Prion disease, like generic mutations, really boggles my sense of self. There’s no foreign invader battling your own parts for survival. It’s just the substrate that life gets built upon getting fucked up. It highlights the literal truth in the metaphor that we are biological machines.

Maybe he is. They should have still brought charges against him.

I’m on the fence on this one. How old are they?

On the visit home over Christmas, the idea crossed my mind of retiring there, and I got fairly homesick. I miss the arid, rugged climate. I hate the cold. Being close to family would be nice, and Texas could use more hard-headed, angry liberals. But it’s too dangerous until my uterus is old and broken down and while I’m responsible for other people with functional or soon-to-be-functional uterii. Texas also has water shortage on the near-term horizon from shitty resource management, so it’s best to wait and see where that goes.

But my point is, everyone wants to go home to die, right?

It doesn’t even matter what people on the Internet think of you. Wake up from your defensiveness. America is already at the point now where we are going to have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Texas has long been a lost cause.

Fuck this opinion. Every last member of my family is in Texas. From Austin to Ft. Worth. All the women are liberal and all the men are gun toting MAGAs. Maybe one brother is just a conspiracy-minded libertarian, but the rest are MAGAs. I still love them and visit them, but I don’t want them having any legal jurisdiction over me or my kids.

After they have witnesses of him telling her he didn’t care if she got raped!

Texas, I swear to God. I am from there, all of my family is there. My daughters adore their cousins and beg to move there. Absolutely not.

My MAGA Dad raised his hand like he was going to hit me at Christmas during a political discussion. I was shocked. He is old and feeble, so I told him I would hit him back.

While I agree that Reddit is awash in (multiple) state propaganda, and that posting violent rhetoric, or even sympathy for it, there is likely to put you on a list (or multiple), I don’t think Reddit users really trust it’s that safe. In the last year and a half, since Luigi, there has been huge amounts of bitterness over the censorship of content and strict banning policies. People have discussed, and followed through on, leaving in droves. Huge amounts of old content are no longer available because people scrubbed their post history on the way out.

If the current discourse doesn’t reflect that, I would suggest it’s because :

1. the real people still there remain to discuss uncontroversial niche topics
2. political discussion there is largely driven by bots and paid actors now

Not entirely obvious, but this is what the substack referenced: https://interestingengineering.com/health/stem-cell-therapy-diabetes-china

I know what he’s saying. I’m pointing out what he doesn’t realize he’s saying. Because he’s an idiot.

Same. But also, his reasoning here is basically:

"Having experience with all of the consequences of a given situation does not qualify you to form an opinion on it "

First, I agree with you. But, even if Congress opposes him accepting it, they can’t enforce it. Pretty sure Congress wrote into law that we were supposed to have the Epstein files a month ago.

You’re asking for non-Americans to observe nuance that isn’t relevant to them.

As Americans who despise Trump and have spoken and voted again him for more than a decade now, we will still be collateral damage if war broke out and they dropped bombs on American cities. Some amount of our economic activity still benefits the billionaire donors keeping MAGA in power, and any economic sanctions or boycotts they might impose to hurt MAGA will still hurt us. If we get into a shooting war with them, they will not stop to check the voting history of the soldiers they encounter. That’s how conflicts go.

They have no jurisdiction over you to treat you as an individual, or as anything other than an American citizen. And if they cared too much about hurting you, they couldn’t do what was necessary to opposed MAGA anyway.

I don’t think the user you responded to was defending ICE. They were bitterly pointing out how the court system is rigged and how there is no oversight to enforce the law on the executive branch.

Just goes to show how much people ranting on the Internet know what they’re talking about…

My guess is they are still gun shy from the defund the police movement after George Floyd.

Sigh. I came to Lemmy thinking it was small enough to be populated with real people who would have real policy discussions. But I see now that I’ve just been taken in by a troll. Kudos to you. You seem like a real person and not a bot, so I hope you enjoy the descent into chaos you have spurned.

It is a fucking lie. Women historically worked FOR MONEY, and you still deny them credit for it to fit your agenda.

5+ years of government paid income to every single household with children is not the standard anywhere. Some European governments give ONE year. You are misrepresenting facts again. And yes, I could get behind some kind of additional welfare for children in poverty, but I don’t think it needs to be universal. My children don’t need welfare checks. Nor do any of my neighbors’ children. Nor do I really believe that yours do; your irresponsibility in representing other numbers makes me doubt the veracity of your own income claims.

The $100k family, my family members, who choose to live their ideology about a woman’s role in the family and outsource the consequences of that decision to the rest of their family/ our family without the family’s consent do excite my frustration, yes. Their repeated poor decisions about money and then expectation that they will be relieved of the consequences of those decision is extremely frustrating. But they are inherently not other. They are blood relations and part of me. Your personal judgments about me continue to be wildly off base.

