Tootfinder

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

This is exactly the thing I wonder about. Was it shoved through over internal objections? Was it many teams’ separate good work stuck together too hastily? Was it the wrong kind of pressure from above, or bad taste from below, or what?
It’s frustrating because as a dev I catch glimpses of all the really fantastic engineering work folks at Apple are doing •inside• the box, and they’re feeling very little love for it right now because the •outside•is so clunky.
https://sfba.social/@scm/116296203532915798

Sources: Bengaluru-based quick grocery delivery startup Zepto confidentially files for a ~$1.3B India IPO; Zepto raised $450M at a $7B valuation in October 2025 (Pranav Mukul/The Economic Times)
https://economi…

Zepto makes confidential filing with Sebi for $1.3 billion IPO: sources
The listing is planned for the July-September quarter of 2026. In October, the quick commerce major had closed a $450 million round, valuing it at $7 billion. As of late November, Zepto had around Rs 7,000 crore in cash, while competitors Eternal and Swiggy each have around Rs 17,000-18,000 crore on their books currently.

Trying to geocode some of my old holiday pictures with #immich
Pages and pages of log messages like this:
"LOG [Microservices:MapRepository] Empty response from database for city reverse geocoding lat: 64.978553, lon: -21.063319. Likely cause: no nearby large populated place (500 within 25km). Falling back to country boundaries."
Clearly, the queue has reached my picture…

NASA is taking steps to potentially roll back the #ArtemisII rocket and Orion spacecraft to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida after overnight Feb. 21 observing interrupted flow of helium to the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket’s interim cryogenic propulsion stage: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/02/21/nasa-troubleshooting-artemis-ii-rocket-upper-stage-issue-preparing-to-roll-back/ - the upper stage uses helium to maintain the proper environmental conditions for the stage’s engine and to pressurize liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant tanks; the systems worked during NASA’s Artemis II wet dress rehearsals, but teams were not able to properly flow helium during normal operations and reconfigurations following the wet dress rehearsal that concluded Feb. 19.

Following federal cuts to history-focused organizations, the president of the Canadian Historical Association, Colin Coates, sent this letter to Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.
One thing might not be obvious: Coates's reference to Carney's recent Quebec City speech suggests Canadians' need for historical context right now. He doesn't agree with Carney's claims. In fact, most Canadian historians would dispute them.

I'm in an unhappy place with my reading these days. 😟📚
I feel impatient with many books and end up abandoning them.
At times like this I often reread what I think of as my "core authors", their voices familiar and well-loved.
About a decade ago I realised that I basically only need 7 particular albums, and two authors (complete works of), the rest are nice for a fling, but not strictly necessary.
Are other people like this too?

The thing that Renee Good now knows, that Tortuguita knows, that Heather Heyer knows, that I only know because I glimpsed for a second, is that when you die fighting oppression you live forever in that memory of resistance. When we carve their names into a monument, along with all the other names of the murdered and disappeared, that will stand, perhaps, across from the statue of Willem in the park where the Northwest Detention Center once stood, they will always be reminders of what it looks like to sacrifice everything in order to be on the right side of history.
The names of those who resist live as ghosts, summoned by name to haunt future oppressors, summoned by name to awaken our own conscience to the call. Martyrs, whispered like the White Rose or yelled as a threat like John Brown, cannot die so long as any of us with a bit of spine carries even an ounce of humanity.
It is possible to die knowing you did the right thing, and I have felt it. There is an acceptance that is impossible to imagine without being there, without feeling it for yourself. You have nothing to fear in resisting, even if it ends you. But you will never forget the shame of doing nothing if you fail to.