knightly the Sneptaur

Okay, someone please tell me that there is better terminology for this…

“Cyberwitch” and “Technomagic” feel like cyberpunk tropes straight out of Shadowrun and it’s really awkward to try and explain my Practice to normies, non-tech-savy occultists, and the techies that stridently refuse to use their own magical thinking with Intent. XD

Eh, it’s not just BBQ tho. Houston is America’s most international city and you can find restaurants serving cuisines from around the world all fighting tooth and nail to prove thselves against the competition. The Cajun, Tex-Mex, and Southwest American food is amazing. Some of the best Greek, Thai, and Indian I’ve ever tried, the only fancy Irish pub I’ve ever tried (try the Guiness Stew at McGonigals Mucky Duck), not to mention almost everything else from late-night Italian delivery to a literal Russian bar to an Ethiopian eatery. Want Phó, a street taco, sushi, and a slice of pizza after watching the game at a sports bar? They’re all just minutes away and they’re all great!

I’d love for the Dems to start acting like an actual opposition party, but they’re owned by the same billionaires and not much has changed in the ten years since the party took a collective shit on Bernie so Hillary Clinton could have “Her Turn” like it was owed to her.

Vote however you want, but you have to do more than just vote if you want anything to change.

Only if you’re using the Chrome extension, maybe. This is just Google trying to kill even the memory of Google Reader by fucking with the biggest competitor to social media in Chrome.

Now there’s a euphemism. XD

Information Women

Economic Women

Marital Women

Gender Women

Source: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1.full

Exactly as predicted back in late 2014 when it became obvious that the party was going to throw an entire election just to keep Sanders from winning the primary.

They’d shit the bed, Trump would win 2016, backlash to Trump would carry a nothingburger Dem to win 2020, their fecklessness would turn off enough folks to give away 2024 for Trump’s second term, and now we’ve reached the time of monsters where the future depends on whether the kind of folks who go to No Kings protests can be organized into a general strike.

Arch w/KDE Plasma desktop, of course.

“Smart” TVs should be kept off the internet and only used as video output for actual computers.

IMO (and IANAL especially not of constitutional law) the executive branch has to prove to the courts that it has a compelling interest to keep such registries and that its need is such that less invasive recordkeeping would not serve that justifiable purpose. E.G., it needs a registry of voters to determine if someone is eligible to vote and in which jurisdiction, because without it the pollworkers would have no way to tell.

Under Strict Scrutiny, laws enabling such registries must be “narrowly tailored” (E.G., voter registration doesn’t need to know how much taxes you pay and your tax record doesn’t need to know which party you’re registered to) and employs the “least restrictive means” necessary to satisfy its compelling interest (E.G., they can’t charge you a fee to update your voter registration and there will always be a free option for filing your tax paperwork).

Keeping lists of trans folks serves no compelling interest, is not narrowly tailored to the interests it supposedly serves, and there isn’t even a civil means of determining whether or not one is on the list (to say nothing of correcting it for the folks that have undoubtedly been added to it in error). As such, it is prima facie unconstitutional.

Even the lowest bar of constitutional scrutiny, “Rational Basis”, would require that the law allowing the list be “rationally related” to a “legitimate goverent interest”, and I can’t think of anything less legitimate or rational than a government’s claimed need to get into everyone’s pants.

4th Amendment, the right against unreasonable searches.

Look at that source, might as well be posted by the Israeli state department for how much I’d trust it.

So, either you’re accusing me of tone policing and engaging with me anyway, or you’re not accusing me of tone policing yet continue to meander off topic anyway. XD

To be frank, I don’t care about your tone, I’m concerned with the disconnect between what you say the topic is (why people feel a certain way) and how you’re choosing to engage (insisting on another perspective instead).

In what way is making a counter point disingenuous?

It reveals that your intent is not to comprehend another perspective, but to insist upon your own.

Why do I need to just blindly accept what someone says without any pushback?

The thing that you’re being asked to accept is that this someone believes what they say they believe.

Nobody’s asking you to blindly assume that this someone is being honest, but making a counterpoint is not the same thing as asking clarifying questions to better understand their perspective or probe it for the inconsistencies that would indicate deception.

I’d like to argue that this isn’t a slow collapse, but a remarkably rapid one. The Roman Empire, for example, took almost 300 years from the Antonine Plague that halted it’s growth before the last western emperor was deposed, or almost 500 years if counting from Julius Ceasar and the eruption at Pompei.

The USA, by contrast, entered its decline a mere 25 years ago when it expended vast resources attempting to conquer the Graveyard of Empires, and only just last year ceded its position as global hegemon to China. At this rate, the American Empire might only last another generation or two.

It reads like a joke to me, and his published works suggest he’s not one to meekly take things at face value: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&citation_for_view=EEdRH98AAAAJ%3A0EnyYjriUFMC

Professor of Religion at James Madison University, published in a few journals and had an article in Wired about Go (the board game) ten-ish years ago.

My intent was to try to understand why people feel the way they feel. If I disagree with a reason someone has, am I just supposed to be like “oh, ok”, and move on?

Make up your mind, is your point to understand why people feel the way they feel or to convince them to feel in a way you agree with?

Am I not supposed to give any rebuttal to any points whatsoever

Rebuttals are for arguments, not for understanding.

If you can’t look at things from their perspective then you should be asking questions, not trying to convince them that their perspective is wrong.

The early days of “AI” were a full generation before the beginning of the internet, as it was formalized as an academic field back in the 50’s while ARPANET didn’t start admitting non-Defense users until the 80’s.

Are you saying I am being disingenuous in my intentions by making counter points in a discussion?

Yes, that’s very clearly what’s happening here.