@Gurre@msquebanh@deepmud I, too, know one edible and one utterly toxic mushroom, and need to spend hours making spore prints and poring through books to ID any others.
@Gurre@msquebanh@deepmud (To make it worse: the one mushroom I know is safe and will happily harvest and cook and know how to cook etc. is the oyster, which is delicious a.f. but also is basically the Chicken McNuggets of mushrooms.)
Back in 2006, I started my first blog, VichyDems, and immediately began using it to organize grassroots opposition to the confirmation of Samuel Alito. Specifically, I (and then others, esp. Bob Fertik) began tracking which Dem senators supported the filibuster against his nomination; which ones were leaning towards selling out and voting for cloture out of a misplaced sense of comity and institutionalism (the 'Vichies"); and which were on the fence. We published game plans, target lists, talking points, and contact info. SIX DAYS after starting the blog, we were getting thousands of views and had inspired tens of thousands of calls urging key senators to support the filibuster.
It failed, of course. The filibuster failed, and Auto was confirmed 75-25. But we definitely got one senator (Clinton) to outright reverse her position, from opposing to supporting the filibuster; persuaded some undecideds; and (so far as I can tell) demonstrated for the first time ever that the Internet could be used for political organizing. (And it launched my political writing career.)
And we were RIGHT, of course. #Alito's treason flag and Dobbs and today's decision upholding racial gerrymandering and etc and etc prove we were right, and every fucking Vichy Dem senator who didn't support the filibuster was wrong.
My posts about Alito back then remain an interesting and relevant read, and include some very familiar names, including Biden: https://vichydems.blogspot.com/2006/01/
Bracing myself now for the slew of “yes but if the LEFT had control and the Supreme Court was protecting peoples’ rights instead of stripping them away, and preventing corruption instead of enabling it, the OTHER side would be just as angry” takes.
The current SCOTUS continues to do what they’ve been doing since Dobbs. They make one decision that is pretty middle of the road “yep, that’s the right call”, and then the next five or six big decisions are all deeply unpopular, and wildly partisan. They think people don’t see the systematic erosion of democracy, separation of church and state, and equality. They are so fucking removed from actual society that they think this will all blow over.
My wife and I both filled out our ballots today, and then because we live in Oregon (which is a relatively sane state that has vote by mail and dropbox), I went to the nearby city hall to drop off our ballots, only to realize that there is an 8:00 p.m. cutoff and the box was locked.
When I got home, I had my first panic attack in years. This is the first election I haven't participated in since 1980, and I hadn't realized how much I rely emotionally on the perception of control that voting gives me in a world that's dying and falling apart.
Please, friends: protest and rebel and fight back any way you can. Burn everything down if you need to. But please, please, don't abstain from voting.
Saying “I support the right of Jewish people to exist” is already a little weird to me since I don’t see that as questionable (guess it is for some) but it definitely sounds bad if you add a “but” on the end. That’s not as supportive as you think it is, people who keep saying it.
@TonyStark@dukepaaron Is anyone actually saying that? So far as I know, outside the real nutjobs (of which, yeah, there are too fucking many), people are saying Jewish people don't have a right to exist on other people's land, and only Zionists and American evangelicals are responding by saying that that somehow denies the right of Jewish people qua Jewish people to exist at all. But I'm neither Jewish nor plugged into the antisemitic world, so maybe I'm missing something.
@TonyStark@Okanogen@dukepaaron I actually preferred Tony's reply, actually. It's one thing for the United States to have stolen native land in the 19th and early 20th centuries; it's quite another to have started doing it in 1948 or 1969 and still be doing it in 2024 and pretending it's okay. (And that's definitely Israel, not Jews, that's doing that.)
I don’t believe for a second that the favorable reference to the Third Reich from Trump’s campaign was a mistake. But whether it is or not, why isn’t the staffer supposedly responsible for the post being fired immediately? The staffer is totally irresponsible or an actual Nazi. Any responsible campaign would discharge such a staffer post haste.
Plz remember to use NFL (Not For Laffy, no hashtag) so I can ignore those replies while live-posting. TY!
1/...Tyler McBrien:
Trey Gowdy again...
Per Trump's campaign, this is today's Greek chrous: Don Trump, Jr., Matt Whitaker, Pam Bondi, Sen. Eric Schmitt, Rep. Daniel Webster, Rep. Dan Meuser, Rep. Ronny Jackson, Rep. Troy Nehls, Rep. Dale Strong, Rep. Maria Salazar, Sebastian Gorka, Chuck Zito, Joe Piscopo, Bill White
@GottaLaff NFL: This is incredibly good and difficult lawyering. When b an opposition witness wants to explain something, it's hard (but vital!) to stand in front of the jury and not let them seize the narrative by doing so.
Boy, remember when we panicked after 911 and passed those cool laws with names like The Patriot Act and The Protect America Act and got rid of all those restrictions on the intelligence community that the intelligence community literally warned America NOT to do because we KNEW the power would abused?
@stonekettle Yeah, this might be a good time to call your Congresscritters and tell them to pressure the new Un-American Activities Inquisition to back the FUCK off because students protesting genocide is PROFOUNDLY LAWFUL AND PATRIOTIC AND WHAT AMERICANS ARE SUPPOSED TO DO AND SHOULD BE PRAISED, NOT INFILTRATED.
@GottaLaff NFL: Which is the right move by Trump's lawyers. Disrupting the sequence by calling back a witness and laying a foundation for a new exhibit would have screamed to the jury that "THIS EXHIBIT IS SOOOOPER IMPORTANT!!!" Far better to just stipulate so it seems like no big deal.
One time I asked my South African friend why he called it "maths" with an "s," and I patiently waited while he said, "because there's more than one" before jumping in and shouting, "THEN WHY DO YOU SAY YOU PLAY 'SPORT?'"
@jilleduffy It's not about how many different kinds of math there are, but how many NUMBERS there are. "Math" singular suggests that there's only one number, in which case there wouldn't really be much point in even having a word to describe how to manipulate that number, right? (What's the sum of 1? 1! What's the average of 1? 1!)
Whereas if there were only one sport (as most Europeans believe), there could still be endless discussion/iterations of that sport (again, see: Europe).
(Source: me, undercaffeinated, just making shzt up.)