dactylotheca

Reminds me of Serena from Handmaid's Tale – she helped install a theocratic dictatorship where one major goal was to strip women of their rights, and was all surprised Pikachu face when she had her rights taken away from her

A rotary notary, if you will

The Phase II clinical trial is evaluating the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics and efficacy of Incel administered intravenously

Mainlining incel, damn that doesn't sound great at all

The amount of pants-shitting about the film from people who'd only read the books (probably not even all of them) was, well… predictable

Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.

This seems to be very common with conservatives more generally. Criticizing them does nothing, but turns out that mocking their absolutely fucking bizarre beliefs drives them up the wall

Agh, figures that the Russian Volunteer Corps was apparently in on the action. It just never fails to boggle my mind that the majority of the anti-Russian militias that are fighting in Ukraine are so far right that they think Putin isn't fascist enough.

Like, yeah, it's great that they're fighting Russia, but holy fuck is it this hard to find people in Russia who aren't complete pieces of shit and are also willing to fight Putin?

Yep, exactly. Sex education, criminal policy, economics, everything.

Conservative abortion bans remind me of the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does" (wiki):

The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer, who observed that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do."

Conservative policies in general practically never do what they are "supposed" to do. Their actual purpose is what they inevitably end up causing

That's what we in the "getting snowed on" business call sleet

Well that's… weird. Why on earth would they do that?

Assuming any of this is true, at any rate.

I think it's interesting is that so many autocracies keep up the pretense of democratic and rules-based governance; even North Korea has elections. Same with political trials like you see in so many authoritarian regimes, from modern Russia or China to Nazi Germany – it's like autocrats need to be able to pretend to themselves that the system they run is fair and just, and that they're not just tyrants who govern with impunity and enforce rules arbitrarily.

What I don't get is why? Why bother when it's immediately obvious to everyone that it's all a sham? Why not drop the pretense, which everybody knows is just a pretense?