Yes. And to let them know you don’t particularly resent their choice of using a non-standard browser.

Yes but install a cute banner. We didn’t test for compatibility with your browser. We’re sorry! You may continue to use your browser, but you may get errors and see all the subliminal advertising to buy more of our fine prducts!

I said what I said.

Well, the California example is about too many PSA warning labels. So many things are known by the State of California to cause cancer that no-one takes heed of the labels anymore. Similarly Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign (and Tipper Gore’s parental advisory music labels) only encouraged kids to do more drugs and listen to angrier music.

So it’s not that kids will smoke more (or much more) it’s that the labels will be more easily ignored when the government fails to be sparing in their use.

In an non-government example, when everything is a sin, then nothing is a sin.

I had no idea.

I’m reminded of Christopher Lee, who’s awesomeness on the silver screen (and in Metal) was only the tip of his iceberg of accomplishments.

Which is why our governments are trying to kill US Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that platforms cannot be held responsible for their content. (Although, if you want advertisers, it needs to be brand safe, and its this that does most of the censorship) – there are still some limits. You have to take down CSAM when someone posts it, and it’s generally a good idea to moderate spam and hate speech. And when dealing with billions of posts or comments per hour, it’s really hard to moderate at that scale.

Social media allows us to see the truth of what’s going on, e.g. what it’s really like on the Gaza Strip and what’s really being done by the IDF. Police shootings and unnecessary SWAT and DEA raids were a problem before the internet got going, but now when someone dies, BLM and ACLU get videos of the incident, and that fuels discontent and unrest, and to our elites, that’s a problem.

This is the very point of the Freedom of the Press in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to let people know when institutions aren’t serving the public, rather are serving something else, usually plutocratic interests.

All the disinformation, the enshittification of big social media platforms, and heck, Musk’s direct purchase of X are about neutering the power of the internet, which is how I ended up on Lemmy.

It is absolutely AI generated. I plucked it from one of the AI artist feeds, thinking it might have applicability.

The wikipedia article on Hulme is in shambles. What exactly happened to him?

Jesus is a failed apocalyptic prophet from the iron age. He wasn’t resurrected, and the narratives written by the biblical authors had their own agendas. The scholarly consensus remains that the OT and NT are not univocal, not divinely inspired and not inerrant. It’s a historic work, but is not a strong chronicle of history but of mythology, like The Illiad.

But ministries are always going to take advantage of common mythologies and ideologies to manipulate the people. They are, after all, for-profit institutions in a capitalist market, or before were a nexus of political power. They remain places that serve themselves, not the people.

We can even note that the message of Christianity has changed with time to serve the ministries, to reflect the mores of the culture at the time, though in the 20th century, there was an active effort to shift Protestant Evangelical Christianity in the United States towards American Exceptionalism, far-right conservatism, anti-communism, pro-patriarchy and pro-hierarchy, resulting in the Christian nationalist movement we are facing today. The movement that wants to purge LGBT+ and non-Christians, and force women to become breeding mares is the product of decades of willful manipulation. As some sociologists and historians who are Evangelist, themselves have observed, this may well kill Christianity as we know it today, making it the de-facto bad-guy the way Nazis (the old German Reich ones) have been for the last century.

In the meantime, the poet is doing something different. In this case, it serves the same role as other internal mentors and heroes. In Dialectical Behavior Training (DBT, related to CBT – the other CBT) imagining what Wonder Woman, or Captain America, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Jesus Christ might say to you taps into that part of you that loves you unconditionally, beyond the fear that you don’t fit into mainstream society. Jay Hulme is seeing within himself someone that loves and regards him and accepts him for who he is, which is a critical step for all of us, especially those of us who didn’t have others to do the job.

(This can also be applied to other media that celebrates the love of Jesus or the love of a mentor, such as I Don’t Deserve You by Plumb or The Wind Beneath My Wings by… two songwriters – Jeff Silbar and Larry Henley – and performed a whole lot of artists)

Jinn traditionally are magical beings (beings of essential fire) from the Dusky Lands. We assume they’re stuck in jars because Solomon vacuumed a bunch up (angels too) and stuffed them into objects, sometimes geasing them so they are bound to serve.

This is how King Soli got his civil works projects done.

There are tens of thousands of Solomon’s captured Jinns, spread asunder and lost to time. But beware opening a vessel with Solomon’s seal. Some are untamed and with just kill you, while others are tricky and will spoil any requests.

Those that are bound usually are limited only by their own endurance and patience. It’s fairies who like to number their boons.

• Sorcerers and Witches, those who practice magic without a license from the religious establishment, often consulted by the poor and underprivileged since the undesirables can’t simply walk into Oz without the right fancy dress.

• Thieves, shunned by all since stealing is a greater sin than murder or human sacrifice (mostly because it’s a lower-class crime), but are clever enough to activate wands, identity herbs and potions and use practical household magic, just from ad-hoc experience and fiddling around.

The tail end of a selective breeding program, but yes. The Bene Gesserit were (according to some internal hypotheses) belived to have been manipulated to expect the outcome later down the line, featuring an Atraides–Harkonnen child. But they were wrong.

In the fanfic sequel the poo people are kept addicted on magic-suppressing opioids and mind-dulling cigarettes provided by the Special owned industrial pharmaceutical companies. It’s been this way so long

Eveyone knows people who don’t smoke can’t be trusted. The temple priests say so every Sunday service.

On occasion we have that story, where just some basic high school algebra and chemistry levels up the tech of the good guys enough to turn the tide of war.

We’ve had this conversation before, most famously regarding Jive (see the movie Airplane ) which had regional variations (e.g. Brooklyn vs. New Orleans) that were incomprehensible to each other.

And there are ongoing regional comprehension problems with general regional and ethnic dialects, hence the whole ebonics controversy of the 1990s.

So this ain’t our first rodeo. Totally.

This comic brought to you by the National Heritage Foundation.

We can’t even come together to wear a peice of cloth to slow the spread of a virus.

• No one washes their hands — Increased infection rates.
• Research doctors don’t work — Reduced cure research speed.
• Sick people given hugs — Infectivity increased once spotted.
  – Plague Inc. description of Easy Difficulty (Written before the 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown)

Humans are not descended from contemporary apes rather the apes that were around millions of years ago.

Also, if we attain the not-insignificant-anymore possibility of going extinct in the next couple hundred years (like the dinosaurs from famine complicated by drastic climate change, or from too many microplastics in the brain, or from nuclear escalation, which we haven’t entirely ruled out) we will have only survived ~250,000 years compared to Homo-Erectus which survived over 2,000,000. But we will get the self-extermination achievement.

If an asteroid were to hit the Earth large enough to cause human extinction, it would save us the embarrassment of killing ourselves from poisoning the climate or microplastic pollution.

I’m pretty sure we navigated nuclear holocaust, but we haven’t fully ruled it out either.