The “secret messages” part cleanly gives it away.

Entirely correct. Latin Times is owned by the International Business Times who also drove Newsweek into the ground. I don’t think the Latin Times have enough usage yet to get much discussion on Wikipedia, but we consider the IB Times generally unreliable – effectively heavily discouraged against using.

I’m going to go brutally murder and deep-fry my dog just to cancel out whatever grass you ate today, you extremist vegoon! something something lions something desert island grumble grumble muh canines

Hope that serves as a warning the next time you feel like expressing an opinion that differs from mine being preachy.

“Finally, my time has come.” —the model train nerds

A friend brought up Greenland nuking somebody as a joke. And I imagined how disproportionate a retaliatory strike could be, quickly remembering though that the current population is less than 60,000 and that I’m almost certain I’ve seen figures of more than 60,000 nukes during the Cold War, so I imagined a retaliatory strike where literally every person in Greenland had a personalized nuke.

The research was done make sure I wasn’t misremembering, that Greenland didn’t at any point exceed 60,000 (thus necessitating a closer comparison), and that I’m not Senator Armstrong-ing this.

Okay, but the ruling is totally sensible inasmuch as it applies to “purposes of tariffs, imports and customs”. Tomatoes by and large aren’t being imported for their botanical value; they’re being used for food. This ruling exists so corporations can’t “um ackshually” their way out of paying their fair share.

But that’s too sensible; in reality, this unanimous ruling that I never bothered to spend five seconds researching independently (I am very intellectually superior) was just “le Americans uneducated ecksdee”.

(And before you point it out: yes, an “um ackshually” definition of vegetables includes fruits, although this is using a culinary one. So indeed, the original post can’t even pedant right.)

Edit: to totally gild the lily, imagine your country adds a tax to crab meat because overfishing for a luxury good is destroying the Earth’s oceans. Someone sells Alaskan king crab, and they go to the courts demanding their taxes back because “um, ackshually, crabs are infraorder Brachyura, but king crabs are nested cladistically inside the hermit crab superfamily”. You would hope the court would tell them to get lost, because for the environmental impact and culinary uses that the bill is targeting, it’s a crab.

It’s chiefly a UK usage of the word. And happy cake day!

Winston Payne energy. (Like Squidward, it’s even funnier when the flashback shows them losing that hair in a single traumatic incident.)

Finally, some vegan recipe representation on Lemmy (with some ideas for vegetarians too).

I actually disagree having listened to it as someone who gets sensory overload and panic attacks. (Disclaimer: I’ve just listened with headphones; the real-world implementation might change this.)

I thought the music was pleasant. I can see it helping to organically drown out the loud, chaotic, stressful noises naturally present in the airport.

I’m interested to hear what other people who get sensory overload think, though, since I’ll bet it manifests in very different ways.

I’m just saying, renaming your store to “53 Shoes” after this would be really funny.

OP’s article is from July 1st.

OP, for preservation purposes, could you swap your MSN rehost link out for the original: https://kfor.com/news/local/man-who-advised-ok-gov-stitt-deported-to-guatemala/

It’s not against the rules, but MSN is notorious for link rot. That link will likely be dead within months.

Edit: Thanks, OP.

Except it categorically isn’t. If you sit two people in a laboratory – an adherent to an Abrahamic religion and a “practitioner” of “magic” – neither will be able to perform a supernatural feat. We agree that far. But unless the “witch” wants to resort to special pleading that they can’t perform it under laboratory conditions for no good reason (the woo magic system presumably isn’t sentient and has no reason to care? or maybe they have really bad performance anxiety?), then it’s provably false. Even if they say something vague like “better luck” or “better health”, well we have statistics for a reason. Are you not powerful enough? Okay, well like, we’re measuring down to the attometer at this point. If you want to drink masala chai under an amber calcite chandelier of 100 candles, listening to pagan-coded fantasy music, and you can consistently, measurably move a human hair 20 meters away, congratulations: you’ve still proven witchcraft is real.

The Abrahamic God, meanwhile, is constructed to be unfalsifiable. It’d be subject to everything I just mentioned except that there are a million bullshit but unfalsifiable rationalizations why a sentient God wouldn’t respond to these prayers to let them be observed. Literally no matter how hard you try, a sentient third-party gets the final say.

