So, tomorrow will see @HumzaYousaf stepping down and @neilcgray being the SNP choice to replace him. You heard it here first!

— Murdo Fraser (@murdo_fraser) April 25, 2024

!britbongs

Or maybe not

/r/Scotland seem to have completely turned on the SNP at this point

https://old.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/1cdf3yi/humza_yousaf_is_not_considering_his_position/?sort=controversial

For context the National is the paper for Scottish independence fanatics

He probably won't have much of a choice in the matter though

https://old.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/1ccpvcm/scottish_tories_to_lodge_noconfidence_vote_in/?sort=controversial

Humza just essentially kicked the Greens out of Scottish government too so I'm sure they'll all be super keen to keep him in power

https://old.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/1ccvlxz/yousafs_fate_hangs_on_single_msp_as_greens_will/?sort=controversial

The MSP who he's relying on left the party due to their policies too

!redscarepod !chuds

Never have I seen so many governments and powerful institutions bend at the knee for Israel to silence overwhelming public support for Palestine

its literally illegal to question certain things in many countries, that should be all a person with critical thinking needs to know

Don't worry, soon enough the government will start planting Nazi flags, Trump flags, and flat Earther nonsense in the protests to demonize you. There will be marches by some folks in matching clothes who arrive in the back of a U-Haul.

THIS TIME THE DEATH SQUADS WILL BE REAL GUISE TRUST ME

Get out and talk to real people. There is not overwhelming support for Palestine in the US. Americans identify more with the cops than the fat enby protesters. Not a judgment call - just reality.

this party pooper ruining things

You are getting it backwards, really. >Israel has no power, they exist because America wants them to. They're a useful regional power and ally against Iran. If the US stopped supporting them they wouldn't exist. Criticism of Israel and zionism gets shut down so fast because its criticism of US imperialism. Zionism is just a convenient cover.

2020 Lockdowns had nothing to do with Covid, and everything to do with expanding. the bounds of governmental control, surveillance, and propaganda (I'm not saying Covid wasn't real, I'm saying it's not why we had "Lockdowbs" shutting down schools, hospitals (yes, hospitals), and other vital services leading to overall more death, comorbidities, and mental health issues---which we are ABSOLUTELY still in the wake of and will be for a while, check Sweden against it's comparable neighbors.

That is to say, a LOT of this, has ZERO to do with neither Israel NOR Gaza, and everything to do with power-grabs & power-moved which can serve as a guise for being "about Israel" or "about Gaza" or about "maintaining civility" "peace" "safety", etc.

Remember the phrase "Abundance of caution" in 2020? There are so many games being played at so many levels. That's why the gravitation towards conspiracy feels so strong.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Spiderman/comments/14nkz9o/peter_parker_was_trans/?sort=controversial

https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/03/29/spider-man-across-the-spider-verse-gwen-stacy-trans/

https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-evidence-that-Spider-Man-Peter-Parker-is-bisexual

This is all false.

Evening all.

I don't know how I feel about inhabiting this place. But I do know I can use it to draft.

Shiri's Slippers

Long time readers will know of my grudge with Scott Alexander, high priest of the SFBA Rationalist Cult. Previously it was suggested that we begin a bombing run of their spaces but I called a 'hold.' Honestly there's no time like the present.

Ultimately my problem with these people is that the demand the status of seriousness without being willing to do the work to be serious. In forums like /r/theschism or themotte, the topics of the day have been, bizarrely, subtracted out of the conversation.

The most important political conversation happening today is about the Supreme Court ruling on the immunity which a President enjoys.

You won't see this talked about.

See I used to think that Scott Alexander's "You Are Still Calling Wolf" was the most damaging piece Scott ever wrote. For his own reputation. For the political damage it did to the brains of his followers.

Scott Alexander doesn't think of himself as a cult leader of course, even though his followers do, and have regular struggle sessions about this fact. See this hilarious exchange in which a twitter thread praises Scott Alexander for not being a prophet.

Now I can't assume everyone has familiarity with the spiritual mechanisms Scott Alexander has engaged with. To recap: Scott Alexander self-consciously wrote Unsong to imitate schizophrenic individuals attempting to write a holy text. Scott Alexander copied the prophet motion without, apparently, understanding what it meant that he did this for his followers.

Then his followers didn't do this either.

The other very very funny recurrence at work here is the SFBA Rationalist Cult's founder, whose work included a number of overtly spiritual calls, led to an early incident in the cult history where they linked hands and sang "We are not a cult." To this day SFBA Rationalist Cultists, when they gather, engage in praise of the founder under an ambiguous amount of irony. And as you all know at this point: in a post-ironic world, all expression is genuine. (I'm referring here to the Valentine's Day musical that some postrats put on as a dating show.)

