Throughout the American South, there are lots of “nice” conservatives. They’ll invite you to church and be friendly towards you and maybe invite you over for dinner…and then talk about how “those people” – a group that includes you – are “destroying America” and shouldn’t be here.

The problem is “nice”. “Nice” is very different from kind, caring, or even empathetic.

I will say that in the Trump era, a lot of these folks no longer feel like they “have to” be “nice”, and so increasingly they’re just not anymore. It means that the area is more openly mean, but it’s because there’s no longer the fake veneer of “nice” to hide how cruel they really are.

Fox News has said the same thing about themselves in court. It really shouldn’t hold up as a defense anymore.

Interestingly, if folks like this read their Bibles – especially the Genesis part they love so much – they’d see that the one of the very first commands God gave to humans in there was to tend the earth as a garden. Like, it’s one of the first things ever said to a human in the whole book.

But like a lot of the Bible, right-wing types tend to ignore that because religion is a tool for control for them, not a guiding morality that constrains their unchecked lust for power.

Can’t afford a home, can’t afford a car, might get randomly shot by either the cops or a nutjob or an edgy schoolkid, what an American dream

Thanks. It wasn’t the worst thing she did, but it was particularly crystallizing.

I’ve done a lot of work on healing from it since. I’ve got a kid now, and it’s been healing to live every day in a way that shows that you totally can just love your kid and not have to treat them like that.

No.

I might, if what they did were severe enough, express that what they did is disappointing. But that’s different from branding them with the iron of disappointment-as-identity. Everyone does stuff sometimes that is worse than they aspire to be. The trick is coming back from it, learning and growing and changing.

I remember how it felt the day I asked my mom, after she had screamed at me and hit me a bunch for stuff she made up about me, “what did I ever do to you to make you hate me this much?”, and she screamed back “YOU WERE BORN!” And I believed she meant it, because none of this was out of character.

I was 12.

No kid should ever feel the hopelessness and abandonment I felt in that moment.

Oh cool, a whole new e-waste industry. Anyone want this old gpt4.1 chip? I know the latest is GPT-8 and the whole ecosystem has largely moved on in a way that renders most software incompatible, but hey, it’s right here on this PCI-E card so you can’t stick it in a Raspberry Pi either!

No? Guess I’ll chuck it in the landfill!

See, the thing Jim Crow and its “literacy tests” taught us is that you just need a rule that you can enforce on the wrong people, and then you just choose not to enforce it when it’s convenient.

Why would I need Steve Kornacki or whoever when I’ve got degenerate gamblers?

I mean, the USA was pro-Nazi until Pearl Harbor, and even then it took a propaganda campaign by the government to convince the American public to oppose Hitler.

Those Nazis were, by the way, inspired by the USA. Eugenics programs in North Carolina inspired later eugenics programs in Hitler’s Germany. Jim Crow was seen as a textbook example of how to use the legal system to enforce racial dominance, and was named pretty directly by Hitler as an inspiration.

That’s what I thought too, but it doesn’t work for the 7 at the end, and the caption explicitly says that the seven is not an error.

I say: more chargers in more places.

Plus, if I’m going on vacation, I often stop off at a store to pick up some supplies. Being able to charge while I’m doing so is really nice, especially if I’m having to stay somewhere without a charger.

I think he’s saying that the clue would need to be “two zeroes, two fours”

States’ rights and all, y’know. Like the right to ban federal gestapo kidnappings.

I mean, I don’t think they do draw that line; 47% of Republicans would still vote for Trump even if Trump were implicated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking activities – and those are just the ones who answered brazenly and honestly on the survey, to say nothing of those who say one thing in public and do another when nobody’s looking.