Four day old account, thirteen comments, ALL trolls.

I think it’s fair to predict I’ll be reading all of Mario Puzo’s Godfather books (again) before I’ll be reading anything more from your troll account, lol.

EDITED TO ADD: Already banned for trolling, lol – thank you lemmy.world mods!

I don’t know what time period you knew this guy, but back in the 90s when the first retrovirals came out it was not a friendly place for gay people, especially gay men.

I actively covered for at least two in workplace situations where bosses were hinting/asking around about questionable sexual orientation, and made up brief scenarios where I’d seen them out with some beautiful woman just to throw these assholes off the track, if only because I knew how it would be for them at work if anyone found out: the prelude hell of whispers and glances, then open harassment, then complete loss of employment.

One of them, who ended up being a good friend, was also HIV+ and stared this exact scenario in the face on multiple occasions, but got his retrovirals through one of the first studies so at least that specific healthcare access wasn’t threatened.

And remember the statement at the top of this thread:

The fact that your employment in the US determines what medical care you can get is absolutely bonkers.

AIDS was not rare at all. It is still not rare in many parts of the world. But you could not get a better group of people to marginalize, deny, and treat criminally than gay men in the 80s and 90s – especially ones who had to keep their sexuality completely hidden from employers just to have jobs and health insurance in the first place.

They can do both. You, apparently not.

Technically, no, the request itself very real and has teeth, but for it to just die and produce attention is what she seems to want and is betting on. It’s all a gamble on her part, but the dice are real.

A Motion to Vacate is a legal request for Congress to hold a vote on having the current Speaker vacate the office. -IF- it ever gets to a vote, a simple majority is all that is needed, under the new rules for this Congress, for a Speaker to be ousted.

But she’s personally betting it will never get to a vote, not be supported, and will be killed by others long before that. From Wikipedia (bolding is mine):

Under House Rule IX, a resolution to declare the office of Speaker of the United States House of Representatives vacant is considered privileged: once introduced on the floor by a member, the resolution must be put to a floor vote within two legislative days. In 2019, at the beginning of the 116th Congress, the rules were altered to prevent motions from qualifying as matters of privilege unless “offered on behalf of a party conference or caucus.” The 2019 rule change remained in place until 2023, when the 118th Congress reversed it. A member can decide whether to introduce the motion to vacate on the floor or through the regular channels: the motion is only privileged in the first case.

In the history of the House of Representatives, there have been only four instances of a motion to vacate the chair being filed: one in March 1910 against Joe Cannon, which ended up being voted down, one in July 2015 against John Boehner, which was never put up to a vote, one in October 2023 against Kevin McCarthy (which, unlike its predecessors, was successful) and one against Mike Johnson. All four were filed by Republicans against a Republican speaker.

Read further in Wikipedia if you want the details, but it’s the Speaker of the House’s main job to allow specific pieces of legislation to come to the floor to be voted on, and he can gatekeep whatever he wants. So essentially she’s counting on Mike Johnson refusing to allow a motion for his own firing to come to the floor for a vote, or for the House Rules Committee to shoot it down first. This is probably a good bet. Also, if it ever gets to a vote, any other member can respond to the motion by entering a countering Motion to Table (postpone) the vote itself, indefinitely if they like.

Thus, success or failure simply depends on how many votes are needed at any given step, and she is betting, probably rightly so, that there just isn’t enough hatred for Mike Johnson yet for this to get anywhere near a vote.

But she’s doing the legislative equivalent of waving a loaded gun. Don’t think it’s just perfunctory, because this is the same shit that got McCarthy ousted in under a week without breaking a sweat. Hence, the threat. It frankly reminds me of the same irresponsible, self-certain political brinksmanship that called for a “non-binding” referendum in the UK as to their continued membership in the EU that turned out to be very binding indeed.

Bitch is playing with fire.

