I suggest we all start revering Ahura Mazda.

Ahhh, but if you read the article, this is different. This redefines it to “if you PERCEIVE there to be a threat of death or injury” - meaning that any suburban cowboy can just blast the bear wandering through their backyard and not hurting anyone because “well I figured it would hurt my kids if it came towards the house”. Kinda like how Wyoming relaxed hunting laws to allow farmers to kill pretty much whatever wolves they came across.

Honestly, same here. I despise what they enabled, and continue to enable. I also despise that they’re facing homelessness and serious healthcare issues because nobody should have to face that, regardless of how repugnant I might find their beliefs and actions. I honestly hope that they manage to get out from under this and continue to live long, healthy, and happy lives, because I believe that everyone SHOULD have these things.

I’ll be the one to point out that TMI is exactly what you want to happen in a “nuclear disaster”. Nobody got seriously hurt that we know of, the problem was found and dealt with quickly once identified, and we’ve implemented TONS of extra safeties to make sure that can’t happen again without massive alarms and Serious Lights. Could it have not happened at all? Absolutely. But in a disaster, it’s the perfect “disaster” - nobody died, nobody got seriously injured directly, the plant got screwed up, and $2b to clean up ANY disaster site is honestly pretty damn cheap when we’re talking radioactive heavy metal remediation.

So, Fukushima was a story of incompetence and bribery, not under-engineering. It was perfectly safe when built. In the 30 years after that, the owners bribed investigators again and again to cover up deficiencies that were known.

I’m not sure what the nuclear plant being occupied by Russians who forced the entire safety team out at gunpoint has to do with the plant not being safe. The team was willing, by their own words, to keep working even with the Russians occupying the plant, even just keeping a minimum skeleton crew there to safely shut down the plant if necessary. That was shot down, almost literally - and Ukraine has been VERY careful about shelling that plant for political and infrastructure reasons even though enemy combatants are using it as a shelter to launch their own artillery strikes from.

I’ll bet you anything it’s taxes.

But that’s the thing. The Dems want to campaign like they have for the past century, going out and making sensible campaign stops every so often. Obama was trying to change this, and honestly had the right of it - you blast your message everywhere, all at once, KEEP REPEATING IT, and shorten the general gist until it can fit in a meme.

As Behind the Bastards pointed out recently in their Kent Hovind episode, the IRS doesn’t give a shit about what illegal or immoral activity you commit, they literally just want you to pay taxes on it.

Remember the times they effectively blockaded highways with their ad hoc motorcades, and they kept getting into wrecks there too?

It’s not creditors - lawyers from his supplement company were attempting to get a bankruptcy judge to shut down InfoWars’ parent company. I don’t fully disagree with a lot of assessments saying this is pretty clearly Jones trying to manufacture a crisis to drum up cash (probably to pay the giant settlement he owes in CT). On the other hand, the judge handling his bankruptcy case is expected to make a decision on whether or not Free Speech Systems will continue operating by the end of next week, so Dan and Jordan may have to find someone else to style on for their podcast.

And that’s my bright spot.

You would be VERY surprised - bigots are usually very willing to shoot themselves in the foot. I mentioned going to my city’s Pride parade once to a prospective landlord I was touring an apartment with, and they all but told me outright “I won’t rent to you”. I’ve also seen this happen with friends buying cars - a buddy asked me to go kick tires with him when he was looking for a new car, and since I’m white and he isn’t, the salesman that came out to talk with us IMMEDIATELY assumed I was the one buying the car.

I also used to work commission-based sales myself as a cellphone salesperson. One common complaint I had from a lot of my Black and Hispanic clientele was that the anchor store sales staff (who were closer to them and better-stocked) would almost always assume they wanted to see the worst, shittiest phones (this was back right as the iPhone 5 was coming out), even if they had walked in ready to drop several thousand dollars on new Apple phones (which got us a commission of about $100 per device). These people would drive 20-30 minutes past THAT store to come to my store (the next closest) just so they didn’t have to deal with those salespeople.

Ehh, populism isn’t limited to politics, at least not tactics-wise. Lots of televangelists and the like use the same sort of tactics - boil down everything wrong in your life to a single, easily-solvable datapoint that YOU can take action on.

At the same time, I think it’s important to recognize that not all Trump voters are “stupid” or “ignorant”. While those exist, cults can - and HAVE - suckered in people with high-paying jobs, with degrees and education and accolades. Trump’s cult of personality is no different - a LOT of Trump voters aren’t stupid or ignorant or anything, they might vote for him for dozens of reasons, from “well I’m a shitty racist as well” to “well he wears the trappings of success” to “he sounds confident”, and it’s important to recognize that anyone can fall victim to a cult like that through the sheer momentum of peer pressure. Jonestown was full of people who were desperately seeking a better world, and a lot of them were fairly well-educated engineers and doctors and lawyers and the like. Aum Shinrikyo was FULL of PhDs and MDs. Trump has lost a lot of the more well-informed and well-educated people in his camp, but characterizing his entire voter base as “dumb hicks waiting to be conned” is unhelpful at best and harmful at worst.

Offsides/Five Dollar Footlong Jesus just isn’t the same.

Not in all areas.

You forgot the parts where he drove an APC through the wrong guy’s house, and also the part about the sex slave that escaped from his house.

Also, social consequences are IMPORTANT for fighting fascism. Making them feel unwelcome at every table, every party, every workplace, EVERYWHERE is a time-tested and actually fairly effective way to fight the spread of fascist thought. It won’t get rid of the most entrenched, the true believers - but it can help the knock-on effect of “hey maybe that guy has a real point”.

They either speed-dial the police, OR they simply just come out and shoot at whoever they feel is “invading”. My friend had a whole list of areas he wouldn’t deliver when he was running Instacart stuff because he’d gotten shot at or threatened by neighbors (or sometimes the people who actually ordered things).

Nah, this has been a thing for a WHILE. My great grandma had cookbooks from the 1910s with recipes for cicadas.

Reconnaissance aircraft? C’mon man, get your head in the game. Combat aircraft are sexy. Give me a Mirage any day.

Historically, large-scale withdrawals of drugs from markets ONLY occur, and large-scale marketing ONLY is barred when the side effects are deemed dangerous enough to not risk at any significant percentage. If you look through the list of withdrawn drugs throughout the world, almost all of them are withdrawn for either abuse reasons, or significant side effects like organ toxicity, serious risk of overdose even inside prescriber control, carcinogenicity, or neurological reactions (like some fungicides/bactericides causing blindness/deafness even when used properly).

SOME of these have been returned to market (like thalidomide) under very strict guidelines, used for very strict reasons (thalidomide is used for leprosy and multiple myeloma treatment now in certain situations, in combination with certain drugs to help reduce teratogenicity). Others, which were formerly seen as helpful, have been removed from markets because of newly-found dangers involving them (like Zantac, which was found to spontaneously break down into a carcinogenic compound).