Yeah it sounds like something mainstream media would accuse TST of doing. Like, I strongly suspect that most of the “movements” to include pedophiles in diversity conversations are really just bigots astroturfing because that just makes more sense.

And I still think it’s worth supporting TST just for the legal work they do alone.

I’ll admit I’ve never been a member of either organization, but I have friends who were TST members and last year a good chunk of that congregation split off to join GoS. And they’ve since helped others so the same. So this is basically how they’ve described it to me.

From Wikipedia, it looks like GoS started in 2018 as a UK split-off for various concerns. Wikipedia focused on specific issues the UK branch had, but I was also told a huge factor was the logistics and goals. TST is a very US-focused organization that puts a lot of resources into US legal battles. They also had strict controls over branding, policies, and structures that just didn’t suit them.

The main reason for the schism in my local chapter was more specific. TST regularly streams online services and last year had a leader from a chapter who advocated for welcoming, accepting, and celebrating people regardless of sexual preference. Which sounds great…, except he also explicitly called for the inclusion of pedophiles as part of LQBTQ+. Despite pedophilia being in direct opposition to tenents 1 and 3. The local chapter (and several other chapter) complained to their national representatives and the response was… Nothing. No statement from the national organization, no consequences for that leader. Just swept under the rug.

Also of significance was allegedly there was some sort of documentary released in 2023 called “The Lies of the Satanic Temple” by Dead Domain that claims to expose fraud and abuse from TST leadership. I have not watched it (although coincidentally I have watched a couple of her videos on videogames- she had a really interesting interview with the creators of Paradise Killer), but I heard that it caused several other congregations across the country to split off of TST.

GOS is much less centralized. It’s more of a collection of guidelines, resources, and suggestions. Some chapters keep their own branding, like the House of Heretics in Seattle.

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems to me like GOS is more focused on replacing the role of the church in an individual’s life with a secular alternative. They do charity work like adopt-a-highway, food drives, clothing drives, etc. A lot of the members are young, queer, alternative people, and if their families disowned them they don’t have a support system. They have support for things like non-religious sobriety programs. I almost get the impression it’s like a religious rehab for people who grew up in very restrictive or abusive churches. At Pride this year the local chapter was doing “un-baptisms”. They have potlucks and parties and other social events. I think some of these things they might have carried over from TST.

They keep a much lower profile than TST. They don’t engage in the legal battles that TST does, and a lot of the people I know who left TST still respect the organization for fighting that fight. Personally… I’m really confused as to why GOS still keeps the “satanic” imagery of TST because I thought the point of that was to serve as a counterpoint to Christians in those legal battles.

Personally I’m just introverted and not interested in all that “community” and “networking”. But I’ve donated to both organizations for the work they do.

Oh yes of course there’s very good reasons for the different organizations. Personally I’ve been a bit turned off by some of the stuff TST has been doing and more interested in the Global Order of Satan (GOS).

I just think it’s funny how Christians don’t seem to have any problems separating (and feuding against) the hundreds of thousands of different denominations, many of which have nearly identical names. But two different organizations with 0 words in their name in common is apparently too confusing for them to handle.

But it’s really weird and sinister to even bring up the Church of Satan. The Church of Satan purposefully does not publish numbers, but the best estimates I can find have them peaking at 300 members. They haven’t been relevant since the 80’s when LaVey got in front of the media during Satanic Panic. TST might have more congregations than CoS has members.

It would be like saying “the Roman Catholic Church, which is different from Christian Scientists”.

Despite its name, TST is not affiliated with the Church of Satan

I find it really funny that they need to call this out given the thousands of different Christian churches that all have varying degrees of affiliation or animosity with each other and often nearly indistinguishable names.

“Armed settlers”

Incredibly soft language

Just to toss my feedback in the ring: I listen to a podcast themed around a local sports team on Spotify, and I often download them to my phone locally because I’m old and still have the habits of being on a limited data plan even though I’ve had unlimited for years.

