I work for a charter school, which means I have no sick leave. I also tutor, and don’t get paid if I don’t tutor. I’ve been working usually 8 am to 9 pm for about the past three months.

I also live in the only state that’s counties are 100% red. Part of the reason that I work so much is that there are no legal protections for my employment, housing, or even just discrimination in divorce court ❤️ I’m hopelessly in debt and genuinely terrified for my life, because I do a lot of work with children in rural areas and a cop could very easily rape and murder a transgender man with no consequences out there.

I do deeply care about what is happening in Palestine and Ukraine; my vote in a state which doesn’t recognize me as a human being doesn’t usually matter anyway.

Fun story - in high school, I did a lot of volunteering for a city council run in my city. The person running was a lesbian - she wasn’t out publicly - but it was pretty important to me after a kid at my high school killed himself after a horrific city council meeting over a pride month proclamation. We worked our asses off, the opponent barely campaigned and was fucking unhinged.

The day before the election, he sent out an illegal flyer. It said something like “sex, lies, and we wish we had a videotape!” They outed her the day before, and she lost.

I’ve knocked a lot of doors in my life. I can tell you confidently that my vote will never matter in Oklahoma, just like my personhood doesn’t. I’m sorry I didn’t perform my civic duty, but I’m working on some of those earlier levels of Maslow’s needs right now.

Uneducated people in rural areas struggle very much with understanding their experiences of others, and have very strange ideas about how the world works. I told my grandmother I wanted to move to Chicago - she’s convinced I’m going to get gang murdered. (She would be horrified if I told her about wandering around LA on foot)

The idea that there are options other than cisgender heterosexual people is threatening to their understanding of their world. Many have not thought about their gender or sexuality; it’s assumed that you’ll get married to the opposite sex, get gender appropriate jobs, have kids, and go to church on Sunday. That’s what life is in Anadarko or Siloam Springs. Many also struggle with unaddressed trauma from the opioid/fent crisis, or military service - so they think the appropriate response to anguish about your body should just be to just cope with it.

Many of these men are secretly bisexual. Many, many, many heterosexually married men seek out sexual encounters with gay men on the side. They would never want to be in a relationship with a man or someone they perceived as a strange, mentally defective man - for many of them that would also assault their understandings of a relationship as more of a property thing. They feel guilty about porn usage, especially the Christian ones, but externalize it as hatred.

The woman are miserable and are committed to making everyone else miserable as well. You gain power in those communities by policing others, especially young women. They are threatened by the idea that they weren’t locked into compulsive heterosexuality and performative femininity. There was a possibility that they could have graduated college, or not had children.

They get the program though. They’re proper Puritans. If life is suffering then the only joy to be had is in watching other people. And what better target than those who are defying our most basic sociological roles? These are the same people who host gender reveal parties - it matters to them. So it must matter to everyone else.

That’s my guess as a trans man at least, obviously I’m biased.

It isn’t something I had ever heard until I attended a lecture by the National Security Decision Making Game folks - they are intense on history. (And I genuinely have a bachelors degree in history - with an American focus)

Essentially, the French and Indian war fucking sucked for the Crown and Kingdom. It was mega expensive and difficult and ya know, the Indians live there. Who knows how many of them there are, if we keep pissing them off it’s going to keep costing us money. Soldiers cost money. Sending soldiers across the ocean costs a lot of money.

The French had a lot more native allies. The Americans were constantly being mega dicks, the French weren’t awesome but they were relatively chill.

Anyway, they finally win this expensive ass war and get some land. Indians live on it. Americans want land now - the Crown wants to not start another war and would in fact like a nice buffer state. At the very least, it’s a good idea to take some time to lick some wounds and figure out what We want to do. (I suspect if George could have foreseen the French Revolution, maybe they would be more agrees - something to try if you play NSDM lol)

The Americans are not happy. And they keep pushing into native lands, making illegal and shady treaties, all the while having a fucking meltdown about having to pay taxes for all these fucking soldiers that are protecting them when people get mad about having their land stolen. The Crown is having to say things like “hey no you can’t buy Kentucky from like one guy.”

It’s one thing to be pissed off about paying taxes - it’s another to have the promise of land. In a way, we were built similarly to Rome.

Exactly. The social situation of the men’s bathroom is such that anyone trying to confront someone about using a stall would automatically make them the weird one. I used to be self conscious that someone would notice difference in splashing sound, but realized that was stupid.

It’s funny, I remember in middle and high school going to the bathroom with groups of friends. It would be totally normal to be chatting, pass a pad or tampon under the stall. Unimaginable in a men’s restroom.

You don’t even have to be in a stable situation to be a Big Brother/Sister at your local Boys and Girls club or a court advocate/CASA for a child. Volunteer at a school district. Children recognize how fucked everything is, and on the whole they are suffering. We need kind and loving adults to show up for them - to teach them art and read them stories to show them the parts of living that can hopefully make it worth it.

Talked to a social worker - kids in DHS care sleep in homeless shelters, hospitals, DHS offices. Teen group homes are inherently damaging to them; I’ve never seen a good one.

