Didn’t you hear? The past was always better, and Now is always the low ebb in the decline of our civilization until we return to the values that made yesterday great.

If the past is somehow to blame for the problems of today, that might mean there was something wrong with the past. If that’s the case, then maybe other things from the past have problems, including things that I like or benefit me personally, or that changing would imply a lot of big scary changes that I’m not ready for.

That’s why attempts to talk about little mistakes from the past like chattel slavery, indigenous genocide, phillipino genocide or endemic discrimination and institutionalized racism are just attempts by bad people to tear down perfection and keep us from returning to a simpler, better time where those mistakes never happened.

Definitely agree 100%.

The cop thing is weird. In all the cases where (extremist) people talk about wanting to use the military that would normally be handled by the police, like crowd control, detaining large numbers of people, or systematic checkpoints and door to do searches, I’d actually prefer the military to the cops. Not because they’ll push back or violate civil liberties any less, but because military training is consistent and actually happens, so when someone shoves them at a checkpoint the training they regress to will be at least of a higher baseline quality than the average cop.

Never. There’s no space in their oath for fragging their commander in response to a legal order.
At the highest level, doing so is a military coup, and directly opposed to their oath.

Rounding up innocent Americans and putting them in camps isn’t unconstitutional if you pass a law saying you can do it. Just ask the Japanese citizens of the country of the military stood up for them, or if they just accepted their legal orders.

Relying on the military, the violent arm of the state, to protect us from the civilian arm of the state is at best not going to happen. More likely it’s so much worse if they do, because they typically don’t turn control over to someone better, if they do at all.

NAS. Most things sit in downloads indefinitely, and I’ll randomly decide the folder is gross and unmanageable and put things into appropriate folders. Usually Documents gets the most sub-categories, with various significant life docs sorted by category and year. Pictures gets random art I made in a folder, pictures, memes and funny shit, etc also get their own folders.

Media downloads go straight to the NAS where they’re organized by Format/Category/Series/Name. As in Video/Movies/John wick/John wick 1. TV gets a season level in there.

More like cereal infiltrating your bowl of cereal after being poured out of an unlabeled clear bag.

“You’re never gonna believe this, but someone snuck Cheerios into my bowl while I was pouring from this sack! The container wasn’t labeled, so I couldn’t possibly have known what was inside, despite it being plainly visible and entirely out in the open”

Why the fuck do we care what musk thinks about anything? Jesus fuck just ignore the asshole. His endorsement means nothing.

I mean, the human will to evil and the military leadership being willing to listen to political evil are in alignment in this case. So if the military is ordered to do some camps, they’re gonna do some camps.

You just always here a lot of talk about how much the military is focused on not doing atrocities, and it’s tossed out as a knowing trump card whenever talk of the military doing stuff on US soil comes up.
“The army would never torch a subdivision in Milwaukee, the houses look like their houses, the people look like them, and they get too much training telling them not to evil in specific ways in specific contexts”. It misses that the same people who explained the rules are the ones who’ll be telling them to do the evil, and that our soldiers aren’t better or worse than any other, morally. And soldiers regularly do evil in places that look like their homes, to people who look like their families.

The integrity of the military is just not a barrier to them being used to do bad things ™ domestically.

We have plenty of examples of soldiers merrily war-criming their way into history in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It doesn’t matter how many power points you watch, it doesn’t make a soldier not a soldier, and soldiers are defined by signing up to maybe do a bit of unprovoked violence.
They may or may not get punished for it later, but the sheer number of civilian casualties in both those wars makes it abundantly clear that killing civilians isn’t the hard line we like to think it is. We just need to tell the pilot that it’s a valid target, and chances are they’ll bomb that wedding.

Humans are pretty willing to do messed up stuff in war. All that training is what gets you to the point where it’s a coin toss, and not perfect willingness to engage in collective punishment, reprisal killing, intimidation murder or just plain “shooting through the windshields of cars for fun”.

We don’t have a lot of reason to think that the military wouldn’t comply. We have a handful of examples of troops refusing orders from very close in the command hierarchy to commit overt inarguable war crimes. We have more examples to the contrary.

If they get the order from someone just up the chain to torch a subdivision and napalm the children, it’s a coin toss. If it’s the presidents policy, and they’re just relocating people? Bit risky not to comply.

Is this uncharitable to the troops that a lot of people have high ideals will behave morally as regards legal and illegal orders? Most definitely. But also, they napalm civilian targets, torch villages and have literally rounded up Americans and our them in camps before, without due process. It’s not even a novel situation.

And they’re delicious. ~Although usually not just plain meat, but filled with wonderful spices~

you can’t refute my main point that…

This is the part where you’re dense as fuck. As I said from the get go, I wasn’t trying to do that, you absolute insecure buffoon.
Go back and re-read the first comment, and try not being insecure and combative. I was literally, as you say, correcting a typo (Although then using that typo in math makes me feel like it was a misunderstanding of the numbers and not a typo).

You can keep ranting about irrelevant details and then agreeing with my original conclusion.

“Wikipedia has a half billion cash and is evil for asking for more” is really different from “Wikipedia isn’t in as bad a situation as you might think, and donation isn’t as crucial as they might lead you to believe”.
Your first comment is grossly misleading. I don’t really give a shit about your conclusion, since I’m ambivalent about donating. See also: the paragraphs I quoted from your second article I liked.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s like I’ve been saying and you refuse to accept: I’m not trying to “gotcha” you, I just actually cared about accurate numbers. If you actually care about accurate numbers for drawing conclusions, like a person who goes and reads financial audits might, then perhaps they aren’t “irrelevant details”. Or, as I like to call them: A $320 million dollar error.

