The right as a political machine didn’t bat an eye when democratic government officials were assassinated. They also have completely ignored the facts of just about everything and inserted their own ideology or fantasy about what’s true and what’s not. What do you think “shouting from the rooftops” is going to accomplish here? This same nonsense has repeated itself multiple times with the attempted Trump assassinations and with other figures on the right. 99 times out of 100 it’s a young straight white conservative male behind shootings, yet there is never introspection on this issue. I cannot imagine this will change the minds of any significant number of those on the right. As Kirk himself said, this is the price of business.

I’m fairly certain that this is what’s being cited. The journalism, unfortunately, is quite poor and it’s hard to confirm precisely what article she was referring to.

Public input was nothing but a facade anyways. We all know under current president they are being gutted and only listen to corporations.

It’s almost entirely medically irrelevant, and the times in which it becomes medically relevant you need to go to a doctor to manage the transition and they can explain to you the times where you need to disclose it (practically never).

With the increasing concentration/divide of wealth, this is only going to get worse without regulation. It’s frustratingly easy to solve, yet places suffering from this problem seem to be hesitant to solve it in the simplest of ways possible - add a flat tax to anyone who owns more than one property or is not a resident.

War on homeless, really? This fucking country I s2g

consultant-approved campaign

The same consultants who have repeatedly said the democrats need to keep pulling to the right. It’s entirely unsurprising that doing exactly what they don’t advise is what’s winning over people, lmao.

I think it’s probably much more mundane; they simply see an opening so they’re going to throw him under the bus so they can be the next king.

In a way, it’s extremely surprising. I agree that it seems wild for this to be what takes down the house of cards.

On the other hand, trying to think of it through the lens of someone already living within the conspiracism bubble, I do think this issue is notably different. Bragging about being a rapist is just how they talk, because they explicitly endorse sexism. That’s just “boys being boys” and whatnot. Unity is necessary to impose a collective will, so some level of bad behavior is excusable so long as you’re towing the party line. But they spent far too long mysticizing and building up the epstein files and importantly it reflected a value that they collectively held - to protect the children. For something which was so central to their conspiracist theorems (just like the deep state, except in this case it was a plausibly real thing) to be discarded so wantonly like this without a clear and plausible explanation which maintains their theories (even Alex Jones couldn’t resolve his cognitive dissonance on this entirely… is Trump actually a deep state actor?!)? Well that is a difficult pill to swallow.

Maybe someone will be creative enough to weave a story which both explains and allows them to continue to press on with their core beliefs of a global elite running the world and them fighting back against it but somehow Trump not being part of said cabal and instead acting on their behalf. If that happens, I’m sure it’ll spread like wildfire among them because it’ll help them suspend their disbelief. One can simply hope they implode upon themselves because right now things are looking exceptionally bleak for the US not nose-diving directly into fascism and being at the center of WW3 and a Nazi 2.0 movement

this is very concerning

Ah yes, integration of church and state, just like the founding fathers wanted 🙄

“There is going to come a time when everyone is retiring and there’s not going to be a workforce.”

Well there certainly wont be a workforce if we keep framing immigration as only murderers and thieves and trying our hardest to deport them all (and a bunch of legal citizens in the process).

I find it interesting that this article takes the framing of freedom, options, and a positive reality. Where’s the mention of cost? If your average worker is struggling to get by paycheck to paycheck more than 50 years ago, is it really surprising that less people are willing to take on the financial burden of kids?

And what of thinking about the future of our planet as a whole? We’re cooking the planet and many of the young adults alive today know they’ll be facing dire times in the upcoming decades. If I were younger and considering kids I would surely think twice knowing my kids would be drafted into the climate wars…

One of the most salient and annoying sludges I ever experienced was doordash support. There was an issue with my account where the credits they gave me for a failed delivery somehow broke the ability for it to process payment (the total credits exceeded the cost of any reasonable single meal). No amount of adding different cards would fix it. There is a second line of service which supports via email, but they do not keep on the same ticket, it goes back to an inbox which multiple people see and every single reply was from a different support person. In addition to changing the support person each reply, they are clearly incentivized to reply quickly, rather than thoroughly. I say this because I would get the same questions, for which my reply would be “please see the full email chain which is included, this question was asked by <representative> and the answer is in the reply”. I got stuck in an endless loop of this before I decided to just entirely give up on the app. There is no number you can call, there is no way to get a person who will read through the entire email to understand the problem and troubleshooting steps taken. It was hostile by design, and designed to make you go away.

free chewy

yea fair enough

I mean, yeah? Are things so bad this isn’t obvious?

That’s not even worth addressing or bringing up, because they don’t understand science. It’s better to just call them racist, for being racist, because that’s what is happening here… racism

From another article on the same issue:

Buried within the list of issues is a reference to a display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The display, the executive order complains, “claims that ‘sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism’ and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.”

I’m brought to mind of the concept that any movement must have a peaceful branch for the system to acknowledge and meet demands for change as well as a “violent” branch to drive the opponents to the bargaining table. And within both of those is a need to take care of the community to enable them to continue to protest for change.

Completely agreed with this concept. I’ve been a big fan of multiple voices advocating for different things. It helps others understand where the center is or where the most agreement is likely to be. You need some people asking for everything in order to push in the direction of change, otherwise the people in charge will think what they have given up is satisfactory (or perhaps even too much).

I think where these protests will succeed or fail is community coming together to take care of each other, with a safety net so many more people will be able to participate and make their voices heard.

Yes I think general principles of anarchy apply here in that the more people you can get mobilized around a single issue and the more engagement you can get the more successful it will be. Entirely peaceful protests can drive huge change, but only when the government is a peaceful one who actively wishes to represent the people. The more corrupt and out of touch they get the less they will care about the constituency and the massive prevalence of voter disenfranchisement and a system of corruption which is increasingly run on money in the United States seems to suggest that it falls more closely in that latter bucket.

Yeah, I’ll have to check the book out to understand more.