One of the cornerstones of the religion they profess to follow is that followers will be beset by false prophets who try to lead the faithful into wickedness. It’s the origin of the idiom “wolf in sheep’s clothing”. Followers of Jesus are then advised that they’ll be able to tell who’s who the same way you can tell that rotten fruit means a fig tree is blighted: you will know them by their fruits. In other words, if you listen to the warning and take even the slightest notice of what Jesus tells you is the right way to live, you won’t be led astray by people who pretend to be spiritual authorities but preach things Jesus said are bad things for any human to do, such as proclaming their own righteousness, claiming to be more Godly than you, and openly seeking riches and power. Whether you believe in Christianity or not, what it comes down to is that these people are “following God” in a way they are, word for word, told not to. By God.

It’s like if you tried to start up a Anarcho-Capitalist club and then immediately set up a hierarchical power structure and began extracting dues from the members to fund a project that disproportionately benefits the poorer members. It’s like if you taught a class on healthy eating and then began extolling the benefits of swallowing batteries.

That’s just a plus for his base.

Spoiler: that conversation will just be them looking around to see if anyone else is listening followed by asking each other how many people they’ve tried to discourage from voting.

“Seethe mother fucker” coming from a guy who talks at you like an anime villain and accidentally contradicts his own point about the U.S. legislative process. Take a break bro.

The president isn’t a king dipshit, he straight up doesn’t have the power to do whatever he wants, by design.

I want to check your band out, where’s your stuff at?

Wallander is a really good Swedish crime show, if you like being depressed.

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Was this article written by a LLM? It looks like it wasn’t even edited, as evidenced by several pictures in a row separated only by the word “snip”.

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It’s significant because it’s a choice, the normal number is zero

What’s more, DVD-RW drives for a desktop PC can be had for under $10 and USB-powered ones aren’t much more. If anyone out there in TV land still relies on DVDs, you should get yourself a drive and rip your local library’s DVDs to your computer. Handbrake is your friend and you can get a DVD down to a video stream with a much smaller file size than the disc image, but you can also still get blank DVDs at any major retailer and make your own copies with all the menus and special features. DVD still works, but it’s 30-year-old technology and paying other people to watch the movies on that format is getting ridiculous, you owe it to yourself to keep DVD expenses to the drive and blank discs from here on out.

Disclaimer for the people who will whine about it: Yes, this copyright infringement. Don’t snitch on yourself and you’ll be fine. I personally recommend and fully endorse violation of copyright law in this way. I advocate that you commit this criminal activity in full knowledge that this makes me an accessory to crime, and I advocate that you commit this crime and others. I do so with the full approval of the MPA and RIAA, whom I unequivocally represent and speak for in absolutely all matters, and they assume all civil and criminal liability for everything I just said.

As business barons are fond of saying, verbal agreements are only worth the paper they’re printed on.

Would 2 and 2 make 4?

My people have a saying about that. When the white field mouse gathers his store of seeds, the blind wolf howls at a new moon. Akuchimoya.

This feels like a Chakotay story

Part of it, I’m sure, is the natural human tendency to think emotionally and allow Perfection to become the enemy of Better when you get worked up. Some people go so far into this that they actively sabotage the exact thing they want, because they’d rather not have it at all if it can’t be done their way.

But really, I think what it comes down to is that the idea of poor people (or worse, poor non-white people) getting ahead and having a good quality of life sickens them. More people than say so out loud have an emotional attachment to the existence of the wage-enslaved underclass of Little People, people who do things for you but don’t matter, people you’re better than. They might want gun violence to stop, but on no account do they want people from projects and trailer parks to look them straight in the eye and say “we’re equals”. Even poor people fall into this, any current or former poor person you ask can tell you all about the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality.

Consider this: if people didn’t have to worry about paying a red cent to check on their weird heartbeat or get that cough checked on; if they weren’t afraid for their homes or families if they lost their job; if they weren’t scared of not being able to pay for their bipolar meds or their insulin; then other people would have a shitload less domination and control over them. In short, the kind of person who ascends to a position of party policymaking would lose one of the only things their broken brains are capable of taking pleasure in. The only things they’d have left are abusing their children and murdering sex workers, and while those are popular pastimes for political leaders of all stripes, they’re increasingly risky to get away with. It’s going to be a long uphill battle to remove the artifical sources of despair in our country, and I believe they’ll do quite a bit to try and keep those sources flowing. I also suspect that some of the purportedly benevolent advocates of gun control are really just motivated by fear: deep down, they think “if you had any sense, you would kill us for what we’re doing to you”. As much as I hate to spew the rhetoric of communists, capitalists (as in the ones with real capital, not normal people who believe in private property and entrepreneurship) should be viewed with perpetual suspicion in every circumstance, trusted only as far as they can be thrown, and the ones who call for gun control are just wolves calling for sheepdog control.

The gun control debate is the best thing to happen to the Republican Party since the election of Lincoln. It has singlehandedly ensured that the Democratic Party will never achieve practical dominance, funneling literally millions of single-issue voters into the GOP’s arms. If American progressives were capable of seeing farther than the ends of their own noses, they would push to drop it from the Democratic platform. Two reasons for that:

1. We’ll rid our society of guns the same day we go back to the way things were before AI. In other words, when we find out how to put things back inside Pandora’s box: it’s never going to happen. Besides, the brief window in time where it was possible ended the very instant it became possible to manufacture guns at home on a prosumer-grade CNC machine and a 3D printer. You can’t un-fuck that goat.

2. People who have universal medical/vision/dental/mental health care, a social safety net, and a job that pays a fair wage generally don’t care anywhere near as much about shooting people as desperate/poor/sick people do. It’s idiotic to treat a sickness by ignoring the disease and treating the symptoms, it’s like clearing your basement of black mold by putting a coat of paint over it. There’s no way in hell I’ll support disarming the working class, and certainly not when they’re getting constantly fucked the way they are now.