It’s clear that Trump’s choice of Paula White is contentious. And I agree. She’s not fit for the office. Not because she’s a woman, I could not care less about that. Not because she’s pompous and tawdry, either, although she absolutely is. No, the problem is that she is not a unifier. That’s what you need, in a Faith Office. Of course… Of course, the problem is, you’re never going to pick a Christian spiritual leader who unifies. You’re going to piss off the atheists, of course, and obviously the Muslims and probably the Jews too, but those are all little groups. Individually, they aren’t a problem. No, the problem is you’re also going to piss off some random collection of other Christians, too. You can’t win. Christians are united against outsiders, but if left to their own devices, they devolve into sectarian infighting. Hell, they can’t even all agree on which ones of them actually count as Christian. As an outsider, I have no clue what toes I’m going to step on sometimes when I accidentally call a Mormon a Christian to the wrong person, for example. Clearly, there is no good solution from within the faiths of Abraham. So, being the generous sort that I am, I’m going to offer myself as a sacrificial goat. I’m announcing myself as a volunteer to head up the Faith Office. My qualification? I’m a heathen. Everyone in MAGA hates us already. We’re either dismissed as silly LARPers or hell-bound Satanists, depending on who you ask. But it gets better! The left hates us, too. Unlike Wiccans and most other pagan groups, that are all nicely diverse and line-toe-ing, we heathens are persona non grata on the left. They dismiss us as neo-Nazis. We were getting dismissed as neo-Nazis before MAGA was a gleam in Emperor Trump’s eye. It’s perfect. We will be united in hate. Everyone will be united in hating the smallest of minorities, and we’re used to that anyway, and really don’t give a shit. So. I’m tossing my runes in the circle for Faith Office! MAHA! Make America Heathen Again! As a bonus, the rune ᚻ, which corresponds to H, has connotations of change and disruption. Very fitting, I think.

@dvader518 @GPrime85 You're free to go over there. I understand they're having problems with pedophiles and zoophiles, but hey, you say it's a better place.

@dvader518 @GPrime85

@cboyack @elonmusk In 14 years of using this platform I've never gotten porn pushed into my feed. I don't know what to tell you, my understanding is the algorithm works in part off the people you follow.

I'll let you off for your ignorance because you're basically still a child at 22. This time. It was not "founded by gay people". There were gay people there. But we didn't found it. Not by a long shot. It grew organically out of sci-fi and fantasy fandoms in the 70s and early 80s. Sci-fi and fantasy fandoms were typically more inclusive of gay folks than the wider population at the time, absolutely, which accounts for their being a fair number of openly gay furries from the beginning, but founded it? Hell no.

I don't agree. It seems logical, don't get me wrong. That would have been my thinking at one time. But my overall faith in humanity isn't what it once was. A little bit of token honesty is the sugar coating on the bitter pill of deception. You tell people you're being transparent, and you show them a nice set of numbers, and most people will, if not actually believe it, at least be content with it. They believe they've done their due diligence by examining numbers that, upon even a minute's reflection, anyone of middling intelligence would realize are far too simplistic to convey any meaningful information. I'm not even being too critical, despite my earlier bleak appraisal of my faith in humanity... It's information overload. Even a smart person would drown in the sea of data available to them. It's too much. It's asking one person to explore the ocean, when maybe they aren't even a particularly good swimmer. So instead, they look at the ocean, and... Yup, that's an ocean. There's probably stuff under there, but they're sure it's all fine. And that's all the thought 99.9% of people ever give the ocean.

The left was (and still is) incredibly censorious. The difference is that they don't... usually... go in for outright banning things, like books, per se. Very rarely in those exact words. Deplatforming. Debanking. Pushing to get their developers in charge of media projects and large publishers so that all of them conform to a message, pushing out directors and writers that don't acquiesce. Public shaming to silence dissent and crush wrongthink. Hell, their whole new Twitter replacement - and remember what Twitter was like, a few years ago, by the by? - was basically founded as a way to be able to curate their own social media network to silence, shut out, and block people who espoused the wrong ideas. The left leans slightly more to the velvet glove than the iron fist, when it comes to control. The right slightly leans more towards the iron fist, traditionally. But there's no less will to control there.

