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Happy Spring. Tennis:Pickleball::Baseball:Rounders (except for the order in which they inspired each other) SourKraut posted:Don't worry, dilution is the solution to pollution! Of course we should do everything in our power to stop environmental contamination (because this poo poo adds up) but the toxicity is always in the dose. If somebody puts a vial of MegaCancer Serum in the Mississippi in St. Paul, a person in New Orleans doesn't need to worry because 90,000 gallons per second is a pretty good mixer. I sincerely doubt anybody in Philly has anything to worry about.
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Mar 27, 2023 13:14
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Overall it's probably good that they loudly announced the spill, but the limits of "people deserve full information" can bump up against the limits of "the information makes people do dumb things." Bottled water is an environmental problem in and of itself and on an individual level a waste of money. There are probably people in the city for whom buying the water was a financial strain, but they thought they had to for the health of their families. But I can't blame people for getting worked up. There is no such thing as "full information" in a case like this, because most people don't (and shouldn't have to) have a good understanding of environmental science, and getting a piece of information without the wider context is going to lead people in unproductive directions. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 13:22
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bird food bathtub posted:Kinda feels like a symptom of the wider diagnosis of "People don't trust poo poo coming from those in power anymore". A few decades of skull loving anyone south of the 1% for an extra dollar has effects like that on a society. If there was a reservoir of trust from previous actions to draw on, individual events like this could be smoothed over and dealt with appropriately by those who do have a good understanding of environmental science. We just went through something where the EPA said "there's not really any reason to think there's dioxins here," and everybody screamed "dioxins, dioxins!" until finally they tested and what do you know, there weren't any dioxins, except in the Indiana test that was basically intentionally designed to show dioxins because they stored the samples in a place teeming with dioxins. (What was up with that anyway?) People having no trust in public health and safety officials is not a good thing, even if you think it's coming from a good anti-capitalist place (which I'm frankly dubious about), and it's something that makes people retreat further towards individualism and paranoia instead of community. There should absolutely be a "reservoir of trust" established by the environmental transformation that this country has gone through over the last 60 years, because this place was a god drat dump and we've made gigantic improvements, more or less entirely because of government action. There is, like with crime issues, a tendency for people to "feel" like things are getting worse all the time when the long-term trend is massive improvement. Velocity Raptor posted:With all these chemical spills and train derailments happening lately, is this indicative of a bigger problem currently happening, or is it just frequency bias and the fact that these things are what people are paying attention to currently?
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Mar 27, 2023 14:16
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Freakazoid_ posted:Pickelball is the official state sport of Washington State and was created in Bainbridge Island as a kid's game in 1965. I do fear that my lack of coordination, which is not just "pronounced" but "outlier" will make me no good at it, to the point where I don't really enjoy it, because that's what happened with cornhole.  I did enjoy tennis as a younger, healthier man, though.
Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 15:06
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Veryslightlymad posted:I'm more distressed that so many people believe in the lie of hard work than I am in any decline of any other dubious personal value. Oh boy, there are a bunch of lies about hard work, though. A few of them: - That hard work is an unmitigated good that does not create its own personal and social ills - That hard work is always worthwhile - That hard work is a prerequisite for deserving respect - That one's financial status is a reflection of how hard they've worked - (The biggest, in the US) That hard work is consistently rewarded, or insulates you from disaster
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Mar 27, 2023 17:13
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Judgy Fucker posted:I'm just waiting for the school shooting du jour to finally happen at one of my kids' schools. Almost feels inevitable at this point. Hell the odds are possibly even "better" than the chances of ending up in a car crash where your seatbelt saves your life, and 90% of Americans make sure to buckle up every time. Rough time to have kids. :/ Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 17:38
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Ten million to one is somewhat comforting, but consider that for every death there's dozens of maimings and hundreds, maybe over a thousand kids who are scarred for life. The chances of this affecting your family, even if it's not the death of your child, start to get uncomfortably high. And when I take those stats in concert with your point that schools are actually a relatively safe place to be... yikes.
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Mar 27, 2023 17:53
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cunningham posted:Another idea on "community" is the increased mobility of Americans over the years: See, this is why I'm saying that at the right price point, you could get people to move to ecologically sound cities built from scratch on rural farmland! It wouldn't have worked 50 years ago but now that we have the internet, and the percentage of Americans who are fine with (or prefer) never seeing anybody from their family or hometown has grown, things could be different.