Are you now going to demonize us for paying for childcare? You have no idea what we paid. We organized a harassment campaign at the first corporate daycare we went to, to get the corporation to pay the staff more and fund their certifications so they would quit leaving. Then we took our business to a non profit daycare, that charged nothing to poor families, and we paid full price, but left because they barely had any kids there. Then we went to a local chain that pays their staff some of the best rates in region.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the rest of the world is getting tired of funding the US’s mountain of debt. And you can tax me more, that’s fine. And you can certainly close all the loopholes for the assholes at the top. But when the rest of the world dumps the dollar, we won’t be able to just make up money and inflate our problems away. We’ll only be able to provide services we can actually pay for. And the amount of money you’re asking for is huge. If you say 11 million people stay home and that is a quarter of families, then your asking for income for 44 million more people for at least 5 years each. What kind of income are you looking for? $30k/yr/ person? That’s $1.3 trillion per year. And if you scoff and say that’s not what you said, it’s because you conveniently left out any specifics to your demand, so I tried to sketch out what you might mean.

If you think expecting society to help out with their future citizens as demanding privileges then there is little hope for you.

I literally said there should be more subsidized daycare options. You are asking for tax dollars? Forced corporate fees? to cover the cost of half of every family’s income for 4-5 years? I said THAT is privileged. And if that’s not your ask, then you should be explicit about exactly what it is you’re proposing.

I never asserted that the majority of women used to not work.

Also you:

Going back to when one income could support a family and almost everyone had a parent that was at home that they could rely on is not a stupid lie.

If “almost everyone” isn’t the same as “the majority”, then we’re done here.

You cannot use her words to understand the struggles of the poor because she didn’t experience that

This is a logical fallacy. Do you disbelieve historians because they didn’t live in the time period they speak of?

I don’t know what “othering” people is… I assume it’s similar to dehumanizing them? At no point did I do that. And I’m tired of your word soup of all the progressive buzzwords. Someone who made enough money for his wife to comfortably stop working for 5+ years has no right to lecture anyone about class solidarity. You are better off than most and still feeling sorry for yourself about the struggles of parenting and how difficult the US is. It IS difficult for many many Americans, but that ain’t you. You are closer to me than those struggling. If you were going to suggest some kind of welfare payment to people with children below a certain income, I could get on board with that. The majority of the US’s children live in poverty; we should absolutely be addressing that. But you only care about your own problems. A hand up to the already privileged, just like the push for government to wave ALL student loan repayment.

Again with the laziness. As much as demanding privilege is lazy, I guess it’s applicable? But they’re not really the same vice. Minding young children and the household is very laborious, so I don’t think staying home with young children is lazy. But I do think it’s easier to dedicate the labor of a whole parent to them vs both people bringing in income and minding them.

I am denying your assertion that the majority of women used to not work, that that is the norm for history. And because I am denying that it was ever the case, I am skeptical that it is feasible in the future.

Personally, we are fairly privileged. We are both well-compensated engineers, so we paid for private daycare. And when the daycares closed for Covid, we rotated watching the children with a couple other families from daycare so that all parents could get all their hours in.

Society, particularly in the US, is guilty of not giving enough benefits and pay to take care of a family.

Largely agree with your assessment of the problem, it’s just your assessment of the solution I disagree with… Which I thought I implied earlier. Societally there should be more options for subsidized child care, there should be modifications to the tax code and corporate regulations to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth, and also we should give children more freedom. As a society we expect parents to keep a close eye on children at all times, and it is oppressive to both parents and children and stifles their development: both their confidence and their decision making abilities.

I never said women should have to stay at home, please GTFO with that nonsense.

Indeed you never said that. And you seemed to think, however misguidedly, that the confinment of one parent to the home would be born just as equally by men. But history, and the current political climate, clearly show that one end of the political spectrum seeks to disempower women, and here you are making half of their argument for them.

Beauvoir was a misogynistic classist at heart.

What I’ve read so far is exactly the opposite of that, but I’m no expert on her.

No, my point is that your demand that everyone be able to do it is entitled and unrealistic. And I think your insistence that almost everyone has always done it does a huge disservice to the majority of women who always had to bring in income.

‘Parasitic women’ is a term de Beauvoir made up to refer to the elite women who did not advocate for their own sex and instead adhered to classist, sexist ideals that maintained their husband’s - and by extension their own - privilege. I just referenced it so you could go look it up.

I’m not interested in your defensiveness. I never used the word lazy. Do I think it’s more important to give your children the stability of a home and consistent heating than to be able to keep them isolated in religious indoctrination (the family existing on $100k)? Yes, yes I do. As a working woman, do I resent the implication that I ought to personally be more devoted to my children while also being tapped for money to support someone else’s ideology? Yes, yes I do. As a working woman, do I want to be shoved back into economic obscurity so that it is easier for my human rights to be trampled upon? What the fuck do you think?