Yep. This is why online recipe sites put a whole goddamn personal essay before the actual recipe: if someone scrapes the page and copies it, they’ll scrape the (copyrightable) essay as well as the (non-copyrightable) recipe.

Many Republicans are sponsored and bribed by fascist powers such as Putin’s Russia. They are under orders to take actions intended to weaken American industry, government, and society. This includes, for instance, sabotaging infrastructure projects, blocking disaster preparedness and relief, and fomenting political violence. The long-range goal is to make America incapable of projecting force to protect its international allies, global trade, etc.; a medium-range goal is to restore a regime broadly supportive of the international fascist movement.

(Just consider: Why does Putin support Trump? Putin doesn’t want to make America great; he wants to make America incapable — especially, incapable of defending Ukraine and, ultimately, other European allies. Putin predicts that Trump/Vance will accomplish that goal.)

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The first-past-the-post voting system sucks; the resulting two-party system sucks; but right now we have to operate within it. The mathematics of that system entail the simple fact that if you discourage people from keeping Trump out, you are helping get Trump in. That makes you a Trump supporter.

You’re currently a Trump supporter. If you don’t want to be one, you can stop.

I’m gonna smoke me a Mary J. Wana
Y’all ain’t can stop me, I’m totally gonna
Bake me a stoned like a sunny iguana
I’m gonna smoke me a Mary J. Wana

I’m gonna hash pipe to high me my head
Mellow my jello from born until dead
Teq’ me no 'quila, no pills blue and red
I’m gonna hash pipe to high me my head

I’m gonna weed me some grassical pots
Look you my dime bag 'cause that’s what I gots
Ain’t gonna shoot me no heroin shots
Just gonna weed me some grassical pots

Pot, weed, grass, ganja, herb, trees, green, chronic, reefer, doobage, dagga, dank, tea, …

Odd?

Show me what Stalinism looks like
This is what Stalinism looks like

Some homophobes don’t believe in the existence of straight people.

🍕 I only have pepperoni.

Orange you glad …

How many 1700s drinking songs does anyone know the tune of today? Well, there’s “To Anacreon in Heaven”, better known as “The Star Spangled Banner”.

“Aura Lee” is from the 1860s, but the tune is better known today as Elvis’s “Love Me Tender”.

Maoism did a lot of evil without any religion. Were all of its perpetrators bad people?

Being targeted by Nazis doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. And thus, there’s nothing you can avoid doing, that will protect you from Nazis.

The doctors were lied to, too; specifically about how long OxyContin is effective. Doctors aren’t wizards; they’re trained workers. If they’re given bad training, they reliably generate bad work.

Anti-science, misogyny, etc. are bad independently of whether they are done in the name of religion, or pseudoscience, or political ideology. Doing bad things in the name of religion is exactly as bad as doing them in the name of communism, or capitalism, or racial ideology, etc.

Sure. Voting for religious genocide is just as bad as voting for non-religious genocide: e.g. on the basis of nationalism, pseudoscience, or the like.

Imagine if that person did all the same things they do, but without the label of “religion” being attached.

Charity? Awesome! Habitat for Humanity is an explicitly Christian organization and does great work. In my neighborhood, the local Lutheran and Quaker churches give out free food to the poor, and they don’t sneak any Lutheran or Quaker cooties into it. If you’re good to others because you think God wants you to be good to others, that still really does count as being good to others.

Prayer? Okay, take “religion” off of it and they’re meditating, thinking, or talking to themselves. That’s good. Unless they’re thinking and talking about torturing their neighbors eternally, or something creepy like that. (But even then, better to keep those fantasies to yourself than to act them out in public.) Die Gedanken sind frei — thoughts are free.

Going to worship services? Okay, they’ve got a weekly social event where they sing songs and listen to speeches. Sounds great, unless the songs are about “everyone outside this room is a terrible person and deserves to suffer forever” and the speeches are about hate politics. If they’re about how wonderful it is to be nice to each other, or being brave and standing up against oppression, or something else that would be positive even without the label of “religion” on it, great!

Dietary rules? It’s okay to have preferences, distinct cultures, cuisines, and so forth. For that matter: my family isn’t Jewish, but when I was little, we ate kosher beef hot dogs, because my mom expected the rabbis would care about the meat being sanitary. (Unfortunately in retrospect, kosher slaughter is, shall we say, not clearly better than secular slaughter.)

Beard, not mullet.