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.

My eDP->HDMI converter arrived...and is confusing me! The picture with 'edp dp in' is the converter - note how the denser pins are nearer the triangle on the board - but there's also a triangle on the socket itself at the other end; looking at the other picture, which is the original panel, the connector is in the same orientation - but.... all the interesting stuff matches the cable.

You know how you’re in the middle of a process and you refresh a web page and it loses state?
So that sucks.
With Kitten¹ – when using the new state-maintaining/class-based and event model-based component model – it’s easy to have flowing interfaces that animate between states, etc., that don’t lose state if you refresh the page (or open another tab).
What you can’t do on the Web, however, is restore the state of any cross-origin iframes. (As you have no visibility into th…

Israel launched a daylight attack Saturday on Iran’s capital,
with a cloud of smoke rising from the city’s downtown.
The apparent strike happened near the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the 86-year-old Khamenei had been in his offices at the time.
He hasn’t been seen publicly in days as tensions with the United States have grown.
But the attack comes as the United States has assembled a vast fleet of fighter …

Israel and US launch attack on Iran with tensions high over nuclear talks
The U.S. and Israel have launched a major attack on targets across Iran. U.S. President Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to “take over your government.” That was an extraordinary appeal that suggested the allies could be seeking to end of the country’s theocracy after decades of tensions. The first strikes of the attack Saturday appeared to target the compound home to Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in downtown Tehran. It wasn’t immediately clear if h…

Daring Fireball: The Names They Call Themselves
#USpol

The Names They Call Themselves
*Fascist* and *Nazi* weren’t slurs that were applied to the Italians and Germans by their political or military opponents. That’s what they called themselves. The job won’t be done, this era of madness will not end, until we make *the names Trump’s regime calls themselves* universally acknowledged slurs.

When DHS, USCIS, and DOGE announced the overhaul of the SAVE program,
they explicitly linked the effort to a campaign to combat the “taint” of noncitizen voter fraud,
a long-standing claim tied to the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
By all appearances, the administration is poised to use the SAVE program to prop up these false claims,
and sympathetic local officials may deploy SAVE to concoct evidence.
This move poses serious risks to vo…

DHS, USCIS, DOGE Overhaul Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Database | Homeland Security
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, alongside USCIS and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), announced a comprehensive optimization of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to ensure a single, reliable source for verifying non-citizen status nationwide.

And like.... I get it. I know these folks are terrible. But if you still have any of these people in your life, there is a level of privilege generally associated with that. Everyone who doesn't have the privilege needs you to use it now to help ease the boot on their neck.
Every crack in this system is important, even if it's just one more person who is out.
"When your ready enemy is strong, divide them. When your enemy is weak, attack them."
We're still in that "dividing" phase, and providing a path for folks to leave the cult undermines the power of the cult. The more people who leave, the faster they leave, the faster it unravels. If you hate Trump, and you still can talk to any of his supporters, now is the time to stop gloating and pointing out how stupid they are and to instead give them a way to leave. Most of them don't actually want to be defending a demented pedophile, so please help them stop doing that.

As Shamita Sharmacharja puts it,
“people want to live for ever, but they don’t want to get old”.
With the prospect that one in 10 boys and one in six girls born in the UK today can expect to live past 100,
"The Coming of Age" opens at a time when anxieties over ageing have risen to the fore as the perceived solidity of life stages melt into thin air,
from the perennial adolescence of adults in their 20s unable to move into a home of their own
to the…

The Trump administration is planning to
👉use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations,
according to U.S. Department of Transportation records
and interviews with six agency staffers.
The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,”
agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues.
The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI to…

Government by AI? Trump Administration Plans to Write Regulations Using Artificial Intelligence
The Transportation Department, which oversees the safety of airplanes, cars and pipelines, plans to use Google Gemini to draft new regulations. “We don’t need the perfect rule,” said DOT’s top lawyer. “We want good enough.”