I noticed the ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) and was surprised because a lot of them tend to be local ads for various cities across the US. HVAC services in Chicago, lawyers in Houston, etc. None for the city where the podcasters live, most of their audience lives, or the spots team is based.

I don’t always download the episodes to listen, only if I know I’m going to be out , or if I’m mowing the lawn and might occasionally stretch my wifi range. I haven’t tested fully, but it seems as though the ads only get baked into the audio upon download.

I also noticdd a few months ago that downloading a podcast I was partway through resets my progress, which has been incredibly annoying. If the ads are inserted at the time of download, that would make sense because the length of the audio would change.

Just recently I finally convinced my wife to watch Venture Bros. I watched it on Max a couple years ago and enjoyed it, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to watch the movie. So I was hoping we could watch the series together and finish off with the movie.

The movie is on Max, but the show is not anymore. The first 3 seasons are on Netflix. Seasons 4-7… They don’t seem to be available anywhere. Well, I think Adult Swim’s website might have it but their website sucks for binging shows even on a desktop, and either worse or literally not possible to use on other devices. I could “buy” them digitally on Amazon. Instead I just bought the DVD collection and added it to my Jellyfin server.

It used to be that a show had to be really special for me to shell out money and dedicate digital and physical storage space for me to buy a physical copy. But more and more I find myself buying the DVD’s and Blu-Rays even for shows like Venture Bros that I like, but may not love. Streaming just keeps getting worse.

I kept on checking throughout the day yesterday- Verizon’s website said no outages, but istheservicedown showed most of the east coast of the US was down.

I also heard from friends with business class Internet that they were fine.

Ah I just searched for Firefox news and the PPA thing was the only one that came up.

As for firing the executive, I can’t find anything about him being specifically relayed to being open-source anything. Steve Teixeira was their Chief Product Office briefly- he only was hired in 2022 and left the company a few months ago, and prior to that he worked for Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter. So I don’t think this can really be framed as some attack on open-source or privacy. If the allegations are true that they discriminated against him for having cancer that’s shitty of course, but Mozilla has of course claimed that they did not and it’s going to court. They didn’t fire him either- they asked him to take a demotion to Senior VP of Technology Strategy and he chose to leave instead.

Yes Mozilla bought an ad company. They’re called Anonym and their stated goal is to provide an advertising service that can exist profitably without violating privacy. I hate ads- I block as many as I can and I use a pi-hole. I avoid ad-supported services as much as possible. I’m also privileged enough that I can afford to pay for a subscription to a lot of stuff or just buy physical media to rip and store on my own server. But there was a time when I was a broke college student stuck using campus Internet and playing by their rules, so the safest option I could afford was just to watch ads. Ads can be an ethical business model that helps improve the lives of low-income households. For people with legal or ethical concerns about piracy, or additional restrictions on their Internet, or who just lack the technical skill.

It’s certainly fair to keep an eye on Anonym and Mozilla in this regard, but I haven’t seen anything objectionable there yet.

Similar for the Mozilla AI. It seems it’s still in it’s infancy and I’m not a fan of companies jumping on the air bandwagon in general, but at the very least Mozilla has identified the problems with other AI’s and is looking to create a better alternative. If they get caught stealing training data, releasing tools to allow high schoolers to make deep fake revenge porn, tell people to start putting glue in their pizza cheese, or some other crap like that then they should absolutely be criticized for it. But none of that has happened yet that I’m aware of.

I also can’t find exactly what you’re referring to with Russia. The closest thing is that it looks like there were some extensions that were made to work around Russian state censorship. The Russian government passed a law in March banning such workarounds. In response, Mozilla took down 5 extensions, reviewed them, and then decided to reinstate them in June. Not quite ideal, but still seems like reasonable action to me.

It’s fair and a good thing to criticize Mozilla and Firefox. But it seems like you’re trying to spin every single move they make as a sign the sky is falling.

