That’s our struggle currently, they both put a lot of effort and money into demonizing it from the perspective that to do so would weaken whichever “team” you’re on and only benefits the other guys. Preventing it is probably the only thing that has bipartisan support.

We have methods of getting citizen led initiatives on the ballot, typically through collecting signatures of registered voters in favor of the initiative being added to the ballot; reach a certain number, they’re validated, the initiative is put up for a vote that bypasses the legislature. The government is constantly making this process more difficult and often finds any excuse to invalidate or undercut the result. Should it make it onto the ballot and win, in theory implementing the policy should move forward. But for policies the bureaucrats and party members are staunchly opposed it becomes a fight through red tape, feet dragging, court battles, appeals, and sometimes they pretty much say “fuck you, we’re not doing it”. With our courts as corrupt as they are and the legislature having unlimited tax dollars to drag out the battle they can bleed their opponents dry until they make it to the Supreme Court who nowadays mostly rules however the regime sees fit.

In my state, one of the strictest and most severe in the nation about weed, the grassroots initiative to override them and legalize it continues to gain traction and quite possibly will pass in another election or two, so the the legislature has been busy trying to make such measures impossible and have debated rewriting our state constitution before it happens so that even if the majority overwhelmingly votes for it, it’s automatically rejected.

The fact both parties are equally concerned about the prospect give me some clue that it’s a step in breaking the stranglehold the parties have over left or right, conservative or liberal, our guy or their guy, and the the democrat’s default “you’ll vote for our pick because it’s the lesser of two evils”. Progressives are running and winning under the democrat “brand” even as their own party refuses to endorse them, so at least on that side we can see party leadership is losing control of it’s power to maintain the status quo of making sure dogma loyal Dems win primaries and seats.

I think ranked choice would destroy the old school, pro-Israel, Cuck Schumer brand democrat party with more candidates like Mamdani, AOC, and Bernie getting elected. Trumpism is not as popular as his propaganda machine makes it, he’s lost some of his most vocal supporters, and his picks are bootlicking and incompetent. Not that I support a return to Regan/Bush style republicanism, but if the choice wasn’t MAGA or Democrat, I suspect there’s no shortage of conservatives that would use ranked choice to begin to distance themselves from MAGA even if they’ll never admit they fucked up and do it for selfish reasons. Quite possibly all this speculation is too late because I don’t think this regime is going anywhere even if it got a mandate from the masses to leave.

Don’t worry. Thanks to the combination of industrial waste in our water supply and VR cybersex they’ll be pumping out Ninja Turtles and Transformers.

Fight for ranked choice voting. Both sides have gerrymandered our districts to hell in a back and forth effort to give their team an advantage with no real concern about the people within those districts, they only care about how they can use their knowledge of likely outcomes to secure a win for the party’s choice of candidate.

With ranked choice having to pick between one of two candidates, the R & D the party decided to offer is eliminated because you might end up with 3 Rs and 3 Ds, all of which represent left and right ideals to a different level. Voters will be forced to pay closer attention if they really want to have their goals/values represented and can’t just default to my team/their team. It would also make it more difficult for parties to demand candidates stick to party doctrine. It would also be a foot in the door for third party candidates who don’t want to be associated with either of the juggernauts to start making gains, probably at local and state level first.

Even if candidates decide to align with the established parties, what’s up for vote will represent a wider array of options of opinions on how the party should move forward, the people pick rather than the party masters telling us “it’s our guy or their guy, and we know you’ll vote for whoever we offer”. It is a first step in diluting the power of the two parties to control their teams because while I don’t doubt they’d still throw money behind their top pick, they wouldn’t be able to assure the final outcome is just an A or B, party Dem vs party GOP showdown. It’d also make it a lot harder for them to constantly redraw the maps every election to predict the best possible outcome.

Microplastics are stored in the balls.

That’s a good take. Putting themselves in situations where they hope they can find an excuse for violence (Rittenhouse) or parading around in Nazi uniforms and body cams hoping to provoke a response so they can play victim/self-defense are two of their most popular tactics currently and have been tolerable to the system even if it’s obvious what they did. This one wasn’t smooth enough to play the game and isn’t enough of a somebody to get a pass.

If we ever colonize an ice planet we’ll know exactly how to melt it!

Always a great day when science confirms that supervillain origin stories are now on the cutting edge of possibility.

Well then you’ve either chosen ignorance or are a liar and have run out of excuses and redirects. If you want a safe space where people won’t call you out on your put downs at the expense of vulnerable populations, I’d suggest Facebook or Twitter. They’re filled with MAGAts, Zionists, and Christofascists who turn being held accountable into a persecution complex.

