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.

Just rewatched Jurassic Park (33 years old now!) and it totally holds up.
There's maybe some obvious CGI in a few scenes but it's all so well constructed and comes together so amazingly that it honestly didn't distract at all.
Definitely in the top 5 most perfectly executed movies for me.

So Israel decided to strike Tehran, in a limited way until now, curious if it was coordinated with the US. Also it is not an all-out attack, so what were the targets and goals? 🤔
Update: it is together with the US, first Israeli strikes were just optics and it looks like an all out attack.
#israel #iran

Not off to a great start this year: wasted 300g of filament and 9 hours of print time because the designer of a model created two different versions with a 5 mm difference in size and just put all the files in one folder without clearly labeling them. And since I had to print them in batches and didn't realize the slight size difference I now have a bunch of parts that do not fit together and I'm out of that particular filament (which is apparently also no longer produced). 😒

Is MAGA a cult?
Ok, so here's something I don't talk about much. My high school girlfriend, who I married at 18, was a member of the LDS church. She got me involved in it because that was the only way that we could be together. I've been out for years now, but the experience set my life and my maturity back by a lot.
One of my favorite television moments of all time is when Stan asks his Mormon friend incredulously, "You mean you people know this story and you ST…

This is what BBC news articles look like nowadays: Every single sentence is its own paragraph, and I absolute cannot stand this “style” at all. I suspect the editors only care about making articles look nice in the mobile app.
IMHO, paragraphs are specifically meant to intuitively communicate which sentences belong together because of content/meaning. Just separating any sentences is what full stops do. If actually no two consecutive sentences belong together, the article is just incoh…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #CraigCharles
The Farm:
🎵 All Together Now
#TheFarm
https://retrovese.bandcamp.com/track/the-farm-all-together-now-remix-intro-112-bpm-2
https://open.spotify.com/track/3FMwO7SOz9VTn9ii3Zkk0j

“How many people does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
The answer – in SAPN’s case study – is an electrician, a plumber and software techs, who now all need to work together to ensure the home management system can control the proverbial lights.”
https://

"It is also that these are not all working-class struggles around which a global proletariat could possibly be cobbled together. The class composition of the mass protests in Iran (now), Ukraine (in 2013-14), or Venezuela (since 2013) clearly don’t flow from the manuals of marxist revolutionaries. I’ve argued elsewhere that the world is undergoing a “class reconfiguration” in which ecological struggles and climate vulnerability will be playing a newly unifying role."

Now the reality is that all speech has that affiliation-building aspect and the argument-building aspect, but the scale of each varies a _lot_.
This thread itself is doing both! I'm making some concrete persuasive points here, but I'm also setting up an affiliation here. I want more people to join this "thinking well about the world" club and conversation. I want us to end up collectively in a better place than we're at. We gotta band together to do that. But also that means we need to communicate like we're in public and talking to people who don't all agree, and some of whom are hostile, and some of whom are real boneheads for various reasons.

While I'm not much for the law, I recognize that not everyone I talk to thinks the same way. But even if you are like me, the enormity of the list of Trump's crimes is just staggering. There really couldn't be any more clear of an illustration of the fact that there are two legal systems: one for the elite, and one for everyone else.
We all know #Trump just does crimes all the time, but it can be hard to track the enormity of it. The YouTube lawyer LegalEagle put together a list and it's pretty incredible. It's a little over 40 minutes of him rapidly listing times that Trump has violated the law during his second term (completely ignoring his first term).
#MassBlackout is a #Boycott of the American corporations that support the dictatorship. By showing
that people have the power to shut down the economy if elites don't listen, we can hit them where it actually hurts.
From now until December 2nd, do as many of these things as you can:
- Stop online or in-store shopping (except for small businesses)
- Stop work
- Stop streaming, cancel subscriptions, no digital purchases
This is one of the few times that boosting stuff on social media and doing nothing else actually *can* make a difference. Boost posts tagged with #WeAintBuyingIt, #MassBlackout, and #BlackOutTheSystem. Make sure everyone you know knows about it. Hold each other accountable to keep from spending. You may already not be spending because.... well,.. Trump has already made everything too expensive. The thing is that elites can't actually tell the difference. Spreading word, making the protest seem as big and impactful as possible is all that's really needed to fracture elites and turn them against each other. Boost, write your own post, make these tags trend on every platform you can, then do nothing.
Don't buy things, (if you can) don't work. Just stop. Refuse to participate in capitalism. This is the ultimate "fuck you, make me" because they absolutely can't make you. This is the ultimate reminder of where power actually comes from.
I've been trying to remind everyone, every day. Please do the same. Keep this opportunity at the top of everyone's mind. Keep it in your mind.
Trump is more vulnerable now than he's ever been, and there is no time in the next year that we have more power than right now. This is one of the most important parts of the year for the US economy. What you do, or don't do, right now has more of an impact than any other time.
#USPol #BlackFriday #CyberMonday

I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of ghoulish dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and *definitely* multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.

"...the scams perpetrated during the Corbyn period by Labour Together, CCDH and its sock-puppet ‘Stop Funding Fake News’ (SFFN) to topple Corbyn and install Starmer in his stead, have led directly to the burgeoning police state Starmer is building against the people of this country, their rights and their freedoms, all to protect Israel and its interests."
Starmer's attempt to destroy Corbyn reaches US

Starmer's Corbyn smear accusations FINALLY go global with US coverage
Starmer's attempt to bring down Corbyn was notably investigated in The Fraud - which is now making its way over to American audiences

Shit people, idioms only work if we all agree on the definitions!
After nearly 200 years of "Out-Of-Pocket" meaning "Paid for it yourself", some ignorant bonehead mashed "Out of office" together with it, and now all of corporate America says "Out-of-pocket" when they mean "unavailable".
Culturally it important? No, of course not. Am I irrationally furious every time I spend time during a meeting looking like an idiot because I h…

The BBC running damage control on its own broadcast is wild to witness. The most egregious part of the affair to me is that no one from BAFTA or the BBC even bothered to apologize to Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo when they got off the stage, let alone tell *them* what was going to be done about it. There was no effort to bring the three people involved together for resolution at the time of the incident, nothing.
But the other part of this that just grates on me with every article is the BBC trying to defend itself by saying “that another racial slur had been edited out of the broadcast.”
#BBC #BAFTA #Racism #FreePalestine #Israel #Gaza #Palestine #misinformation #disinformation #complicity
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165835

RE: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/116064657955859408
I love the sentiment, but this is actually exactly what law enforcement has always been. It's always been political, always racist, always arbitrary, always genocidal.
ICE is just what happens when they think they can get away with it. The other abuses require a lot more investigation. Abolishing ICE is a good first step.
For all folks who have just now become enraged with the brutality of law enforcement agencies like ICE: I hope we can walk together, and learn from each other, until our ways part... But I do hope you'll walk a little farther with me after we achieve our shared goals.