No need to wonder. The rule was changed specifically for the 118th Congress (this one) and it’s the very first line in the summary:

Specific changes include

permitting a single Member to call for a vote to remove the Speaker;

Here are the rules as a whole, in PDF (link in page): https://rules.house.gov/rules-and-resources

Yesterday and the day before I was seeing some articles regarding attempted breaches of her health records, so I’m assuming they were in fact stolen, the story is out and about to break anyway, and this announcement is just the royal PR machine getting ahead of its inevitable release with or without their say.

Here’s one I saw Wednesday: NY Times - Report of Kate Privacy Breach Is Being Assessed by U.K. Authorities

Archive link

Not mutually exclusive.

Of the two positions stated, theirs in the interview feedback and yours here, yours is BY FAR the more reasonable. That they would even feel free to say that to you indicates a bizarre level of entitlement or pre-employment loyalty there, one that’s made worse if it was the literal truth.

Entitlement is like an iceberg: what you see is just the tip. There’s always a whole lot more right behind it.

So let’s go there. I haven’t seen anyone else bring it up yet, but hypothetically, let’s say you drank the koolaid about their brand and, to increase your chances, you did spend a wad of cash (that you probably can’t easily afford) on their product before you even got to the interview. You walk in with that experience, able to tell them you’ve had their lessons and talk about their platform from a user’s experience, etc. Great!

Now what? How much farther does that actually get you? Not a goddamn bit, IMO, since you’re still behind anyone who has ever worked on a product of their own brand, and/or kissed whatever other invisible and undefined rings they want most but were not actually disclosed in the job posting. You spent all that cash, but your deficits as a candidate are still hanging in the air: you’ve never actually worked on it, just familiarized yourself with the product, albeit at a cost to you.

I am so glad you are writing this from the perspective of “should I have spent the cash?” rather than the perspective of “I spent this cash and now I’m out” because above and beyond the weirdness of their behavior, the last place you ever want to sink cash is on a job posting that can’t be bothered to include its most important requirements. Doesn’t matter that it’s a well known company, individuals and departments can be unethical too, and these certainly were.

It’s also entirely possible there’s an internal battle going on over this job, with some insisting it should go to someone already in-house and others, possibly even company policy, forcing it to be posted to external candidates – but in reality it has already been decided and they are just going through the motions of ticking the boxes until they can hire the one they wanted from the start. If so, you were never going to win it, and the whole thing was a gargantuan waste of time.

Add to that the fact that the posting itself omitted the company’s own most important requirement for the job, and I can only add to the chorus of people here who have already said you dodged a bullet.

Relax, you did good. Glad you made the decision you did. Best of luck in your job hunt.

I’m not readily skeeved by differences in people, but I’ll be honest, this woman creeps me out hard. Her eyes, specifically. Something absolutely NOT right in there, and that’s before you get to all the weirdness regarding Trump.

And that involves her placing her entire judicial career on the line time after time, even risking censure and certainly many appeals, to help the con man that is Donald Trump by making obviously partisan and overtly inexplicable rulings in his favor, not once but regularly. As though she’s placing herself like a cloak over legal puddles in his way, daring anyone to stop her, chivalrously rescuing him from his own repercussions.

It’s ALL weird with her. ALL bizarre and inexplicable, even from the standpoint of everyday banal corruption. People who throw events for cash, be it a baseball game or a court case, are generally a bit more slick about it, trying to justify it with bullshit that’s less overtly attention grabbing, and not Every Single Time it’s in their hands, like someone who’s on the take but still wants to have a career to show for it at the end.

With her, it’s almost like she wants everyone to see that she’s throwing rulings for Trump. Rather than a payoff or gratitude for her appointment, it’s more like she’s actively in love with him and has some kind of personal fixation/fantasy with him that she proves to him from her professional occupation as often as she can.

And then there’s her creepy ass alien eyes.

So for me, the real question is how she keeps clerks at all.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, it’s not all sunshine and roses up here in the north.

Lol, I know, I have Canadian friends. There is no such thing as paradise, and we haven’t even talked about your flying insects yet. But Canadians are not looking at the prospect of Donald Trump for a second term, staring oncoming fascism directly in the face, and watching the ongoing garage sale style piece-by-piece dismantling of the entire government and judicial system, either.

