Good luck with that.

Even in the 70s, if you went to Catholic school in a very Catholic city, or had a number of friends that did, whether male or female, you knew. The only ones keeping quiet about it were the press and the church itself.

No, I did not know that. It sounds relaxing, which is what I watch powerwashing for. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check it out.

I love pressure washing myself, but don’t have the situation right now where it’s necessary or even feasible, so I go watch others who do it. I’m a big fan of Sid Partridge’s YT channel, and he started with a small Karcher just like that. It’s a younger man’s game in a lot of ways, but god it is satisfying. Well done you!

Meta today began removing ads from attorneys who were seeking clients that claim to have been harmed by social media

. . . Thereby proving the absolute ease and facility with which content can be rapidly identified and removed when that content removal serves the corporation, and thereby actively helping to prove the plaintiffs’ cases for them.

Now that’s meta.

I did use a leaf blower at the end

Yup. Sometimes it just needs that overkill. The garage I used the leaf blower in belonged to a relative and hadn’t been cleaned in well over a decade, and after I got done with all the heavy work of moving all the shelves and boxes around I didn’t have much enthusiasm for the good sweep it really needed. Plus the leaf blower got all the cobwebs I couldn’t reach under and around the shelves, win/win. There was a water softener but no hardened salt anywhere, fortunately.

I don’t know if you’ve seen this kind of second handle, that’s just an example (non-affiliate link), but for straight handled tools that also need force they’re a back saver.

It takes technique. Handle it like a pressure washer, at a sharp angle to the ground but slightly lifted in the direction you want the air to go, and it moves dirt the same way. But on the whole it was not a serious suggestion, though I’ve done it when I just couldn’t be bothered with sweeping a LOT of dirt.

Why use a broom when you could use a leaf blower? I mean yeah, it’s annoyingly loud, uses electric or fuel, can take even more time than a broom if you lack technique, and is probably extreme overkill, but when you want to get that garage floor cleaner than it’s ever been – including under the shelves – leaf blower is the way to go.

No, I think I understand you perfectly, Fudgy McTubbs.

All I was saying is people who are boisterous in their hatred of pedos can be pedos

You say this, but I have not come across it at all. On the contrary: pedos defend pedos, and as we’ve seen in the Epstein files alone, pedos tend to befriend each other and protect each other. On the whole, pedophiles are very comfortable with their own desires, and often have their actions toward children, even babies, repulsively self-justified as some kind of love, or loving act, when in fact it is vomitously perverted and confers lifelong damage to its targets. Think NAMBLA: there’s a LOT more where that came from.

Some pedos also tend to be drawn toward open discussions of pedophilia online, because in addition to the sickening lust for children, they often think of themselves as smarter than regular folk (not without cause, because they tend to get away with their crimes for decades, due to the fact no one wants to think about it) and occasionally believe that the average stranger they discuss pedophilia with online has zero personal knowledge or understanding of their crimes. I’ve drawn a few of these out of the woodwork myself.

But in regard to my own experience, I can only say I am old, I have known this person I speak of for decades, I have known what they went through, I’ve read a lot about it and keep up with the news, and I can honestly say I have NEVER once seen a pedo come out in hatred of other pedos and then be outed as a pedo. Not once. Much less a judge.

But I have known personally, and heard of many more, where pedos found each other, traded materials with each other, helped each other find victims, and covered for each other in massive lies and routines of deception spanning entire decades. Again, the Epstein files are full of proof of this. So is the dark web. That shit’s wide open to anyone who has the stomach to go looking for it.

I also have never come across this:

Judges who turn out to be secret pedos tend to have a record of sentencing maximums against pedos in their court. It’s a thing.

To the best of my understanding, this may be true of some crimes, including sexual crime, but not of pedophila. Literally, I do not know of one case.

I’d be happy to learn, though. So can you cite some examples of judges over-sentencing specifically involving the crime of pedophilia, where the judge is then outed as a pedophile? Certainly you’d remember where you saw some, since “it’s a thing.”

Again, you made the claim specifically about pedophila, and you set the specifics yourself: “Judges who turn out to be secret pedos tend to have a record of sentencing maximums against pedos in their court. It’s a thing.” If you could name these multiple judges you speak of, I’d be very interested to know the specifics.

If you’re going there then you should also count people who have personally suffered adversity caused by that specific evil, who absolutely “come down harder” on the perpetrators of those actions than those who have not personally suffered.

As for pedos and the harm they cause, for me there’s zero room for ambiguity, zero room for doubt. Many people have been directly harmed by it; many more love someone else who has. For myself, someone very close to me has been profoundly adversely affected by their actions, so hell yeah I come down hard and have no sympathy. They are left with lifetimes of hells the rest of us can’t even imagine, day in and day out, and when it involves pubescent and prepubescent children it is nothing short of sickeningly repulsive: it is predator and prey. Nothing can change that. No amount of discussion can normalize that.

