this is a hate crime and it's not being charged as such because our government favors violent christian fundamentalist terrorists
Hannah Arendt prize for political thought
Genocide Expert Award Rescinded After Genocide Expert Compares Genocide To Genocide
Once again: if paying for it isn't owning it, then not paying for it isn't stealing it.
The steam deck is how you prevent piracy. If you look at the huge influx of streaming services, you'll see an example of how you encourage piracy. I recently dropped three of my services in favor of one pirate site that has almost everything. They even offer a subscription tier and I've considered it. I'm willing to pay for good content. What I'm not willing to do is pay dozens of middlemen across multiple companies to rip off the people who actually make my favorite shows and then memory hole the shows a few months after they premiere.
Fun fact about this blatantly criminal police department, they currently have an officer on trial for murder because he shot a suspect 7 times while that suspect was HANDCUFFED AND IN THE FUCKING POLICE CAR
This incident happened four years ago, and taxpayers who did nothing wrong have already settled with the victim's family for millions. The judge presiding over the case has openly accused the prosecution of sandbagging the case for four years and rejected a plea deal the prosecution offered the officer because the victim's family protested that it was too lenient. This man shot and killed a cooperative, restrained suspect and the prosecution is doing everything they can to let him off the hook, down to and including just not having a trial because they think he'll be convicted. This is what we mean when we say ACAB, that the police engage in blatant, open criminality up to and including murder and then an entire system does everything it can to avoid holding them responsible. Same story with Jackie Johnson, the DA who initially failed to charge the men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery. She's been charged with misconduct as well, but it's been years and she's not even been arraigned. She violated the law and her oath of office in order to cover up a lynching because one of the murderers is an ex-cop and friend of hers, and she's being protected from the consequences of enabling a lynch mob by a system that knows that the cops are there to use violence to protect aristocrats from the underclass. Same with Freddie Gray. The neighboring police department in Baltimore arrested him for having a knife even though that isn't illegal, loaded him into a van, then the official story is "no one knows what happened and no one did anything wrong but he died of a broken neck".
The police are a street gang. They get to use violence any time they want to without responsibility, and in exchange for that they allow the wealthy to occasionally funnel that violence toward inconvenient people. There is no law, only favor and violence.
If you're wondering how fun this could get, here's an article from the National Post arguing that poverty should be a qualifier for assisted suicide
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-medical-aid-in-dying
Here's another where a woman with sensitivities to various chemical smells chose to die because she couldn't find an apartment that was affordable and didn't reek of noxious chemicals
The people who are worried about this aren't worried about people who genuinely want to die committing suicide. It was always nearly impossible to stop them anyway, and there's no way to change that. What we're worried about is people being pushed toward MAID because they've been systemically denied things they need to live that are absolutely available. We're worried about mentally ill people being told "do the right thing, don't be a burden" when they want to live. We're worried about suicide becoming the answer to problems that are caused by social and legislative conditions. We're worried about becoming the kind of society where, rather than help one another, it's expected that anyone who needs help just off themselves.
This is all coming from someone who tried twice and will be eternally grateful that I managed to fuck it up both times.
I don't want to be controversial here, but if someone is forcibly destroying the internal organs of someone else without their knowledge or consent then maybe we should, and again I don't wanna overstep my bounds on this nuanced and multifaceted issue here but my instinct is that maybe we should, I don't know, maybe make them stop doing that. If that makes me a "no secretly wrecking someone else's innards" extremist then I guess I'll have to live with that.
complicate attacks on Biden's age
No they really don't. They'll talk about Biden's "obvious mental decline" and they'll just not talk at all about Mitch's very public 30 second Journeys Beyond the Stars. They'll absolutely say Biden is too old but that Trump, who is only 3 years younger, isn't. The right is absolutely capable of that level of doublethink. Stop assuming anything matters to them other than getting power they can use to hurt people. They don't care about policy. They don't care about seeming like hypocrites. They've been whipped into a paranoid frenzy and they'll do anything they need to do in order to hurt the people they're afraid of. Start looking at their behavior through that lens and see if it doesn't start to make a lot of sense to you.
California gets trotted out in the conservative media sphere as "liberalism run wild", a place where being what they consider to be a "real American" is illegal but crime is subsidized by the state, where everything is expensive and dangerous, and homeless people have gay sex in the street. There's an entire industry focused on filtering for the most extremely awful news they can find in a state of almost 40 million people, packaging that news as though it's the typical experience everyone there goes through, and then blasting that news into the brains of Americans 24/7. That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.
lower unemployment
Doesn't matter, I can only have two, maybe three jobs at once so any more than that is irrelevant to me
higher growth
I get the same $8/hr whether the GDP goes up, stays the same or goes down. You can't leave workers out of the distribution of wealth and then pretend that more wealth is good for workers
holy shit fuck you you lying fuck