At least you still have something that works, for now, however imperfectly. Right now, here, it’s all broken to the point that when one person here or there actually does what they signed up to do in spite of partisanship – like Pence actually certifying the vote as VP, or Raffensberger in Georgia refusing to “find” fraudulent votes for Trump – that individual person’s correct, honorable act, what might be considered their bare minimum duty in times past, turns out to be the ONLY thing between that particular government function and chaos. And even then, just for doing their job with integrity, they suffer public doxxing, criticism, accusations, and even death threats. This is across the board and affects every level of government, from local government to state functions to the presidential election and seating the Supreme Court.

I do understand your concerns about the conservatives coming in; there as well as here that’s often the “two steps backward” after having had some tiny steps forward by non-business-owned governments, and, well, you already know what I could say about their counterparts here. But at least Canadians are still getting what are basically free and fair elections that are based in a solid and time tested process, one not readily subverted by bad actors, and not waking up to news of even more chaos at every level. Your civic foundations are, as far as I can see, still solid. Ours are proving to be anything but, eroded by decades of neglect, public assumptions (including my own as a citizen) and active efforts by bad actors to weaken all the guardrails.

Just so we’re clear. I don’t worship Canada, but I do admit to having often wished I’d been born a bit farther north, and today it’s because I actively envy the banal solidity of your public institutions. I know, it should be the poutine, maple syrup, and Second City (yeah, I’m that old lol) instead of your civics, but maybe one day again.

I didn’t know too much about canning before the drama last summer (except that it’s hard physical kitchen labor I’d rather not do), but when I read what was going on it was clear you guys were really holding the line against the continual bombardment of the sub with truly unsafe “hacks” and “shortcuts” and “it never hurt me and I’ve been doing it for years” posts. I am absolutely convinced there are a non-zero number of people who are alive because you stopped them from this stupidity, and the painstaking, precise work you put into sourcing your statements and linking the science was quite impressive even to this total non-canner.

And then Reddit admin put their scabs in anyway.

Which is to say that Reddit admin is made of fools. I split in solidarity when the API changes kicked the accessibility users off (the third party app devs were the ONLY folks who cared enough in almost two decades to make Reddit usable for anyone needing accessibility) but afterward, reading about what they did to gut harm reduction in various subs like r/canning just convinced me that I was right to consider them literally conscienceless and take my posting elsewhere.

Their loss. In so many ways. Glad you’re here on Lemmy too.

I don’t know who’s downvoting you or why, but this is just nth on the list of reasons I wish I’d been born north of the border. We (US) should never have left paper ballots.

Your system works, and why wouldn’t it? It was the gold standard for decades, even here, until we fucked with it. And it wasn’t just the unnecessary switch to unsecured electronic voting, either: anyone remember “butterfly” ballots and hanging chads in Florida?

If we still had paper ballots, much of the current accusatory atmosphere regarding the 2020 election would simply not be possible: maybe the count would have been contested or repeated in certain areas, but in the end they’d have had to find some other conspiracy.

Jared Kushner is a fucking slumlord and a losing one at that; I don’t think for two seconds anyone is expecting him to successfully “manage” anything but his in-laws. Which is what the cash is for, regardless of what they want to call it. If his father-in-law weren’t Donald Trump they wouldn’t even know his name.

No, they were looking for the “holiness” angle. Sacr- is a word root meaning “consecrated” or “holy,” and you see it a LOT in religious texts: sacred, sacrosanct, sacerdotal, etc.

As an ex-christian it was the first thing I saw; it would be sort of a non-secret code that anyone deeply familiar with the linguistics of Christianity would see right off the bat.

The acronym SACR was no accident, unfortunately: they worked for it. Which is to say that they know all the right words but have completely lost the meaning.

Apparently not. It’s about crazy ass book bans in schools to begin with. This seriously creepy fuck just gratuitously tacked on his coworker’s name as though she was part of the narrative, but the original effort goes on:

The sponsor of the bill, Republican Sen. Joni Albrecht, apologized to her colleagues on Monday. “I’m so sorry that your name was injected into it,” she said. "That is absolutely, I will be the first to stand up and say I’m sorry.

