Swagnarok

Really though, I've never heard this kind of testimonial before. It's almost as if they had the potential to be a genuinely good and wholesome group if the top brass wasn't a bunch of greedy cult leaders. Perhaps the world could use more of what you initially experienced, but played straight and without the bullcrap mind games. For some reason that doesn't seem to really exist.

Did you ever have the Xenu narrative told to you in any of the courses?

They try to keep a very sanitized public image and probably spend a lot of money/volunteer hours on outreach to yuppies who don't know a lot about the group. Said yuppies, lured into their building by promises of spiritual awakening or whatever the pitch is, get offered a free "auditing" session.

They speak to an unlicensed, phoney shrink and spill their guts about their personal issues, not unlike Catholic confession. The shrink keeps a record of whatever compromising things were said, and then viola, the church has dirt on that individual. From there, some people are just gullible or emotionally vulnerable enough to willingly pay for the courses that they think will clear their souls of the billion year old volcano demons haunting them and making them feel sad. Others might be blackmailed into doing so, or at minimum they'll be threatened to keep quiet upon leaving so that the next batch of new arrivals isn't scared off.

The Church of Scientology doesn't ascribe to conventional morality about turning the other cheek, and considers any critic of the church to be "fair game" for a prolonged and brutal retaliation campaign.

A big part of their advertising, of course, entails big name celebrity endorsements. Tom Cruise not only joined the group but was treated exceptionally well and enjoyed all manner of privileges to buy his loyalty. It should also be said that people like him, with deep pockets, are likely their primary customer base as well.

Finally, we shouldn't rule out second generation church members, who've been indoctrinated from childhood and are probably made to hand over the bulk of their time, money, and energy to the group.

Is he still relevant?

Not long ago I watched a pretty long interview of an ex-neo Nazi recounting his time with the movement back in the '80s and '90s.

One of his insights was telling: they spent a lot of time and effort trying to convince young white men that they were under attack because of the color of their skin, which was how their movement recruited most of its new members. This was a lot harder to do back then because said narrative rather plainly wasn't true. There was a general "live and let live" and "colorblindness is good" attitude in society. But apparently the neo-Nazis have a much easier time persuading people today, since the left and Black America have adopted a far more openly hateful stance toward their white neighbors in the last 10+ years.

Again, this was from the mouth of a person who no longer believes in neo-Nazism but has like a decade of personal experience with its inner workings. He dispassionately testified that the self-described opponents of racism are doing a lot of the heavy lifting toward actively making the problem worse.

Yes, you must be fully initiated into the cult to understand that it's really a good thing and right about everything, or else you'll only be confused by information that contradicts its core narratives, like the bad things alleged by apostates who deserted it with their "testimonials of abuse", or "evidence that the founder was a fraud and a plagiarist who wanted to skim a quick buck off his gullible followers", and all that nonsense hippie bullcrap.

Lashwnda is a beautiful, strong, independent black woman who don't need no man. I hope she manages to achieve #justice4tyrone

Lemming would be a fine moderator, I think.

The problem with this is that the laws are interpreted to afford convicted criminals a lot of leeway. I recently watched a video where a man was sentenced to death for raping and killing a child, and he looked pretty calm, because he knew he had infinite appeals and, even if none of them managed to overturn his sentence, he could plausibly drag his case out until the end of his natural lifespan. And sure enough, that guy has appealed.

This almost certainly wasn't the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution, seeing how they lived in an age where a man could be sentenced to hang for a robbery and then have the sentence carried out on noon of the following day, and they were apparently fine with this. But the currently in vogue interpretation of the law would be very hard to replace.

A potentially easier alternative would be what I call "Engagement Doctrine". Basically, there is a window of time between when a person begins to act in the commission of a violent crime, and when they've clearly acted to disengage themselves from said activity in a way that a reasonable person could discern, during which their right not to be killed by anyone is forfeit. If this doctrine was recognized by the courts, and if the police were to become highly efficient at finding and killing criminals during said window without a large number of miscalculations, it could do far more than our nerfed death penalty to keep our streets and communities safe.

That hasn't seriously been the case since 2003, dude.

An "LGBTQ Tolerance Day" would've sufficed to promote human rights. But the framing of "Pride Month" goes beyond the mere promotion of tolerance.

Pride Month can still be privately observed by whoever wants to do it, and obviously is still being privately observed by a large number of people/corporations, so to say the whole thing has been canceled is silly.

