Pure unmitigated evil.

Explaining the sudden access for some users on Wednesday, X said a change of network providers had “resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users”.

The company’s explanation had caught some observers by surprise.

“Everything that happened during the day led us to believe that it was on purpose,” said Basílio Rodriguez Pérez, advisor to ABRINT, the country’s leading trade group for Internet Service Providers (ISP).

Um… yeah. See… there’s this thing that people do called “lying.” It’s when they deliberately claim something other than what’s actually true.

There was likely a time when “incel” just meant “involuntarily celibate,” without all of the baggage, but then two things happened together.

First, a significant number of “incels,” most notably on 4chan, fell into a specific set of essentially misogynistic coping behaviors - primarily blaming the supposed hypocrisy and shallowness of women for their own problems.

And second, a significant number of smugly self-righteous bigots saw an opportunity to hurl self-affirming hatred at an undifferentiated mass of people without suffering the backlash they’d get if it was directed at a group that essentially enjoys protected status, and leaped at the opportunity.

So now the popular conception is that all involuntarily celibate men are “incels,” with all that that implies - that they’re not just involuntarily celibate, but shallow, hateful, misogynistic losers and assholes.

It could potentially help if involuntarily celibate men who don’t share the misogyny of the “incels” had their own label, but honestly I don’t think it would make much of a difference in the long run, because there are now enough asshole bigots reveling in their hatred of “incels” that they’d refuse to let anyone get away. Just like all other more traditional bigots, they’d cling to their self-affirming conception that the mere fact that an individual is of a specific race gender sexual orientation relationship status means that they’re necessarily foul and loathsome, so their hatred of them is justified.

True, and I indeed should have said “reflex” instead.

I actually started early with gamepads, dating all the way back to the Gravis and the original Logitech Wingman, but it might be relevant that I still primarily use a mouse and keyboard, and especially for anything that requires precise aiming.

I use a gamepad for emulated console games, since they’re designed for a pad, and for things that require free and flowing movement, so respond well to a stick or a d-pad - racing games primarily, and many platformers and similar action games. But for things that combine separate movement and aiming - first person shooters and RPGs and the like - I just think a mouse and keyboard is better than dual sticks ever could be.

Seriously, WHAT is THE DEAL with conservative disinformationists scattering ALL-CAPS WORDS throughout EVERYTHING they WRITE?

My THEORY is that it’s MEANT as a SUBSTITUTE for LOGIC and REASON - that in LIEU of saying things that are ACTUALLY logical, reasonable or true, they JUST say things really LOUDLY.

It MUST be TRUE because it’s so EMPHATIC, right?

And it PROBABLY triggers a PAVLOVIAN response in the DUNDERHEADS who READ it. “LOOK at all the CAPS! This is MY kind of TRUTHINESS!”

It’s just… WEIRD. And sort of PATHETIC.

Good to see this - this is a story that needs to be repeated often, so that more and more westerners will come to see where and how things went wrong, and most notably, who bears the responsibilty for it.

It’s also what first led me to the theory that the underlying goal of American Middle East policy is simply destabilization - that the American authorities, and the interests they represent, broadly seek to avoid the threat to western hegemony that would be posed by Middle East oil wealth administered by stable and progressive governments, and to provide recurring enemies to empower the military/industrial complex, so have deliberately pursued policies designed to keep religious fundamentalists and paranoid authoritarians in power.

I have no more right to interfere in someone else’s life than they have to interfere in mine.

Avoid people who don’t share that view.

A nation of psychopaths.

an annexed West Bank and Gaza under Israeli army control.

That’s the plan, right there.

Actually, the plan was to annex Gaza too, but it’s looking like Netanyahu isn’t going to be able to keep sabotaging cease-fire deals long enough for that to happen. So the fallback position is to hold the Philadelphi corridor so that Gaza is completely encicled, so that Israel can fully control the flow of food and water and can prevent foreign access (and most notably foreign journalists), so they can then carry out their final solution for Gaza unhindered, and annex it sometime later.

Of course he is.

It’s really a very simple calculus - any deal is going to include a timeline for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and if Netanyahu signs off on a deal that includes a withdrawal from Gaza, the hard right assholes are going to turn on him. And if the hard right assholes turn on him, he’s not going to be able to hold onto the office. And if he doesn’t hold onto the office, he’s likely going to jail, because he’s not just a psychopathic piece of shit, but a grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit.

And that’s really the whole deal right there - tens and potentially hundreds of thousands of people are dying and millions of people are displaced all so that one grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit can evade justice.

People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff

Ironically enough, that’s because they’re stupid.

It amuses the hell out of me every time the conservatives whine about their brazen disinformation getting censored, since whenenver and wherever they get an opportunity (including, especially ironically, Facebook), they reveal themselves to be the most cowardly censorious people on the planet.

Everywhere, without exception, where conservatives have control, anything that even hints at undermining their comforting delusions is instantly censored.

But if anybody dares to censor anything they might want to say, including overt and deliberate lies, they wail and cry like the spoiled children they are.

I guarantee that the explanation for this would become very obvious if one were to simply, as the cliche has it, “follow the money.”

So the unspoken bit about RFK Jr. is that he’s a tweaker, right?

I mean, the details are all in the context of politically entitled progeny, but the underlying vibe I get from the stories about him is very reminiscent of the tweakers I’ve known over the years.

Israel is a rogue state.

“Doubts grow?”

Why would they even need to “grow?” This is just June and July all over again, with the only difference being that Hamas isn’t buying any of it this time around.

The Biden administration isn’t trying to negotiate anything. It’s just trying to strike a pose to dodge the entirely deserved condemnation it’s getting for enabling a genocide while continuing to enable a genocide.

“I think she’s beautiful — very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually — unusually beautiful!"

I don’t think it’s with her popularity that the creepy old serial sex abuser is preoccupied…

And a billionaire singer who’s already such a common target for AI deepfakes that she’s quite likely the one person on the planet most ready, willing and able to sue someone’s ass off over them.

Wow - that was quite possibly the dumbest thing he’s done yet.