There’s no greater risk in foraging mushrooms than there is in foraging plants. The real reason for the American fear of mushrooms being so prevalent is the dearth of knowledge about mushrooms in American culture. It’s similar to how many cultures in the past believed tomatoes and potatos were poisonous because they were new to those cultures.

The problem is that the center is defined relative to whatever political strains happen to exist at the moment, which are always in motion. The periphery moves, so the center moves with it. Anyone calling themselves centrists for an extended period of time is just someone without convictions who follows the general vibe around them.

Also burgoo and hot brown, not only uniquely American but uniquely Kentuckian. Each state and territory has their own signature dishes like any other country.

If one of those colors is red 40 then you have been drugged.

I agree, but I still think that as long as charities exist they should be tax exempt. I look at it similarly to USAID, which was a way for the US empire to project soft power, but also saved and improved lives. Ending 501c3 tax exempt status would be a disaster in the same way that the current administration ending USAID was. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

By that logic, charities should not be tax exempt either. I agree that charity isn’t the ideal solution to poverty, hunger, homelessness, etc. and we should be funding social welfare to solve those problems, but in the meantime people who are working to alleviate these issues should not be tax burdened. I don’t like the religious exemption, but the 501©(3) exemption as a whole is a good thing.

That is not healthy, and you should stop doing that.

The churches that would call him out are likely the same few that actually do something to deserve their tax exempt status, like feeding the homeless.

I would find some way to let them know it’s coming and ask them to not let anyone know I told them. Weeks is crazy.

It reads to me as a record of a very intelligent person having a total mental breakdown (likely as a result of being drugged and tortured by the CIA as part of MKULTRA). It contains some cogent points about capitalist alienation resulting from the industrial revolution (without identifying it as such), but is also full of homophobic, reactionary, and ecofascist rhetoric. It also completely falls flat with the conclusion being that the only way forward is a complete rejection of technology and modernity, without presenting a compelling alternative.

The real crime here is that she’s cutting hot dogs with a paring knife.

AI is new, the military industrial complex is not.

You don’t seem to understand the history you’re referencing. Slavery and mass displacement / ethnic cleansing aren’t mutually exclusive, they are mutually interdependent. Empires engaging in settler-colonialism didn’t choose one or the other, they did both, always. Even if they outlawed slavery domestically, they still participated in the trade internationally or in their colonies. Settler-colonial empires still engage in slavery to this day, they’re just better at hiding and justifying it. See: the US prison system and abuse of migrant workers, and the kafala system in the middle east (called the “binding system” in Israel until it was de jure abolished in 2006, but de facto continues to this day in a sort of legal gray area). These days the word slavery makes people squeamish, so we call it things like human trafficking, prison labor, migrant labor, and all sorts of other more polite euphemisms to lull us into the false notion that slavery is a thing of the past - or at the least relegated to a tiny secretive black market.

Just picking a random region of the world and looking at Wikipedia’s list of conflicts in Asia, you can try counting the years in the gaps between conflicts and comparing them to the duration of the conflicts themselves. I would bet good money that the average duration of periods of peace in any given region is greater than the average duration of conflicts, and that cumulatively years spent peacefully coexisting far exceed the years spent in conflict.

Notice also that the bias towards violence being mentionable and peace being less so is evident in the fact that I had to do this by finding a list of conflicts rather than a list of peaceful periods.

I disagree that it’s rare. In fact, peaceful coexistence is the norm and violent displacement is the anomaly. It only seems like that’s not the case because peace is delicate and unmentionable (what’s there to say in history books about nothing happening?) while violence is sudden and has permanent consequences. A peace lasting centuries can be ended by a single violent event, and that single event will be written about in greater detail than the centuries of peace that preceded it. Our perception of human nature is also skewed by the fact that we’re currently living in a global order dominated by violent settler-colonial factions who have created a system of extraction based fundamentally on theft.

I reject the premise that there must be some magical land where people have lived undisturbed since the beginning of time for you to even consider that it’s possible to peacefully coexist. There are plenty of places and times where people have settled an inhabited area and did not displace the natives, but no land where no one was displaced for all of human history, and that’s an unreasonable thing to demand I give an example of.

That you don’t even consider coexistence before immediately jumping to slavery as the only alternative says a lot about you.

I am a Jellyfin server guy, and I Iet family and friends use it for free. I also am not shy about telling people that I do this, as I don’t see any moral issue with it and will happily defend piracy as not only completely fine, but a net moral good. I see it as a tiny bit of anarchist calisthenics.

I think it’s because people are no longer in a mood to laugh at anything Trump does. We already know that nothing he could do will shame him or his base, so Trump shitting himself on live TV feels more like a sick joke at our expense meant to humiliate us.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

• Frank Wilhoit