And I also know that there are both states and corporations paying people to go on the Internet and push propaganda. Firrfox has a lot of enemies. You cant just blindly believe every article saying they are succumbing to enshittification.

I’ve seen predictions of Firefox’s downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.

It’s really easy to see the headlines saying things like “Firefox is tracking it’s users and violating their privacy!!!” And panic. But digging into the latest “scandal” (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.

One of the main criticisms is that it’s opt-out instead of opt-in. Which… I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren’t going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.

I don’t fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It’s good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.

But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.

But only a small fraction of the plastic gets recycled.

If 9/10ths of the plastic ends up in a landfill or the Pacific garbage patch, having 1/10th of that plastic recycled into another bottle (which then will eventually have 9/10ths tossed in a landfill anyways) isn’t doing much. It’s better than not recycling at all, but it’s green washing to say that it’s “eco friendly”, which Capri-Sun allegedly did at this trade show.

It also includes flavoring (of which the orange juice is one). They come in more flavors than just orange.

I invited myself because it’s an interesting article, nothing to do with nostalgia.

“Sometimes” feels a bit generous. From a quick search I can find estimates that 5-9% of all plastic is recycled. It might be higher or lower depending on the specific kinds of plastic these bottles use, but most of it is probably ending up in a landfill anyways.

You think the bottles are going to be any better? They’re going to end up in the ocean with all of the other plastic bottles from other drinks.

I see a ton of comments here hating on nostalgic people, with no actual nostalgic people in sight yet.

Personally I don’t care if a pouched drink exists or not, but if they are no longer producing pouched drinks they should probably retire the brand.

Do you remember what a CapriSun tastes like? It’s somewhere between an extremely-artificially flavored “juice” concentrate and a “fruit flavored” drink like Kool-Aid. The whole appeal was the packaging.

Is that the Smilodon?

As a black person she’ll alienate the racists in the DNC. There aren’t as many as the DNC, but it would be naive to think there aren’t any. As much as I don’t want to cater to racists, beating Trump is more important right now.

As a woman she will alienate misogynists. Same thing.

As a cop she’s going to alienate a ton of voters. She’s recently changed her positions on a lot of crime-related issues like marijuana, but idk how much that’s going to help her win the BLM crowd.

I’ll vote for her if she’s the pick, no question. Heck, there are very few people the DNC could nominate at this point that I wouldn’t vote for. I suppose as Biden’s VP she was kind of nominated in the primary if you squint. But yeah… DNC elites appointing a cop at the last minute doesn’t strike me as the best way to fight fascism.

Identity politics aside, I like a lot of what she claims to support, but that’s assuming that she’s truly no longer the prosecutor she used to be. She has good records on reproductive rights, economics, LGBTQ+ support. My biggest gripe with her would be she’s still just as pro-Israel as Biden and most of the DNC seems to be.

Victor Gruen is widely considered the inventory of the modern shopping mall. He was an Austrian Jew who immigrated to the US when the Nazi’s annexed Austria.

I can’t find much specific on his political views, but I’ve seen him described by historians as “far-left” and “socialist”.

Shopping was originally a small part of his vision. He wanted to make an indoor, air-conditioned version of European pedestrian areas. Residences, schools, libraries, hospitals, parks, etc. He hated how the mall he envisioned became the shopping mall. He was influenced by Disney Land - trying to make a planned neighborhood that optimized the human experience. In turn, Disney took a lot of influence from him to make EPCOT.

So I don’t know that he was a Marxist, but he denounced the capitalist hellscape that his malls eventually became.

It’s the same reason why factory workers don’t join unions or go on strike.

The system is designed to enforce compliance and keep individuals focused on submitting in order to meet their short-term, basic needs. Desperation is the design. When everyone is forced to choose between standing up for themselves or feeding themselves and their families, most people throughout history choose food.