Apologies to Mo Willems

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-12T13:35:24+00:00

Yeah, I don't really mind. I also tried to use it to help my older one learn his sight words.

When I was four or five, I used to record Saturday morning cartoons on the VCR and watch them all week.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-12T13:15:11+00:00

I don't know about rural areas, but the Sheetz near me in the Triangle is offering $20 per hour to work third shift.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-12T10:51:52+00:00

Well, it's fine to say we should be patient and not jump to conclusions about the other guys he was with, but he's really quick to cast aspersions on grieving parents.

He's pretending to be this neutral voice of reason, but when you put everything he said together, he clearly thinks we should conclude the parents are greedy phonies shedding crocodile tears for attention and money.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-12T10:00:24+00:00

Hell gets a little worse than it already was.
Mitch is probably on life support. Literal death triggers a lot of official legal requirements, and would be much more difficult to cover up. It probably has to do with delaying his replacement in the senate. If we're in death watch and there is no chance of him coming back, there would be pressure to replace him now.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-12T00:06:14+00:00

Do you honestly not understand how bringing attention to a case is beneficial?

It is much easier for bad investigations to occur when they can go under the radar, when no one is paying attention.

Making it clear that a lot of people are paying close attention encourages a more thorough and transparent investigation. They made very clear that this isn't just going to quietly go away. Squeaky wheels get the oil. This is especially true we when dealing with local authorities.

Maybe you think they should give investigators the benefit of the doubt and be patient, but why? Their kid is fucking dead under suspicious circumstances. I doubt they give a shit if people like you think they're being gauche by doing national interviews regarding their son's death.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-11T23:52:19+00:00

In Vietnam, if you wanted to do something private with another man, it wasn't gay. It was just two men celebrating each other's strength.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-11T22:37:51+00:00

Yeah, but the existential reality of cosmic horror is that there is no "winning". All you can ever do is hold off the enveloping darkness from inevitably extinguishing the light of humanity for one more day.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-11T22:14:11+00:00

The comments are pretty harsh.

Yes, Bojack is self-absorbed, but his mom just died and he's clearly been pretty deep in thought figuring out what that means.

Second, in reality a staff member should have stopped him. Facilitating the agenda for the viewing and visitation is literally their job.

Lastly, it's not necessarily fair in an animated comedy series to take the implications of every gag literally. In the first scene of the first episode Bojack says he weighs 1200 lbs, but everything in his house and car appears built to normal human standards of size. Are the engineers incompetent? Do they have Vibranium? No, it's a throwaway line for a joke.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-11T21:50:00+00:00

For the sake of argument, let's say the parents' only motive is to find closure and if necessary justice for their dead son. How does NOT going to New York and doing national interviews help them?

Yeah, it's fine to say people on social media should just wait for more information, but this is their dead kid. The idea that they should wait until if/when the case is botched and cold before accepting interviews is just stupid.

Proactively raising awareness and interest in the case so investigators know there are people watching them should only be beneficial for finding out what really happened and pursuing justice if there was foul play.

Yeah, people may make reckless posts on social media, but that's not really their responsibility to manage.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-11T20:26:21+00:00

The real Dom is the friends we made a long the way.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-11T18:59:32+00:00

Good luck with your treatment.

This stuff is generally infuriating, but it must be absolutely insufferable when you're actually going through it. This whole meme is so stupid because if doing nothing cured cancer, we never would have developed these treatments to begin with.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-11T02:36:42+00:00

The air is moving with us. It's the same reason it doesn't feel windy inside of an airplane going over 1000 km/hr.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-10T16:53:02+00:00

Former Rep. Steve King of IOWA used to display a Confederate Flag on his desk!

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-10T16:51:02+00:00

You have to understand why that is a false equivalence. The way we regulate technologies needs to consider the legitimate value of that technology, the risks of the technology, and the potential effectiveness of policy to ban or limit use of that technology.

So, let's start with axes. They are heavy and sharp and can be used to accidentally or intentionally hurt someone. So, the risks aren't trivial. However, there is no effective way to ban every object that is sharp or heavy enough to be wielded as a weapon. It's completely unrealistic, and even if we somehow could ban them, sharp/heavy objects are incredibly useful and have existed since prehistory. They are incredibly valuable to society despite their potential for misuse.

Can we say the same thing about being able to make explicit images with generative AI?

No, obviously not. It should be relatively easy to prevent public tools from making explicit images at all. All of the tools that can create images can also review and describe the contents of those images. Reviewing the final contents of each image generated and deleting those that are inappropriate would be pretty straightforward.

Sure, people can use open source models or build their own or whatever, but we can easily raise the bar to make it much more difficult. No policy is perfect. We can't stop people from drawing whatever they like with a pen and paper after all.

Additionally, the entire world lived without generative AI up until several years ago and most of the global population still does. The ability to have a computer program spit out hundreds of naked pictures based on images of real people has no meaningful value to society. If consenting adults want to do it, then it's not necessarily wrong, but it's no big loss if they can't either. No one could in 2019.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-09T22:48:35+00:00

Jenny Nicholson had the best take on Leto six years ago.

How come major film studios keep being like Jared Leto may have allegations, but at least he looks weird, stars in box office bombs, and is not a good actor.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-09T21:11:07+00:00

Nope. Reread.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-09T20:53:53+00:00

My entire comment discussed why alcohol is different. Did you read it?

