Schadrach

He is admittedly a good salesman. Most cult leaders are.

Once read a forum thread on “how your state/region is depicted in media” and had to point out that aside from one movie about a college the biggest things I could point to were the Wrong Turn movies (slasher movies about inbred cannibal hillfolk) and the movie version of Silent Hill (which is set in WV but based on Centralia, PA while the game version of Silent Hill is in New England).

Centralia, PA is one of those places with less than a dozen residents and a neat history. It’s been on fire since 1962, the government tried to eminent domain all real estate in Centralia and a handful of extremely stubborn folks fought back leading to an agreement where they get to stay there for the rest of their lives after which the property reverts to the government via eminent domain. All seven of them. Five of which are still around as of 2020, having lived under that agreement for forty years. The church still holds services, and their graveyard are still maintained, even the one that’s in a perpetual haze as the ground releases smoke.

It appears like most of Appalachia is under “swamp racists” and the rest as “NYC”, which I strongly reject. Very little of Appalachia is swamp, it’s mostly forested mountains. And it’s far to rural to be compared to NYC.

Getting high as shit has had an important cultural role in most of the world at one point in time or another. Westerners got away from it post-Christendom but even then it’s been a thing basically everywhere at one point or another, unless nothing psychedelic grows there, and even then there are ways to achieve ecstatic states to roughly similar effect through extreme asceticism - if there’s not something to eat or smoke to get there then your shaman might have to starve and dehydrate himself then be suspended in the air through rods run through his chest, but you can get there either way.

Coca-Cola literally used to contain cocaine. It started life as a patent medicine made from coca leaf and kola nut, and expanded from there. By the 1950s they at least on paper were already cocaine free - they switched to “spent” leaves in 1904 (leaves that already had cocaine extracted and so only had what was left due to inefficiencies in the process) and later switched to extract made by a third party that was invested in being thorough in removing the cocaine since they were selling that for medical use as well so any cocaine in the extract sold to Coca-Cola was a loss in their higher-dollar product.

Where dafuq it stacks?

Jobs for my state’s state government, for example, You get an hour of time off for every so many hours worked and they accumulate and are retained indefinitely up to a cap.

my SO worked in clinic that wasn’t open on holidays, but offered no holiday pay, so employees had to use the 10 or 14 vaca days they got to cover their 7 holidays, which they couldn’t have worked if they wanted to.

That sucks. I get 9ish holiday days/year (ish because sometimes we work New Years and get the holiday day for it the previous year) and we start at 2 weeks vacation in addition, with it going up with seniority, eventually capping out at 5 weeks. It is use it, sell it or lose it though - new vacation is granted at start of year and expires at end of year.

I say #2, specifically because it can be done mathematically, as opposed to trying to agree on some definition of “fairness” that isn’t completely different for every office and doesn’t have to be wholly redistricted every election as a consequence.

Say, something like least split line. Basically, if you have an even number of seats for a region, draw the shortest length line that splits the region into two regions of equal population. If you have an odd number of seats > 1, then draw the shortest line that splits the region based on number per seat given one side gets the “extra” seat (for example, for 5 seats you’d split so that one side is 2/3 of the other side and give 3 seats to one side and 2 to the other). Repeat the process for each region created by these lines until each region represents one seat. If there are multiple shortest lines, you the one closest to a NS axis. The extra seat always goes to the west side of the line.

A master click baiter? You are quite the cunning linguist.

This is obviously due to Democrat fiddling with the numbers

Literally what they’re running with. The person ultimately responsible for those numbers was a Biden appointee and Trump didn’t like the result so she’s been fired under the excuse that those job loss number are “inaccurate”. Her replacement will of course make those numbers whatever best suits Trump rather than anything tethered to reality, but that’s what MAGA thinks truth is - whatever best polishes Trump’s knob.

Oh now, not all MAGA are pedophiles. Some are just useful idiots for the pedophiles.

The difference being you weren’t desperate enough to take “any hole is a goal” as a motto worth following.

Apparently I married a unicorn. She explicitly didn’t want a diamond but a sapphire and explicitly didn’t want me to spend a fortune on it. Got her ring from an online jeweler on sale. Paid less than $300 for it. During the first Trump admin. We had talked about what she wanted and I found something close after shopping around. Then I held onto it for six months planning when to ask.