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Mar 27, 2023 18:16
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cr0y posted:Gonna assume it's a combination of false flag/we need to arm the teachers with howitzers/socialism would be worse 
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Mar 27, 2023 18:19
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CuddleCryptid posted:That didn't go away until basically the civil rights movement, and even then gun control laws were put into place specifically because white Americans were scared of black Americans having guns.
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Mar 27, 2023 18:46
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I appreciate the response Cygnids. The thing about testing being used to protect firms from liability sounds bad, and I'm sure it's been misused plenty over the years, but it's also true that sometimes they just aren't liable. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to take stuff like this seriously: quote:The results of CTEH’s tests in East Palestine were used at one point to deny a family’s reimbursement for hotel and relocation costs. Zsuzsa Gyenes, who lives about a mile from the derailment site, said she began to feel ill a few hours after the accident. “It felt like my brain was smacking into my skull. I got very disoriented, nauseous. And my skin started tingling,” she said. Her nine-year-old son also became sick. “He was projectile puking and shaking violently,” said Gyenes, who was especially concerned about his breathing because he has been hospitalized several times for asthma. “He was gasping for air.” Like, am I missing something or there is simply no way on God's green earth this was actually caused by the derailment? (Keep in mind that this was days before the controlled burn.) If people a mile away were projectile vomiting then the immediate fallout of the disaster would've been orders of magnitude worse than it was. I mean somebody correct me if I'm way off base on this... And honestly part of the reason I'm so skeptical is because it's pretty much unambiguously true now that an absolute deluge of exaggerated, inaccurate and falsely alarmist stuff has come out of East Palestine. That kind of material undermines people's confidence in all information about a situation. If we are working under the assumption that orgs like the EPA are always lying to us, then aren't we going to end up doing something stupid when they're telling the truth? CuddleCryptid posted:Could there be a spike in cancer rate down the road from people who were exposed to it in the immediate surroundings the first day of the crash? Hard to say. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 19:20
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If a train has gotta derail that looks like a fantastic place for it to happen. (Kelso is a ghost town/abandoned depot, not an actual place people live.) But yeah. Apparently you can forget to put a train in park?
Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 20:36
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Just to rehash from previous discussions, 3 derailments is an average day. There are about 1000 per year.
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Mar 27, 2023 20:38
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From what I'm seeing, Hale was not a transgender woman, he was a transgender man. Audrey Hale was his deadname, and he's been incorrectly (/ideologically) misidentified as a woman. I mean, rest in piss, child murderer scum, but it's disappointing to see this kind of stuff getting screwed up... Source: The Independent posted:The woman who killed six people, including three children, at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee has been identified as Audrey Elizabeth Hale.
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Mar 27, 2023 23:44
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So you know, if you were feeling a little bummed out about women getting in the mass shooting game, that's a bit of good news, I guess?????
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Mar 27, 2023 23:47
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Yeah sorry to have presented that as authoritative. Definitely prudent to wait for more information. It's already been faked once before, and, yeah, it's the UK press, so any anti-trans angle will be fervently pursued.
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Mar 28, 2023 00:28
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Barrel Cactaur posted:As far as the linked in profile thing, its really weak. “Our sources within the police department inform us that the shooter identified as a porpoise, and that the lack of a gender-specific pronoun there was in no way intended as sexism.”
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Mar 28, 2023 05:21
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I’m not sure why it wasn’t included but a zillion polls (here’s one) have shown that if military spending had been included, a majority would support increasing it. The public absolutely has paradoxical fiscal policy preferences. E: oh I was way behind, carry on
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Mar 29, 2023 16:50
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Actually he wouldn’t have to commit any regicide, technically. He could just kill the rest of his family; Charles himself would just be style points. And as long as Charles is alive William and his kids aren’t regents, so it’s cool. (This post is not an endorsement of killing any royals)
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Mar 29, 2023 23:39
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cat botherer posted:https://twitter.com/DavidJollyFL/status/1641119107696455680 e: My math was a mess I dunno. We use about 6.5 billion mt a year, which works out to about 17 million mt per day. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Mar 30, 2023 |
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Mar 30, 2023 19:25
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koolkal posted:Who are these onlookers that need people to factcheck Greene for the 50th time about whatever insane poo poo she's saying? I'm honestly not super sure that fact checking is all that helpful either, but I can certainly see an argument for at least having a response to each new lie in your pocket.
