explicitly types out several different slurs for a minority group

Insists it’s because Americans are racist

Yeeeeeaaaaahh literally none of those slurs are okay to use

But, if humanity stays below replacement rate, humanity goes extinct.

I don’t think this is a real risk. And if it were, it certainly won’t be anytime soon. Fewer people means fewer mouths to feed, fewer homes to build/maintain and less consumption in general, which given how the planet is struggling to continue balance with current human resource consumption, a gradual decline in human population would probably be beneficial in the long run.

To actually threaten humanity’s continued existence the number of humans would need to dwindle so low that the societial and the medical infrastructure that permits/causes the declining birth rates would completely collapse and people would naturally start having more kids again in order to keep up with the work on the farms that most people would need to work on at that scale of society

My wife has one branch of her family where 4 generations occured in a 60 year period, the 5 generation photos are pretty neat, and also I’m really happy for the last generation which broke the cycle.

I knew someone who was by her own description baby-crazy as a teen and basically seeked out someone to knock her up. Hormones are wild things sometimes. Her child did not repeat the cycle fortunately

The difference is that fascists crumple under ridicule. It’s an idealogy entirely dependant on maintaining the appearance of incredible power (strategic, political and physical) and anything that makes them look lame or maybe a bit kooky completely subverts the entire premise.

Therefore, setting aside normal rules of “no kink shaming” for example to redicule fascists hurts the fascists far more than it hurts those with actually extreme/subversive kinks. Fascists have no defense against redicule, meanwhile someone mocked for simply engaging in kink with other consenting adults can simply say “I like what I like and everyone involved consented so what’s it to you?”

For a real world example, the Ku Klux Klan was heavily set back about a century ago when a journalist wrote an expose about how goofy their super-secret ceremonies are that they do behind closed doors, and suddenly people stopped seeing them as scary masked mobs but instead started seeing them as sad angry men who engage in silly dress up games with other sad angry men.

I love how generic his kinks are, but to a right-winger they’re absolutely the most subversive extreme kinks imaginable

I only have more questions now than before seeing this image…

My local library system went fine-free around 2020, reintroduced some fines around 2023ish and now they’re somewhere between fine-free and not? I’m honestly confused and also I so rarely incur fines that I’ve not been able to fully figure out the current fine structure

Oh I see what you’re saying! Does make me wonder how long until it cycles around again (assuming vehicle opinions do cycle around over time like fashion/design language preferences tend to)

Like I said, I got the crossover before I understood what actually gets you safely across unplowed roads and unpaved farm driveways in the winter, but I at least knew just enough that I went for a crossover and not some disgusting oversized SUV or truck like plenty of other folks around me go for.

Now that it’s been totaled (cosmetically) by hail damage it’s simply not fiscally reasonable to replace it until it’s entirely worn out so that’s just a past decision that I’m going to have to live with for the next decade or so

Part of this is because for someone in the process of obtaining citizenship in the US it’s actually much easier to legally start a business than it is to legally get a job. And with the decade or so that it can take to become a fully naturalized citizen in the US, folks have to make ends meet somehow so they’ll naturally start a business since that’s the one way they can legally make money until they get a work permit.

This is part of why there’s such a thriving restaurant scene for foreign foods across the entire US, a family will come and pool their time and money to open a small restaurant, and that will be how they survive until everyone gets work permits and eventually naturalized. There’s even a sub-industry of immigrants teaching other immigrants how to start a successful restaurant and what recipes work well for the American pallete. This is where some of the staples of Americanized Mexican and Chinese menus come from for example.

Those mansions and bunkers and yachts and private jets all require a surprising amount of working class labor to maintain. Often dozens of employees. The distribution center in the OP only had 8 employees at the time of the fire, so it would be comparably safer!

The factory window tint that’s now standard is also incredible for making getting into a parked car on a hot day so much more bearable

I recently inherited an older Toyota Sienna and it’s made me realize the current crop of 3 row SUVs and gigantic trucks is mostly sold to people who would absolutely love a minivan but just don’t know it.

• I’ve got more cargo space than any truck I pass on the road made in this century
• I can fit my entire family plus drag along multiple friends and still have space for everyone’s bags
• I can stand and walk through the interior if desired, even climbing to the far back from the front seat
• the sliding doors mean you can get in and out of the vehicle from any parking spot without a door in the way
• it’s got a turn radius so short that I can do a full U-turn without reversing on any road or parking lot
• the high seat+low nose means I can nussle up within inches of a vehicle in front of me and still see the bumper
• the engine is has enough power to be comparable to some small locomotives.

I would never have bought a minivan on account of the gas milage (~20mpg just ain’t great, and filling up the 25 gallon tank every week hurts the pocket book way more than my crossover that I got before I knew snow tires were a thing) but holy crap having this much space for people/stuff is incredible and I thoroughly enjoy playing bus/truck with it for all of my friends and family. For anyone who’s considered a truck/3-row SUV to be a requirement, they need to do themselves a favor and try out a minivan

This is part of why I was hoping the conflict in Iran would keep ballooning gas prices, we got so many small cars and creative approaches to save gas out of the 1970s oil crisis, and a new oil crisis could absolutely do the same thing again, except now a lot of that technology that companies were experimenting with in the 70s is far more viable, so just that small push of a couple of years of oil crisis (honestly just needs to be >$4/gallon from what I’ve seen) could easily push oversized vehicles off a cliff and usher in the bike revolution that New York, London and Paris have been experiencing across the entire US

There’s also awesome new streetlights which will fade off when there’s no traffic and fade back on when a car comes through, adjusting the brightness depending on the quantity of tradfic

The action of automating the Selective Service Registration honestly seems on its surface like a logical choice to reduce paperwork. It’s been a hot minute since I filled out mine but I remember the information being extremely minimal and already basically all prefilled since I received the card in the mail.

Now, a politician like Trump instituting this change makes me extremely skeptical, but hopefully the US military still remembers why it’s 100% volunteer and the soldiers revolts they had deal with the last time they held a draft for a shitty war that the United States had no business starting/inserting itself into.

I think the point they’re trying to make is that racism is a state of mind, and opening oneself up to being racist against a non-human or imaginary thing can open the floodgates to more “real” forms of racism against fellow humans.

Basically the difference between anthropomorphizing bots while one expresses their dislike for interacting with them vs. expressing one’s dislike of being forced to interact with a machine that is made to feel like interacting with a person but isn’t.

I’m not sure how I feel about this sentiment I’ve described, but it’s one I’m open to arguments on since as a white dude I come into it with a mountain of privilege that likely blinds my view of things

I only got as far through the books as I did because I was commuting 2 hours a day and needed something to occupy my brain during the 100 miles of driving I was doing each day. Didn’t finish the third book because that job I was commuting to ended up making up a reason to fire me when I was about a week away from finishing it, and I just didn’t feel like slogging through the remaining 8 hours on my own time

Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Wight are honestly both really memorable parts of the book. Tom Bombadil happened to just be an ancient spirit that had aligned values with the hobbits and clearly used a form of magick heavily infused with music. He showed up just as the peril was becoming more than the hobbits could handle at that stage and happened to be the one force strong enough to protect them as they had to quickly learn the scale and scope of the peril they faced.

I’m disappointed he was cut from the films, but I get why they did cut him from the already 3+ hour long film

Driving under the influence is not cool in any situation though