So these people all have this habitual denial of their spiritual connection. They Think They're Atheists, and atheists can't be in a cult. And if it is a cult, they think it's a benign one, a harmless one, if they're pressed. But secretly, they believe they are an elevated specimen of human thinker, and this was accomplished with Shiri's Slippers.

I thought they were a harmless cult when I first encountered them. The most devastating review of the founder's work was always: what's novel in it isn't good, and what's good in it isn't novel. The SFBA Rationalist Cult literally bricked a bunch of minds in the 2010s and we're only still figuring this out.

Because the consequences of Scott Alexander's foray into politics were that he was one of the foremost beacons of fascism denialism. These people all had a grudge against the academy. They think they're better than schooling. But then they create their own forms and fall down dead wrong.

It turns out that the fools at the academy are better equipped.

There's this crackpot tinge of resentment against the fools at the academy for rejecting their founder's bad writing as bad writing. This is one of the things that make them less a harmless cult and more a destructive torment nexus of incompetence. It's not a coincidence that these people developed idiot confidence and SBF is now under arrest for Big Fraud. They're all frauds. They can't even function as a cult because of their bizarre denial complex around their cultishness.

The consequentialist argument against the utility of the SFBA Rationalist Cult goes something like:

The consequences of Scott Alexander's writing is an island of people separated from mainstream intellectual politics. They're really alone out there.

Fascism

At this point I think it's more important than ever to drag Scott Alexander's flock kicking and screaming into accepting that they were wrong about the fascism. That doesn't mean that I need them to immediately endorse the use of the term 'fascism.'

If there's one thing that I wish they understood, it's that whatever it is that Trumpism represented, the people who were warning of the danger Trump faced were not overreacting. The wolf was real. This incompetence and waste of energy in our politics is an authoritarian bound now by legal processes. They seemed to think that Trump could never succeed at instituting a fascistic purge, and that therefore the people who were warning of Trump's desire to implement a fascist purge were overreacting.

Whether or not the wolf can succeed is somewhat independent of whether or not the wolf exists.

But the real bad wrong turn that Scott Alexander took was writing "Shiri's Scissors."

Shiri's Scissors

Scott postulated a class of controversial statement that caused irrational behavior in people, dividing them from one another. And I was confused by this at first because I was at this point understanding that these people coin phrases as if by instinct. What Scott Alexander was pointing to with "Shiri's Scissors" was the mere word

CONTROVERSIAL.

This is what made Shiri's Scissors an unnecessary concept and bad writing. Controversial topics have always existed.

And I tried to take this up with someone in Scott Alexander's circle and they resisted my notion that it was a pointless concept.

Only now do I understand that there's an alchemical process at work in Shiri's Scissors: it allows people to view controversy as enabling irrational behavior and therefore discarding them.

Instead of controversy being an invitation to dispute, a marker around discourse's present topics of conversation, Shiri's Scissor allowed these cultists to subtract themselves from discourse.

Controversial topics have always existed. Concepts which justified disregarding people who reacted to controversial topics have not.

With Shiri's Scissors

Scott Alexander Cut The Cord

TETHERING

His Cult

To Political Reality

Whether or not you want to use the term fascist, the gathering of physical forces armed with actual weapons to assault the Capitol on 1/6 was an act of war which is exactly the kind of thing the leftists have been warning about. But Scott Alexander and his flock aren't tuned into the Supreme Court hearing today on the most important subject of most thinking minds.

They put Shiri's Slippers on and just walked away. Right off of the map (IN POLITICS THE TERRITORY IS THE MAP IS THE TERRITORY) into a domain of their own making, still bitter at the fact that other people dared find their intellectual contribution bad.

See Shiri's Scissors/Slippers, as a concept, create a reality in which there's just these bizarre artifacts in discourse which are incomprehensible. It makes discourse not just unnecessary but impossible because it contains within it the assumption of the unreasonable (AND THEREFORE, TO THESE BRICKED CULTISTS, INCOMPREHENSIBLE) nature of those with which they interacted with politically.

Postscripts

Cult Takes on Christian Nationalism

An interesting sampling of the topics du jour of these spaces. Both TheMotte and TheSchism platformed this curious bit of "rationality" around the decrease in Christian Nationalism by raw percent. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is motivated reasoning: these people want to believe that fears of a Christian theocracy are overstated. TheMotte, and TheSchism.

It's not within their capacity to understand that a threatened minority might resort to fascism, the fascism might drive people away from the church, and that Christian Nationalism can still be a very real threat. These are the people who have said nothing about the Trump Supreme Court case.

Cult Takes on Lab Leak Origins for Coronavirus

Now I will admit that I'm more willing to believe that COVID came from zoonosis than I was before engaging this material. But I want to share some reading I've done in Blood Money, a book about Chinese mindsets and tactics in dealing with the US as an adversary.

