No, that’s what they’re doing. If you’ve ever heard it said of conservatives, “every accusation is a confession,” this is a pretty prime example. It’s a lot easier to convince people to do some gnarly shit if you can pretend that the same gnarly shit is already being done to them.

Like, running a successful grift isn’t about convincing your mark that your dubious proposition is above board. They can pretty much always tell something shady is going on. To con someone successfully you convince them that, yes, something shady is going on, but that shady thing is actually working in their favor. You have to convince them that shadiness is the trick that’s going to let them get one over on everyone else.

Nobody wants to live under a dictatorship. Literally nobody. But if you can trick them into believing they’re already living in one, well then installing your own suddenly gets a lot easier. “Look, you’re already getting grifted. But if you put us in power and let us run our grift, our grift is going to benefit you this time. We promise.”

It won’t, though. It never does.

It might finally give conservatives clear permission to go out and hurt the people they don’t like, though. And that might be enough for a lot of them.

Huh, my money would have been on syphilis-related brain disease.

She’s still probably going to win her primary though. If it were her against a single other Republican she’d be in trouble, but there are five other candidates, none of whom are willing to step aside for the strongest contender, so there’s a good chance Bobert is going to skate through with some shockingly low percentage of the vote.

Most people only know them from that one single that got popular back in the day. They’ve never been a pop band though. They’re actually an anarchist art collective that’s been around since the early '80s. The podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff did two episodes on them. It’s worth a listen. They’re much cooler than you think they are.

Same for me too. Reddit, for all its other faults, is still just about the only place you can still get candid opinions on products in a place where it’s discussed by a large group with a deep knowledge base. Especially with niche things like fountain pens, goodyear-welted boots, and stuff like that.

Not sure how long that’s going to last though. The search engines are already hip to that trick, and even in just the last few months I’ve noticed a change in how many Reddit links I get vs product links when I add Reddit to my search query. Reddit is hip to it too, and with recently becoming a publicly traded corporation they’re probably going to wring every last cent out of that until every post mentioning a product is a bot-infested sewage fire like everything else.

Not necessarily. With most newer pistols being designed to be drop safe, modern hard-sided Kydex retention holsters have taken over most of the function that you used to need a manual safety for.

Safeties aren’t there to prevent the person holding the gun from pulling the trigger, and they’re not meant to compensate for unsafe handling of the gun. They’re mostly there to keep the gun from firing while you’re carrying it, or if it gets dropped. Imagine a soldier walking through some dense brush, or hitting the ground while diving for cover with a pistol in a leather or nylon holster on their hip. If you bump into the wrong stray branch, or land on the wrong rock, it could poke the holster hard enough to pull the trigger through the side of the holster. So you need something that physically prevents the trigger from being pulled.

Glocks, and other brands of similarly designed pistols have several internal safeties that make it drop-safe, and which block the firing pin from moving forward unless the trigger is pulled all the way. It’s next to impossible for a Glock to go off unless the trigger is pulled. Then with a modern hard-sided retention holster protecting the trigger, you can carry with a round in the chamber and not have to worry about the gun going off. It makes a traditional manual safety a little redundant, and some companies just don’t bother with it anymore. On a lot of hammer-fired pistols it’s been replaced by a de-cocker.

The thing manual safeties are still nice to have for is re-holstering your gun while the holster is on your body. You don’t have to worry about loose clothing getting caught in the trigger guard as much. You should still be careful doing it, but it’s nice to have that extra layer of safety. But then, if you’re walking around with a gun it really should never come out of its holster except for a life-or-death situation.

I do actually know the difference between a Glock and a S&W. The video I saw was light on pixels, and the way it was edited the gun was in motion for most of it. I could tell it was a striker-fired pistol, but it was hard to make out exactly which one, and I’m at work and didn’t want to Google up a higher quality video of a guy shooting himself in the head. It looked enough like a Glock, and it’s usually a Glock in these types of videos so I just kind of guessed. Apparently I got it wrong.

Did he just fucking think the safety was on?

That looks like a Glock, and Glocks don’t have a manual safety. A lot of modern pistols don’t have them anymore. Not that having one would have helped this guy. With gun handling this reckless it was only a matter of time before something bad happened.

I’m not sure if they’re still around, but PostSecret and the Internet K-Hole were sites you could spend hours on.

I don’t know anything about the Drake/Kendrick thing, but the term nymph probably became associated with pedophilia because of the novel Lolita. It’s one of the creepy endearments the main character comes up with while he is obsessing over the child he’s going to rape later in the story.

Yeah, for people with hemochromatosis (too much iron in the blood) the main treatment is still bloodletting.

And if you eat that, and then eat the right kind of flower… Holy crap, my dude, shit gets wild.

The privilege is being able to choose to eat that way out of a sense of morality or fashion rather for the reason that it’s literally all there is to eat. The privilege is being able to turn your nose up at perfectly edible food for no other reason than that it’s got a bit of egg, honey, or butter in it without having to worry about starving to death. The privilege is also having access to such an abundance and variety of food that you can maintain a vegan diet year round and not have to fear that you won’t meet all the calorie, protein, and vitamin requirements you need to stay alive and healthy while much of the world is in a constant struggle to scrape together enough calories of any kind to stay alive.

It is perpetually disappointing the extent to which so many people who claim to be Christians fail to understand even the CliffsNotes version of the Gospel.

Jesus’ arrest was probably bound to happen sooner or later though. As noted Biblical scholar Andrew Zaltzman has often pointed out, Pontius Pilate was a law and order administrator, and Jesus was absolutely guilty under the law at the time.

It must be amazing to have that much money and influence.

Coincidentally the podcast I’m listening to as I type this is talking about a man sitting on death row who was convicted solely on the testimony of one “bite mark analyst” who was later shown to be an absolute fraud in a field that is already highly dubious at best. The appeals court in his case feels that just because the “expert” was wrong in all his other cases doesn’t necessarily mean he was wrong in his. So that’s cool.

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Yes. The police. That famously liberal group of bleeding heart lefties.

And just like that there’s a plausible scenario where The Undertaker comes out of nowhere and saves Democracy by choke-slamming them both through a podium.

I don’t think he’s an out-and-out white supremacist, but one of the weirdest heel-turns ever was seeing actual Latino immigrant Tom Araya go from being the face of the evilest thrash metal band in the world to an outspoken evangelical Catholic MAGA-pilled Trump supporter.

Crash Worship. They did sort of tribal industrial experimental music from the mid-80s through (I think) the mid-00s. I don’t know if they came out of the OG Burning Man crowd, but they very much had the Burning Man vibe from back when the Burning Man experience still included shooting guns. I saw them play a NYE show at a 1920s-era movie house turned music venue called the Aztlan, and it was bonkers.

The show started with a massive floor-to-ceiling fireball, and kind of escalated from there. There were a lot of drummers and fire performers moving through the crowd flanked by a phalanx of nubile people in various states of undress carrying alcohol whose mission seemed to be to get as many people as possible as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. At one point I was so soaked with kerosene and alcohol that I was genuinely worried about lighting my own cigarette. Fortunately I was shortly put at ease about it when I got hit with a stray firework and didn’t burst into flame.

It was a pretty intense experience. It’s not surprising that Crash Worship has been banned from just about every venue they’ve ever played (and I think maybe some entire cities as well). There’s no way the owners of the Aztlan knew what they were signing up for when they made this booking. I’m glad I got to be there to see it though.