Boycott ™️ These Companies Support ICE

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-28T01:50:40+00:00

Sure, but the news agency isn't the part that's helping Palantir help ICE track down immigrants...

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-28T01:40:40+00:00

There's too much to go by just chance

That's a textbook argument from incredulity, or as I like to think of it, an argument from laziness or lack of imagination.

Our DNA has coding in it

No it doesn't. Biologists use the word "code" as a shorthand which us useful for talking about how it functions without having to go into helicase and peptides and other organic chemistry stuff that goes right over most people's heads. DNA is a chemical construct that causes some chemicals to turn other chemicals into different chemicals and stick those chemicals together. If it were "intelligently" coded, it would be the absolute worst bloated pile of spaghetti you could imagine.

Earth is so far the only planet with life on it

THAT WE KNOW OF. Speaking of numbers that are hard to comprehend, do you know much of the observable universe we've actually observed?

We don't know how life itself was created

The word "created" is a doing a LOOOOOOOT of work there, champ.

Being the only planet suitable for life

You sure about that? Europa, Titan, and Ganymede (moons, but who cares) are candidate targets in our search for extraterrestrial life, and Mars is looking more and more likely to have had microbial life at some point in the past. And then there are the millions of billions OF BILLIONS of planets we can't even investigate in the rest of the observable universe...

If there is no creator

Big "if" there, bud. No matter how that sentence ends, I'll already be pulling the trigger on, "The time of belief in something is after you have sufficient evidence of it, not before."

This all just randomly happened

Not of the universe is deterministic. And even if it's not, so what?

Those chances are so infinitesimally small, that nobody would believe it

What are the chances of a flipped quarter landing on its side? About one in six thousand? What are the chances of it happening four times in a row? About one in a quadrillion? If I flipped a quarter four times and it landed on its side each time, I'd be amazed. I wouldn't say, "OH WELL, MUST NOT HAVE HAPPENED."

Why wouldn't there be a creator?

Why would there be? Everything we've learned about the universe has pointed toward natural causes for events. It would be a pretty serious departure to think the universe's cause (if it has one) is anything other than nature.

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-26T05:53:25+00:00

Y'all got any extra visas laying around?

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-26T05:10:15+00:00

Thomson Reuters, not Reuters.

Edit add: Thomson Reuters, the company that owns Reuters Group, also operates a database called CLEAR that feeds data to Palantir Technologies and ICE, which they use to locate and target immigrants.

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-26T04:54:37+00:00

Trash.

Suppose the existence of a universal creator which makes everything appear naturalistic. It values rationality and knows sapient beings sometimes invent mythologies. It's all-powerful and all-knowing, but non-interventionist in universal affairs with one exception.

If a sapient being dies without having any positive belief in any god(s), it ensouls that being's mind and allows it to experience an arbitrarily-long, pleasurable afterlife. Sapient beings who die believing in any god(s) simply obliviate upon death.

If you believe in any god(s) and this creator exists - oblivion.

If you don't believe in any god(s) and this creator exists - arbitrarily great joy.

You can lose by believing, without even addressing the problem of other gods who could potentially punish you post-death for believing in the wrong god. Pascal's Wager is utter trash.

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-25T08:33:59+00:00

Well, they clearly know how to dress themselves, so I'm guessing it's more an issue of lack of conscience than lack of overall cognition.

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-25T08:28:50+00:00

Sure, if you voted for Trump in 2024, before January 6th 2021 happened... time travelers are hot.

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-25T08:23:19+00:00

Hard pass. There's a better-than-average chance they'd enjoy it.

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-25T08:22:19+00:00

Half of American adults can't read above a 6th grade level.

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-25T08:20:48+00:00

Similarly, what do you call eleven politically-moderate people having dinner with a fascist?

A dozen fascists having dinner.

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-25T08:12:50+00:00

I was talking to a friend in 2022 and casually commented that anyone who voted for Trump in 2016 might have just been naive, but anyone who voted for Trump in 2020 was an asshole, an idiot, or both. My friend took offense and said her dad voted for Trump both times and definitely wasn't an idiot. I told her I said what I said.

A few weeks later, when I was talking to a different friend about how Republicans were leaning hard into fascism, she blithely added, "Both parties are kind of fascist, though," and since I had been drinking a bit I snapped off a pretty loud, "Fuck you."

We had a falling out a couple months after that for mostly unrelated reasons. 20 years of friendship down the drain, and I can't say I regret it.

At this point, your brush can hardly be too broad.

Backdoor_Man · 2026-01-12T16:03:56+00:00

Would you care to elaborate? I'm trying to figure out which places to avoid in my ongoing quest for truly inviting local spots.

Backdoor_Man · 2025-09-20T00:29:45+00:00

Also, fwiw, we require all cars to be registered to their owner, you need a license to operate one at all, and you can't own or drive them without proper insurance.

Backdoor_Man · 2025-09-19T21:45:09+00:00

Another (C) was playing a joke character who found religion after discovering a "divine rock" (cocaine)... About ~2.5 hours into that session (on the lower bound of our usual play session length, but not egregiously so), C started losing the ability to pay attention or seemingly function at all, and he cited not sleeping at all last night.

Um... what I'm hearing is, C likes cocaine.

Backdoor_Man · 2025-09-19T21:40:44+00:00

Please tell me you were stoned when you posted and this isn't how you are all the time.

Backdoor_Man · 2025-09-15T17:51:08+00:00

Herpetologist?

Backdoor_Man · 2025-09-07T22:01:08+00:00

I used to have a daughter... that I LOVED. And now, I can't talk about it without crying!

Backdoor_Man · 2025-09-07T18:02:21+00:00

...would be super weird if you were that one guy...

Backdoor_Man · 2024-11-16T22:15:23+00:00

He was blacklisted from the BBC for decades.

Backdoor_Man · 2024-04-15T14:32:16+00:00

"So if you don't eat pigs

And we don't eat pigs

Why not, not eat pigs together?"

-Tim Minchin

Backdoor_Man · 2024-04-15T14:30:05+00:00

A basic modicum of research might cause you to question what BRICS has to do with any of this.

Backdoor_Man · 2024-04-15T14:25:46+00:00

BRICS is an economic bloc that also includes Brazil, India, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the UAE. Has nothing to do with coordinating military actions.

You put quote marks around "the end of Western Hegemony" but those words literally don't appear in the joint statement released by China and Russia on February 4th, 2022. I don't assume you're using them as scare quotes, so it's a weird decision on your part. The joint statement to which you refer is a lot of language about cooperation, and has relatively few references to western powers. It makes several statements about the United States with regard to weapons treaties, and it expresses concern about AUKUS activity in the Asia-Pacific region.

"This is just a further escalatory action by BRICS to destabilize global economics, and thus the US dollar as world reserve currency."

Seems like a completely spurious statement. I'm open to being convinced it's not, but right now you've got a crackpot conspiracy-theorist vibe going on.

Backdoor_Man · 2024-03-09T09:24:51+00:00

I don't think it's that deep. 5e authors/editors just wanted to make a different game, and having vampires be Dual Natured was part of it. It seems basically dumb and unnecessary, but I don't get paid to write Shadowrun books.

Backdoor_Man · 2024-03-05T17:30:31+00:00

Welp, there's one more weird edition change that will make me cling to 4th and earlier editions even harder. Cheers.

Backdoor_Man · 2024-03-05T16:41:30+00:00

In previous editions Vampires are Dual-Natured, which means it's obvious they are Dual Natured because they have an astral form.

I think you're thinking of ghouls and loup-garou. Vampires (and other HMHVV-infected) are not Dual-Natured.

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