In the US, age of consent varies by state. In most US states the age of consent to sex with someone who is not in a position of authority is 16. Often with a close in age exception. 18 gets used in US media so much because that’s what it is in CA and NY, and that’s where most media is made.

18 is also federal age of consent, but that only applies when an incident involves crossing state lines.

I mean yeah. That said, if the GOP seems to start shining that turd a bit later than this time next year, know that the plan is for Trump to learn the meaning of planned obsolescence.

You only asked about rape/SA, so it was the only topic I responded to. According to FBI stats, the 8-10% is actually pretty typical for many other crimes too, but falsely accusing someone of most other crimes aside from something like murder is going to have consequences that are either shorter term or less severe (reputational consequences of being falsely accused of beating someone up are smaller than being falsely accused of rape, for example). Also, rape/SA often has the accusation itself as the primary or occasionally only evidence against the accused, and sometimes that is enough especially in older cases where any physical evidence would be long gone.

inconvenienced

“Inconvenienced” to several months in jail, or 5 years in prison and five of probation and registered as a sex offender until they were exonerated, and several of the ones in the Innocence Project archives are worse than that.

The 2006 Duke Lacrosse kids were “inconvenienced”, and even that involved threats, harassment and vandalism for a case where every piece of evidence except her claims worked against her claims - she also finally admitted to making it up, in 2024.

false accusations are a tiny fraction of accusations

In the 8-10% range by most studies, with some outliers going as low as 2% or as high as 40%.

The distinction between rape and sex is consent. Whether a given sex act is consensual or not exists only in the minds of those involved in it (consent is a mental state, not something directly observable from outside), unless communicated and when communicated only the communication exists which is likely not in any fixed form.

How bad does the damage from the false accusation need to be?

One I’m fond of pointing to as evidence that they happen is Tracy West accusing her ex Louis Gonzales. He spent three months in jail while it was being investigated, and only got out because he happened to have a very heavily corroborated alibi for the day that left only a 6 minute window during which he would have had to travel a total of 2 miles, obtain a duffel bag full of forensic countermeasures, subdue and rape the victim, dispose of said duffel bag in a manner it would never be recovered and return. And that 6 minute window was not when she originally said it happened, until they allowed her to revise her statement which became much fuzzier about when it happened. Also there was evidence that she was researching the way she was tied up in the days leading up to her being tied up exactly that way. By all appearances this case was about a custody dispute over their kid, and despite the case being dropped because it was physically impossible for him to have done it she still got to use it against him because fucking family courts. He eventually got a finding of factual innocence from CA courts and had the entire thing expunged from his record - to be clear, this essentially requires proving beyond a reasonable doubt that you could not have committed the crime. When he was interviewed by an LA paper about the case, he’d developed an obsession with being as publicly visible with as much paper trail as possible at all time, just in case because of how lucky he was with his alibi from this case (if he’d eaten before he left to get the kid, his alibi wouldn’t exist and that alibi is the reason he only spent 3 months in jail).

How about Brian Banks? Kid with a real chance of going into professional football, Falsely accused, threatened with 41 years, plead to 5 years + 5 probation + registering as a sex offender on advice of his lawyer. The accuser sues the school and wins $1.5M. 9 years later, his accuser contacts him on Facebook and they speak. He secretly records the conversation, in which she admits to having lied but refuses to tell authorities that because she was afraid that they might make her pay back the money. The video gets released publicly and the Innocence Project gets involved. He goes on to briefly join the UFL and then NFL after not having meaningfully played for 11 years (time that would have been the prime of his career if not for the accusation).

Speaking of the Innocence Project, what’s your opinion of them? It tends to vary for left leaning folks - either they like it because a lot of the people exonerated are POC or they hate it because a significant majority of people exonerated by it were imprisoned for some flavor of sexual assault. Go look at their list of cases: https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ According to the site when filtered for sex crimes 184 of the “more than 250” people were imprisoned wrongly for a sex crime. 124/184 of those exonerated by the Innocence Project that were imprisoned for a sex crime were misidentified by an eyewitness. For sex crimes, that eyewitness is very often the alleged victim.

They want him to make it to Jan 21, 2027, then he can keel over. That way Vance can still qualify for two full terms afterward.