@DemocracyMattersALot We know we can believe him because he said we could.

You know -- like the way we know we can believe the Bible, because it says it was written by someone who never makes mistakes. (Does this mean Johnson is God? Click here to find out...) I mean, the Bible says God never makes mistakes, and God wrote the Bible, so, I mean, they can't both be lying, right?

...or like that car dealer down on the boulevard, who says you can totally trust him because everyone knows (according to him) that he's totally known for being trustworthy and honest.

(When did gullibility become an American value, again? I must have missed a memo...)

@czarbucks @ChrisMayLA6 Agreed. It's been impressive, what has happened so far -- but the fascists are doubling down, so we need to triple down. This is all absolutely unacceptable and against any conceivable positive definition of "American".

New Comic Strip found: Arctic Circle by Alex Hallatt for Mon, 12 Jan 2026 https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/arcticcircle/s-3973812

#comicstrip #arcticcirclestrip

@czarbucks @ChrisMayLA6 Parkrose Permaculture believes they have been trying really really hard to get an ICE agent killed so they can declare martial law, declare protesters to be "terrorists", and anything else that they think might fly.

People have been doing a really excellent job not rising to the bait.

@androcat Well actually @meatballhat -- Engineering-wise, I am just the site's MAS (Meatballhat Alert System). ^.^

@thatdawnperson

@coywolf The <details> tag needs to be more widely used and supported, if you ask me. It's so freakin' useful.

@pzmyers > "pseudo-scientific explanations that sounded persuasive, [if your] most sophisticated analyses were the kind of thing you’d hear from a church pulpit."

I have to think that something like this is why so many people find RW BS to be credible: they've been trained to accept glib explanations that are somehow sanctified (by source, or certain key words/phrases? dunno).

I'm sure someone is studying this, but we need to study it a lot more and start working out how to fix it.

@CptSuperlative "Then everything changed, when the Stupid Nation attacked..."

(Trying to respond to this, but we had a db outage and there's now a data-glitch which is making that into a ghost-post on TC.)

@lexinova :

That's because you have had the practice -- the EU has a strong union culture. We're still building ours back up, after unions were decimated in the 70s and 80s.

(...plus the fact that striking is a very different proposition here, where our safety-net has been mostly destroyed, along with laws that protect strikers. A lot of people who would otherwise participate simply can't afford the risk to their families -- be that from starvation, homelessness, or arrest.)

I don't think you're arguing in good faith, but I thought your comment deserved a response anyway.

@Lkdc @cbarbermd

@harper It was mostly @meatballhat, really. (I'm just the MAS. :D)

(*Meatballhat Alerting System)

Sorry for the toot-outage*! Posting seems to be working again, though there's still at least one anomaly I need to poke at. :tootcat:

Details here.

(*tootage? toutage?)

I think we're kinda working up to that, @lexinova . You don't start with the marathon; you run shorter races first, to build up the muscles.

@cbarbermd

Another option: https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/sustainable-toilet-paper-fsc-certification/

I had thought most tpaper / paper towel companies were doing this already, but I guess not? It's unclear from the article and I'm not sure how to research it further without going into a serious rabbit-hole quest...

@molly0xfff idk the first thing about #knitting or #crochet, but the people who do these crafts seem very fun-spirited. So, I share this reminder that the U.S. National Park Service has patterns for a goat, a cactus, fish, triops, a beaver, and more. https://www.nps.gov/search/?query=crochet&sitelimit=&affiliate=nps

While the GoFundMe to support Renée Good's family raised $1.5 million, a GoFundMe for the family of Keith Porter, Jr., a Black man shot by an ICE agent a week earlier, hasn't met its $35,000 goal. Join me in donating if you're able: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-keiths-daughters-after-tragedy

@superflippy Make sure you can enable a markup mode! I don't know if IceCubes supports that or even if your instance does... @alice

@Asuyuia Hence the need for an indicator (including when I accidentally join their numbers).

You are allowed to find moments of joy, even in all the horror. Joy is not a prize for getting through it all, it is an important tool to *enable* us to get through this. Joy itself is an act of resistance, so look for the joys. Small ones, big ones-doesn't matter. Find them, embrace them, let them comfort you, let them fuel you.

#joy #joyisresistance #resist #findjoy

@inthehands I am too, and I wasn't even there.

@superflippy
<sup>(text)</sup> if you're editing in a mode that accepts HTML, ^text_with_no_spaces if you're in a mode which accepts Markdown:

• ^(text)
• ^{text_with_no_spaces}

(...at least, that's how it works over here.)

@alice