I mean, they deter people from having children go headfirst through the windshield.

To my understanding, she’s pretty reviled by boomers for being anti-war.

Depends on the boomer. Some people thought what she did was important and brave, but for the people who hate her it wasn’t just that she was anti-war. A ton of celebrities were anti-war. It was that she flew out to Vietnam, embedded with the North Vietnamese army, and filmed what a lot of people considered anti-American propaganda.

I used to work in a machine shop where a bunch of the old-timers were Vietnam vets. I made the mistake of talking about Barbarella one day, and ended up with an earful about “Hanoi Jane,” and her “crimes” against America. They absolutely despised her. For a long time after that they’d all take turns asking me how my communist girlfriend was doing.

“Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” - Benito Mussolini

I caught the cat eating thing, and the post-birth abortion thing. I must have been too distracted by the Venezuelan gangs that are supposed to have taken over my city to catch the other stuff.

Did I miss the news cycle where Democrats started dismembering children?

Historically, the people who say, “Some folks need killing,” usually turn out to be the folks who actually need killing.

That’s just Melanie Scrofano.

The correct answer is chile verde and cheddar cheese. I don’t care if you need to eat it with a fork, it’s what happiness tastes like.

I uhhhhhhh… never really understood uhhhhhhhh… why Obama uhhhhhhhh… was uhhhhhhh… considered such a great orator. Sure he uhhhhhhh… could uhhhhhhh… clearly communicate a thought, but uhhhhhhh… it fucking took a while to uhhhhhhhh… get it out of his mouth.

The Congressional Dish podcast did a pretty good episode about it a while back. I think it was Episode 266: Contriving January 6th.

Are they genuinely trying to stifle education, or is it all just racist bullshit?

That’s the fun part: stifling education is the racist bullshit.

They’ve been anti-education since desegregation. Back in the ‘60s the Religious Right, particularly Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and the people in that orbit, tried really hard to go through the courts and use their freedom of religion under the First Amendment to keep black people out of their church-based schools. Obviously they lost, but they have never forgotten how the mean ol’ federal government defiled their perfect little angels by forcing them sit next to some filthy negro while they learn their multiplication tables or whatever. Ever since then they’ve made it their mission to destroy public education.

By the 1980s that Evangelical movement had become fully ingrained into the Republican party, and that drive to destroy public education came with it. It’s what’s behind the push for charter schools. It’s what’s behind the push for private school vouchers. It’s what’s behind Evangelicals astroturfing school board meetings, and sometimes taking over the school board itself. It’s a big part of why public schools (inner city public schools in particular) have been chronically underfunded for longer than I’ve been alive. It was racism the whole time.

But yeah, whenever I hear a conservative use the word “woke,” I’ve found you can pretty much always mentally transpose “woke” with “ni–er stuff” (or “fa–ot stuff,” depending on the context) and whatever they’re trying to say suddenly makes a lot more sense.

You do have the benefit of being right though.

The word octopus is a classical Greek word that comes to English via Latin. The Greek plural is octopodes, the Latin plural is octopi. But we don’t speak Latin or classical Greek. We speak English. Because octopus is the English word for octopus it follows the English rules for pluralization, which is to add “s” or “es” to the end of the word. Cases can be made why octopi and octopodes could be technically correct, but for English speakers octopuses is the most correct.

I feel like they should be doing that regardless.

For anyone wanting to save a click it’s Hymn for the Weekend by Coldplay.

Depends on which map you look at.

There’s really only one choice .

As noted biblical historian Andrew Zaltzman has often pointed out, Pontius Pilate was a law-and-order administrator and Jesus was absolutely guilty under the law at the time.

There was a story going around yesterday about Wendy’s supposedly trying it. It sounds like the kind of headline that’s going to turn out to be BS, but I also didn’t really look into it so I don’t know any of the details. Seems like the kind of thing you’d have to be an idiot to actually attempt. Hard to imagine a universe where that goes over well.

Bosnia: “Ooh, can we go to the beach?”

Croatia: “Haha, fuck no!”

I’m talking about how it’s literally impossible for your eyes to focus at more than one distance at a time. This has nothing to do with speed, training, or how good you imagine the marksmanship of your average soldier to be. It’s about how your eyes work.

Correctly lining up a shot with iron sights doesn’t mean everything in your sight picture is perfectly in focus. Unless you’re shooting a handgun with a very short sight radius you usually can’t even keep both the front and rear sights in focus at the same time, forget about doing it with both your sights and the target. Your eyes can’t focus at three distances at once. Or even two. You have to pick one.

Most people when they learn to shoot learn “front sight focus.” And front sight focus is exactly what it sounds like: the front sight post is what you focus on. You line your sights up with each other (equal height/equal light), and line that up with your target, with your focus on your front sight. With this sight picture your target will be blurry and your rear sights will be blurry, but you can still see the mass of your target well enough, and your rear sights well enough to keep everything lined up.

There’s also “target focus,” which is basically the same except the target is in focus and both your sights are blurry. The people who prefer target focus tend to be more experienced shooters who have already developed good enough muscle memory, and are comfortable enough with their weapon, that they don’t need to spend much of their attention maintaining EH/EL.

You can shoot target focused, or you can shoot front sight focused, but you can’t do both. The appeal of red dot sights is that they kind of flatten all of that out. They make it easy to look at your target normally with both eyes open. You put the optic up in front of your dominant eye, and now there’s a dot in your regular field of vision showing you where the bullet will go. You don’t need to direct your focus to the dot, you don’t need to be tempted to close an eye for a clearer sight picture, you don’t need to line up a bunch of posts. The dot is just there. It really is like having a cheat code for aiming.