This was posted in another thread yesterday, and I found it particularly persuasive: https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/

There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.

…

On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.

Look, I’m not saying “easy access to guns might result in bad people getting what they deserve” was a good argument for him to have made, but you gotta admit the practical demonstration was pretty effective in driving home the point.

Cry some more.

I mean, did he lose, though?

Bullshit. He could’ve been plainspoken like this at any time, but he played coy about it instead out of some misguided sense of “norms” or “decorum” or whatever, despite having a front row seat to the slow-walking and obstruction and willful feigned ignorance of those above and around him.

He could’ve made the plain fact of Trump’s guilt impossible to ignore, but he didn’t. That means he shares the guilt. Is it the majority of it? No. But there’s plenty to go around, and it is some.

Look, I’m not saying I admit anything, but speaking purely hypothetically, if I were to do some naked woodworking, I’d be extra careful about it.

No, fuck that. I am sick and tired of having shit pushed at me and then it being made my responsibility to be eternally hypervigilent to avoid it. It’s abusive and fucking shame on you for defending it!

Never KYS for something that’s somebody else’s fault.

Politicians ought to do this sort of thing on a regular basis (holding events out in the community, which is very different having people make appointments to meet them in their office). If it gets too popular, attendees ought to be prioritized by how long it’s been since they last had a turn, rather than first-come, first-served.

Self-respect. I’m not going to tolerate my property being sabotaged against me in service of some other entity, and I don’t understand why anybody else would either.

As soon as Windows 10 “telemetry” (read: spyware) started getting backported into Windows 7 almost a decade ago, I was gone.

Windows users in 2025 are nothing but cucks and simps for corporate abuse. They don’t “just buy, have, and use a computer;” they are part of the problem.

If the price is free, you are the product

This is anti-Free Software propaganda. Some things really are free without catches, and we shouldn’t impugn them just because other things are fraudulent.

It’s not his fault that the political landscape shifted on him making his activities now illegal, but the charges aren’t bogus.

In addition to the other reasons others have pointed out why your position is bullshit, imagine actually defending an ex-post-facto law.

Sigh… unzips plays episode.

It’s always projection.

From http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab’s PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab’s hardware hackers (no one knows who).

You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.

I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it’s a basic fact of electricity that a switch can’t do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.

It was clear that this switch was someone’s idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.

Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.

A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn’t affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.

The computer promptly crashed.

This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.

We still don’t know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we’ll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.

I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I’m silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.

1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn’t necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.

All the Boomers’ recipes were designed to use boxed, processed ingredients. Think green bean casserole with Campbell’s® Cream Of Mushroom Soup and French’s® Original Crispy Fried Onions, for example. “Modern” “convenience foods” were all the rage when they were growing up and it shows.

Wonderful Christmastime 11 hours

No, but seriously, it’s really hard for me to pick a single favorite song (or even worse, single best version of a particular song). I do tend to gravitate to the upbeat/rock kinda ones, though: “Need a Little Christmas”, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”, " Carol of the Bells," “Sleigh Ride” – stuff like that.

I will say I recently discovered this song, which I was enjoying during November specifically:

Tom Cardy - Not Quite Almost Christmas Time

Izzard is great, don’t get me wrong, but this is the best version of 12 Days of Christmas and it’s not even close:

Straight No Chaser - The 12 Days of Christmas

You let your 5 year old paint something real? I admire your bravery.

As are “committed by a family member” and “unrelated to politics,” for that matter.