millie

I do think there's a sizeable difference between having deeply buried shame about what they're doing and actually having doubts that make their way to the surface where they could actually change the behavior.

It's crazy to look at these people and just see the layers of the onion. Here is a person who knows she's doing wrong. It's written on her face. And yet, she puts on a defensive layer and keeps right on trudging forward with tears in her eyes as she digs deeper and deeper into her hole.

Mike Johnson is another one of these. You can look at him and know that his smug little grin is a thin veneer trying to keep the outside world from realizing that he knows how wrong he is and somewhere in there absolutely hates himself. Even with Trump and Vance, it's written all over their faces. They spend every day fighting it, denying it, trying not to let themselves look, but you can see in their eyes that they can't help it. They know, and they keep on anyway despite themselves.

It would be so easy for any of them to just let go of all that and start trying to help people. To listen to that part of themselves they desperately try to shut up day in and day out. To stop feigning ignorance and try to make things better. They could pick any second to just stop poisoning themselves for a sake of a sunken cost cult mentality held up by people who feel just as sick about their own decisions.

Carlin had some good material, but this is an absolutely stupid mindset. We can cause an extreme level of ecological damage. Will the planet eventually recover? Quite possibly. But that's not a certainty, and in the mean time we're triggering a mass extinction precisely because irresponsible humans figure there's no way we can hurt the Earth and it's self-important hubris to think that we can.

But the time we're living through and the time we're heading into are all the proof we should need that it's actually hubris to assume our actions have no meaningful impact.

Nope. These people need to feel just as stupid as Trump voters in 2016 who subsequently voted for Biden after seeing the result. Given how many are still defensively showing up to post walls of text every time this is brought up, there's a lot of work to be done to overcome the counter-messaging.

We should absolutely do what we can to primary feckless centrist Democrats, and to push the party to the left, but that's not mutually exclusive with getting people to show up and not make the same stupid decision twice. We aren't going to completely fix our democracy in 2 years to the point that these idiots will be satisfied. We can make headway on making things better, but people need to vote for that to happen.

So to be absolutely clear: if you did not vote, this is what you voted for. That should be upsetting, you should feel bad, and you should make damn sure that you don't make the same mistake in 2026, 2028, or any other election as long as you live.

I have silicone trays and I love them. I haven't had them super long (about a year), but I use them every day and they show no sign of wear. It doesn't get brittle with time like some plastic, so I don't see them wearing down any time soon.

If you need to be able to stack them, it might be worth looking into some kind of small rack?

I completely understand that feeling, and it was my initial reaction too, but honestly, I think they're kind of right.

If you're playing chess and the opponent's knight takes your rook, do you throw your queen at it on principle? Even though it's backed by a pawn? Or do you tighten up your own defenses and wait for the best opportunity to strike?

Don't get me wrong, AOC and Green are the energy we need here. I don't even think it's a bad play for them to make as much noise as possible about Trump's overreach, even if it is repeating the same behavior we've seen for decades. But if 126 Democrats voted against it, how many Republicans actually voted for it? What's the strategic cost of using the inertia that might flip a handful of Republicans on something that doesn't have the numbers yet?

What if we need them for a play down the line? What if we can flip more of them and actually get an impeachment instead of just proposing one on principle because we didn't already exhaust the idea?

I think the people should be pushing for impeachment, and I think Congress should impeach him. But I want that to actually happen. I don't just want it to be a sentiment that doesn't go anywhere.

The Washington Post had their chance to give a shit about this and they decided not to. Too late for panic from that particular rag.

We absolutely are heating up the planet. Look at the curve on that graph and look at the time scales. That exact graph demonstrates that this is completely unprecedented.

Your own link shows a change in pattern from ups and downs from year to year with larger patterns of rising and falling to an extremely recent upward trend in which every year is hotter than the last. We're looking at a level of heating on the scale of decades to centuries that would normally be seen over millions of years. And humans didn't show up during those hot periods, we showed up during the cooler period. Sure, there may very well still be life on the planet after we're done, assuming we don't acidify the oceans and we figure out how to dial down the rampant pollution after pushing ourselves into a kind of climate not seen for 35 million years, but will humans be able to live in that environment? Quite possibly not.

Looking at the wider picture doesn't show that there's no issue, it shows that there's a critical issue and we're screwing with extremely long-term trends that constitute the conditions we evolved under.

If it quacks like a duck.

I may be mistaken, but when I see someone doing their level best to turn a niche community into nothing but an advertising feed targeting that community specifically, that looks like paid advertising to me. It's certainly possible that he's just clueless about what constitutes quality content and is posting low-effort spam for attention, but this is at this point a pretty well known marketing strategy on other platforms. Reddit is inundated with this stuff.

The fact that he's also spending a good chunk of his time squashing any vote-based feedback on his constant spamming is also probably a pretty good indicator.

I honestly kind of love Discovery, and Lower Decks is my second favorite Trek show (just behind DS9), but if we can't argue about what is and isn't good or is and isn't Trek-like on a Star Trek website, what's the point? Nerds arguing about nerd things is such a fundamental part of stuff like Star Trek that for a lot of people that trope is literally all they know about Star Trek!

Buuut for VS Star Trek is just about advertising, probably as a paid astroturfer, so of course anything other than praise is literally trolling!

Hey, I'm in this post!

If I remember correctly, I got banned for accusing ValueSubtracted of being essentially an advertiser. He's constantly flooding the feed with patch notes for STO and advertisements for merch. I assume he's being paid for this.

I did also tell him that his name describes what he's doing to the website.

The funny thing is, I saw this and was going to post here anyway, but didn't actually remember if I got banned or not. Well.. I guess I did! Nothing of value was lost.

Oh, I didn't see the screenshots somehow!Apparently you can see all this for yourself! :D