You’re the one who can’t accept that someone saying “hey, their financials are by no means weak but they don’t have decades of cash saved up” isn’t a disagreement with your main point.

Then you went off on insane ad hominem tangents and refused to believe that maybe someone isn’t attacking you.

given that I’ve roundly quashed all of your efforts here

You really haven’t. If you’ll recall: “what the fuck are you even talking about”? Insecure gibberish isn’t the masterful debate strategy you think it is. You aren’t coming across as cleverly as you seem to think you are.

You’re a surprisingly dense person. You’ve managed to mistake a news article for a financial audit, misread a number of comments, misinterpret numbers, think that the phrase “article I agree with” means I don’t agree with it, and somehow take “hey, your number’s wrong” to mean “your numbers are wrong, your conclusion is wrong, and everything you say is wrong”.

I wrote assets, because I was talking about total assets

Except, you didn’t. And neither did the article I said was inaccurate where you plainly pulled that number from.
Maybe go actually read the second article you shared, which doesn’t get their cash or assets wrong or make grossly inaccurate assertions about their financial status.

Also, congrats on actually running with “bold of you to assume I can read”.

You’re confusing cash with assets. $80 million is nowhere near $400 million cash.

dozens of accurate numbers from two articles, one of those many numbers in one of those articles you have picked out to focus on

Except $300 million cash isn’t in the article I said was a good article.

“Dozens” of good numbers don’t really matter when the one you use to make your point isn’t one of them.
They don’t have $400 million dollars cash, so they can’t run for 40 years just on cash on hand. Which is the entire thing I was talking about.

I sort of assumed that basic literacy meant you could understand that a question doesn’t have to end in a question mark. For example: I’m curious what you think I’m making up.
Note how that doesn’t end in a question mark, but is clearly a request for information.
And, for pedantic ness: “what the fuck are you talking about?”

What “mistakes” are you correcting? I’m referencing their financial audit. Where do you think those news articles you’re not understanding get their numbers?

You can’t just pick a number off a page, say “yeah, that one’s big, it’s how much cash they have”, then round up and add $100 million dollars and wave it off as a typo. At best, it’s a typo compounding a gross misunderstanding of the financials.

So again, what “mistakes” are you correcting? You keep saying you’re correcting some mistakes, but … You’re not. You haven’t actually done anything other than share some bad data and be offended someone would point that out.

We colloquially call a lot of things I’ve cream that aren’t labeled ice cream, and aren’t legally ice cream.

The US has tediously long definitions for different foods, and ice cream needs specific proportions of milk products, as well as limits on other physical properties.

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=135.140

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=135.110

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?CFRPart=135

So while I might pick up some sherbet and say “I got ice cream”, and people would know what I meant, it would never be labeled ice cream.
I also like oat milk ice cream, but it’s actually labeled “frozen dessert” because it doesn’t contain dairy.

The company isn’t allowed to use a term that might mislead a unwitting or uninformed consumer, but the consumer is free to have a more relaxed definition, and stores can put things where you would expect.

From your source: "After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March”.

From you: “they have at least 400 million in reserves now”.

Their financial audit, that I linked to, shows that they have nowhere near that much cash. They don’t even have that much total assets if you count their endowment, real estate, and computer hardware.

The entire reason for my comment was that I read that number, thought “wow, that number seems preposterous”, and looked up their financial report which shows that indeed, it’s a totally bogus number detached from reality.

You seem deeply upset that someone might not just accept your opinion at face value, and it seems to be making you respond like an asshole instead of “not responding because you don’t care”, or actually giving some sort of response.

Har har har.

I’m honestly curious what point you think I’m responding to that you didn’t make.
You did actually use grossly inaccurate financial data when the tax documents were publicly available.

What are you even talking about?

Check engine light? That’s fine, if it goes wrong it’s just him. The high beams are dangerous, inconsiderate and just a dick move, but also something that could be done by mistake.

Flagrantly violating traffic control signs is dangerous to him, anyone in his vehicle, other drivers, and random passerbys. That’s a pretty big no-no, and worth reporting in the harshest terms on its own.

Would you have wanted previous riders to have reported that behavior before you got in the car? If you knew they were going to drive like that would you still have picked them as a driver?
If not, why would you let someone else be in the same situation you would take steps to avoid?

Just a reminder that the national review is a garbage rag and a biased source.

The judge had questions about the process used to decide the onion had won, and reviewed the information. That’s not the same as blocking the sale.
A hearing is normal after the sale of assets, and the people making the claim that it’s not are the other buyer, which is … Alex Jones.

Jones was accused of peddling the narrative that the shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 first-grade students and six teachers twelve years ago, was a massive hoax designed to get federal gun-control legislation enacted. The plaintiffs alleged Jones defamed them on his show and inflicted emotional distress.

That’s a very slanted way to say “Jones was convicted of defamation and inflicting emotional distress on the families of a school shooting by insisting their children weren’t real”.

https://apnews.com/article/alex-jones-infowars-auction-onion-how-d42e7b2c916205b348628686c8b8dd4a

https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3lb3hecp7l22k

Looking at the profiles for the executives, you definitely get the feeling that they’re either the sort that prioritizes “my work put good into the world and you don’t need to squint to see it” over cash, so “yeah, that lets me live” is sufficient, or their seemingly going for a high score for number of “oh, nice!” organizations they can put on their CV, and the total compensation from them all is probably more than competitive.