Easter is neither a Federal holiday nor on Wikipedia's list of observances declared by presidential proclamation, whereas Christmas at this point has been very much commercialized and secularized, and to much of the population isn't plainly connected to Christianity. For gay pride to have an entire month of being celebrated by the Federal government seems sketchy from a standpoint of secularism (re: the principle of government neutrality in matters of religion/irreligion and of ideologies detrimentally impacting religion in general).

Dude, not even one week ago you and RM were practically dry humping each other. Your extremely public breakup all but made a mockery of DART's moderation team.

I think there's an understated phenomenon in the US where the most successful Republican politicians and influencers are ex-Democrats. Trump is the big one but there's also people like Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, RFK Jr. (he was polling about as well as a third party candidate could in 2024), etc.

As for why, I'd argue there are three reasons.

First, the Overton Window in the last half-century has near consistently moved left. This means a general trend where yesteryear's centrist Democrats become palatable to Republicans, while at the same time the purity spiral comes for said centrist Democrats, pushing them into the Republican camp. Second, someone who leaves their old party is thought of positively as a freethinker not beholden to blind dogma. Third, Democrats as a historical rule have been a lot better at populism than Republicans, so an ex-Democrat running in Republican primaries brings with him a very useful skillset that his opponents tend to lack.

I will say I am giving some actual thought to signing up. Internet censorship is an issue with the power to evoke very strong emotions from me, so if there's any chance Arena could become a larger community it's worth considering. I am tech illiterate and can't contribute to its development in any way, shape, or form; this would be solely as a user.

I have two work computers that are both Windows but I wouldn't use either for this purpose, so if I were to follow through it'd entail buying a fourth laptop (money isn't a concern for me at the moment). There is also a personal project I'm considering that I would need a Windows for, so doing this would also give me the push I need to get started on that, since it'd be a waste to buy a computer solely to plug into a chatroom.

Not solidly committed yet, but at this point it's plausible, though I'd need Wylted to give me the email address deleted by the mods.

Hey, long time no see, man. I hope the last 6 years have been swell for you.

Does the term "Third Position" ring a bell to you?

"leader"

My brother in Allah and Xenu, we're a bunch of fat dudes on the internet rehashing the same 90 IQ "debates" over and over. The stakes aren't even a small fraction as high as you seem to think they are.

A mod should be chill and reluctant to use their power under normal site conditions (not counting, for example, when there's a torrent of spambots). They ought to afford users of the platform a long leash, and be as ideologically neutral as possible in their evaluations. They should be slower to treat attacks on themselves as worthy of mod action than attacks on other users, and should never brandish threats relating to their position of authority as a crass bludgeon for winning petty internet arguments or retaliating against perceived slights. They should be willing to hear appeals, and fairly consider if what they've been told merits showing leniency. The ideal mod is one that, most of the time, people just kind of forget is a mod.

I would nominate myself, but I never win these quasi-popularity contests so I only hope that whoever gets it next will match these qualities.

Love, as distinguished from lust, is a virtue. There is no doubt utility (from a pleasure-centric view) to be had from the feeling of being romantically attracted to someone, and from everything that follows if that feeling is reciprocated, and this is a good and wholesome thing, but to love is to accept the obligations of that relationship even if your heart's no longer in it. That's not to say love is inauthentic if no occasion for self-sacrifice should happen to arise, but a prerequisite is to be of the mindset that you would do what you're supposed to do if ever appropriate. This is, of course, also true of key obligations to family, though the relationship be of a different nature.

As unromantic as it may sound, the best way to secure the existence of love is structurally and institutionally. Marriage, which takes the form of a binding agreement, lays down the ground rules and expectations for what you owe your partner in a way that premarital relationships don't. Families, likewise, are very powerful social constructs that most of humanity agrees to the general rules of.

The petty bullshit mod drama was enough to bring Thett back from retirement lol

Excuse me for being rather tech illiterate (the most savvy thing I've ever done was download a romhack to play an old Japan-exclusive SNES game, and all I really had to do was follow the steps).

From my very limited knowledge, I don't see any bulletproof solution for this. Making users pay would keep out bots (to the extent that they target old 20th century platforms), but either the cost would be high enough to deter users from signing up or low enough that a stubborn troublemaker who was willing to fork over some lunch money could get back on when he needed to shed his skin every other week or so. The fact that we'd be using Tor or VPNs would rule out IP bans, whereas a requirement to tell a central moderator who you were would unduly rely on honesty.

