propaneandrevelations

[propaneandrevelations]

man sometimes i really want to get back into welding but then i remember that the guys from the first course i took won’t be there and change my mind

[propaneandrevelations]

The phrase “due process” has been coming up a lot in the news lately, and it seems like way too many people somehow don’t know what it means

I’ve heard people say that only US citizens are entitled to due process. I’ve heard people say that you don’t deserve due process if you’ve broken the law. If you’re in the country illegally, if you’re a member of a gang, if you’ve committed a violent crime. The problem with putting any condition on due process is that

“due process” is just the process of finding stuff out.

Due process is finding out what your name is, your citizenship/legal status, your gang membership, your criminal history. Due process is finding out whether you’ve committed a crime, based on what evidence and defense is presented to a court. (I do believe due process also includes fair sentencing, ie after it’s determined that you have committed a crime, then there’s a process to determine what your punishment should be; but this rant is about the “finding out” part)

If we grant that any particular category of people isn’t entitled to due process in the US, how do we find out whether someone belongs to that category without first applying due process? without due process, police can just point at anyone they want and say “they’re a gang member, arrest them,” and then never check whether they are in fact a gang member.

due process is not some privilege reserved for respectable law-abiding US citizens. due process is how we find out who you are and what you’ve done, instead of just going by “trust me bro.” without due process, there’s nothing to stop you - the person reading this - from being deported on a whim without ever getting a chance to say “but I’m not a criminal”

[propaneandrevelations]

this might sound stupid but I can’t help but believe that the new wave of “birth control is actually horrible for your body, you need to get off it immediately” misinformation from influencers and the ‘natural cycle tracking’ apps suddenly being advertised is a sneaky underhanded way of causing more unplanned pregnancies that people now cannot abort. now is possibly the worst time ever to turn towards ‘natural family planning’

[propaneandrevelations]

I know that some British people take umbrage at Americans calling the Great British Bake Off relaxing, but it's just because GBBO is such a different kind of stressful from American baking shows.

American baking shows will be called something like "Cupcake Knife Fight", there's horror movie lighting everywhere and dramatic stings every 5 seconds. All of the contestants are shit talking each other and fist fighting over the one single deep fryer provided by production. It will show the judges all whispering to each other at their super villain table overlooking the whole kitchen, and one will be like, "Oh my god. Everyone look at Brenda right now. She's straight tanking it." And it will cut to Brenda, who is running around covered in flour and crying and also bleeding for some reason. Then you get a clip from an interview with one of the contestants, and they're like, "I really need to win this. Without this award money, I'm gonna need to close my restaurant, sell my dad, and live out of my car. AGAIN." Then the giant digital doomsday clock overhead lets out a horrid klaxon, the judges tell half of them that their cupcakes taste disgusting, and one of them gets eliminated and sent to walk down the dramatically-lit shame hallway never to be seen again.

Meanwhile GBBO is in a lovely, brightly colored tent, there are delightful and friendly hosts/jesters there to keep everyone entertained, and all of the B Roll is of like... a bumblebee going into a flower, or a lamb running in a field. And yes, there will be moments where someone will mess up their timing or something, and they'll be looking at their bake through the oven door like, "oh gosh I don't think this will rise in time!" Then they stand up to find Paul Hollywood directly behind them ominously. His creepy whitewalker eyes will glow white, and he'll say something like "the 12th of June. 2035. Drowning." And his eyes will go back to normal and he'll walk away. Then the baker gives a playful grimace to the camera and says "that didnt sound great, did it?". Cut to a sweet looking older woman sipping tea on a stool and she says "oo I do hope that Prue enjoys the taste of my sugary, sticky baps!". Then, at the end, someone gets a gold star for doing good, and the loser of the episode gets in the middle of a giant group hug. You see all of them at the end of the series at a giant carnival with their families and the post credits informs you that all of the contestants have become a Partridge Family-style traveling band and stayed friends forever.

[propaneandrevelations]

[propaneandrevelations]

me when my empire isn't decaying

[propaneandrevelations]

I'd still trust you with my life doctor tbh

[propaneandrevelations]

Conservatives are disgusting racists.

Stephen Miller is an unelected ghoul, yet runs the White House with zero pushback.

[propaneandrevelations]

like, okay, consent does literally just mean agree. which is what enables this little rhetorical trick. because there's all this cultural emphasis on sexual consent, which is just expressed as consent, a lot of phrases whose intended meanings are "rape is bad" can be taken literally to mean "i should get to agree to everything that happens in my vicinity."

[propaneandrevelations]

Five months into Trump's presidency, and we are in a war.

Did his supporters have that on the bingo card?

[propaneandrevelations]

"what do you want to do tonight"

"the dice say: gay bar"

[propaneandrevelations]

the Star Wars fandom isn't having enough fun with the acronym for the Confederacy of Independent Systems but this one youtuber is showing us the way

[propaneandrevelations]

comments are turned off on this and i know it was a bloodbath in there

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A good rule of thumb for AI is "would you trust a trained pigeon to do this?"

"We trained a pigeon to recognise cancerous cell clusters and somehow they're really good at it" okay great, that's something that could plausibly be a thing.

"We trained a pigeon to recognise good CV:s and left it in charge of sorting through all our job applications" uh perhaps consider not doing that.