But then, in the SAME SENTENCE, without a breath between, she adds,

This is in our schools. This is what’s going on. And I don’t want to see this elevated to any level."

I absolutely do NOT believe a person with a working conscience (!!!) would narrate a passage of graphic sexual violence out of a book as an example of what is being read by kids in schools and then ADD THEIR COWORKER’S NAME to the retelling as though she was a participant in the events described, whether as a joke or a come-on or for whatever perverted reason. That’s the difference between knowing right and wrong.

But what I’m getting from the article is that some (most?) of those present were fine with it, no one stopped him while he was doing this, and at least one of them (Albrecht, above) apologized only to try to rescue the book banning effort from this perv’s “one twist too far” efforts to use fear and loathing to ban more books.

So pointing out this asshole’s new low, as justified as it is, is almost like trying to find the worst protagonist in the last chapter of The Lord of the Flies, IMO. Because in the end, all this seriously warped bastard did was manage to shoehorn some very open and tightly targeted workplace sexual harassment into their concerted group workplace effort to harass the entire student population of Nebraska.

Which is the worse crime?

I honestly don’t know. I only know I would not be caught dead participating in either, and no one I know with an operating sense of human empathy would either: if you’re already lying to ban books, killing women by criminalizing pregnancy, demonizing people of color, and openly embracing other equally repugnant fascist principles, why would this further misbehavior against a woman shock and horrify you so much?

Also, consider that whatever justification he comes up with, it only has to work for his fellow Republicans, and that’s a bar low enough to turn an average cockroach into an Olympian.

But a male Republican state senator openly sexually harassing a Democrat female state senator on the floor of the Nebraska state senate? As horrific and gratuitous as that performance was, as much of an open sexual act toward his coworker as it was, nothing will be done, except the female senator will be pressured to “forgive” and let it go. Why? Because the doer is a man, a Republican and a state senator in Nebraska.

Lol, blocked

https://www.reddit.com/u/PhillyCanada/s/O52X2oGf5V

It’s gone now, on www. and old. via browser. “Page not found” with a pic of that snoo crying under a hot sun because he bought the pre-IPO shares, lol.

Oh, he wrote a letter.

I was wondering how anyone could tell McConnell had a reaction to something.

other Christian or near-Christian faiths will not be spared. This is certainly a religious movement, but it does not have Jesus of Nazareth at its head.

They certainly were not spared during the original exercise of fascism.

And I’ll go one point further and assert that the closer a single individual is to walking the tenets of classical Christianity – compassion, honesty, practicing ethical consideration in choosing personal acts, abhorring unnecessarily hurtful acts – not only will they NOT be spared, they will be among those most violently targeted, as soon as they become known to the persecutors.

Why? Because these are True Believers, and they are what real resistance is made of.

Regardless of the belief system underlying a True Believer, that’s what makes a True Believer tick: the belief itself. It doesn’t have to be Christianity, or even any specific religion; just their own belief system and their near-exclusive personal reliance upon it in daily life, and especially in times of crisis.

Nothing outside that belief system moves them in matters that are important to them, nor do they require external validation for their choices. That makes them impossible to control, hard to spot because they are not necessarily talkative or participative on social media, and frequently impossible to predict if you don’t know them personally.

So when that belief system involves a deep abhorrence of all things unnecessarily hurtful to others (or “evil” if you will), when they are the ones who actually decide to be that One Good Man in their current reality when they hear the old maxim “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” – classic Christianity, in a nutshell – they are deeply threatening to authoritarian governments and regimes that rely on manufacturing fear and the manipulation of personal belief to maintain control over individual citizens.

Yep, you hit the high points. The McMartin daycare thing was insane.

And I am sorry to report that I did in fact read Michelle Remembers whenever it came out; I had finally forgotten it Thank You Very Fucking Much lol. Of all the lurid unworthy trash I have read in my life, that was likely the unworthiest.