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Mar 30, 2023 20:46
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Meatball posted:The people who didn't see or hear the first 49 times. Apologies for the post about posters - in this case, myself - but I really need to learn how to be more concise.  Meatball said it much better.
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Mar 30, 2023 21:09
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Whether or not to release manifestos and other messages from spree killers is a tough call, one I'm glad I don't have to make. Avoiding a situation where killing a bunch of people becomes a great way to get your super cool ideas broadcasted nationwide is obviously a high priority. One argument for releasing them is to say, "look at the kind of people you are letting get guns." It's not like the guns had been sitting around their parents house - they bought the guns within the last few weeks, at the same time that they were writing their presumably insane manifesto. Like, ask somebody to visualize somebody sitting down at their keyboard and writing violent, paranoid nonsense and then heading over the gun store for a no-questions-asked purchase.
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Mar 30, 2023 21:17
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Skex posted:I think that is the point that the Left, Liberals and Democrats need to be hammering constantly. Braggs didn't indict Trump, the grand jury indicted Trump, a grand jury consisting of regular Americans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmhgtBA16aA Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:The New York Young Republicans just put out an absolutely bonkers statement about Trump's indictment and is vowing to organize protests outside of the courthouse next week. It seems like Trump legal proceedings in NYC will bring large protests, and considering the area's political leanings they're likely to be met with even larger counterprotests. The dynamic doesn't really put me at ease.
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Mar 31, 2023 15:31
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Young Freud posted:I'm thinking of that NYC library drag queen read from a month ago where the Proud Boys had to get police escort away from the event because almost all of NYC showed up and started bricking them. New York is a hostile environment for chuds, unless they wear a badge or venture out of lower Manhattan. Also, although ACAB applies there as much as anywhere else, I would guess that given its diversity, the NYPD may actually lean Democratic among its rank-and-file (in a very centrist, coppy way of course), and is more hostile to white supremacy. That could inhibit the ability of groups like the PB to operate there and get the favorable treatment they've come to expect from cops.
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Mar 31, 2023 16:22
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I wouldn't go so far as to predict that cops would act properly during clashes of protests, or that there won't be terrible misconduct, or that their collective bias won't lie on the side of the fascists. Still, I cannot for a second imagine that 50% of NYPD officers being non-white would not have an effect on the way it treats white supremacists. Yes, higher-ups are willing to appoint a security detail for some scumbags for a smaller event. That's leadership, and we know what side it's on. But when it's down in the street, with hundreds of young, low-ranking cops and tens of thousands of protestors in close quarters, and both sides are throwing things and knocking over barriers, I don't think either side is going to have a very good time.
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Mar 31, 2023 16:55
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Youremother posted:This is pure conjecture on my part, I am not a psychologist or even a particularly intelligent person, but it feels like to me a lot of the recent issues with mass shooters is an extension of the growing suicide problem in America. People who once may have quietly killed themselves are turning towards enormous shows of violence as a way to express their frustrations with the state of the world. If death is their end goal, what is it to them to take out as many people with them anyway? In the end this is directly caused by what is causing the suicide crisis in the first place: trivial access to guns. To me, A. Hale does not appear to have fit a typical profile of a mass shooter. They do not appear to have any history of obsession with guns, or a history of violent behavior. It seems like they were a really sick, suicidal person, but if mass shootings were not a regular occurrence, if they weren’t in the news all the time, I honestly doubt that their addled brain would have even gone to that place. Of course, gun rights advocates are happy to just say "They're evil! Can't stop criminals!" and move on. But I'm not really sure if there was anything inherently wicked about Hale. At least not moreso than thousands or millions of other people who don't mass murder children. It does look like we’ve entered a feedback loop where more mass shootings produce more mass shootings which produce more mass shootings.
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Mar 31, 2023 17:04
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:He killed six people, three of which were children. Don't do that "but was he really evil?" Pontificating bullshit. The main problem with the rhetoric of "evil" entering this discussion at all is: it's completely useless. There is no policy response to "evil".
