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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I’m no expert, but I think you’re mixing up jail and prison. Prison would require a judge, jury and trial. But a cop can unilaterally throw someone in jail temporarily until their first court appearance.

    From the article:

    They [the sherif and a deputy] told Patterson to turn around and put her hands behind her back. As three of her kids watched, Patterson was handcuffed. The sheriff took her purse and phone, put her in the cruiser, and hauled her off to jail.


  • More than anything else I’ve heard, this Trump action scares me the most.

    Military generals recognize the president as commander in chief. They’re generally going to follow the chain of command in situations where the US is attacking a strategic target, regardless of the ‘ethics’ of the situation.

    If Trump wants to level the Gaza Strip or the West Bank or even parts of the Ukraine. They’ll likely follow orders because there’s a strategic value in those targets militarily. They might not agree with the strategy, but they’re primarily loyal to the office of the president regardless of who’s sitting in it.

    But when generals would push back, is any scenario where following orders was a risk to the country with no strategic gain. Like attacking US citizens, using nuclear weapons, attacking strategic allies or starting World War III for no other reason than because Trump wanted to flex his ego.

    The scenarios where these roles needed to be replaced by a Trump loyalist willing to do anything are… nightmarish.


  • This is what 24/7 news does to the brain. It completely fucks up people’s sense of how risky things are.

    As humans we tend to assume that the probability of something happening is proportional to the number of times we can remember hearing of it happening.

    Many people think children walking or playing alone are at high risk of getting abducted because they hear about it “all the time” on the news. Yet they don’t think twice about sticking their kids in the car and driving somewhere.

    Statistically though you’re orders of magnitude more likely to kill your child in a car accident, than have them abducted by a random stranger while allowing them to play or walk somewhere unattended. Car accidents are common so they rarely make the news, Child Abductions are extremely rare And frequently make the news. The mom in the story could have literally driven the child to the town and put the child at a greater risk in doing so then letting the child walk there alone.

    Both the cop in the story, and the Karen that called him, Have a completely distorted sense of how much risk this child was in, And it’s all because the news media makes us think the extremely rare is relatively common.

    In recent years, the media has told stories in fear mongering ways in order to drive more ratings, Which is only the amplifying this effect.









  • Any doctor that performs an abortion in Texas is risking a minimum $100,000 fine and permanently losing there license to practice medicine if lawyers, who are not medical professionals, decide it was medically necessary yet.

    As a result, doctors in TX have been advised by their lawyers not to perform abortions unless the mother is literally minutes away from death, because otherwise you can’t prove that it was medically necessary.

    In the case, the patient died of sepsis. Doctors couldn’t perform the abortion when she needed it because they couldn’t prove that it was medically necessary yet.

    They knew that not performing the abortion would put mom at a much high risk of dying later. But they couldn’t legally prove that risk exists because all pregnancies involve some degree of risk.

    If you want doctors to perform medical procedures when it’s medically necessary, you need doctors making that decision, not lawyers, not the state. That’s what Texas had before this law went into effect.

    It’s literally created a trolly problem, it’s now better for the doctors to let some women die so they can save more lives later.



  • Most of them are hurting in one way or another. This particular round it’s mostly the financial, mental and emotional aftershocks of the pandemic amplified by greedy people coming up with new and inventive ways to take money from the poor and give it to the rich.

    But you need to first hear and understand their pain to have any hope of getting through to them.

    They’ve been told over and over through misinformation that immigrants, people with disabilities, loose/secular/independent women, people of different religious beliefs, skin colour, whatever else are the reason for their suffering, and that they should be afraid of them. That initial pain is channeled from fear to anger to hate to dehumanization to… “final solutions”.

    They want Trump in because they’ve been convinced that he’s powerful and “Trump will fix it.” ‘It’ being whatever the pain is.

    The reality is of course a much different story of basically just greedy people distracting them while they steal their lunch money, and narcissists that will do anything to gain ever more power.

    But if you want to unprogram someone from that you need to hear their pain. What was that thing that was used by the greedy and narcissistic to channel into hate.

    It’s mostly hurt/hurting people who are voting for Trump. To turn them around you need to hear their pain.






  • The problem with all “abortions are illegal except in cases where the mother’s life is at risk” laws is who gets to decide when the mother’s life is at sufficiently at risk?

    Any pregnancy is a risk to the mother’s life to some extent. The only person who should be making the decision of how much risk it too much is the mother after an informed and private discussion with her doctor.

    These stupid laws today make it so that even if it’s an emergency, any doctor performing an abortion is taking a risk that the state won’t agree it was an emergency (or perhaps that it wasn’t an emergency yet). That means that even in an emergency it gets left to the last minute where it’s high risk for everyone.

    The only way to actually be pro-life and make abortions safe when it’s medically required. Is to make abortion legal and left as a decision between a woman and her doctor.



  • My mental image of the bicycle changed as each detail was added, but sometimes the detail changed the image (the handlebars were straight until you said they were dropped) and sometimes the detail didn’t exist; the dropped handlebars were wrapped in handlebar tape, but that tape didn’t have a colour (not sure how to explain that better) until you mentioned it was black. Most of the details “added” something to the scene rather than “changing” an assumed detail.

    The “front forks on the ground” question was particularly interesting to me.

    The bicycle started with two wheels, and front wheel just sorta disappeared from my image when you mentioned it was stolen, but the front fork remained floating in the air as if there was a wheel still supporting it. But asking the question about the forks on the ground made gravity exist, and then there had to be a reason it was floating, which became it was being held up by the U-Lock.

    I seem to imagine scenes with few superfluous details that mostly includes only what is mentioned or implied by the narrative. But it’s super interesting to me what details we’re in fact implied.

    The ball on the table was similar. The table was at waist height to the person, and the ball had a specific size of roughly the size of a racket ball because it had to be something that could be easily pushed. But the person pushing it was just a silhouette of a person, it had no gender, the only thing I pictured clearly was the hand that pushed the ball. It was pushed in an intentional way that made the ball roll across the table away from the “person” (as opposed to bouncing, or pushed sideways)

    The table was just an elevated plane it had no texture, or even legs supporting it, (probably because there was no ground for those legs to be on,) it didn’t go on forever, you could see the end of the table, but it also didn’t have a size.