There a lot to choose from! I haven’t read this translation myself but I know people who have and say its very good - the Richard Howard edition: https://www.tfobooks.com/book/9781567928273

Does the current US administration have a ‘best’ to send? It really seems like we should be framing this as ‘least worst’ and even that phrasing confers too much positivity.

LMDE - no idea if its the ‘best’ but its the best for me right now in that it does what I want, looks how I want and stays out of my way.

Self hosted Standard Notes?

I’m both cis and hetero. There is not one iota of evidence I’ve seen that there is any sort of movement that wishes death on cis and hetero people, or that organises vigilante groups to hunt down cis or hetero people to beat them up, or that invents bizarre rumours about ‘what they do’ or conflates cis and hetero people with paedophilia or that tries to organise campaigns to get cis or hetero-centric book removed from libraries.

There is no formal or informal system of oppression towards cis and hetero people. It just doesn’t exist.

There’s so many variables to each persons threadiverse experience that its difficult to quantify another’s experience. I don;t think there is an objective default experience. It depends on what instance your on, which also might dictate which software as the two main players don;t have feature parity, it then depends on how you use the available tools each software type has, how you sort your feeds, which communities you’re subbed to, how willing you are to simply block and move on, what your own beliefs are and what sort of experience you expect.

You’ll only think its a ghost town if you are someone who spends the majority of their time on social media. The flip side of that is that there’s also a sizeable amount of people who might simply check in once or twice a day. To them, its not a ghost town at all.

You’ll only think its full of hate if you’re not prepared to be on an instance that curates the hate away and you combine that with liberal use of blocking tools when some gets through.

And there are lots of other wider societal issues going on too - Westernised countries (which includes the majority of users I see on here) are largely descending into right-wing, xtian-fuelled, uber-capitalism, bigoted hellscapes and lots of people are understandably scared and angry about that. Scared and angry people lash out. Doesn’t excuse it a as behaviour but I don’t think growing fear and anger is a threadiverse-specific issue at all.

The answer is that there is no one-sized fits all answer beyond finding the best fit for yourself in terms of instance/software/tools/feeds and posting/commenting on more of what you personally enjoy and maybe lessen the time you spend on here and social media generally. It doesn’t have to be always on, just something you do alongside other things like reading a book, going for a walk etc.

That sounds like its sent via SMS.

There are other auth apps such as Aegis on f-droid. No idea what Teams supports though.

There’s a fine line between celebrating the history of your ancestors and performative cultural appropriation. Being interested in ones ancestors is one thing - swearing that you’re ‘fiery’ because of your Irish ancestry when you’re 3 or 4 generations removed from that ancestry is a bit weird at best.

I think the US does have a culture all its own - some of the world’s best authors, musicians, artists etc are from the US. It does puzzle me that some US folks are so desperate to claim deep cultural ties elsewhere when they have a pretty good culture already, formed in part from those ancestors.

• Twin Peaks
• The X-Files
• Dark
• Chernobyl
• Happy Valley
• Line of Duty
• Luther
• Spaced
• Wolf Hall
• True Detective S1, S4

I find posts/headlines like these genuinely bizarre. “Now be plainly said”? “hard to picture the specifics”? “Less hypothetical by the week”? I’m not American, I don’t live there but even I can see - and have always been able to see - that its been on his agenda since day 1, that he doesn’t care - and never did care - about how it looks or how it works, that its never, ever been hypothetical.

I don’t make any claim to a superior level of intelligence, I’m not intimately familiar with the inner workings of the US political system but surely this has been utterly obvious to literally everyone since 2016. How many times does this man need to subvert political processes - which has also been happening since 2016 - before US citizens realise that democracy there is gone as a political system? All the various points along the last 10 years I’ve heard US citizens say “well, OK, thats bad, but at least he can’t do this thing” - and then he does it and they say “wow yeah, thats terrible but at least he’s not done the other thing.” repeat unto infinity.

He doesn’t care about head-shaking sombre articles from left-leaning media, he doesn’t care about No Kings marches. He doesn’t care that judges rule against him, he doesn’t care about violating your constitution. What he cares about is beefing up the military, turning the area around the Whitehouse into a heavily armoured, protected zone and creating distraction after distraction after distraction for US left wing political podcasters to froth about in Instagram Reels. Whilst you’re all laughing at his propensity to shit his pants and fall asleep and make rambling speeches, he’s preparing his likely combat zones and mass detention centres/camps.

Yes the US army historically has performed superbly against countries they deemed small easily beaten opponents.

Charles has no real choice. Latest polling on how we (UK) feel about having a royal family is finally swinging in a positive direction (for those of us who want to see the lot of them gone) and he knows, or at least his advisers know, that anything other than what he’s quoted as saying could be step one on public opinion definitively turning against them as an institution.

Phone, no. Second hand Kobo + calibre, yes.

Much as I love physical books, I’ve now reached an age where having the ability to increase font size, adjust margins, kerning and leading is invaluable.

That’s giving it to them straight - like pear cider that made from 100% pears.

I’m sure they’ll get right on that, given how law-abiding they are.

From the article:

“Britain’s seventh-richest man, who vocally backed Brexit then moved to Monaco, also hits out at people on benefits”

because of course he does.

I am also a Satanist and they have no direct affect on me either. That doesn’t change the fact that what they do and how they use their power, including how they treat members and ex-members, is, in my opinion badly wrong.

From what I can see the claim they fight for religious pluralism is very ambiguous. They’ve certainly lost a lot of court cases but I’m not sure how that’s helped anyone.

That’s totally your call but for, its always been my opinion that the ends rarely justify the means. Especially these means.

I can;t vouch for the temple watch site itself as I don’t know who is behind it (and is seems dead on the live web) but it is heavily referenced and they seem like pretty good sources to me.

It literally is a cult of personality. The two of them own and control all aspects of it.