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Mar 31, 2023 18:20
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XboxPants posted:If our problem is that we have all these "shitheads" who want sympathy and see that the easiest way to get it is through a mass shooting, then I'd argue that we can address this by making sympathy easier to find. I'll quote Elendil004 from the thread they recently made on this topic: It's interesting when people say they want to address the "mental health crisis," and what they think that means. How do we actually make the lives of mentally ill people better, and how do we make them more stable? I’m a fairly severely mentally ill person; I’ve been diagnosed with Bipolar type I and I had two extreme delusional episodes back in the aughts. And as longtime D&D readers might be aware, I sometimes have trouble regulating my emotions. (IMO, the DSM is a bunch of pseudoscience as far as classification goes, but in any case, I ain't right.) What is expected of me by society is, in my experience, to find the right meds, and a good therapist, and then just carry on living on like everybody else, with all the ups and downs and stress and pressure, all of it. As if some psychiatric treatment - vastly underinvested in by the government and insurance companies - would just eliminate all the problems my disease causes me. Right now that’s working out for me, but I’ve had varying degrees of success over the years, and it’s very likely that I am going to run into trouble again at some point in my life. And I have done much better than most people with my level of illness. I think that people "like me" should be “allowed” by the disability system to just gently caress off for a while if they feel like they need to. (Well, everybody should be able to gently caress off for a while if they want, but let’s start with the mentally ill first.) As it is now, sure, I could probably get a lawyer and get on disability full time (after many months and many appeals), but that would basically lock me into a life of poverty and government dependence when 80%+ of the time, I'm perfectly capable of doing high level work. "Disability" is a temporary state for me, not a permanent one, but that's not how SSI is set up. Now, I have some privilege, and because I got a great education and have a good job, I was actually able to use my employer’s disability insurance to take three months off last year when I was suffering from severe depression. Without that time off I would’ve ended up unemployed, in the hospital or both. That benefit should be guaranteed, not just a perk for white collar workers. I'll be sure to check out Elendil's thread too, thanks for the referral. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Mar 31, 2023 |
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Mar 31, 2023 19:26
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The "wait who the gently caress is this person???" reaction seems pretty hard-coded into the human response to this kind of thing, and I don't know that we even have the option of avoiding it - it may be more infeasible than getting rid of the guns! At least in the pre-social media days you could imagine some kind of regulation or collusion among networks, but that's probably out the window now. At least we are talking about them for a shorter period of time than we used to? Dear prospective mass shooters: I do not remember the Uvalde shooter's name or anything about him, and I'll forget yours too, I promise.
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Mar 31, 2023 20:15
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Jaxyon posted:All I can say is you are not very familiar with the NYPD and you should probably do some research, because you're super duper wrong.  I lived in New York for years and still have many friends there. I know about Diallou, I know about stop and frisk, I know what Kerik and Kelly were all about and that their philosophy still runs the department. I know that Pat Lynch will get the union to enthusiastically defend them for absolutely anything. I know about the rapes, I know about the murders of whistleblowers. I know what a loving rat bastard organization they are. (And as far as minority officers, I certainly remember the events in Memphis a few weeks ago.) I'm not saying anything more than what I'm saying, which is an "all else being equal" thing. (And, in this case, all else is equal because ACAB.)Mellow Seas posted:I wouldn't go so far as to predict that cops would act properly during clashes of protests, or that there won't be terrible misconduct, or that their collective bias won't lie on the side of the fascists. You quoted this, but did you read it? You don't have to be a cop apologist or ignorant of the NYPD to hypothesize that black and Latin cops cause the Proud Boys and other white supremacists to be less comfortable, or that those cops will be less forgiving of their violence than the white cops will be. (I saw firsthand the difference between white cops and minority cops in the NYPD - they're all bad but the white cops are noticeably worse.) I know cops are deeply brainwashed by their organization, and that even minority cops have a strong tendency to be racist in their policing, but there's still a person in there.