Roughly, the Wuhan lab was built with the help of French scientists. Then the Chinese government kicked the French scientists out.

It was always a possible black site.

Scott Alexander's coverage of his cult's perfect thinking about perfect thinking about viruses is one of the worst things Scott Alexander wrote, but not the most damaging.

As mentioned earlier, the DEFUSE grant was rejected. Further, the grant said that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for finding the viruses, and the University of North Carolina would do all the gain-of-function research. This was a reasonable division of labor, since UNC was actually good at gain-of-function research, and WIV mostly wasn't. They had done a few very simple gain-of-function projects before, but weren't really set up for this particular proposal and were happy to leave it for their American colleagues.

Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn't have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn't have BANAL-52. It wasn't discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can't create COVID from RATG-13; they're too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither.

Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV's whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn't include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn't close enough to work.

Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn't good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn't as unpopular as it is now) so it's not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did.

If there's one thing I want you to understand, it's this:

These people have almost no ability to understand deception.

The notion that China lies about the purposes of the lab just doesn't enter the picture.

Are you sure the Chinese would not use US science to create a virus that then escaped?

And then lie about it?

We're not going to know the truth. China may never reveal what it knows. But these people are not very good at finding the truth because they're not very good at understanding lies.

And these are the people who believe that AI can be 'aligned.'

They fundamentally don't understand humans. They don't understand deception.

They refuse to see the wolf of the present political era. They have deliberately chosen to walk away from mainstream politics with their Magic Stupid Slippers.

This is what a truly dangerous cult looks like. Most dangerous cults self-destruct. The bad ones are those that get big enough to confuse a large enough number of people.

POV: You're Scott Alexander and you're tired at people yelling at you about the fascism your side missed.

There's also a pattern I want to discourage, where one side will come up with some new trivial finding, or re-dredge up and re-package something that everyone already everyone else had already considered, then release it as THE SMOKING GUN! Then they release another SMOKING GUN!, and another, and after five or six SMOKING GUNS, they say their opponents are stubborn and refuse to yield to evidence, since they've obstinately ignored every single SMOKING GUN! without changing their probability even a little bit.

I've saved the chaser. This is how Scott chose to close his coverage.

But fifth, if the coronavirus' story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer . Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim's moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare.

I look forward to the movie, especially seeing who plays the dashing young blogger who helped the participants meet.

POV: You're the high priest of a cult of reason, worshiping a false god of perfect information, perfectly understood. These people don't just believe that salvation is possible through brainthinking alone, they believe that they have achieved salvation and are enlightened by their own intelligence.

Even as they stand in proud ignorance of contemporary politics.

PSA

Look through the comments and it all just foid avatars

White Foids are so oversensitive that they want to end all human life lmao

The right used to hate backwards women hating ideologies like Islam

Now many “red pill” influencers are embracing it

Apparently all it takes is a couple extra 💰💰💰 to support the cultural decimation they used to warn about

Pathetic pic.twitter.com/jinV6vxnwd

— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) April 24, 2024

https://twitter.com/joe_norte/status/1783071396714664361

Pre-Weimar Christianity was more like Islam than modern day Onlyfans Christianity.

men will pick their allies carefully and they will not be fooled.

https://twitter.com/H0US30FW0LV3S/status/1783353685122203777

Everyone in that photo genuinely looks inbred lmfao

https://twitter.com/joe_norte/status/1783354888015011903

so?

does most people around the world are inbred.

it is only in our cosmopolitan society where race mixing is celebrated and the norm

LMFAO rightoids want to RETVRN to inbreeding now !moidmoment !mayomoment

https://twitter.com/AvdullahYousef/status/1783537047598227907

Keep crying Lauren 👍🏻

Converting to Islam couldn't save that whiteoid's teeth

@ReKonger0

I recently rode a train I had wanted to for a long time, the Kalka-Shimla narrow gauge line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalka%E2%80%93Shimla_Railway

The railway was built under the direction of Herbert Septimus Harington between 1898 and 1903 to connect Shimla, the summer capital of India during the British Raj, with the rest of the Indian rail system.

Shimla (then spelt Simla), which was settled by the British shortly after the first Anglo-Gurkha war, is located at 7,116 feet (2,169 m) in the foothills of the Himalayas. The idea of connecting Shimla by rail was first raised by a correspondent to the Delhi gazette in November 1847.[2][3]

Shimla became the summer capital of British India in 1864, and was the headquarters of the Indian army. This meant that twice a year it was necessary to transfer the entire government between Calcutta and Shimla by horse and ox drawn carts.

In 1905 the company took delivery of a 10-ton Cowans Sheldon travelling crane to assist with lifting rolling stock back onto the tracks after accidents and for general track maintenance.

