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Tuesday’s Forum
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16 responses to “Tuesday’s Forum”
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The monsters our tax dollars are paying for.
ICE is arresting relatives who come forward to take custody of migrant children in federal shelters
Since President Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has implemented a slew of changes to the vetting process for close relatives and other guardians who volunteer to take in undocumented children, from narrowing the list of acceptable identity documents to mandating DNA tests. Crucially, it also dropped a rule that prohibited the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for unaccompanied migrant kids, from sharing information about potential sponsors with ICE.
Those changes have led to prolonged stays in shelters for unaccompanied children. Some advocates say the changes allow ICE to use kids as “bait” to arrest their potential caregivers.
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Saudi oil tankers on the Red Sea make a U turn and head for Suez rather than China and India.
So, in the era of drones and cheap missiles, it doesn’t take much to close off a maritime choke point.
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I will say it again, the gods should have warned humanity about chutzpah, not hubris.
Israel’s far far right finance minister, says his country has no interest in joining the US war on Iran
So, “no interest” in joining the war Israel and the US started?
It must be nice to help upend the world’s economy and pass the buck right away to someone else.
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In Current Affairs, Elizabeth R. Blackburn, a software engineer turned internet-enabled 976 operator, pens an informal sort-of ethnography of white nationalist professionals who pay $60+/hr to satiate a humiliation kink.
When a well-meaning misadventure in 2022 left my life in shambles, a friend suggested I try the phone sex operator platform NiteFlirt. I was already neck-deep in the sex work industry and desperate to climb out of debt from the safety of my bedroom, so I made three lines: an inexpensive chat line, a comparatively expensive role-playing line, and a line for flirty online chess games. This last one was my friend’s suggestion; special interests sometimes made for lucrative niches (no one ever called).
[…]
Several months in, I created a line for a different special interest: “Talk Politics With The Anarchist Bimbo.” Unlike sexy chess, the market for this niche found me immediately.
What Australian Neo-Nazis Really Want
The first call to my “Debate Me, bro” line was a trial by fire. Michael was a white Australian Millennial, worked a white-collar office job, and was a white nationalist. We spoke for two hours at $1.99 per minute (of which I would receive 63 percent). Our conversation was—until the last 20 minutes—exclusively a discussion of personal politics.
Worth a read. I wish there was as much detail about some of Blackburn’s other clients as there is about this Michael character. The Jewish (non-observant) Texan seems interesting enough for a follow-up piece.
Stray thoughts:
-That $1.99 figure is low.
The author charged $5.99/minute for her most successful niche line. Out of respect for our hosts, I think it best not to describe the service here.
Byron Noem, Kristi Noem’s soon-to-be ex-husband, paid far more to engage his “bimbofication” kink. The piece links to an interview with his alleged Webmistress* wherein she claims that Mr. Noem paid $25/min to sport exotropic nipples perched on latex breasts that would be excessive for age-gated Steam games.
-Recent discussions of Hegseth come to mind. It would be no more than a mild surprise if I found out he paid Blackburn’s $5.99 rate.
-Not surprising: Blackburn also indulged the fantasies of lefty clients.
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One last passage as a tease:
If this weren’t a serious essay about sex and ideology, here I’d include a Venn diagram meme with overlapping circles of hustle culture, the NoFap community, amphetamine abuse, and homoerotic looksmaxxing; Nazism lives at its center.
*to hell with proper grammar, it feels wrong not to capitalize that job title, out of respect for the work. Plus, I would rather not be hunted down by some lurking Dom wearing spiked heels armed with a cat-o’-nine-tails. That’s, uh, not my thing.
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After using the new site for a couple weeks now, I would like to say that I hate nested comments.
It used to be that I could reload a page and it would return me to my last position. Any comment after that would be new.
Now, I have to first scroll back to the top, then reload to see if there are any new comments.
Then I have to scroll down through all the comments to see if there’s been a new response–which requires that I read all of the previous responses to remember if I’ve read them before.
It’s become a chore. And in long threads, I can’t be arsed to scan through 50 comments to see whether or not I’ve already read them, and whether or not there are any new responses.
I expect I’m in the minority, but nested comments means I’m not going to be reading the comments, and I’m not going to be participating.
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@Mu Yixiao I actually share some of your experience with the nested comments and can see your point.
Having said that, I would ask for some level of patience. We are trying to figure out the best choices within the new options before us, and would beg everyone to recognize that what one person likes, another does not.
Sometimes, it also just takes getting used to something new.
I again would request patience. Part of the problem, too, is an ongoing struggle with the email system to inform readers of new comments to threads, including the authors of the posts.
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@Mu Yixiao
I’m not crazy about it, either. But I figure it may just take some time for us to adjust, and for Steven and James to play with options.
Not sure if you saw it the other day, but I replied to your similar comment. For the time being, I am more likely to just tag people than use the reply function.
But others need to use the reply so the hosts can figure out the best way to configure comments.
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