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Mar 31, 2023 20:56
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:The cops collective bias would absolutely be on the side of the fascists because the cops are the fascists cops:fascists::squares:rectangles I mean this seems to be a "no quarter" thing where some people don't want it spoken or acknowledged that cops ever act less than 100% evil, 100% of the time, which I totally get, so I'll just drop it. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Mar 31, 2023 |
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Mar 31, 2023 21:06
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Uncle Boogeyman posted:How does “i don’t think the fascists would side with the fascists” make any sense It sure wouldn't, maybe you need some new glasses champ e: I'll take a bit of blame for the communication error on account of the double negative Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Mar 31, 2023 |
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Mar 31, 2023 21:10
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Jaxyon posted:Yes, I read it. Still comes off as naive. Science (the research journal, not the concept) posted:In the wake of high-profile police shootings of Black Americans, it is important to know whether the race and gender of officers and civilians affect their interactions. Ba et al. overcame previous data constraints and found that Hispanic and Black officers make far fewer stops and arrests and use force less than white officers, especially against Black civilians. These differences are largest in majority-Black neighborhoods in the city of Chicago (see the Perspective by Goff). Female officers also use less force than male officers. These effects are supportive of the efficacy of increasing diversity in police forces. I have not read the actual study, if anybody wants to get into it I'd enjoy that. This is distinct from the much more well-established research that black cops exhibit negative bias against blacks, which is absolutely true. Not all bad things are equally bad, and noticing that a bad thing is less bad is not claiming that it's good. But that's a discussion we've had here a whole bunch over the years, isn't it?
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Mar 31, 2023 21:24
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I was saying diversity is relevant specifically in the context of interactions with white supremacists, although the study takes a broader scope. Really, it’s something that could maybe, to assign some arbitrary values, take a “9.5” on the awful scale and make it into a “8.2”. That’s still far, far too awful, so it’s not a solution. You can look at it as something to do that’s short-term achievable that can make some changes on the margins, like pork said - but departments have already made a lot of progress on diversification and it hasn’t “fixed” anything. I just think protests where one side is white supremacist is one of the marginal cases where it matters. Would not be shocked, however, if I’m totally wrong and they roll out the red carpet for the worst pieces of poo poo to show up.
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Apr 1, 2023 00:03
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Judgy Fucker posted:...philosophically good...
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Apr 1, 2023 15:37
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Timeless Appeal posted:Drag bans are pretty obviously unconstitutional, and I can't even imagine them surviving the current worst Supreme Court. It has nothing to do with gender identity or accepting trans people. Drag bans just clearly violate the 1st Amendment and 14th Amendment because they're just bans on a guy wearing a dress*. Taken to their natural extreme they pretty much give state governments the power to force women to not wear pants. Of course, if it actually gets to the Supreme Court, it'll still probably just end up being a 5-4 decision agains the bans. They also might just deny cert if lower courts have struck it down. But yeah the far right side of the court has no limits. It reminds me of when federal judge Reed O'Connor (who this week ruled coverage requirements for insurance are unconstitutional) struck down the entire ACA a few years ago on some flimsy reasoning. It got appealed up the chain and every judge who saw it basically laughed at what absurd legal argument it was. So then it gets to the Supreme Court and his ruling is officially overturned... 7-2. 
Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Apr 1, 2023 |
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Apr 1, 2023 20:07
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Nobody gave a poo poo about drag for yeeeaaaaaars, up until extremely recently. RuPaul was super famous in the '90s and his show has been on since 2009. It's 100% an outgrowth of trans panic. Men dressing as women is just a good harmless fun time, but people with penises being women, well, that won't do at all. Drag is just kind of getting caught in the net. (Honestly I thought if we saw hostility to drag it would come from the left, for appropriation!) I am kind of hoping that we are approaching backlash-to-the-backlash time... not enjoying the madness over the last year or so after so much progress was made.
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Apr 2, 2023 05:37
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The law was pretty transparently designed so that sheriffs (i.e. elected far right Republican officials) and their deputies could arrest pretty much any manner of gender non-conformist they wanted to. I mean, consider that the prototypical bogeyman here is "Drag Queen Story Hour." If reading a children's book, to children, while wearing a dress falls under the banner of "appealing to a prurient interest" then what the hell doesn't?
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Apr 2, 2023 06:49
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It's so incredibly hosed up because the point of things like DQSH isn’t about gender at all, really, it’s just to give kids the message that, you know, people like to express themselves in different ways, and however you want to express yourself is okay, even if it seems weird to other people, and you should respect how other people express themselves as well. The problem is that conservatives don’t want their kids - or, for that matter, anybody’s kids - getting that message. And because the motivation of just “making people be nicer to other people despite their differences” is so alien and even frightening to them, they come up with this entire alternate reality where it’s all about trying to molest kids - while, in the real world, children continue to get molested by their relatives and authority figures. Just so many layers of hosed.
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Apr 2, 2023 06:58
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