difference between being President or Acting President.

Again, it really wouldn’t require a super stretched interpretation of the Constitution for SCOTUS to rule this as a valid method. The writers of the 22nd Amendment wrote the amendment to say, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President…” They should have written it, “No person shall be elected to or hold the powers of the office of the President…” They didn’t consider that someone could try to deliberately become president in a way that doesn’t involve being elected president.

There’s never been case law on this, because no one has ever been vain enough to try and use this loophole to get a third term. But according to a strict reading of the Constitution, someone can absolutely serve a third term this way. Hell, this would also be a path for someone like Elon Musk, who is not a native-born citizen, to become president.

Get a bidet.

Yeah, but there’s something a lot more gross about spraying yourself with a bottle than just turning a knob and letting the plumbing do it.

We just finished a big holiday trip, 2 weeks visiting both sides of the family. Stayed with one family and then the other. After that…yeah…seriously considering getting everyone bidets next year for Christmas…

500 million, but not a single one more.

Sure. I remember reading the concept somewhere, perhaps in an old r/asksciencefiction thread. I didn’t come up with it originally.

I don’t believe in ghosts or psychic phenomena, but I do love the concept in fiction that ghosts aren’t actual human souls. Rather, they’re a sort of psychic “burn in.” If a living person experiences strong emotions, such as a prolonged period of grieving, or the incredible emotional intensities that come with being murder victim, those emotions can become embedded within a place. Do you grieve for a deceased partner, mourning for years, remembering key moments over and over? A reflection of that grief becomes embedded within reality in the location you experienced those emotions. When you die or leave, someone else can come into that place and experience a recording, a reflection, or echo of the emotions and memories you experienced.

Ghosts are effectively traumatic memories burned in to the fabric of the world. They don’t actually experience anything; they’re not conscious beings. They’re not souls looking to complete their business and move on. They’re simply psychic echoes. They’re imprints left on reality from very intense and painful emotions, particularly those experienced repeatedly over a long period of time.

This also explains why ghosts have a half life. Ever wonder why in the US, all the ghosts seem to be old timey white people from the 1800s or similar? Considering the total number of Native Americans that must have lived in what is now the US down the millennia, the vast, vast majority of ghosts should be Native American. But aside from the classic example of a disturbed native burial ground, Native American ghosts don’t show up much in fiction. It’s usually old timey white people.

The reason for this, in the imprint theory, is that like any imprint, ghosts tend to fade with time. Just as most footprints will slowly be eroded, the knots in the psychic fabric that ghosts represent slowly work themselves out over time. The ghosts people do experience tend to be from the last century or two, as most ghosts older than that have decayed below the level of human perception.

Maybe. On a completely unrelated note, can you let me know the next time you’ll be in public, preferably not standing within several feet of anyone else and anything flammable?

To light things on fire with my mind.

https://timecube.online/

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

Well, first, I’m not a guy. But two, if anyone ever makes a comment like that, I just say, "look…my work involves cutting, grinding, smashing, burning, and straining wood specimens until they break and buckle. If you really want to associate that with certain body parts, be my guest. But…it sounds quite painful.*

Sure. But again, it’s a distributed platform. And it does tend to be less subject to zero-thought zero tolerance policies built to appease advertisers. If you start posting death threats to politicians, you’ll get banned (and probably visited by law enforcement.) But I never posted anything like that. I never threatened anyone. I never advocated vigilante violence. I never posted anything that I couldn’t, completely legally, write on a big sign and literally walk around in front of the White House fence advocating for.

Ah yes. I remember these guys From Mad Max: Fury Road

I’ve had a few accounts banned from a few of the larger subreddits, then I got a general permaban for ban evasion. Among the things I was banned from big subreddits for:

1. Making even vaguely pro-Palestinian comments on r/worldnews

2. Commenting in r/politics, that if the SCOTUS ruled that the president had complete immunity and was effectively a dictator, he should drone strike Supreme Court justices until that power is taken away. (Actual news stories proposing this were allowed on r/politics. But the comments section had an idiotic zero-context zero-thought “no violence” policy. IMO, the only moral use of dictatorial powers is to force through changes stripping yourself of those dictatorial powers.)

3. Literally on January 6th, as a group of armed insurgents was actively trying to overthrow our government in a coup, asking why they weren’t being met with automatic weapons fire. I have zero doubt that if BLM tried to storm the inauguration of a president Trump, they would be shot by the dozen. But right wing extremists were allowed to openly attempt a coup in broad daylight. (We later learned the reason this didn’t happen is that the president had deliberately kept troops from being deployed to protect the capital building.)

My primary account on reddit had several hundred thousand comment karma on it. I’ve had accounts with 15 year histories on there. But the main subreddits have been completely taken over by either right wing radicals or pro-advertiser zero-thought censorship policies. I literally had my main account banned from r/politics for wondering why my nation’s military wasn’t defending the peaceful transfer of power from a group of armed revolutionaries.

Looking back, I think we would have been a lot better off if January 6th HAD resulted in scores of thugs being gunned down with machine guns. Instead, the people who planned it haven’t been brought to justice and have been left to simply try again. And since then, in right wing circles, it’s been recast as some noble peaceful protest. We would have been far better off if the leaders of that movement never made it off the capital grounds. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s when fascists try to seize power violently, you need to come down like the Hammer of God upon them. Giving them a slap on the wrist to appease them does not work, it just teaches them that you are weak, and that they should keep trying til they succeed. If a thousand of the countries most violent right wing extremists had instead never left capital grounds alive that day, I think today we would be in a far better place.

But…you can’t post that kind of thing on r/politics without getting instantly permabanned. They censor any discussion of violence, even when it is entirely justified and legal in the defense of a nation and its democracy. It’s been said that from time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants. But on r/politics, the tree of liberty is doomed to wither, as discussing watering the tree with the blood of tyrants violates community guidelines and doesn’t make advertisers happy.

Or, as a final example, I think there was a story on there once that was hyperbolically lamenting, “OMG, what happens if Trump raises a group of right wing militias to stage an armed revolution if they lose in 2024?” I replied truthfully and correctly. What do we do if any group of people tries to overthrow the government by force? We shoot them. We send in the most powerful military on Earth, we shoot them, and we put them in the ground. That is what you do with rebels. That is what any democracy needs to do if it wants people to respect the results of elections. When you try to overthrow a legitimately elected government, your life is now forfeit, and you will be met with unrelenting merciless force. That is how that scenario would actually go down in real life. Democracy is worth fighting for. And democracy is worth killing for. And I wasn’t afraid to state this plain and obvious fact. That got one account permabanned from r/politics.

In short, I am not afraid of saying that under certain circumstances, it is entirely just and legal for violence, even extreme and lethal violence, to be used to protect a nation and its republic. But on a big subreddit like r/politics, you’ll be permabanned for saying it’s OK to shoot people trying to violently overthrow the government.