The family has a tendency to not have a lot of brains

One remembers the “refrigerator mothers” idea

Bizarrely, the urge to make money off scared trans people overpowered the urge to be fascist.

Real criminal organizations will know that proprietary software is less secure than open-source stuff.

A proper criminal should use Signal or another open-source e2ee messenger, and so should you.

(Signal is blocked in Russia)

In this particular case literally all I want is to be able to talk to my family members without risking the FSB arresting them for calling the “Special Military Operation” a war in a phone call. If using WhatsApp for texting isn’t banned alongside phone calls, that is halfway okay for discussions of that nature, and I’ll have to watch my tongue if I call them over the Roskomnadzor-Approved ™ apps.

The trouble with those of course is that they don’t always work well with non-Russian phone numbers (because of course fucking everything needs my number nowadays). And you have to hope they’re not megaspyware. I am NOT downloading fucking MAX.

I will assume that you are saying that people should not be using Signal based on this (e.g. the United States are sliding into fascism and may fuck over Signal).

What would you suggest then? PGP? Ngl I’m happy that GnuPG is introducing post-quantum encryption in the new releases but I’m talking about calling my grandma.

It means that making phone calls with either will likely soon become impossible for those with a Russian Internet connection.

People should be using Signal, which is also blocked.

I’m now frantically trying to cook up some way to be able to call my family back there. A VPN is of course an option, but also illegal.

I often fry whatever vegetables I can find and add a fried egg.

Rice and buckwheat are very cheap (and vegan if you’re of that persuasion). If you cook buckwheat, you can add a few tiny bits of sausage in there and you’ve got a very filling meal.

Oatmeal is great because you buy it in huge bags that last long and you can eat it for breakfast, lunch or dinner. If the budget is not that bad you cook it with milk. If it is you cook it with water (this is called gruel, medieval peasant food). If you’re making gruel add a bit of salt to make it more palatable.

An old classic is of course ramen, but the ramen bricks can be made much more filling if you boil them in a pot with a sausage or two (this requires you to have sausage).

If you live in certain tropical areas you can harvest some edible fruits from unfenced land and use this to enrich your diet.

Eating a couple extra hours of sleep for breakfast instead of food is a dubiously healthy but certainly effective way to save some money on weekends.

A pro tip is if your drawer is not very clean your onions will start to sprout and take root. I didn’t have to buy onions for about half a year at one point because I just kept cutting off a bit and it kept growing back. I didn’t water them or anything, they just did that in my dark dingy cupboard.

Because liberalism is a hypocritical ideology.

The USA built itself off genocide and colonialism and has spent the last three centuries expanding its empire to every continent (and has long-since been an attack dog for Israel).

France endorsed liberty, equality, and fraternity at home and horrors abroad in Haiti and Algeria.

To the credit of the Liberal Party, they were much less imperialist than the Whigs they derived from or Tories. This is not to say that they were truly opposed to imperialism. Cecil Rhodes was a Liberal.

In all of these cases, the colonial adventures did not occur despite liberalism but were justified by it. We must bring enlightened civilization to the savages, you see. Locke and Mill, two foundational British figures of liberalism, were both supporters of colonialism.

Every day we learn something is a happy day for us

I think you and I think of different meanings for “your man”. Never said that Trump wasn’t a gombeen piece of shit.

I looked through a different article and it said this: “Trump will be the first president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 not to speak at the conference at all, skipping it entirely in 2016 as the presidential nominee and again in 2017 and 2018.”

So your man was invited but didn’t come.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/naacp-breaks-with-116-years-of-history-to-snub-trump/

Did they invite him during his first term?

Also the anniversary of an important attempt to liberate the Dominican Republic from Trujillo, a fascist dictator who was propped up by the USA.

A very big portion of How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm criticizes this study and how it ignores the more violent and property-destroying aspects of the movements it studied.

As Malm describes, the radical flank effect is a well-documented phenomenon in which the presence of a more militant faction in a social movement makes the authorities much more likely to compromise with the moderate elements.

I suggest you read the book if you haven’t already.

The crosses are iron at least

The username looks to me like a joke

According to the article, the context for the flashy headline is that all Catholics are children of God and that all must be treated with compassion, while still acknowledging that pedophiles are monsters.

I will not pretend that Francis’s hands are totally clean. He has mistreated abuse cases in the past. Around 2019 he actually started implementing some reforms that have to some extent helped. While I don’t think he did enough, he did much more than his predecessors. I highly suspect the next pope will be another Benedict and not another Francis. Consequently, I suspect that the mishandling will get worse.

He was an alright Pope in the end. Not a soulless bastard like Benedict.