The difference between believing in a monotheistic God and believing in witchcraft is the difference between believing in Santa Claus and believing you made and placed those presents yourself. Of course neither is true and both are ridiculous: there is another entity putting those presents there, but it’s not magic, and by taking action in the real world, you can influence what those presents will be without magic. But for one of them, if you told your other little kid friends, they’d ask you to put up or shut up.

Sure. Doesn’t make them not stupid as hell; it just makes their beliefs less corrosive to society. I can imagine they’d be extremely toxic if they had widespread public support, but probably still not nearly as much as “I commune with an all-powerful sky daddy whose word is ultimate law that divides people between everlasting bliss and everlasting suffering and I can choose to believe whatever that word is” like Abrahamic religions.

That actually isn’t weird at all. People treat “politics” as an epithet for “controversial politics”, but in reality, almost everything in society is political – relating to power structures, the distribution of status and resources, and how those factors are determined. What you’re getting at, of course, is that Republicans have shifted the Overton window so disgustingly far to the right that “everyone is welcome” in a classroom is treated as a controversial ideology.

We’re constantly conditioned to think of the status quo as apolitical in nature (it’s just “normal” and the people who want to change it for better or worse are “the politicals”), but it is and always has been, and it’s why we’ve needed so desperately these past several decades to remain politically engaged to protect what we want and to change what we don’t. Now? Who knows, but we still need to try.

What I think you missed is that I’m saying there are far fewer excuses for spells than there are for prayers. If we think of a prayer or spell like a transmission, one that starts and ends in our reality but can’t be measured by science is (even) dumber than one that starts above our reality by an omnipotent, hyperdimensional trickster set on not revealing itself.

A prayer means that someone else – infinitely wiser and outside time and space – will do this for you if they so choose. From this, you have near-infinite freedom to weasel around why your prayer was or wasn’t answered. You’ve made it unfalsifiable, which is intellectual sludge, but it means you’ve insulated yourself from being provably wrong.

But for “witchcraft”? Yes, this particular brand of delusion often turns to weasel spells (whereas I used to see a lot more of “I can do concrete, measurable things that couldn’t happen otherwise”), but given they’re making the action happen or creating a conduit for that action, there ought to be some physically observable explanation behind it. But apparently magic can interface with patterns of candles and lavender and minerals and clockwise tea set up by some early 20s stoner in their parents’ basement but can’t be measured by science.

They’re not “exactly the same behavior” because 1) the locus of control is different and 2) that locus of control effectively being yourself should make this scientifically falsifiable.

Is it though…? As stupid as the Abrahamic God is, at least you have a “God of the Gaps” thing going on where all God really has to be is someone with their own agency to grant you what you ask for and to determine where to place you in an untestable “afterlife”. Of course there’s an obvious cocktail of inherent contradictions when you choose “omniscient”, “omnipotent”, and “omnibenevolent” at the same time, but then you can appeal to the idea we wouldn’t possibly understand the whims of such a god outside of time and space. Again, stupid as fuck, but you can weasel your way out of anything.

But witchcraft? Okay, you’re transferring the agency to yourself, a human that exists here, and you’re saying you can perform magic, but now you have no evidence you’re capable of jack shit and you have no excuse to pawn it off onto. You’ll never be able to do magic your entire life because it categorically isn’t real, so is the excuse that witches are real but you personally really suck as one? Is the idea that you do what “God” does and take credit for anything that vaguely “works” by sheer coincidence and ignore everything else? Do you only cast “spells” that function as placebos like easing someone’s pain or making them feel happy – similar to many prayers?

And of course with God you don’t have any way to test where this magic is coming from; it was there before time and is all-powerful, and there’s any number of ways with that setup to weasel your way out. But what’s the scientifically measurable phenomenon behind witchcraft? There is none, and unlike God where there also is none, this should be easily testable if it exists since it allegedly interacts with the physical world on your command.

So now you’ve gone from untestable woo like the afterlife and testable but weaselable woo like prayers to woo that you should absolutely be able to test empirically because you’re in control of it.

I didn’t know so much “no contact” could exist in such a small space.