https://trashbat.co.ck/

Nathan Barley vibes.

As someone forced to use the CVS Specialty branch of CVS to get my medications: Yes, they’re all around terrible everywhere.

Do like the BBC and spin up your own mastodon instance, Guardian.

I mean the King of All Cosmos has a codpiece the size of the moon, so I dunno if he’s really a good voice on the subject.

There’s honestly no reason to make these figures larger than life than they already are.

Further, depicting them as strong and confident supervillains is well in line with the cult mentality of seeing Trump as a strongman. Trump voters like that these people are like that, and they like that you are scared of them.

Yeah when the Epstein tapes dropped and Epstein talked about how Trump liked to fuck his “friends’” wives behind their backs, I knew it was just gonna make him more popular. That’s seen as an alpha chad move, despite being utterly gross.

Sorry I’m bad at photoshop and was failing to turn the limes into horses.

You can’t spell enlightenment without lighten

Trump voters when reading this article:

true, but Lemmy is at least pseudo-anonymous.

@[email protected]

gonna have to bring this one back to life.

more like perfectlycutquaks tho.

Well, the rise of the megacorps came after The War Against Terror (TWAT) but we don’t really like to recall such vulgar beginnings.

Well, as I get older, it’s less “party every day” and more “have a wonderful… time. Is that it?”

A former dog groomer faces prison in Dubai for posting a critical Google review from Northern Ireland months before holidaying in the United Arab Emirates.

Craig Ballentine, 33, was arrested on slander charges three weeks ago after arriving in Abu Dhabi to visit friends, according to Detained in Dubai, a British organisation that provides legal assistance to tourists in the UAE.

His sudden detention comes months after he criticised his former employer, a Dubai-based canine salon, online about the “legal nightmare” he experienced following a six-month stint at the company.

After becoming ill — and having a couple of days off work — he was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a long-term condition that causes pain all over the body.

Ballentine, from Cookstown, Northern Ireland, told Detained that despite informing his boss about the diagnosis, and providing his employer with his doctor’s certificate, she registered him as “absconded” with the authorities, meaning he faced a travel ban on his passport which took two months and thousands of pounds to resolve.

“After picking up the pieces, he left an online review of the grooming centre and his former boss, noting the problems she had caused him. It wasn’t an abusive post and he had no idea that several months later, he would become a criminal and face prosecution,” the group said.

Ballentine was transported from Abu Dhabi to Dubai to face charges of slander under the UAE’s strict cybercrime laws that prohibit any form of online criticism.

Ballentine is now “stuck in the country, absent from his employment as a support worker with autistic people and facing two years in prison”, the group said.

“This case will send shockwaves to tourists and expats who feel safe posting online from the safety of their own countries,” warned Radha Stirling, the chief executive of Detained.

His family said they were not informed by the authorities in Dubai about his arrest, and did not know where he was during what was supposed to be a short vacation. Ballentine told Stirling in a phone call: “Mum was so upset and stressed, she thought I was dead.”

Stirling warned that Ballentine “has been advised by local lawyers there is almost zero chance of the case against him being dropped”.

She said: “When someone is offended, even if they are at fault, they can open a criminal prosecution out of spite. Craig deleted the post, apologised but still faces jail. It’s outrageous.

“The UAE’s recently enacted cybercrime laws are a nightmare for foreigners. It is sufficient for a complainant to simply tell police that someone posted something offensive or rude. The police don’t even need to see the actual post. The complainants have all the power and often demand money from the accused to close out the case.”

The Khaleej Times recently warned that those caught out by the strict cybercrime rules become trapped in legal battles and can face hefty fines if they are “overtly critical or give a vilifying Google review, as businesses are becoming increasingly vigilant about safeguarding their reputations”.

A woman in Dubai was last year found guilty of defamation for an Instagram post that “damaged a hospital’s reputation” after she posted a video clip, criticising it as the “worst hospital”.

Stirling said that Ballentine needed to return home and to his work, as he has dedicated his life to helping others.

“It’s atrocious that authorities are allowing such frivolous criminal reports to entangle visitors in the system. There are no protections or safeguards and people’s lives are being ruined,” she added.

The Times has contacted the Foreign Office, the UAE embassy in London, and the Dubai prosecutor’s office for comment.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: “We are providing support to a British man in the UAE and have been in contact with the local authorities.”

Wouldn’t work, unlike the Protestants, who all had their own interpretations of the Bible, so they had to learn to not persecute each other…

Corporations, capitalists, and the people they’ve bought in government are all on the same page worshiping the Almighty Dollar and it’s Holy Book, Modern Monetary Theory.

You’ll find the economics discipline frighteningly dogmatic and unwilling to adapt to new information or accept that accepted theories may be flat out wrong.

OpenAI Research Finds That Even Its Best Models Give Wrong Answers a Wild Proportion of the Time

Right, they don’t seem to understand the kind of change they’ve chosen here. If they were actually upset about corruption, they picked the wrong team.

I think they just got stuck in a rut. They have been dealing with an all-obstructionist Republican party for nearly 16 years now, ever since Obama was elected, if not before.

They stopped promising the moon because they became policy wonks and focused on what was realistically achievable, only making promises they thought they could turn into reality with an obstructionist party blocking them.

Hillary Clinton not-so-famously did a bunch of number crunching on a Basic Income and then said it wouldn’t work, so that’s why she didn’t campaign on anything like that.

They stopped being dreamers, started being policy wonks, and were unwilling to make promises they didn’t think they could keep. Think about the amount of messaging in the last few elections about how progressives were asking too much because we have to be realistic about what we can pass with only a sliver of a majority. People rightly view that as starting from a point of compromise and thus as weak.

Trump promised to smash norms and ignore laws to get his promises done, which people wrongly view as strong. When Republicans like Trump make promises, they are completely unburdened by whether they can accomplish them or not: make the promise, follow through be damned.

Nobody wants a policy wonk telling them they need to wait until their kids are middle aged for things to get better for their family, and the Democrats somehow failed to realize this in 16 years.

Obama was the last Democrat to run on change in the system. Everyone else has been Bush-era-style “Stay the course” status-quo enabling.

File this one with “and Trump won’t instate a national abortion ban”