Admin approval with some text that needs a little bit of thought to fill out is surprisingly effective and definitely slows down spammers a lot.

I had to do that on dbzer0 and I think beehaw, they were both a fun exercise and took no time at all. Hell, I ended up submitting a wall of text about Sacco and Vanzetti on dbzer0 if I remember correctly, lol. But if nothing else they knew that it was 1) a human, and 2) I really believe what I was saying.

If the point is to get regular users who are thoughtful participants in online communities, requiring an email address and the typing of a few coherent words on their own behalf is NOT a barrier to entry, or even a much of a bar. After all, these people are applying to join a forum in which they are presumably going to spend unlimited time typing statements of their own creation in the future. Instance owners are just requiring a bit of that up front, and it’s not a huge ask.

It is, however, a very frustrating requirement for people who want to open multiple accounts for spamming and trolling purposes, and for that reason alone is a great filter for applicants.

“An abnormal response to an abnormal situation is absolutely normal.”

If you are in some hellish or unusually bad kind of situation and you’re not able to keep your cool or stay positive or whatever your personal mental health goals are, it doesn’t mean that you’re insane.

It means you’re human.

This is also exceptionally helpful to remember if you have to be around hypercritical, DARVOing, and/or chronically dishonest people who behave horribly then take any sign of emotional response on your part as an overreaction and proof of mental incompetence. Lol, no. If you weren’t nuts before they started in on you, you’re probably fine right now.

There is so much pressure these days for the sane among us to be 100% perfect in all respects all the time even as norms are crashing down all around us, and it’s just not realistic or possible, much less healthy or true. So remember:

“An abnormal response to an abnormal situation is absolutely normal.”

And then go take care of you as a priority for a little while, because you need some self-focus and self-care while you navigate whatever this is.

Hope this helps someone, because it’s saved my ass countless times.

That’s great advice, and it pairs well with all the words of wisdom regarding not speaking or acting in anger.

Often people threaten in situations where they know they are powerless and cannot act, whether on a threat or anything else. When you have power and you know it, you act differently, more confidently, and as though you know nothing is lost by keeping the mouth shut until ready to act.

But your threats speak for you as well. They warn your opponent how and where you intend to strike them, should you ever be able to do so, and tell an observant enemy exactly how you think and what would frighten or piss you off, because that’s what you’re trying to do to them by threatening them.

Your entire appearance, tone of voice, and choice of words also tell an opponent a lot of the real truth about your immediate attitude and maturity level, and whether you’re personally even worth changing their course to help.

Threats are a product of fear and anger, and are not nearly as threatening as the people making them think they are. If you want to threaten, act cool and confident. Laugh at them when they start getting flustered.

“Oh” and “heh, okay” are how to respond to threats being made to you, like they just don’t matter and your real position is whatever pal, if it makes you feel better. This level of near-total non-response gives you time to evaluate the situation and do nothing you’ll regret, or to do something later that you’ve planned out far better than making angry threats in the heat of the moment.

Threats are almost always the most stupid tactic there is. You’re gonna call my boss and have my job? Not before I call him, lol. But thanks for letting me know. Have a nice day.

This is how threats telegraph weakness to people who are accustomed to holding power. If you want someone to know for sure you hold no cards, start whipping out threats.

TL;DR: Threats are best avoided until you are truly ready to act. And if you can’t act, keep it shut until you can.

Archive link

Ah, makes sense. I must have misread. Glad you don’t need it!

deleted by creator

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

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.

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.

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.

I thought it was the 80s, with the backmasking/D&D/Judas Priest bullshit?

Jesus, I’m so old all the screaming/arm flapping/Chicken Little satanic panics are starting to blend.

EDITED TO ADD: I should have read the other comments first, lol.

That’s what I was wondering: whether this was just a generic fuck you or a special Fuck YOU In Particular. Glad to see him pulling out his special Tea Party skills just for her and the rest of the GOP, I like it.

Thanks for answering the real question, hope you get someone actually interested in representing their own constituents in the special election. (Lol I know, but I can dream, can’t I?)

it has no effect on the timeline for decided cases

It can, if his lawyers plead it and the judge is accommodating. His lawyers have absolutely motioned in the past for a specific judge’s planned schedule to be changed to accommodate another judge’s planned schedule, and that to not do so would present an undue hardship. He generally gets these delays, on the whole.

Yup, correct answer right here. He’s a demagogue, a natural con man and charmer, and the rest of them have all the charisma of questionable leftovers from the back of the fridge.

Seriously. Look at the GOP candidates these days. Funny how spending all a person’s time thinking hateful thoughts and constantly self-basting in rage and wounded entitlement ends up showing on their face.

And avoid having to pay judgements. He doesn’t want to pay a single penny toward the various suits he’s losing, he wants to keep them eternally in progress if he can by submitting bonds and then appealing.

Look at the Carroll judgements. Not that this is any kind of definitive evidence, but he just defamed E. Jean Carroll again even as he is waiting for bond approval from that judge after losing the second trial. Here it is a bit more clearly worded from the NYTimes:

Just days after Donald J. Trump posted a $91.6 million bond in the defamation case he lost recently to the writer E. Jean Carroll, her lawyer on Monday suggested she was considering filing a third defamation lawsuit against the former president.

The lawyer raised the prospect of a new lawsuit after Mr. Trump in recent days repeatedly lashed out at Ms. Carroll, using the same kind of disparaging language that led to the huge judgment against him in January.

Lol, that’s what his strategy is to avoid post-litigation payout forever: keep offending, losing, bonding out and appealing. Lather, rinse, repeat, make his heirs pay up if there’s anything left.

(archive link to NYT article)

Note that in all this, there is not a single word of censure across the board, by anyone, including herself, for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the embarrassment of a representative that originally used the word “illegal” in reference to a human being that Biden repeated as she heckled him from across the chamber floor.

Note also that Biden takes 100% responsibility for what comes out of his own mouth, regardless of the circumstances, doesn’t use being led into it by a howler monkey as an excuse, and instead acknowledges that “illegal” is a hurtful term and he used it and wishes he hadn’t and that’s all that matters.

This, in a nutshell, is where the rubber meets the road between a person with a working conscience and one without.

I bet Trump sure was happy to see that guy.