I feel like there’s got to be a decent middle ground between a pinned post that pushes this in front of everyone and requires further mod comments to try and stave off harassment and silently letting anyone who notices find the mod logs and make their own judgements of everyone involved. Like, in the absence of an actual announcement I think people would absolutely come to their own much more inflammatory conclusions if/when they noticed regardless of what the removed mod does, and the removed mod could make things into an absolute shit storm (which they don’t appear to be trying to do as far as I can tell, to their credit). But on the flip side, the way this post is set up is also an escalation in its own right and represents a more aggressive use of power by the remaining mods than was absolutely necessary.

If blahaj.zone has an instance business forum then making the full statement there (where it won’t get pushed out of sight as fast as the 196 churn would do to a non-stickied post) and linking it may have been wiser, since it preserves the immediate statement without shoving it to the top of everyone’s plate, and would still allow a stickied post on 196 itself if the situation escalated and it became more necessary.

I dunno, mod shit is hard and I’m glad I get to armchair quarterback it rather than actually making these decisions in real time. Props to the full mod team for keeping the chaos of 196 from turning toxic and destructive for however long it’s been here.

Secretly?

My town’s pride event was this weekend. Regrettably the heat and social anxiety in my family won out over heading down there but even so please know that I did remember this exchange. You are still seen and recognized and valid, at least in whatever small ways a stranger on Lemmy can offer.

Stay safe out there.

For anyone else who was curious about the religious context, Luke 15 is about how much God loves repentance, featuring most famously the parable of the Prodigal Son.

You know, some cities (at least one because I live here) delay their local pride celebration until July to avoid competing with larger cities in the local metro area. Don’t get too comfortable if you want to avoid being seen and celebrated, is what I’m saying.

Also, I showed this to my wife since we’re all going through it, and she points out that that burger looks like it knows what an Atari is.

This may be true in the general case, but if you consider that my depression and anxiety make me vaguely megalomaniacal you would understand that I am different and uniquely terrible for having literally any problems ever.

My wife keeps lamenting that we haven’t found ways to help pet rats live as long as cats but I don’t think this is what she had in mind.

Maybe my experiences are unusual, but I’ve seen more harassment and general shittiness from other commuters than I ever have from homeless people camping nearby. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but I feel like we’re back to the problem of harassment and violence already being illegal. Going back to the immediate question here, removing the benches doesn’t make harassment or assholery any more difficult or more consequential.

I mean it seems like a lot of that could be avoided by, for example, keeping the goddamn bathrooms open (or making there be public bathrooms). Drugs are already illegal. The station is still a roof over your head, making it preferable to the street whether or not there are benches.

Ironically it seems like the most direct harm done by homeless people sleeping on the benches is that those benches aren’t usable by commuters who may need to rest. And this certainly makes that problem go away, I guess. Wouldn’t exactly call it solved.

Really needs to have the poison bar slowly filling to complete the FromSoft effect. It can’t just be a normal non-poisoned swamp.

Don’t get me wrong, if Erika Kirk wanted to make the world a better place she could start by hastening her trip to join Charlie in hell. I’ll also happily agree that Charlie was less an innocent victim and more an enemy combatant in the ongoing conflict between fascism and humanity. Even so, I feel like the performative cruelty here isn’t exactly a good look. I’m not criticizing anyone’s feeling of catharsis or schadenfreude about Kirk’s fate, but this was a public display. It took effort and planning. They made props. And as a piece of political theater, this is not what we ought to be about. The message shouldn’t focus on Kirk’s death, but on making sure his life is remembered accurately: as a fascist debate bro who took massive amounts of money from the Epstein class to make internet memes for letting them do whatever they want. A man who immediately abandoned any libertarian small-government principles he used to claim once it became clear that openly hating gays, immigrants, and nonwhite people was politically viable.

If they ever raise the price then the humble Costco hot dog is going to be one of those things that serves as a legendary “economic indicator” up there with the stockbrokers jumping out of windows on black Tuesday.

The fewer checks there are on state power the more valuable corruption becomes.