If you live in an apartment, you can make your neighbors love you by making garum, an ancient Roman fish sauce, in a jar, indoors, in your apartment!

Instead of separating grocery stores by Vegetable, Dairy, etc, we should separate them into Dry Goods, Moist Goods, Wet Goods, and Iced Goods.

The jars…THEY CALL TO ME!

I think my “peak American” was that time many years ago when I went driving down the I35 interstate in rural Kansas…eating a plate of chicken fettuccine alfredo.

It’s OK. The statute of limitations has long passed.

Although, now that I think of it, this might be my peak Italian moment, though I’m not of Italian ancestry…

Anyway, it was delicious Fazoli’s.

If they really wanted to redeem themselves, they should public domain it, allowing anyone to make new Command and Conquer games.

Make one!

His followers did that - after being led by their leaders into doing so. It was the leaders that made it all possible. The only reason several dozen Republican Congress members aren’t rotting in jail right now is because Biden is a coward and a traitor to the Republic.

And are they purging everyone who used such chats? Are they purging every straight person who ever mentioned a romantic partner? Are they purging every cis het guy who mentioned hooking up with someone over the weekend?

Give me a break. People talk about their personal lives all the time at work. This isn’t Severance. What kind of company have you worked for that people never talked about their personal lives? Except, the administration has chosen to interpret completely normal discussions about personal lives and health matters and declare them obscene, simply because they involve queer lives and bodies, rather than straight ones.

People who appeal to “the rules” are usually doing so in bad faith. If the NSA really does have such formal and strict rules, then they would likely have to fire every person there for violating them. The employees on this chat were clearly acting in a way that was considered acceptable within the culture of the agency.

Would you freak out over a group of women discussing their health issues? What about a chat where a group of men discuss the pros/cons of a vasectomy? Everybody has issues that can sound gross and obscene if you read them in bad faith. It’s obvious that at the NSA, this kind of discussion was just acceptable. But then they chose to only fire the trans people for violating the sanctity of “the rules.”

You are the kind of person MLK warned us about, the kind that prefers order over justice. And you should know from history that “the rules” are often applied with blatant bigotry and double standards. And that is the problem here. Appealing to “the rules” when they are clearly being applied incredibly unevenly in the service of overt bigotry shows that you do not give a damn about justice.

Are they also purging everyone in the agency that ever texted about hooking up with someone over the weekend? Please. People talk about their sex lives all the time, even at work. They just make sure to discuss it an appropriate context. And this discussion group was just that kind of appropriate context.

Again, are they firing everyone who ever texted about a weekend hookup? If not, then it’s simple bigotry. Even using lurid words like “gangbang” is honestly almost a slur in this context. Do I participate in that kind of romance? Personally, no. I’m monogamous myself. But I also recognize overt, rank, and despicable bigotry when I see it.

This is how bigotry puts on a polite face. You declare certain sexual practices as obscene while consider others polite and acceptable. On cis het guy brags to another about the time they hooked up with two chicks in one weekend? That’s just a player. A queer person has multiple partners and chooses a poor word to describe it? Suddenly it’s worth firing every trans person in the agency.

You clearly don’t hate this administration enough, as you are completely willing to accept their framing that certain sexualities are inherently deviant and shameful.

Protest outside his house.

Anyone interested in the real story here needs to read the Erin Reed article on this. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/the-new-mccarthyism-lgbtq-purges

This story isn’t being covered well by the mainstream press. They’ve always tended to “both sides” trans issues, and here they’re simply accepting fascist talking points at face value. What’s really happening is that there was a chat group provided by the NSA to employees specifically to discuss trans-related issues. They have groups like this to support the needs of all sorts of demographic groups. The trans group, unsurprisingly, sometimes contained discussions of trans issues like surgery, hormones, etc. Fascists like Gabbard consider trans people to be pornographic for simply existing. A trans person walking down the street is pornographic to her. Any discussion of any of the realities of trans existence is considered elicit and pornographic to them.

This is actually part of Project 2025’s explicitly stated plan to imprison and eventually exterminate the trans population. When people use the phrase “trans genocide,” this is exactly what they’re talking about. The goal has always been to define trans people as pornographic, to make trans people being in the presence of minors a sex offense. And they also wish to make sex offenses against children punishable by the death penalty.

That is what these people are for. That is what they believe. Unfortunately, the main stream media is ignorant, complicit, or both. They simply accept the framing that any discussion of trans people or their issues is “explicit,” and they repeat fascist talking points without thought or criticism.

Most of it seemed to be just discussions of healthcare that are only defined as “explicit” because it’s talking about the healthcare trans people need. It’s just part of the long-running attempt to define trans people as porn. If you are trans, you are walking pornography to these people.

Remember, this was on a chat that was specifically set up, by the agency, to serve as a resource and information sharing section for trans and LGBT people. The employer told them to use it, and they did. Now the new administration, following the model of Florida and other shithole states, has decided that trans people by their nature are pornographic, and any discussion of trans issues is explicit.

And worst, they went through years of texts and found the most explicit messages they could. They leaked these texts to fascist hate mongers to stir shit up. Then they fired anyone who had ever posted on the chat. You could have gone on the company LGBT chat once, said, “Hi,” and then never used it again. And you would be fired for it.

This is the Lavender Scare all over again. They are simply using the chats as a pretext to fire every trans person from the agency.

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/the-new-mccarthyism-lgbtq-purges

Yeah, mutual aid works on the local level or in insular communities like long-term discord groups with a tight group of regular members. With community mutual aid, I’m generally in favor of just taking people at their word. If they say they need help, give them help. No need to interrogate them like the food stamp office will. You prevent people from abusing the system by simply not granting endless requests from the same person. Or if someone needs severe aid, at that point you can start actually verifying their story, helping them access government benefits, helping them find employment, etc.

But that kind of open approach works for in-person aid. It doesn’t work for anonymous online aid, where someone can use bots to spin up hundreds of convincing profiles each begging for money.

I just don’t think mutual aid works well in an online context. The only online context it works in is among communities like small discord groups where people know each other for years. But on a lemmy or mastadon-type service? Mutual aid is impractical. Any people asking for aid should be directed to local groups that can help them in person.

Yes. It’s called summarizing. Obviously it’s a bit more complicated. I’m not writing an essay on the history of Linux here.

Just how fucking dense do you have to be in order to be surprised that a man who created one of the most popular operating systems on Earth, and then gave it away for free, might be a leftist?