I guess one solution would be that you download some kind of program, like a cookie or something, that gives your computer a unique identifier so that multiple "accounts" is impossible. Some users would know how to remove this, while others (such as myself) perhaps wouldn't; at least, this countermeasure would work against some people.

I was thinking more along the lines of Best Korea joining and then feeling emboldened by the dark web-esque format to spam CP, but fair enough.

I'm open to anything that doesn't include porn or viruses. Though realistically it'd be the same people as here and I don't expect the dynamic would be much different from, say, a DART Discord server. The selling point is the mystique more than anything else.

Sounds like a fun concept, though I'm not sure if my Chromebook is compatible with the software needed for this. Honestly "no log" would suck the fun out of everything, as nothing would happen unless two people were on at the same time. I'd suggest maybe a log that deletes entries after, say, a week. This would strike a sensible balance between privacy and basic functionality. It'd also be really messy if there wasn't multiple threads as opposed to a single continuous chat, though admittedly I don't know if a primitive direct chat system would enable this.

Based is Gen Z slang. Off to the gulag for you.

I'd like to raise an educators' paradox, and it goes as following: that there will always be motive to promote certain ideas in such a way that, in the long term, undermines support for such.

Let's take the most dramatic example: a historical government which we'll called Mustachestan (because I have no faith in the current lineup of mods to not sperg out at the use of a word in an innocuous context) is known to have committed mass murder. We know this to be a straightforward fact; there's mountains and mountains of evidence to support that this really happened. With me so far? Good.

Now, if some uninformed or disingenuous person claimed that Mustachestan did not commit mass murder, hearing this claim wouldn't cause a regular person cognitive dissonance, because, rather than taking belief in the fact of Mustachestan's crimes for a marker of personal identity, a normal person merely responds to what he or she knows to be the truth, and hearing a very dubious claim from a possibly dubious source won't suffice to persuade them toward falsehood. Likewise, one may feel viscerally powerful emotions like grief, disgust, or rage at learning of (or later reflecting upon) the enormity of Mustachestan's crimes, but they feel said emotions because said crimes happened; in other words, knowing how to react to Mustachestan is a posteriori, not a priori, knowledge; one would not normally feel these emotions in the face of atrocities that they were not aware of, or in an alternate reality where said atrocities never occurred.

Where am I going with this? If an educator believes that it's important, for the sake of preventing any regime like Mustachestan from ever rising again, that the next generation understands Mustachestan to be evil, then it's incumbent upon him or her to teach them why Mustachestan is evil. In other words, he or she ought to instill an evidence-based education on the topic. Photos of dead bodies and liberated death camps, testimonies of survivors, and so on. Since the evidence overwhelmingly supports the fact that Mustachestan did evil deeds on a scale that only a truly evil government would do, and had no justification compelling enough to excuse crimes of said magnitude, an evidence-based education would serve to convince the overwhelming majority of people.

I don't think I've said anything remarkable so far, but there is a point to this, I promise.

What I described above is the ideal. But my hypothesis is that some educators are uninterested in this approach, and they fall into two camps.

First, there's reasonable people who would raise a counterargument to the above: that some crafty people will devise superficially convincing talking points whose refutation might entail some difficulty, especially in a relentless bullet point format that educators can't keep up with. Most people have enough of a head on their shoulders to not buy into this, but a few gullible people might, and it'll give a few stubborn people excuse to not ditch their wrong beliefs on the topic.

But then, there's people who've made it an article of faith that Mustachestan is evil. Their reason isn't really the specific or general crimes of Mustachestan, but rather the fact that they've based their personal identity around an ideology which has as one of its key tenets defeating and suppressing the idea of Mustachestan. These people do experience cognitive dissonance at hearing denials of Mustachestan's crimes. They're not interested in evidence-based education because it raises the specter of a discussion-based format, wherein they must, for even a fleeting moment, entertain an uncomfortable idea in order to know what to refute.

I would speculate also that teachers sympathetic to certain other mass-murdering regimes don't want to teach that Mustachestan is evil because of crimes their own favored side is also guilty of, since that would lead attentive students to the realization that what said educator supports is also evil.

My guess is that the latter group outnumbers the former, but either could lead to the same end: a new model of education wherein students must accept as an article of dogma that Mustachestan is evil without ever having been taught why it's evil. What I'm raising is a hypothetical where, 30 or 40 years from now, your average young person will have never heard of a certain major genocide, because their textbooks skipped that part in favor of vague generalities about the nature of evil and conflations of this idea with Mustachestan.

