In the aughts George W. Bush signed an executive order instructing the IRS not to enforce the restrictions on churches regarding political speech non-profits are not supposed to endorse parties or specific candidates, though they can talk about issues).

After that dozens of right-wing political action committees and activism organizations redefined themselves as churches, what are now called parachurch organizations that are tax-free and political.

So yes, it is already a laundering business taking advantage of Christian nationalist leadership who believes in loyalty over principle.

Wow. Is this normal behavior for you?

If England is gone, Imperial France would have prevailed. Heck the war of the first coalition might have gone to Napoleon.

Granted, buggery and interracial marriage would have been legalized sooner.

Public equality and public liberty are the responsibility and purview of government. If they are not, we can’t really have government by consent. Instead we have hegemony in which the lower strata are governed by force.

Here in the states, the social norm of taking personal responsibility for all our misfortune and lack of career opportunities allows our industrialists to take credit for propelling themselves to greatness (even when their inherited wealth did the heavy lifting).

So yeah, a latchkey kid childhood (in which I was home alone, because all the adults in my house had to work) figures largely into my lifelong major depression. I suspect our intergenerational mental health epidemic here in the states is informed not only by intergenerational dysfunction (each generation taking the abuse of the previous and then abusing the next) but also by the isolation created by nuclear families without strong communities.

Then there’s the matter that we humans tend to blame ourselves for trauma, as seen by studies of mothers who endured a miscarriage, and the disproportionate tendency to blame themselves for circumstances that could not have been affected by behavior (diet, attitude, whatever). Also people who survive the recently deceased often will look to themselves to see how circumstances of the death might have been changed.

Well, I certainly can’t make my point to you. You have bested my patience, my fellow lemming.

Newton’s Long John Silver was a solid enough performance to warrant a sequel / spin-off, so TTAPD would be like a day to honor Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or even James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader.

These people have absolutely made their mark on American culture.

Black Friday, the shopping day is a gimmick taking advantage of an already popular shopping day. Not necessarily the most popular or most profitable or even the worst day for shopper shennanigans and violence. But then, it’s difficult for capitalist phenomena to not be turned into gimmicks used to market more sales.

Nah, I’m good.

I think an athiest would have a better chance trying to deconvert a Catholic Bishop than I’d have getting you up to speed.

The HarleyWing ship is canon, I think, meeeting incidentally or even adversrially and then boning like the entire rabbit population of the warren’s future depends on it before Grayson gets embarassed again and they part ways while Nightwing gets disappointment vibes from Batman.

So it’s entirely appropriate for Harley to make thirsty jabs at Nightwing at any time.

At least Nightwing hasn’t yet been a jerk to Harley.

In the rurals, we had need of a truck. Of course, it was an old beat up GM, and as a boy I got in trouble when I tossed a log of firewood into the bed of a shiny new ES truck (bigger than the GM) and missed, damaging its otherwise pristine body finish, which I’d later learn was costly to repair.

It informed how I would eventually compute I, a suburban kid, was too unfamiliar with strange rural conventions for heavy labor.

Replace the bluejeans with a codpiece, and you’re going somewhere.

Your cast iron pan isn’t driving you to use a shitload of extra fuel (electricity or natural gas) in this case, while it hangs on your wall waiting to be used.

But having a giant truck instead of a low-pollution economy car does exactly that. Imagine if you had to lug your cast iron pan on your back everywhere you went. (Say if we were still migratory, as a society.) Then you’d be rethinking your cast-iron pan choices, if lighter options were available.

Emotional support trucks are much like emotional support guns. The only thing they’re supporting (other than facilitating rampage killers and suicides) are emotions.

TBF, because I think about this sort of thing, yes, here in the states, our boys are trained that they have to keep up manly appearances, we worship sports figures and deride intellectual prowess as super-villainy material, and these are issues for which ES Trucks and Guns (and rampage killings) are a symptom.

I kind of inferred the /s by the end of the post, but respect that such inference isn’t universal. Also there are many /s comments that I wouldn’t infer if it wasn’t explicit.

I’m even more baffled by your criticism that YT cares more about shareholders than creating an egalitarian society. Thats true of literally every business including the one you work for. YT never said they were trying to make society egalitarian. Where do you even get that shit from?

The pissed-off engineers that develop effective adblockers, for which there remains robust support.

Much like the west coast oyster monopolies of the 1880s that were scourged by oyster pirates, YouTube is fighting a losing battle.

PS: I take you’re aware of the cord-cutting epidemic of cable television, yes?

I wasn’t smarter than all my teachers, but there were a select few that were very much not the sharpest rocks on the tree.

Yes, but I’m curious what Nintendo is talking to the courts about, or if this is merely a weaponization of litigation.

It doesn’t, which informs the rise technical mitigations of YouTube’s terrible ad schemes. YouTube isn’t interested in a more egalitarian society but serving its shareholder masters, and it sucks even at that.

YouTube subscriptions are not a good deal for the consumers, so they’re not going to be popular, which might serve to explain to you why everyone is not a paying subscriber, nor will they ever be.

The Jessica Fletcher problem?

The ratio of income to bills is way lower on our side than YouTube’s.

We need that money more than they do.

Are you talking about some heist on Nintendo’s blueprint vaults?

Because IP infringement is never theft.