If you’re like, from a country where that’s a capital offense, and you’re applying for asylum somewhere…then yes, you would have to prove it. But other than rare occasions like that? No.

Freddy Kruger, as long as I have prep time. Get a good night sleep the night before? Staying awake for 24 hours is pretty trivial. I can get up at 6 one morning and stay up til 6 the next morning. I’m willing to screw my sleep cycle up for a few days in exchange for 3 billion dollars.

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It may just be a factor that a lot of YouTubers don’t want to give up creative control. Working with Hollywood ultimately usually means giving up a lot of control on the type and content of your work. They’re paying for the big production budget; they get final say in all creative decisions.

YouTubing is a career type that naturally attracts those that want creative independence. And by the time someone would be of the clout to make a deal with a studio or network, they’re probably already earning enough money to be making a comfortable living from their work. 10,000-follower YouTube channels aren’t getting calls from Discovery, Nickelodian, or Fox News. They’re only going to be recruiting from the top channels. And people at that level are probably already earning a nice full-time living. Channels of that level are often entire miniature production companies. The biggest YouTubers aren’t individuals, but creative teams.

That’s a level of success many people would consider ideal. You get to live comfortably, you get to have a decent amount of social esteem, you get to pursue what projects you want. And you get the personal satisfaction of providing incomes for a whole bunch of your closest colleagues and maybe even closest friends. Many would call that about as perfect a life as there is possible. And you want to maybe give all that up to go work for a cable network?

I suppose for enough money, you could buy people out. But there’s more to life than money after all. If you’re already living quite comfortably, already very financially secure, would you really want to give up what you have - complete creative independence*, just to make a bit more? YouTube’s top ranks are filled with people who left the rat race to get into YouTube. Many simply won’t want to go back into that big corporate world, regardless of how gilded their chains may be.

*Obviously, creative independence is relative. All forms of ad-funded content will have to pander to the whims of advertisers. Even completely audience-funded works are subject to the whims of the audience.

I still believe that biological males shouldn’t compete in women’s sports or be housed in women’s prisons.

So you’ve still learned nothing. As a transitioned trans person who this person, if I were arrested, would like to subject me to daily rape torture? She can go die in a fire.

But what if the thief steals the books not to read them, but just to fill their house with books and make themselves seem erudite and intelligent?

I’m imagining the most extreme version of this, where a man is living in a house that is a veritable library. Yet, they’re actually illiterate.

Yes, they’ve tried for years. But they actually managed to properly plan it this time. Do you honestly believe there’s no difference between Trump in 2024 and Trump in 2020? They have completely different cabinets. Hell, we would have had Pence as VP. The administration is run by entirely different people. They were a lot more careful about selecting for avowed loyalists this time. Trump winning in 2020 would have completely denied them this chance to reorganize. We would have objectively been much, much better off if a second Trump term came in 2020 than in 2024.

You have very little understanding of what is going on.

You have poor reading comprehension.

There was such a law. Not a law of nature, but that’s a silly high bar that you’re imposing. It was widely predicted that Biden would fail to enact the changes needed to prevent a MAGA return. I remember thinking that would happen the day Biden won the election.

Your post outlines the type of thinking that so damns us. You view every election as a completely independent event, as if they have zero influence on one another. Biden was a milquetoast centrist. He governed that way his entire adult life. It was eminently predictable, and many predicated, that he would fail to stop MAGA. Maybe you didn’t want to listen to those predictions, but that’s failing on your part.

Your view is that voters are always to blame, and that if the party chooses a bad candidate, well the voters are still to blame. You expect voters to show up and vote D election after election after election, even if the party repeatedly fails to live up to its promises and betrays its voters time and time again.

Sorry. Objectively, the best outcome would have been if Trump won in 2020. A Trump victory in 2020 would have been much, much preferable to one in 2024.

But you view each election as an isolated event. Every election is the most important one in history, and we’re never allowed to think strategically long term.