Same for survivors of trafficking, and the loved ones of murder victims, and those who have been raped: they have good reason to come down as hard as they like on those crimes, because they know better than anyone else what they were left with when those crimes were done.

I have long believed that only pedos (or wannabes) defend pedos. Everyone else is too viscerally repulsed to get anywhere near it, even with mere words.

So yeah, I unironically see a pedo defender and think, “Pedo.”

This is really good. Thank you for taking the time to write it.

At this point, I’d be thrilled if just one thing – elections – went back to paper. I feel like paper ballots would have solved at least some of this current insanity already.

anna’s archive

I wish. As someone astutely put it in another conversation, now that the tech companies have pilfered Anna’s Archive, the big publishers are going to try to get it shut down.

Understand that this is not happening in a vacuum and that attempts to convert your democracy into authoritarianism are coming for you too; in the UK it’s the Reform party, and they’re using the same old tired canard of demon immigrants to gain power. Keeping authoritarianism and fascism out of your own country, wherever it may be, helps us all.

By yourself you can’t change the world (yet), but you CAN immunize yourself and prepare yourself, so that when your turn comes (may it never, but here we are) you can readily act in your own community.

First, educate yourself: get your news from multiple sources, preferably from multiple continents, so that no one voice or group of voices can manipulate your worldview. Be an armchair expert on British history basics so that you know the bullshit when you see it online. Familiarize yourself with your own constitutional rights and how they are codified, so that you know when they are in danger.

Especially, be aware that corporate-owned, centralized social media is artificially manipulated, and instead of thinking you can’t be drawn in, be aware of the power of even seeing a headline that is worded a certain way to shape how you mentally frame a subject, for example. It’s subtle but it’s real. So tread carefully, or limit your time altogether.

Understand also that over time, social media teaches us how to self-censor and encourages us to value the opinions of others as highly as our own, giving oversized power to group pushback, when in fact it’s all just an artificial space where nothing is real and our natural instincts get very blunted over time, making us ever more intellectually malleable by tiny increments. By way of strong contrast, there is an absolute amount of power inherent in speaking your own truth, uncensored, full of the passion you feel about your subject: stick to online spaces that foster this, and limit your time to whatever lets you feel healthy and whole and still participate.

Secondly, get to know your own community in person, as much as you can. Is there already some kind of protest or direct action going on near you, like an effort to clean up a local waterway or stop an unwanted corporate building project? That’s a great place to get to know people. Even just doing little things like this you learn that just showing up has so much power. Just showing up. You don’t have to save the world. You can just be one person among many, and getting to know your local neighbors and community is the way to do it.

And that’s it. That’s how you start. Educating yourself (and protecting your mind), and getting to know your own community. That is all that Minneapolis has done, but look at how well they are resisting intense provocation and bringing world censure to the wrong that is happening to their town. That’s community working together, just doing what they can do.

You’re doing both of these things, educating yourself and getting to know your neighbors, because change does not come from “speaking truth to power” or strongly worded letters; it comes from simply knowing your neighbors, and amassing with them in large groups when the time comes. If more is ever necessary, then from that place of mutual agreement the best path for that time and that place is formed, but even that all starts with knowing your neighbors and knowing a basic level of truth about whatever you’re facing. It is far, far easier to do this if you’ve already done it before, and it helps when you already know from personal relationships that what you hate for your neighborhood, your neighbors hate too.

Your power comes from being one of many. You have something you can say or do that, in combination with many others, absolutely can make it incredibly difficult for evil to win.

That’s what you’re seeing in Minnesota, and why you’re drawn to help. Ignore the people who would tell you that none of what I just wrote matters, and look instead at Minneapolis: what you’re seeing is exactly this. They learned from the George Floyd protests, got to know their neighbors, and are relying on personal networks to do everything they are doing. The media isn’t talking much about it but ICE has been having to go farther and farther into the rural areas because neighborhood networks, made of people just like you, are making it insanely difficult to get to anyone anymore, and meanwhile relentlessly documenting all their excesses. That’s what’s winning this war: just regular people, like you, like me, doing whatever little tiny thing we each can do.

Also, thank you for your kind and supportive words. Here in the US we are relentlessly firehosed with propaganda from every direction, and to stand against this horrible thing can feel very isolating and alone. When we protest, it is consistently either undercounted or ignored altogether by mainstream media. So hearing you say that you are standing with us in spirit is very heartening, and I know that you’ve protested our insane president before, in many ways and at multiple times: it really means a lot.

Apologies for the wall of text, and thank you again for caring enough to ask the question. Hope it helps.