Nah my wife loves Forged in Fire too much for me to dare criticize Damascus, its way too cold in my neck of the woods to spend a night in the dog house… And we don’t have a dog house.

I feel like there should be some quotes in there. Damascus “Steel”

And give up on making you explicitly hand over your identity… Sir/Ma’am/Other I believe you have misjudged the ever beneficent Google. This will simply be to augment the other fingerprinting methods they already use regardless of what they might say.

I keep seeing this suggested and while I think that would be amazing I really don’t think its likely. These incumbents are set up to make things difficult for new entrants to their market. With political will and engagement it would be possible, but in the current world political environment these payment processors would simply buy the right politicians & court officials to ensure that any legislative challenges would be killed in the nest.

In the world we are in right now we need to instead focus on making the payment processors bend to the will of the majority not a vocal minority.

We also need to start finding strategies to fight back against paedophilia as an accepted permission slip to let the worst people in the world get away with whatever they want. If its not a disqualifying status for the office of president of the US, then why does the existence of paedophiles mean we (vast majority not paedophiles I hope) have to sacrifice our rights, our privacy, and our free speech?

Well yea, but also no. I think a lot of their ability to operate is the veneer of legitimacy they have, my suggestion above, while funny, was mainly facetious, however if we could figure out a way of stripping that legitimacy away they might see more pushback from the next company they try to convince they represent a statistically large chunk of the population.

In this exact situation if Visa had just said to them: “We will take that under advisement.” Then filed the whole thing with the crayon scrawl “letters” they get from a certain “BLEACH BLONDE BAD BUILT BUTCH BODY” about not letting the Jews buy any more space lasers. Then no one would be getting rights taken away from them.

Posted this elsewhere so just going to copy paste here but with regards to Collective Shout:

I think we need to get this group to weigh in on the content of certain holy books. Surely as a secular organisation they will have no problem demanding that the bible and qur’an be banned (I bet I know which one they actually would like banned).

After all we don’t want kids exposed to books that contain incest, sex, violence, rape, etc. I’m sure there are some parts of Ezekiel they will want editted at the absolute minimum.

I imagine balkanisation would be one way to make them slightly less visible/insufferable, and you know they would love some factional infighting.

Every time they get brought up they should be forced to confront that the people pulling their strings are most likely engaging in all the things they want banned from culture (regardless of culture or intent). Once they are forced to start lobbying Visa and MasterCard to block transactions to religious bodies I will accept they genuinely believe in the drivel they leak. Until then its performative puritanism.

P.s. not a fan of religion of any stripe, but I would feel as violently opposed to censoring them as I am to censoring anything else, I will accept it if its the only responsible solution until then alternative can be found.