Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • I realized that while I prepared him for Vice President Harris winning, I did not prepare him for her losing. I’m not sure I even prepared myself. It’s like having a doctor telling you to prepare for the death of a loved one. What does that even mean or entail?

    I mean, that’s on you, in all brutal honesty. Even the death of a loved one is something you can plan for, despite how difficult it may be.

    Sometimes, you can tell when people haven’t faced real hardship, because they’ve made almost no effort to accept that hardship is a thing that is possible to have happen.

    The Republicans have been trying to gut Social Security for my entire life, and so I always told my disabled partner she needed to be pursuing education while being on disability to ensure that when they finally succeeded she would have a plan to fall back on, and if in the best case scenario where she kept her disability, she got the bonus of an education. Looks like getting those degrees was the right idea, because there’s a high likelihood of that cut to her disability is coming.

    Always hope the best but prepare for the worst. Because “hope” isn’t enough. It’s out there with “thoughts and prayers” in terms of usefulness. Hope is important, but hanging your future on it is a gamble.




  • Look, they don’t give a damn about actually following their own philosophies so let’s drop the tired gotchas. They don’t give a flying fuck about the gotchas.

    We are really letting the right wing dictate the nature of reality with bullshit takes like this.

    That you need one single leader to solve it all is a conservative position. That you need many people working together is a leftist position.

    When you try to hit them with this gotcha you’re actually affirming their beliefs in singular strongmen and are normalizing it for the left.

    Cooperation shouldn’t be vilified. Cooperation isn’t a joke.


  • Also deporting millions of farm workers isn’t going to help prices stabilize when farmers have vegetables rotting on the vine because they can’t afford US citizens and how much they expect to be paid to be a farm-hand and on top of that US citizens tend to be fat and fucking lazy in comparison to the immigrant laborers.

    Further, in Washington state, many immigrants have made a livelihood by working their way up and buying the orchard out from the owner. How many of those immigrants will be denaturalized and now the orchard has no ownership and is up for grabs at pennies on the dollar, further consolidating food ownership.

    If the US dollar is still somehow the world’s reserve currency after all this fucking idiocy, I’ll genuinely be shocked.


  • I worked in a “European” US bakery for a hot minute around 2012, and one of the things I remember most was them trying to find new providers with cheaper products. This lead to a difference in taste because obviously in this case the cheaper products are actually a sub-par product.

    A big part of it has been the consolidation of the businesses who sell food to restaurants. They all pull from the same places, and so the variety has gone down and the filler gone up.

    It’s not just fast food, it’s all restaurants that are suffering this plague.

    I never did anything better than learning to cook at home. My home-made pizza tops any delivery, and I always get to eat it hot out of the oven.







  • A former dog groomer faces prison in Dubai for posting a critical Google review from Northern Ireland months before holidaying in the United Arab Emirates.

    Craig Ballentine, 33, was arrested on slander charges three weeks ago after arriving in Abu Dhabi to visit friends, according to Detained in Dubai, a British organisation that provides legal assistance to tourists in the UAE.

    His sudden detention comes months after he criticised his former employer, a Dubai-based canine salon, online about the “legal nightmare” he experienced following a six-month stint at the company.

    After becoming ill — and having a couple of days off work — he was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a long-term condition that causes pain all over the body.

    Ballentine, from Cookstown, Northern Ireland, told Detained that despite informing his boss about the diagnosis, and providing his employer with his doctor’s certificate, she registered him as “absconded” with the authorities, meaning he faced a travel ban on his passport which took two months and thousands of pounds to resolve.

    “After picking up the pieces, he left an online review of the grooming centre and his former boss, noting the problems she had caused him. It wasn’t an abusive post and he had no idea that several months later, he would become a criminal and face prosecution,” the group said.

    Ballentine was transported from Abu Dhabi to Dubai to face charges of slander under the UAE’s strict cybercrime laws that prohibit any form of online criticism.

    Ballentine is now “stuck in the country, absent from his employment as a support worker with autistic people and facing two years in prison”, the group said.

    “This case will send shockwaves to tourists and expats who feel safe posting online from the safety of their own countries,” warned Radha Stirling, the chief executive of Detained.

    His family said they were not informed by the authorities in Dubai about his arrest, and did not know where he was during what was supposed to be a short vacation. Ballentine told Stirling in a phone call: “Mum was so upset and stressed, she thought I was dead.”