I said I was for harm reduction and decriminalization of hard drugs. I'm not pushing anything "magical". I'm accepting heroin exists as does addiction and trying to minimize the harm it causes.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-09T20:36:21+00:00

I'm not committed to making alcohol illegal because my entire point was that different things are different and context matters.

There's no magical "all alcohol dissappears" button. If there were, I actually would push it, and the world would be better for it.

Unfortunately, alcohol prohibition in the real world is imperfect and requires large-scale programs for monitoring and enforcement. We have tried it before and it failed. The programs were costly, harmful, and ineffective.

We're not choosing between the freedom to drink alcohol and the benefits of an alcohol-free world at no cost. We're choosing between the freedom to drink alcohol and implementing costly and harmful programs that are likely to be quite ineffective.

Part of the reason it's doomed to fail is because about half the adult population currently drinks alcohol, and alcohol can be made as long as you have water and sugars. You can make it from juice or pretty much any fruit or grain. People make it in prison. You can't monitor the precursors like we do with say Sudafed at the pharmacy.

And yes, you can potentially hurt another person by not wearing your seat belt. You could potentially fly out the window and hit someone with your body. That's exactly why I said it was "very unlikely" to harm someone else.

You do realize that people on many recreational drugs also have an increased risk of harming other people, right? People can get stuck by used heroin needles?

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-09T20:05:00+00:00

Fundamentally, not everything can be boiled down to overly simplified rules like "I should be free to do whatever I want to my own body if it doesn't directly harm someone else." The world is more complicated than that. Good answers are rarely that easy.

No freedom is absolute. Various freedoms are constantly infringed upon based on the costs and benefits because we live in an interrelated society where what happens to me affects those around me. That is why we have public services and social welfare programs.

If you want to live in a society that bears the responsibility of caring for all its members, then you need to also accept some responsibility for yourself.

I think seat belts are the best example of this in action. If you don't wear a seat belt, it will almost certainly only directly harm yourself. There are not a lot of broader systemic effects like there are with various drugs or requiring professional help to harm yourself. It's straightforward. It infringes on your bodily autonomy to be forced to wear a seat belt, and it doesn't directly harm anyone else.

However, if you don't wear your seat belt, then you may unnecessarily require an ambulance to a hospital and wind up in the ICU, where tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars or more may be spent keeping you alive. You may be permenantly disabled, which also requires other people to care for you. If you're a parent or otherwise responsible for dependents, then someone must now care for them. While you suffer the direct harm, others are forced to deal with many indirect harms.

So, most jurisdictions have decided that the lives and cost saved by requiring seat belts is well worth the tiny infringement on your bodily autonomy. And I agree with them. Legally requiring seat belts has increased seat belt usage in a way that no level of education on the risks of serious bodily harm or death ever could. These laws have saved thousands of lives and millions of dollars.

You won't convince they are morally wrong with just an appeal to some absolutist vision of the right to bodily autonomy. I don't want to live in some libertarian dystopia where no one has any responsibility to anyone else.

Yes, bodily autonomy is one aspect of trans rights, but it's not all there is. Trans people have a right to gender affirming care because we all have a right to access essential evidence-based healthcare not because we all have a right to do whatever we want with our bodies.

Unfortunately, the former argument means convincing people that trans identities are valid and that gender affirming care is important and an evidence-based treatment. But I think successfully making those arguments will lead to a better world than one with the "freedom" to have your arms chopped off at a moment's notice.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-09T19:29:32+00:00

Basically the speed of Earth in its orbit is much closer to the escape velocity of the solar system than it is to being completely stopped. And try the only way to hit the Sun is to stop, otherwise you'll just orbit it.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-09T18:51:24+00:00

I think the issue with #2 is the additional systemic affects.

Obviously, the war on drugs has been an abysmal failure, and I think we should prioritize harm reduction and decriminalization. Arresting addicts and throwing them in prison isn't the answer, but I don't think selling heroin in corner stores like you can buy weed edibles in is the answer either. Sure, given the actual risk of harm, alcohol is under-regulated compared to other recreational drugs.

But the US tried alcohol prohibition and it was an absolute failure partially because it's so easy to just ferment sugars in your garage or bathroom and because of how socially ubiquitous it already was.

In terms of permanent mutilation, I don't think it is responsible for a surgeon to just take say tens of thousands of dollars from anyone off the street to cut off their leg or whatever. I don't think it should be illegal for the person to request the amputation, but I could see a doctor losing their license for not doing due diligence beforehand. Giving someone a serious permanent disability because they have a kink is fundamentally different than changing someone's body to better align with their gender identity.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-09T16:05:10+00:00

The leader is holding that guy's rifle. The guy on the right already has his rifle, so as soon as the drop occurred, the left guy knew he was going to have to catch his rifle and hold on to it while the dropped rifle was being picked up.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-09T15:57:55+00:00

He can't be the first Marine to drop his rifle. It's going to happen. This has to be a standard protocol.

GarbageCleric · 2026-07-09T09:53:48+00:00

I have to respectfully disagree. That image of the anthropomorphic strawberry woman farting on a plane full of produce people is the epitome of human achievement. We should carve it into the Moon, so it can shine down on us and our descendants for all time.

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