It’s a lot of the aesthetic. There’s no shortage of posts from people outside the punk/metal scene that point out despite the aggressive and “bad boy” appearance they find most to be nice, friendly, decent people. That’s not to say that everyone looks like that is, we’ve got toxic people, tourists, and cosplayers who steal the look but don’t adopt the ethos, but both scenes gatekeep the right way by screening out the assholes and letting them know such behavior is unacceptable and unwelcome. Battlejackets covered in studs and patches look tuff when finished, but it’s a lot less “tuff” when you see behind the scenes and realize there’s a community discussing stitching techniques, pro-tips on how to get your studs straight, and there’s a bunch of mohawked crusties splitting a pizza and a rack while having group sewing night.

The jewelry is fake but the grift will be very real.

“Buy now! Ships soon! Shipping has been delayed! Ships in two weeks! Eat shit, we never intended on delivering in the first place; no refunds!”

You mentioned you brother is a dog guy. Something that gets overlooked when women are trying to escape domestic violence is their pets. Many women’s shelters don’t allow pets, which leaves them in the hands of the abusers, who then use that fact and the threat or actual violence towards the pet to get their human victims to drop charges, return home, or simply out of revenge. Women’s shelters across the country are starting to recognize this but there’s still a need for people/places willing to care for the animal when the available human shelters can’t accept them. Being a temporary foster might be an option.

Billions driven not to madness, but rather mildly confused. Thought he’d succeeded once but turns out that guy was huffing gasoline on the side.

If you truly have someone in your life like that but then use your knowledge of their needs to craft better insults you’re worse than a liar trying to save face. It’s bad enough when people treat disability like it’s an insult out of ignorance. You’re not ignorant, you have someone you supposedly love and know what their life is like but choose to take that path anyway. Shame on you.

👆it’s all in the comments right above this. They even came back when called out on it and did the old “I know someone special needs so it’s not bigoted” defense and are accusing others who called them on it of being abelists.

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/SRH_PREGNANCY_UNINTENDED_RATE

I was being generous. 1/3 is average in most countries where birth control, abortion, and sex ed are available. The number increases in countries where that isn’t the case and I’m guessing will increase in the US as the Christofascists are allowed to retain power.

It’s great that numbers are down, but 1/3 of humanity coming into existence when contraceptives, abortion, and a basic understanding of how babies are made are accessible seems like more than an outlier. Whether 2.2 million or 900k, these aren’t just numbers, each one born is a human being, subject to all that entails and subjecting the world to all that comes with another human existing.

I’m 100% with you that access to contraception and abortion should be human rights, but even if state limitations didn’t exist sex for fun and with full precautions would still sometimes result in the creation of a new human. 2019 was 40yrs into the US allowing access to contraceptives and abortion and still 1/3 of new people came into existence unintentionally.

That’s the core of the moral dilemma. It exists because one side says to take such action is wrong but the other side has no problem doing so, and in our hesitation the most vulnerable are abused, raped, and slaughtered. They currently don’t understand any language but violence, so at what point do we respond to them on their terms? We’ll carry the burden of what we’ve done for our lifetime because we recognize that human beings are human, even one as vile as Trump. He and his kind are irredeemable because no amount of appeals to goodness will sway them from their course and every day you spend trying to reason with them is another day their hate and power has to abuse the most vulnerable. You could lock them away and prevent that individual from causing harm, but that’s a singular solution after the fact and life has shown the threat of such consequence does nothing to stop such people from acting on their impulses in the moment. At what point do people who’d prefer not to harm other people decide that violence is violent but the only means of preventing others from committing it? When does their intolerable behavior come full circle and become a solution we find tolerable? At what point do individuals start putting themselves between the victim and the victimizer but instead of self sacrificing in an effort to slow them down, meets violence with violence and ends the threat?

I guess the point of becoming like them is that we do so not for our personal satisfaction or gain, as they do, but to try and eliminate the threat to those who can’t defend themselves presently and give those who will come after us a better foundation upon which to build their version of society. My grandfather fought Nazis in WWII, and while he never shared all the details I know at some point he was forced to kill indoctrinated kids with guns because if he didn’t he and his would be killed and the regime they were seeking to topple would continue doing what they were doing. It’s a shit reality and I know he carried the burden of what he had to do for the rest of his life, but he survived, they didn’t, he came home and spent the remainder of his years being a decent human being, they forfeited their chance at that because they fought for a cruel version of society. I don’t want to have to embrace the kill or be killed mentality, but at what point do we accept it’s come to that stand our ground on the terms they’ve set?

Fuck off with the “I know someone so my comment isn’t bigoted” bullshit. That’s the oldest save face in the book, and it’s even more pathetic when you’re anonymously online because it’s unverifiable. But by all means, explain how your comment wasn’t an attempt to take a jab at my intellect by implying I was a member of vulnerable minority. Seriously though, don’t reply with whatever you think will “win”. There’s zero doubt that you wrote that as an insult in this conversation, we’re clearly bickering and you didn’t suddenly make a U-Turn and use your supposed loved one’s needs as genuine concern, you used it to undercut by implying my response is unintelligent and needs someone smarter to write it for me. You’re smart enough to know “retard” is verboten but savvy enough with words to make the same implication.