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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I mean, he was double-dealing for the O&G industry right alongside Cheney. He was just the face of the operation while Cheney did all the backroom dealing.

    But the idea that the Bush Family wasn’t flagrantly profiteering? Give me a fucking break. Family members and friends got lucrative jobs in senior administrative positions. Lobbyists got promoted to executive board rooms. Portfolios rapidly outpaced the market growth rates.

    Just ask how Michael Brown, a guy in the boutique thoroughbred horse business, ended up heading FEMA, ffs. Why do you think The Ashcroft Group landed Oracle and AT&T as clients?










  • If a county bans alcohol sales, it’s not sharia just because Islam prohibits alcohol.

    If a Muslim community refuses to issue liquor licenses, you’re going to see Christian Nationalists accuse the municipal government of “operating under Sharia Law” in order to justify a state-level take over of the administration. These laws give them the necessary leverage.

    If your religion says “be a good person and help others” so you get into politics so you can write good policy, it doesn’t make your policy religious unless you write religion into it or pass it under a religious legal system.

    If you’re implementing policies in defiance of the state’s majority party, they can point to your minority religion as the reason for your opposition. And they can galvanize the broader state religious majority to strip you of municipal self-rule, by claiming your religion says “be a bad person and hurt others”.

    When I said republicans want a theocracy, I meant it literally.

    Any hard look at Abbott, Paxton, and Patrick suggest they aren’t theocrats nearly so much as they’re just fascists using any excuse to consolidate power. Texas is heavily conservative Christian, so they slam that peddle a bunch.

    This push for “anti-Sharia Law” legislation is more of the same. An excuse to deprive municipalities of self-rule.



  • Sharia is already prohibited…

    The various ideological tenants of the law aren’t prohibited. If a county wants to declare itself “dry” and refuse to issue alcohol sales permits, for instance, there’s no real state or federal guarantee against it. The fact that the people passing the law are doing so in the name of an Islamic faith rather than a Christian faith or a secular commitment to sobriety doesn’t normally play into the rule’s legality.

    Lest you think I’m advocating for sharia law, I’m not.

    I don’t think people writing or voting on this legislation really know anything about Islamic religious teachings or legal codes.

    If someone in a city council tried to cap the interest rate local creditors could charge, based on their opposition to the concept of usury, I doubt a lay Texan would key in on this being an aspect of Islamic fundamentalism unless some AM Talk Radio host or Joe Rogan affiliated podcaster mentioned it. If a local school district passed an ordinance protecting transgender athletes from discrimination, how many people might trace this back to The Prophet’s positive attitudes toward mukhannathun or Ayatollah Khomeini and Al-Azhar’s fatwas explicitly permitting reassignment surgery… unless a conservative pundit explicitly brought it up.

    “christian law” would be effectively the same thing

    There was a whole Thirty Years War suggesting the definition of “Christian Law” is not so well-defined. But, again, I think there’s a very limited understanding of historical religious strictures across every faith. People tend to only know what they’re told of, within the context of the speaker delivering the message.

    What you’d consider a normal Evangelical religious edict might fly directly in the face of a traditional Catholic or Eastern Orthodox legal code.

    Islamic Laws stray even farther, depending on which Islamic community you’re coming from (Indonesians can hold very different social morals than Nigerians or Turks)


  • We should all start looking into decentralized network infrastructure like a wifi&lora meshnet or community run satellite connection.

    As usual, its a great idea. But it requires the kind of coordinated effort and extensive financial commitment that anarchist movements never seem able to muster. The great thing about the IEFT was that it set universal standards for connection and communication. Community run meshnets and one-off local groups end up with a plethora of competing standards and very insular bespoke networks.

    I’ve played with local meshnets before and what I tend to find lacks the general utility of a standard ISP (trying connecting to your bank or your office VPN from a daisy chained local internet hub) with a few hobbyists who come and go as the mood strikes them.

    It’s very much a “you get what you pay for” situation. Without a real professional organization guaranteeing service, you’re at the whim of someone else’s hobby setup.


  • Orwell was a British police officer in Myanmar, crushing independence movements and worker organizations, during the early parts of his career.

    He wrote these books from lived experience. As propaganda tools to antagonize against the USSR, they were brilliant expressions of the very Doublespeak his most famous book coined. Using fear of the foreigner to rally people into the Two Minute Hate sessions he ostensibly pillared.


  • That’s going to be a crazy policy to try and enforce. Reminds me of the US attempt to ban sports gambling online but only domestically. That just prompted people to make accounts overseas.

    As usual, the governmental response is to increase the surveillance state and punish the end users, without addressing the incentive to create or distribute illicit content. They’re just feeding a sprawling black market which… may be the intent. Black markets are notoriously unregulated and far easier to manipulate/gouge/swindle people over.