You must not be that interested in staying in contact with your family if you’re only willing to use one, specific way to do it and simply refuse to use any other method.

How about texting? Does texting work?

If North Korea wants us to know something different, they could tell us themselves. Or, even better, let the people talk to foreign journalists without handlers and threats of repercussions.

Otherwise, we’re forced to wonder about how weird it is that it seems like every news organization in the world is dead-set on spreading lies about this one, tiny, geopolitically insignificant country (and no, being able to launch toy rockets into the ocean once every couple of years does not make them geopolitically significant). Like, why did the BBC and RFA and Reuters and the AP and Al Jazeera all get together in a dark, smoky room and cook up a conspiracy to defame North Korea, of all countries? Why not, say, Thailand, or Malaysia, or Morocco, or something?

Right? Where has this article been? They’ve been denying it since the 80s.

Over the entire course of my life, the New York Times has never once been on the right side of an issue the first time. They only come around 5-15 years after the obvious public sea change. Same with the Washington Post.

This guy obnoxiouses.

Wait, no, that’s not right.

Uh, instructions unclear, dick stuck in Reddit? How’s that?

Consider that we’re evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin

There’s a third one I didn’t know about?

That’s gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It’s always the one I’m not using.

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I try to use both equally, because I’m always on the hook for picking the “doomed” standard in any 50/50 contest. It’s easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on “All/Active” or “All/Hot”, frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.

Nobody. They are the Supreme Guardian Council, which is why I will only ever refer to the so-called “chief justice” as “Ayatollah Roberts”.

Nobody mentioned the smell? Holy shit, that sounds like the setup to an awful prank.

The smell is an intense sensory experience. We had ferrets for a few years, and at no point did I ever go nose-blind to them. They are the stinkiest things anyone otherwise sane has ever willingly let into their home. Cleaning their litter boxes practically requires a respirator. And that’s after their musk glands have been removed (which, at the time, was standard practice; you couldn’t hardly get ferrets from anywhere with their musk glands intact).

They’re fuckin’ adorable, and playful, and fun, but man, the smell. All the other problems with them being only-just-barely-domesticated wild animals aside, the smell is probably the most important thing to know about them.

My ex had two sun conures.

The thing I would like people to know is that they make the kind of noise that will literally drive you insane if your brain doesn’t adapt to tune it out. It’s loud, high-pitched, and constant.

It’s not about just making phone calls difficult or making it hard to hear what your friends are saying (especially if the parrots decided they hate your friend, which is a whole 'nother parrot problem). It’s so pervasive that it actively changes how your senses perceive your environment.

Years after they both died (at about 20 years old, the female died from getting eggbound and the male died of a broken heart soon after), my brain was still putting parrot noises into the background sounds of my house. I’d be doing my normal daily thing, then stop and be like “Wait, why have I been listening to parrots screeching for the past two hours? They’ve been dead for three years” and my brain would go “Oops, sorry,” and I’d stop hearing it for a while.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of smug, self-satisfied shitheads.

Like today, but worse. We’ll have five-sigma events occurring once a week, but we’ll still insist on calling them “five-sigma” instead of “new normal”, and the denialists will still be denying that it’s any different than it’s ever been, and utopianists will still be screeching about how the technology that will save us is just “a few years” away, and lots of people will die of prosiac, totally preventable things like famines and droughts while the super-rich will have retreated to the bunkers they started building back in 2012 exactly for this scenario.

The kind where Ken goes off on a super-badass special forces mission and says “Take a bullet for ya, babe,” as he leaves the house.

in true Calvinist fashion it doesn’t matter what choices people make, there’s no action one can take to change their position.

Exactly. Like how all the “self-made men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” slag off on AOC for having had to work a real job once.

is this seriously what we’re arguing?

No.

I’m arguing that voter suppression cannot possibly account for the 65% of registered voters in Florida who did not vote one way or the other for DeSantis’s second term.

I’m arguing that a substantial portion of voters in Florida were, if not DeSantis fans, fine enough with DeSantis to not bother going out to vote against him.

I feel like you’re arguing that all of the non-voters would have voted against DeSantis, but did not because they are systematically oppressed. That 14 million citizens were actively denied the right to vote and the Florida gubernatorial election was stolen by voter suppression. If that’s not what you’re claiming, then we don’t have anything to argue about; if that is what you’re claiming, I’m going to need more substantial evidence that Florida’s democracy is in the same state as Myanmar’s and Zimbabwe’s than what has been so far provided. If anywhere close to 14 million people in one state are being actively prevented from voting for DeSantis’s opponent, that would probably be the biggest scandal, with the biggest cover-up, in American history by a wide margin. It makes the Business Plot look like the schemes of a grade-school playground clique.

1 million people being disenfranchised is awful. It does not prove that the 65% of registered voters who did not vote were directly oppressed by the government and denied their rights, and such a claim would be entirely hyperbolic, and would only serve to obscure the fact that a large majority of Floridians are fine with DeSantis and the GOP. I get that it’s more empowering to believe that we can fight a few public entities engaging in voter suppression to free Florida from their minority rule, as opposed to believing that we’d be fighting to change the opinions of over 10 million individuals who literally don’t care about us and who wouldn’t bat an eye if we were all hunted down by DeSantis’s private brownshirts.

I’m not trying to fight those people, or change them. I fled before Fox News told them it was time to “cut the tall trees”, and I advise everyone else to do the same.

1 million voters is just under half of one five percent of registered voters. That’s a far cry from 65%.

Edited to correct my stupid math.

Edit 2: Edited my original post in this thread to reflect the provided data.

i don’t know why you out of hand dismiss this as a possibility.

Because there’s no evidence.

“65% of all the eligible voters in Florida were prevented from voting due to direct governmental interference and extreme voter suppression” is a fantastic claim. One might even call it an extraordinary claim. One for which I would expect to see some fairly extraordinary evidence. I can’t just wake up in the morning and decide to believe something because it fits with my preconceived biases, especially not something directly involving almost 14 million people.

Are you actually expecting me to believe that 14 million people tried to show up at the polls and were turned away, without any evidence whatsoever? That’s a Q-level conspiracy.

35% of the population turned out to vote.

So 65% 60.35% [edited to account for the provided evidence of voter suppression] of Floridians weren’t sufficiently motivated to try to change the government after living through a first DeSantis term.

Yes, yes, I know, “voter suppression”, “disenfranchised”, etc. I’m sorry if I have a hard time believing that 65% of FL really super-duper wanted to vote but were prevented from doing so by systemic corruption; that would put Florida in the same ballpark as Somalia in terms of governmental autocracy.

At some point, we just have to cut our losses and scram. That’s why I left Arkansas, and am now squished into a tiny, overpriced, neglected little apartment with a roommate in a blue state, slowly working on replacing all my stuff.

She is also on record referring to “gazpacho police”

She also made a tweet talking about “marshall law”. She had a series of really dumb bone apple tea tweets early on.

Here you go!

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-republic/

TL;DR: They’re a highly accurate but unapologetically left-biased media organization.