I suspect that what you want to check out is the tangle newsletter.

They report on one major story each day, share several viewpoints from each side, and then the personal take of Isaac Saul, the creator of the newsletter.

https://www.readtangle.com/

Just stopping by to say this:

Not enough racist scum to go around?

My wife made me stop at two viewings. I’ll tell her we have to push through.

I too was traumatized by watching SatansMaggotyCumFart’s parent’s sex tape.

I have no idea why I bought it, and even less idea why SatansMaggotyCumFart would release it.

I’d argue it’s too young, purely from a neurological development point of view.

Your prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop until your mid to late 20’s. That’s what gives you the ability to evaluate future consequences of your actions.

That’s one of my favorite jokes.

They faked the moon landing but hired Stanley Kubrick to direct it, and he insisted on filming on location.

Good Lord, is he so desperate to get people to forget that he raped children that he might actually do something right?

Great!

I won’t stop reminding people that he raped children, but maybe we can get him to do some good in the process.

I remember a couple being interviewed before the 2016 election. They owned a construction business that was hired by Trump. He screwed them over, never paid, and completely destroyed their business and their lives.

They still said they were voting for him.

I bet you could have added “raped their 13-year-old daughter” to the list without him losing their vote.

“Yeah, I won’t let him stay over at the house again, but we need a businessman in the White House.”

For Vance, this is simply unacceptable. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War,” he said, “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”

How’s this for a radical point of view:

I think people whose ancestors fought for the wrong side in the Civil War have a lot less claim over America than the people who become citizens after the Civil War.

You can still sue if you find a lawyer who is willing to do it.

Pennsylvania is an “At Will” state, so in theory my wife could have fired any employee just because she felt like it. However, the steps laid out by our lawyer for firing someone were quite extensive.

We needed to have extensive documentation of failures and performance issues on file before we could consider it.

That’s also why my employer has such an extensive coaching and documentation process for poorly performing employees. The policy documents describe it as a way to ensure all employees have the opportunity and support they need to improve, but the real reason is definitely to protect against lawsuits.

Of course, if anyone in the US is thinking of moving to another state, this might be useful:

https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice/workers-rights/best-states-to-work/

I was going to suggest that you’d want to cross-reference other details as well, such as if the state allows doctors to refuse to treat you because they think their magic sky-daddy doesn’t want them to.

At the beginning of COVID, when our CEO decided all non-essential staff should immediately begin working from home wherever possible, our CIO declared all of IT to be essential on-site. Shortly after the meeting when the CIO made that announcement, people at my level (bottom-level manager) essentially all announced to our supervisors that we were going to refuse to abide by that directive.

My direct supervisor told us to relax and essentially said that the entire management team was going to sit the CIO down and have a come to Jesus meeting. Shortly after that the directive was reversed, and it was left up to managers to decide if their team could be WFH, hybrid, or fully on-site. It’s hard to stay CIO if the entire IT group is in revolt.

For many months after that, in the regular management meetings, the CIO would talk about how difficult it was and how everyone was suffering due to the requirement to work from home. He would talk about how many people told him they were longing for the day when we could all be on-site again. I have no idea who those people were, because everyone I spoke to thought WFH was fantastic.

I have heard that when productivity didn’t drop, the CEO asked, “Why are we paying all these high rents for office space if everyone is just as productive and happier working from home?” It was around that time that the CIO started to talk about WFH like it was a good thing.

At this point, there’s no sign it will ever end. We are allowed to hire people from out-of-state and most people are WFH full time. They’ve reduced office space to the point where we all couldn’t work on-site even if we wanted to.

I think it still depends on the intent and the setting.

If the intent is to end the conversation, then it’s very rude. If it is just being used as an exclamation, then it wouldn’t bother me in a casual setting.

In a chat during an online game as an exclamation: no big deal.

In a response to a personal story shared during a church service: not a good look.

I think we’d need to know the complete context to judge.

I could say someone like, “my doctor says I’ve got stage 4 cancer”, and a friend’s reaction might be STFU, and that could be totally reasonable.

The only way it’s unreasonable is if the intent is to tell you to actually stop talking.

This is probably not the kind of response you want, and it’s going to be a serious downer for everyone, but the first person I thought of was Kathy Change:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Change

Thankfully, I was not a witness to it, but I was working for Penn at the time, and I remember passing her dancing at 34th and Walnut many times.

Like almost everyone else, I paid no attention to what the dances were protesting. When I found out about her concerns after her death, it seemed like such a tragically doomed effort even back in 1996.

Of course, now we’re all hopelessly burning the entire world down, and I still don’t really expect anything to change.