Due to the high capital and maintenance costs and difficult working conditions, the railway was allowed to charge higher fares than on other lines. Nevertheless, the company had spent 16,525,000 rupees by 1904 with no sign of the line becoming profitable, which lead to it being purchased by the government on 1 January 1906 for 17,107,748 rupees

During the 2023 North India floods, several sections of the line were washed out by landslides.

I was there during this Took a bus back from Shimla then.

The track has 20 picturesque stations, 103 tunnels (102 currently active), 912 curves, 969 bridges and 3% slope (1:33 gradient). The 1,143.61 m tunnel at Barog immediately before the Barog station is longest, a 60 ft (18.29 m) bridge is the longest and the sharpest curve has a 123 ft (38 m) radius of curvature. The railway line originally used 42 lb/yd (20.8 kg/m) rail, which was later replaced with 60 lb/yd (29.8 kg/m) rail.[4] The train has an average speed of 25–30 km/h but the railcar is almost 50–60 km/h. Both the train and railcar are equipped with vistadomes.

The route winds from a height of 656 metres (2,152 ft) at Kalka in the Himalayan Shivalik Hills foothills, past Dharampur, Solan, Kandaghat, Taradevi, Barog, Salogra, Totu (Jutogh) and Summerhill, to Shimla at an altitude of 2,075 metres (6,808 ft).[8] The difference in height between the two ends of line is 1,419 metres (4,656 ft).

They still have these manual inspection carts They also use legacy signalling, a chain of connected metallic rods used to shift a board with both red and green glass over a yellow light and those physical token hand overs.

Maintenance area, looks kind of like a sundial

Some visitors while our train was stopped for a while to let a train coming from the opposite end pass. Their panic after the train suddenly started moving was cute but I didn't have camera aimed at that point

Potato quality but its only one I managed to click of the engine on a curved bridge, didn't have camera ready on any other

The bridges look so Steel ones are so ugly Can't even take a good pic through them.

Also first diesel loco I've been on in a long time. The smoke was kind of ugly to look at tbh.

Someone came up to me and offered me a job and I have to give him a cut like 20% of the money and then I have to have sexual intercourse with men.

I am asking for advice on how to seduce men from the !biofoids, do you make random moans and pretend you are enjoying s*x before or after they put the peepee in your butt? I've been practicing the moans.

Is saying Ohhhhhhhh or Ahhhhhhhhh a better way to moan, or do you just remain stoic like I do while you take a peepee in your butt?

What is the best way to have s*x with random strangers?

Also I guess this is what started it?

They were roasting him in the replies. Some are skeptical that Colombia and USC students and NGOs who are pro-Palestine are actually certified MAGA Patriots

Apparently, coming down from whatever he was doing at 2:30pm on a Wednesday he decided that maybe his tweet was incoherent nonsense; Scrubbing his account and leaving the people of twitter to wonder why

Currently, twitter is still Sess-less. https://twitter.com/adamsessler yet the dunking continues

I never dropped u I just couldn’t handle the video of you fingering your asshole. I had a visceral disgust response that perturbed me. As a heterosexual woman, male asshole freaks me out. But I’m willing to look past it and make up.

— SHAWTY (@bronzeageshawty) April 25, 2024

https://www.today.com/health/tammy-slaton-weight-loss-rcna149196

@Spiderman i will mod you when you join

!pinggrouplovers

There's a common gimmick that's been popular online where a content creator will try to make a bunch of sequential trades to turn a paper clip or a pencil into something more substantial like $1000, a car or a house.

In this case, known as The Trade House Project, a woman named Dana did exactly that, traded up from a paper clip all the way to a house.

However, she didn't really need a house so she decided to give it away, and in 2022 chose an 18 year old girl named Shay to receive the house, because Shay had a tragic backstory (mom died of cancer when she was 2, dad killed himself in the aftermath) and I guess that was all it took to win the contest, it's not exactly clear.

Here's a video of a shutterfly sponsorship video when Shay initially moved in

Not only did she get a house & $10,000 from Shutterfly, but people also started sending her tons of Amazon packages from a wish list that was set up so she and her bf could start a new life together

The drama started yesterday, when Shay posted a video crying and claiming that Dana had banned her from her own house and that the entire giveaway was a scam (video, along with Shay's entire account, has since been deleted).

Dana came back posting a video with receipts

TL;DW: Shay had moved in for a month, then disappeared for 14 months while continuing to text Dana that she would be back to live in the house any day now. Because Shay had been there for such a short period, she never actually received the title to the house. Eventually Dana went into the house and found garbage, maggots, cat piss and shit everywhere and generally the house had been trashed, and decided to reclaim it and ban Shay from the house.

Tiktok drama girlies are pretty much universally pooping on Shay to the point where she deleted everything. What do you think?