Foster teens. Short term commitment. They will have severe trauma and can be hard to deal with, but you would be amazed at how they respond if you can genuinely provide love. Love and Logic is fucking magic.

If you can’t foster, you can be a child advocate. Many states have CASA programs. Visit the kid once a month, let them know someone cares, and tell the court what you think is best for them. Even just something like a phone call “hey, kid left something behind at the group home - any way we could get that moved?”

Or even just someone to protect them from the group home. A dozen seriously traumatized kids, with staff paid less than $15/hr on a week of training. A place that provides opportunities for people to be around children, who are already isolated and have limited access to supportive adults… and financial incentives to cover anything up.

I don’t think there’s much hope for the future, but we can focus on the now and helping the children who are already here.

I’m a stealth trans man and use a stall. No one gives a shit. I’ve had “I have a medical condition and need a stall” prepped for years, but never has anyone even gave me a passing glance. It’s annoying to wait when I’m about to piss myself and someone is camping in the lone stall, but the only real rule of the men’s bathroom is “don’t acknowledge anyone’s presence.”

Honestly, give me a stable 9-5 office job with a living wage and I’d be happy. “The grind” doesn’t sound so bad if I can have the money for a bed and food.

For sure, this wasn’t out of benevolence. The Brits mostly wanted to avoid more war. Remember why those all those taxes were raised? Sending soldiers over to fight Frenchmen and Indians is expensive. If those backwards colonists keep fucking with them, the Indians are going to cooperate more with the French.

It’s hilarious how everyone knows the Tea Party and all of the taxes, when the real reason the American revolution happened was that England wasn’t going to let us drive Native Americans out

What about what I wrote made that come across as a choice? I haven’t had time to clean the puke that’s been festering in my bathroom for weeks. I don’t have time to do the dishes. I work and work and work, and it is killing me. I would have loved to have had the time to stand in line and vote, if just for the break.

I didn’t vote because the lack of domestic violence protections in my state mean that I have been working 7 am - 9 pm every day for the past two weeks. I live in Oklahoma, so voting is pissing in the ocean. There’s a good chance I’ll be murdered or arrested for existing in the next year!

The failed actor to right wing pipeline is definitely a phenomenon, see Crowder and Shapiro. It’s almost a welfare program for wealthy fail-sons.

Textile weavers still exist, they just get paid even less and live in third world countries. “AI” is the same - a lot of the training is done by underpaid folks living in Kenya and Tanzania. They have to label the gore and CP so that the “AI” won’t use it. Post traumatic stress disorder is pretty common…

This isn’t the first time there has been a ton of hype surrounding “AI” - folks back in the 60s were having conversations with “Eliza.” IIRC there were also a similar boom in the early 90s.

“AI” has been entirely misrepresented to investors and the public at large. The computing resources needed to produce the impressive results we saw a few months ago are not sustainable long term, and will not produce profit. We can already see ChatGPT being tuned down and giving worse results.

Like crypto/NFT/previous hypes, it’s also being shoved into places it doesn’t belong. The education system is collapsing, why not have kids learn from “AI” teachers? Facebook/every other social platform refuses to pay for effective content moderation - just get an “AI” to do it. It’s not effective at all, but it works enough for the c-suite who believe the hype.

“AI” has also essentially become a digital oil spill - the internet has always been lousy with garbage but “AI” makes it easy to pump out thousands of shitty comments to promote whatever agenda you’d like. You can already see this on Facebook - threads of hundreds of boomers admiring imaginary statues of Jesus or whatever.

Autocratic and repressive. Syngman Rhee wasn’t really an “organic” leader either - essentially picked by the US because he spoke decent English. Imprisoned commies, eventually forced to resign (read: evacuated by the US government) after college kid protestors were murdered by police. South Korea was under autocratic military regimes for most of the second half of the 20th century.

Syngman Rhee’s political philosophy also had an ethnostate aspect to it - a sense of Korean superiority.

I’m not an expert in Korean history, but an autocratic, militaristic government which cracks down hard on communism and believes in a “master race” is getting into “if it quacks like a duck” territory. There are as many definitions of fascism as there are scholars of fascism, but I think it fits a traditional Eco/Griffin mold.

I like GEMDAS personally. “Group” is best, it includes parenthesis and brackets, as well as things under radicals. I find that PEMDAS/BEMDAS causes problems later in math.

I remember when my middle school replaced the soda machines with “juice.” Because Minute Maid is somehow healthier than a coke.

Depends on where you live. Not legal in the UK for example. In the US it can even be broken down at the state level, although there’s lots of debate on whether states are able to enforce their laws. “Obscene” speech is not protected under free speech, the argument would be whether or not the naked drawings had artistic merit or not.

I’m not a lawyer, but I do know that people in the US have gone to prison for possessing naked images of fictional children and it’s on the books as illegal in many other countries.

Not medieval, Confucius was writing in 500 BCE. I’m not staning Confucius, but he was far harsher on rulers than he was peasants. Rulers are supposed to act like rulers, if they want their people to follow. There are more restrictions on them - a bad ruler (not just bad as in ineffective or cruel, but sexual deviance or drunkeness) can cause droughts or other disasters.