My ex-wife. I have never loved anyone as much as I loved her. Unfortunately for me she couldn’t handle my transition and stopped loving me about the time I started to have a modicum of passing privilege. Being cooped up together during lockdown didn’t help either. It’s now been longer since we’ve been apart than we were together, but I still miss her and wish we were still together. But she’s remarried, has some kids, and lives halfway across the country so that door is solidly closed.

Which leads me to believe you singled out the HT because of their brownness or perhaps non-Jeebusness.

I singled them out because it was an obscure source and misinformation is rife on the Internet. If you believe I might be secretly a bigot, you are welcome to check my post history, but I promise you, I am not.

Which are all bullshit in many ways…

100% agree. Not a single source on that list, except maybe the bbc would I trust as a single source, and only then if it were about non-political international stories.

The link I provided says the Hindustan Times has low credibility and their factual reporting is mixed. The post has medium credibility and mixed factual reporting.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t check the others because they were all from more mainstream sources. Especially with breaking news, like this story was yesterday, we should all be giving unfamiliar sources extra scrutiny.

If it makes you feel better though I’ll do the rest of them:

• Hindustan Times: mixed factual reporting, low credibility
• New York Post: mixed factual reporting, medium credibility
• ClickOnDetroit: high factual reporting, high credibility
• Fox 2 Detroit: high factual reporting, high credibility
• NBC News: high factual reporting, high credibility
• CNN: mostly factual reporting, medium credibility
• BBC: high factual reporting, high credibility
• Yahoo News: high factual reporting, high credibility

Fair. Also here is that MSN article.

You probably shouldn’t trust the Hindustan Times, they are not a credible news source

The Hindustan Times probably isn’t a trustworthy source. Especially in this political climate, I’d recommend not believing anything you haven’t seen from multiple sources.

77,302,580 Americans voted for Trump out of a total of 340,865,045 individuals. That makes the total number of Americans who wanted some part of what’s going on strongly enough to take some action is roughly 23%. 75 million Americans voted for Harris and 37 million Americans were registered, but did not vote which is roughly 33%.

Only 55% of the country is registered to vote so it’s really hard to tell what the 45% of Americans who aren’t registered feel politically, but it’s probably safe to assume if they can’t be bothered to vote, they’re probably not down for the civil war remix.

Of the 23% who voted conservative in 2024, not all of them hold far right beliefs. It’s hard to say what fraction of that population would fall on the far right, especially because Trumpism itself holds some far right ideology. Even assuming half of all republican voters are ready and willing to engage in a civil war, that’s only 35 million people or 11% of the population.

They’re really loud online and currently have control of the government, but there really aren’t that many of them. There are far more people who don’t care, centrists, democrats, and leftists.

I can’t find a link, but I saw an article the other day that said /r/assholedesign was going to be one of the first in protest of the move.

Don’t feed the trolls. If you find a bigot willing to have a good faith debate, maybe, but there is no reasoning with cult members. They have to want to change.

Maybe whatever civilization replaces the US will learn from our mistakes and never, under any circumstances allow a single person to have the ability to set any kind of policy. Hopefully they also don’t leave gigantic weapons that can destroy the country all over the legal tapestry and use the honor system to control their usage.

This was years ago, but I was driving around listening to music with my windows down and a couple guys in a van pulled up next to me and asked if I wanted a deal on stereo equipment. Being the naive idiot I was I followed them into a parking lot.

They claimed to be home stereo installers and had accidentally received two premium stereos for a customer order instead of one. They wanted to get rid of the second one for beer money and asked for like $200. They had a magazine that showed the stereo was worth several thousand and I thought I might make a quick buck by reselling it to a pawn shop or online.

I didn’t have $200 but I had overdraft protection so I thought I would pull that money out anyway and pay it back once I had sold the stereo. The guy at the pawnshop was the one who told me I got scammed and I have never felt more embarrassed.

It’s small, but this is definitely a win worth celebrating.

Oh for sure, especially with the ghost and alien abduction stories, but I always got the sense a lot of the callers were either, bored, lonely, crazy, or some combination of those three.

For me it was a call on Coast To Coast AM. I used to be suuuuuuper into all that shit. I was a regular listener to C2C and believed 70% of the crap they shoveled. The 30% I didn’t believe (ghosts and the supernatural) were because I had personally tried astral projecting, recording evps, ghost hunting, etc. and none of it worked for me.

Anyway the call was in the early 2000’s and Art Bell was hosting. The caller claimed to be a scientist working for a secret government lab working on portal tech and had accidentally opened a doorway to another where filled with hostile beings who took control of the facility. When the caller identified themselves as Dr. Gordon Freeman I realized anyone could just say any bullshit and these idiots would believe it.

It took like 10 years to fully flush conspiracy thinking out of my brain and I overcorrected hard by becoming one of those obnoxious skeptics for a while.

Though given the times we live in today I’ve seen a few theories online that have an uncomfortable amount of truth to them and have to admit I have been tempted.

… Republican lawmaker Tony Bacala told his colleagues, “Some of these kids are already lost when they’re two years old.”

How ghoulish and completely divorced from reality must one be to look at a two year old as a criminal?

Probably when they’re tried in the Hague after it’s all over?

“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by his lawyer Marc Toberoff to The Wall Street Journal. “We will make sure that happens.”

I’ll believe that when I see it.

Earlier that summer my father had made me clean a deer that had been shot in the gut and he did some hollywood style child abuse when I barfed about it, so I was pretty numb to the gore. What really bothered me was some of the dialog. I shudder 30 years later when I think about the line, “where we’re going we don’t need eyes to see.”

My stepdad was horrified he’d taken his stepdaughter to see something so graphic and made me and my friends promise not to tell anyone what we saw and to downplay the gore.

I saw Event Horizon on my 13th birthday in theaters with some of my friends.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – Party slogan