@dvader518 @GPrime85 Oh the fucking hell they didn't.

@luvkit @GPrime85 Oh, but they are trying...

@RealBurgerGod @GPrime85 Fine, I choose my beliefs.

@NetCat144 @GPrime85 Ironically one of the champions of the new wave doesn't believe the Satanic Panic really happened.

@DonnieLH14 @NetCat144 @GPrime85 Whatever limited truth may have been hidden behind the lies, egotism, misread scripture, media whoring, scapegoating, and general malfeasance of the Satanic Panic was, I assure you, at best a happy coincidence.

@sinfected13 @GPrime85 I'm going to tattoo an ASCII penis on my dick just to make it a thing. ... no, actually, I'm not. That sounds very painful.

I've only seen it when someone directly linked to it, usually in order to prove porn exists here. I've never once had it just pop up in my feed. I can only conclude that the people calling for bans of porn are hypocrites who have looked at so much porn their feed is flooded with it.

It's absolutely the best. It is a very slow game, compared to the others. It's not an action RPG at all. And yeah, the graphics haven't aged great in places. But it's still a wonderful game. Wonderful characters. And a world that didn't look like it was taken out of a Korean MMO.

@VampiricThe @LinkofSunshine I do, in fact. Local politics, not federal, but I'm glad for that - it's hard enough to keep track of on the local level. But it's hardly necessary. Anyone who pays attention would know it. It's the worst sort of secret - one that works because almost nobody cares enough.

@VampiricThe @LinkofSunshine It's funny how kids these days think "please dox yourself" is a a counter-argument. Please refute my point. I'll wait.

@LostHistory9 How about Vingilot? But the two trees could be good, too. Depending on how you do them and where you put them.

>Hm, that argument sounds too much like: It's too complicated so why bother? Not exactly, but there's some truth there. >Yes, my home budget may obfuscate I spent $50 on candy by categorizing it as Groceries but it's a starting point. Why is the grocery bill $350 now instead of $300. Hm? But you know your household expenses. You know what groceries cost. You are able to comprehend all of the components involved in your household budget. Not perfectly, of course. You can't know where every penny goes, since that comes down to what the thousands of companies that are involved in your life do, but at least you have a good starting point. That's not true with a government budget. You don't know what a budget should look like to begin with. You have no way of knowing if 200 billion for this or 90 million for that are reasonable, or what it means. It's basically an Out of Context problem. >Why can't it be a starting point? Because people are stupid, to be blunt. As a population, I mean. That's why I used the wording I did... That it just becomes another form of obfuscation. You give them a little taste of truth to mask the lies. It's like selling plated jewelry and glass gems to idiots. It works a depressing amount of the time, because a large percentage of people don't think critically about what they see. Which you might think, "Well, at least it's no worse than not knowing, right?" Well, no, actually. Because then they aren't curious anymore. I know, it's a real catch 22. You need people to be curious, but sating their curiosity turns out to be too easy. Worse, then they are weaponized against the truth. Or perhaps a better word is immunized. They've seen the truth, as far as they're concerned, and will resist "wasting time" on it, and argue against attempts to further pierce the veil, because they're more comfortable believing the first "truth" than learning they've been misled.

@RantNinja @LinkofSunshine And I'm saying an overview is so meaningless and easily manipulated as to just be another form of obfuscation.

>This seems like an exaggeration. Broad categories can be derived. e.g. Foreign/domestic, military/civilian, etc. Not really. I mean, sure, you can do it, but they're pretty much meaningless because they encompass so much, there's no real oversight as to what programs get shoved under what categories, and there's no real oversight on the individual components anyway. You know, to be sure that even if you approve of, say, 9 million dollars being spent on public utilities in Uganda, which for some reason got filed under "Defense Budget" for this or that perfectly legitimate reason, totally not just to obfuscate it, that those 9 million dollars actually are being spent on public utilities in Uganda. Or that you know what a "Public Utility" as they define it is. >Even just the name of the agency can help people understand where the bulk of the money gets spent. We don't even know how many agencies there are. Much less what they are all called, and that's not even getting close to finding out what those agencies that we may not even know exist do. I mean, just look at the USAID nightmare. We still don't know everything USAID actually does or spends money on. And theoretically everyone should have known it existed, it wasn't a secret.