This short term thinking is why Republicans control the government. Republicans can think long term. Liberals like yourself can’t.

Reincarnation is real. Every soul reincarnates to vastly different lives. Some male. Some female. Some rich. Some poor. Some live long. Some live tragically short. And every soul in time works every trade and profession under the Sun.

Well, every soul but Ea-nāṣir. Ea-nāṣir is special. He’s just a shitty metal merchant in life after life after life. Somehow he’s found the exact perfect karmic balance that he just keeps re-rolling the same character class and background one life after the next. This one guy’s been cheating people on copper, bronze, iron and steel shipments for three thousand years.

Somehow I doubt your sincerity. Most people who bring up women’s rights when it comes to Muslims only bring up women’s rights when Muslims are involved. Like conservatives who would happily defund every women’s sports programs but use women’s sports as a cudgel to hurt trans people.

It’s really transparent and disingenuous, and you give off those same vibes.

Yet it muddies the water with Islamophobia.

Not voting in 2020 would actually have been the optimal outcome for the country. Objectively, we would have been far, far better off if a large number of Democrats had stayed home in 2020, allowing Trump to get a second term then instead of now. Democrats focused on short-term expediency by forcing Biden through. They won the election in 2020, but at what a terrible price. Instead of a flailing second Trump term with Trump as a lame duck, Democrats gave Trump four more years to regroup, strategize, and come up with Project 2025. Democrats chose the cheap and easy solution in 2020, and every one of us is paying for it now.

Your strategy has some merit, but it fails in that it only considers short-term, rather than long-term thinking. Your victories end up temporary and ultimately Pyrrhic.

Voting for today’s lesser of two evils only works if you’re a goldfish with no memory of history.

Voice mail still has uses. There are times you need to be able to receive calls from businesses or government entities. Often those entities don’t have call centers set up to let their workes send texts. Sometimes the only way you can hear news you need to hear is via a phone call.

I mean, you can still live like that if you want to, for your whole life if you want to. Move into or start a housing co-op. Even kids don’t get in the way of this. We’re supposed to raise kids in a village. That’s how children are meant to be raised.

It’s not how human beings are supposed to live. We’re supposed to have that close-knit friend community our entire lives. People had this up until only 100-200 years ago or so. People in little farming villages were able to have a stable friend group for their entire lives and have time to interact with them. Kids didn’t serve as a substantial barrier, as the friend group helped raise the children. This is how children are supposed to be raised. It’s supposed to take a village.

It’s only our hyper capitalist economy that atomizes us and forces us to scatter to the winds, endlessly chasing job after job in far flung cities, never able to settle down and form real community anywhere.

The way we live is deeply unnatural and fundamentally at odds with human nature. It’s no wonder we’re all mentally ill.

“Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs…It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany… As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

-Mahatma Ghandi, 1946

Ghandi’s militant non-violence was blind to how actual historical justice movements succeed. It turns out that you actually need both violent and nonviolent resistance for any resistance to succeed. Sure, there was the Ghandi wing throwing the British out of India, but there was also a radical militant Hindu movement trying to throw the British out at gunpoint. The existence of this radical and violent side of the movement gave space for a nonviolent ‘moderate’ like Ghandi to come in and play the role of peacemaker. Without the violent resistance, the nonviolent resistance becomes branded as terrorists, and the state can come in and arrest/kill them all. It’s only the existence of an actual violent wing that prevents the peaceful moderates from being labeled as violent extremists.

Or look at MLK. He was peaceful and nonviolent, and they still called him a terrorist. But his message resonated with middle America as it contrasted to the explicitly violent movements like the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, etc. And the powers that be still killed him for it, regardless of his nonviolence.

Sorry, I just take a really dim view to the nonviolence of Ghandi.

And Ghandi was a fucking idiot.

It is an objectively good thing for the world when a violent bigot gets their head caved in.

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