And when, in the spirit of youthful rebellion, many of these decide to buck said dogma and embrace the idea that "Actually, Mustachestan was good" (I.e. your average edgelord Satanist who grew up in a strict Pentecostal household), they won't understand that this is an immoral position to hold. Sure, they'll know that their teachers and society say it's immoral, but they'll have no reason to uncritically accept this, since the entire time it will have been asserted without any proof given.

Now, spamming is a perfectly fine reason to step in. But that wasn't what was cited here.

Dude, there's no violent incitement here. Let it go.

I get that this sort of content makes DART unappetizing to outsiders, but even in its heyday where more moderate discussion prevailed this site was never bringing in a steady influx of genuine newcomers (re: who had no prior connection to debate.org). All this space, and its proposed successor, really has going for it is the long-timers who've been autistically rehashing the same arguments for 10 years, and then once in a full moon someone like Best Korea who's just as unhinged as they (we) are. If you drive off those people through overmoderation, what will remain?

We can't realistically compete with Internet 3.0, like Reddit or whatnot. The one and only thing we can do is play to the strengths of Internet 2.0. And by strength, I mean the fact that Internet 2.0 was a golden age of free speech and free expression, something that promised to push the boundaries of man and his civil liberties; the product of a gentler age where the Western Left still believed in these values. In contrast, Internet 3.0 is an illiberal cesspit of heavyhanded censorship. It seems like every Reddit page, no matter the topic, has the same copy-pasted rules against "hate speech" and "bigotry" (narrowly defined as the right tribe criticizing those demographics favored by the left tribe and never the other way around, but I digress).

That DART is a surviving bastion of Internet 2.0, that it stubbornly flies the old flag of the enlightenment long after popular sentiment has turned against enlightenment values, is something to take pride in, not be ashamed of.  That's not to say we ought to be proud of the ravings of users like the OP, but we should be proud that the right of users like the OP to say their piece is respected here. This was something we all took for granted until the minute you signed on as moderator. But you are still very early into your tenure, and still have ample time to leave a good legacy instead of a bad one.

Seriously, just let it go.

What do you mean? Are you not an American?

Sounds like ADOL is probably not less qualified than whoever else is working on this, so you're needlessly selling yourselves one man short. Hopefully this project goes well despite that.

DDO rises from the ashes, every time.

In many times and places there have been immoral laws, or laws criminalizing harmless behaviors. Zoophilia isn't objectively one of them, but in any case the question of what the laws ought to look like will always be an open one. To advocate for decriminalization of zoophilia isn't the same as to advocate for breaking laws against zoophilia while they're still on the books. If the CoC is unable to make that distinction, then it's nothing but a handbook for censorship and not worth respecting.

Until this thread, there was nothing whatsoever about the way he acted that screamed RM. Plus, he'd not only have to change religions but also his standard-ish liberal politics for hyperreactionary monarchism. As someone who once pretended to be him for troll purposes way back in the day on DDO, it's not hard for me to imagine someone else impersonating him either.

Plus, over DMs I asked him a question he would probably remember the answer to were he RM, and I've yet to get a response several minutes later.

A snowball's chance in hell that this guy's actually RM, but sure. Congrats on the promotion.

Are you still able to get in touch with the owner? If someone bought it, how much would it cost annually to maintain the domain?

God has no sin nature. God has no innate depravity. All humans do; hence, none can be trusted with godlike powers over their fellow man.

One out of the top 20 ranked countries in the 2023 Human Development Index (United Arab Emirates, #15 with its vast oil wealth) was a dictatorship, so it must be the most perfect form of government! /s

Seriously though, I'll admit there's quite a few constitutional monarchies at the top of the list, but even this arguably defeats your point (that unchecked power is good): these kings and queens don't rule outright, but merely offer one additional check on democracy.

The best form of government is that where nobody reigns. Not one man, not a minority, and not the majority. There's many competing interests, and this conflict is mediated through a well-designed constitution.

I could absolutely see an executive monarchy, wherein a halfway-decent king rules the executive branch for life and has absolute veto but no power of the purse or to make laws (powers held exclusively by the elected legislature), working better than some dysfunctional democracies, potentially in the US itself either now or with another 10-20 years of political deterioration. It's an idea that I think doesn't get considered much if at all, because the public face of monarchism in the US is unhinged weirdos who've read one too many fantasy novels or unironically take the latest Pope's pontificating (no pun intended) on political topics he knows little about seriously. But even then, I don't regard this as being superior to a good democracy. More like, it's something of a second resort if a good democracy cannot be achieved.