    Stirling warned that Ballentine “has been advised by local lawyers there is almost zero chance of the case against him being dropped”.

    She said: “When someone is offended, even if they are at fault, they can open a criminal prosecution out of spite. Craig deleted the post, apologised but still faces jail. It’s outrageous.

    “The UAE’s recently enacted cybercrime laws are a nightmare for foreigners. It is sufficient for a complainant to simply tell police that someone posted something offensive or rude. The police don’t even need to see the actual post. The complainants have all the power and often demand money from the accused to close out the case.”

    The Khaleej Times recently warned that those caught out by the strict cybercrime rules become trapped in legal battles and can face hefty fines if they are “overtly critical or give a vilifying Google review, as businesses are becoming increasingly vigilant about safeguarding their reputations”.

    A woman in Dubai was last year found guilty of defamation for an Instagram post that “damaged a hospital’s reputation” after she posted a video clip, criticising it as the “worst hospital”.

    Stirling said that Ballentine needed to return home and to his work, as he has dedicated his life to helping others.

    “It’s atrocious that authorities are allowing such frivolous criminal reports to entangle visitors in the system. There are no protections or safeguards and people’s lives are being ruined,” she added.

    The Times has contacted the Foreign Office, the UAE embassy in London, and the Dubai prosecutor’s office for comment.

    A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: “We are providing support to a British man in the UAE and have been in contact with the local authorities.”





  • who are the people that helped Obama win with his campaign of hope and change.

    They became the establishment that helped Hillary lose to Trump.

    Obama had a winning message and he failed to follow through on a lot of it. It was about hope and more importantly CHANGE.

    The change never came, and the candidates that came after never promised hope OR change. People stopped believing Democrats were offering either hope or change. Because they weren’t, they were offering “don’t rock the boat, it might upset the rich.”

    I mean, even Obama offered up RomneyCare instead of something more progressive. People got wise to that over time. It made them feel defeated.

    Trump offered change, it’s that simple. Most in this country are sadly too uneducated to really realize what his type of change means.

    Democrats were too busy worrying about whether they could actually implement policy, so they tried to only make promises they could keep, and with Republicans obstructing everything they did, they stopped making real, useful promises to the electorate.

    People loved Sanders whether he could make his agenda happen or not, case in point. Nobody likes a policy wonk telling them “no, wait longer.”


  • Bullshit.

    I voted for Harris, but I understand why people gave up.

    I have cancer, under Harris, I would have still had a struggle to afford my medications AND work at the same time. As it was, I was condemned to a life of poverty to afford my medications, choosing to not have a job so I could get the ACA to cover my $18k a month medications. Debating on whether I should be condemned to the poverty of disability or continue trying to find a way to work.

    I will die under Trump, but for a lot of people, the prospect of just waiting and waiting for help that will never come? They got tired and were willing to watch it all burn because what’s the fucking point if no one is coming to save you either way?

    In a way, at least my death here will be swift instead of stressful-to-the-end-of-my-life-in-poverty. I can see why some people chose that. I’m 43 and I’m exhausted, I’m sure there’s more who are even more exhausted than me, because cancer didn’t hit me until I was 42 (I guess cancer is the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything), and many many many people were suffering under similar issues far younger. So they just chose to abandon the Dems because the Dems abandoned them.

    The Dems were busy trying to get WAR CRIMINAL Dick Cheney on their side like that matters to people who are struggling. They spent the election crowing about how good the economy was when it was realistically only good for the already obscenely wealthy. They told railroad unions to go fuck themselves, they don’t get to strike (and then followed up with trains chemical bombing whole cities in derailments). They were willing to hand the Republicans literally everything they wanted in a border bill because FUCK them DREAMers, I guess.

    They abandoned us and continue to abandon us, and I understand why people who have been abandoned don’t show up to vote.

    Honestly so few people actually gave a fuck about Palestine its a joke to bring up. It’s not like anyone even knows who the fuck Rachel Corrie is, and if they cared about Palestine, they would be chanting her fucking name to this god damned day. American citizen murdered with a bulldozer so Israel could steal Palestinian land, over 20 years later and still no one gives a shit. Americans were never going to give a fuck about Gaza, they’re all too god damned selfish.