Much of what makes an education system work well in a free market is honest signaling, but right now this can hardly be said to exist. Schools are incentivized to value graduation rates above objective scoring, state-administered exams can be watered down, and in any case only 8 states still mandate high school exit exams. A degree from one generic school looks about as good as another, and companies would be hard-pressed to avoid a lawsuit if they did discriminate.

One solution would be for most companies to require applicants to first have completed an exam, with different tiers for the secondary, undergrad, graduate, and postgraduate education levels, administered by a number of competing non-governmental entities that share data and are part of a common organizational umbrella. Both the test scores and question difficulty of each would be translated to a score by an independent commission so that fudging the numbers is impossible.  Each test taker's educational background would be collected so that the aggregate test scores of their alma maters could be assessed, and this data made readily available to the public. This way, yes, someone who got a poor score because they attended a crappy school would be punished for it, but it'd reduce the number of future students who suffered the same fate, because (provided that school choice existed) it'd steer children and young adults away from schools with low exam scores and toward those with high scores.

Honestly neither. Deficit spending is the ultimate wealth transfer to the rich from everyone else, since they can afford to hire tax lawyers and minimize what they pay out but then also furnish the government bonds that finance said deficit spending, reaping dividends from other taxpayers down the road. Just during Covid alone there was an unprecedentedly massive stimulus package and income inequality soared higher than ever. Whatever the poor get from this arrangement only helps them in the short term and does nothing to help them achieve self-sufficiency in the long term. We know this because, 60 years after the announcement of LBJ's Great Society, people are still moaning about how devastated the vast American underclass will be by cuts to welfare programs like Medicare, Medicaid, the Child Tax Credit, or SNAP.

Democrats are the ones ultimately responsible for ensuring that Washington keeps passing similar sized budgets year after year. Even when they're the minority party, the fact that in 2 years or less they'd run and easily win against any Republican-led Congress that made substantial cuts all but ensures the status quo remains untouched. But as this would imply, Republicans are completely useless at doing anything about the problem, and indeed add onto the pile with irresponsible tax breaks.

Sure, but what I meant was there are similarities to Mormonism (I.e. Mormonism copied Freemasonry, which is obviously the older of the two).

It's a secretive men-only fraternity with degrees of membership, just like the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods of the LDS.  I remember hearing that Mormon temple initiation ceremonies up until at least the '70s or '80s involved oaths not to reveal its secrets on pains of bloody dismemberment, and I came across some of that in the Masonic text as well, specifically I think in reference to the Hiram Abiff myth (on a random side note, the idea that a guy was a righteous martyr because he refused to give up a trade secret that might've benefited the world if put into wider circulation is silly to me).

It appears that the Mormon endowment ceremony up until at least the '90s made use of a square and compass, and many items of symbolism that were explained to the initiate during such, just like in Freemasonry. Heck, even the manner of speaking heavily resembles what I saw in the Masonic text.

The one mall in my area's run down and on its last leg, which is a shame because I have some fond memories of that place back in its heyday. But anyway, there's a store I just recently took notice of, in the very back of it. And this place sells random antiques. I discovered today that they have antique books in stock, perhaps some from the 1800s (haven't seen the whole collection yet), and I bought one today on a whim.

It was an old handbook for the rituals of Freemasonry. In hindsight the copy that I bought is no older than the 1970s, but it appears to be a reprint of a text from the 1860s. That was the start of my trip down a weird rabbit hole.

The secret behind Freemasonry is that there is no secret. It's chock full of Biblical allusions and Protestant moral allegories, and clearly isn't its own separate, non-Christian religion. In essence, it's an art form (akin to, say, heraldry but without authentic history behind it) of rituals and ranks just for the sake of rituals and ranks and an air of mystique. Secret knocks and hand gestures, people sitting in an exact location inside a room while wearing the goofiest costumes imaginable, etc. This kind of thing should be right up my alley, but after the first page or two it started to make for some very dry reading. There was more hard-to-follow dialogue than actual explanatory material. There were a lot of metaphors relating to construction tools used in the 1800s, and a good amount of completely random jargon that even people at the time didn't consider to be real words. Granted, my atrophied attention span probably has something to do with that; at the very least, though, I could basically make out what was being said, but I could discern no real purpose behind any of it.

Some people online defend what looks to be a massive waste of time by claiming that sinking time into the rituals, which come imbued with moral lessons, have the capacity to improve one's character. There might be merit to this hypothesis. I don't know. And of course, Freemasonry today doesn't look exactly the same as it did back then. But anyway, this was a window into the very alien popular imagination of 160 years ago. Perusing this book also made it a lot easier for me to picture the environment in which Mormonism came about.

To summarize the bill:

Many of the income tax provisions of the 2017 Trump tax cut were scheduled to expire at the end of this year. This bill makes those cuts permanent (and temporarily increases them from 2025 until 2028), and is scheduled to raise deficit spending by a total of $2.3 trillion over ten years, according to CBO.

In that sense this is an abnormally bloated budget, but to a certain extent this is a mere accounting trick, as last year's budget didn't account for the next 10 years of deficit spending (since the tax cuts didn't stand up for renewal then) but the this one does. In a given year we're probably talking about a $200-$300 billion increase compared to if these cuts weren't renewed.

So what's to blame for this? A lot of different things. First, claims that the cuts only benefit the wealthy are false. The Child Tax Credit was scheduled to fall to pre-2017 levels (from $2,000 to $1,000) at the end of the year, but this made it permanent. Note that the child tax credit is refundable; if a single child household paid no income tax, it would be eligible to receive a $2,000 check, or even $2,500 from 2025 until 2028. This means it more resembles a welfare program than a tax break in practice.

Likewise, the second and third income tax brackets, which in 2024 ranged from $11,600 to $100,525, will enjoy a cut as well, or at least keep existing levels under the cuts. Tax bracket 6 (out of 7) will not change at all, while tax bracket 5 will only see/retain a 1 percent reduction.

Just as much to blame is the fact that the bill failed to curb spending. Some green energy subsidies under the IRA will start to be phased out in 2028, but this bill did not outright repeal IRA spending, which was scheduled to hike the deficit by nearly as much as this current legislation by 2034.

Medicaid, partially funded by recipients but also in big part a welfare program, will suffer a cut of up to $500 billion (over many years) starting in 2026. While that is a lot of money, it's worth noting that removing 7.6 million Americans from the Medicaid rolls would've saved $625 billion. What this suggests is that "only" 6.3 million or so Americans will lose coverage, out of roughly 71-72 million current beneficiaries. Current barriers for Medicaid enrollment are low, and it seems plausible enough that 1 out of every 11 enrollees could readily live without it. But if these cuts aren't strategically implemented, it could affect large numbers of people who can't.

All in all, this wasn't a good bill. It took a maximalist position on tax cuts, and a relatively minimalist position on spending cuts. Both parties are responsible for this outcome; a one-party American political system where the GOP faced no electoral competition could've seen real austerity measures put into place, while a one-party American political system where Dems faced no electoral competition could've seen sharp tax increases, and either might've sufficed to balance the budget. Instead, our perpetually gridlocked Congress was unwilling to make the truly hard calls, and our march toward mid-century oblivion continues as usual.

I wish Russia a very miserable Victory Day. They embody the naked aggression which they claim to have singlehandedly defeated 80 years ago, and after 3 years of the meat grinder they have no victory to show for their efforts.

You're not ADOL, are you?

I think some context is sorely needed. The woman, Shiloh Hendrix, did indeed hurl the n-word at a black child (who she accused of rummaging through her purse) and then at his father when he confronted her. But it's unclear how many, if any, people donated to her gofundme for this reason.

It's worth noting what happened next: her Social Security Number was doxxed, as were her address and phone number. Hendrix reported that family members of hers were "attacked", which given how leftists treat the perceived crime of merely owning a Tesla may have entailed real violence. There is also an ongoing campaign to see her criminally charged for her speech. In short, while Shiloh Hendrix was definitely an asshole the punishment she received for this has been plainly disproportionate to her offense. I could very well see non-racists donating to her as a protest against the toxic mob justice mentality exemplified in this case.

Friendly reminder that Orthobros are a small internet subculture and not reflective of real world demographic trends.

A moderately conservative American pope who'll most likely be the face of global Catholicism until the early 2040s? Heck yeah.

Yup. And Israel's going to keep bombing Yemen back.

The Trump Administration has announced a ceasefire deal with the Houthis to end the 1 & 1/2 year Red Sea Crisis, which saw the coast of Yemen used as a launchpad for terrorist attacks on maritime shipping. This deal does not apply to Israeli freight, but it is nonetheless a major step toward stabilizing global trade.

Discuss.