It's pretty okay. Lots of engagement, also there's something of a 'block early and often' culture that seems to have a way of really reducing the drama and nonsense
Yeah I still can't get over how a couple of days later his right ear didn't have a mark on it. At his age, even with the best of plastic surgery, he wouldn't have clean skin on an ear for at least a week if he'd actually had a bullet pass through any part of it. I don't believe things he has to say about his health- he has a pretty solid track record when it comes to not telling the truth about his height, weight, bone spurs, being a stable genius, etc
Ehhhhhhh. 😒
For the 'but sport has to be fair' people, stop. Sport will never be fair, there are always people with better genetics, and with better access to training and equipment and the time to devote to developing their potential, bla bla bla.
The people trying to lawyer about who is or isn't a woman here aren't here to make sport fair, they're using the fact you'd like sport to be fair as a way to get you to support their demand to be able to reduce sport into a thing they can pick winners with by disqualifying people on arbitrary standards they get to invent.
I mean, the people that have been insisting 'you're a woman if you were born with those parts' are now insisting 'you're not a woman if I feel like you're not a woman'. Your takeaway here is that the pretexts will continue to change in order to get or keep your support, the underlying thrust is they want to discriminate against people that don't fit in to their ideas of what being a woman should mean.
It's ABOUT TIME
Srsly, watching grocery chains consolidate and regional prices for staples like butter and cheese go up by 50% in a matter of months got me pretty mad- I mean, on the one hand those things didn't become 50% more attractive or more expensive to make, they just didn't have to compete on price. It was really the fact that they could do it and get away with it that hurt the most.
Yes, that was the wording then, it was the qualification to vote (male, citizen, over 21). Since the adoption of the 19th Amendment (which happened after, and supercedes this text) that standard has included women and today you just need to be a citizen and over 18. The proportionality of loss of EC votes and congressional seating (these are apportioned on the same basis, after all) was about states like South Carolina and Mississippi, whose population of enslaved people exceeded that of white citizens- if these states didn't respect the new citizenship and voting rights of most of their citizens, they'd lose more than half of their federal representation, and that in turn would cost them and their confederates influence in the resulting federal government.
My prior comment, made in the context of a Kansas court declaring that voting is not a right according to the Kansas constitution, was intended to point out that if nobody has that right in Kansas, that may be well and fine in Kansas politics, but if Kansas conducts itself in that way it will cost them influence federally, and that sets the stage for another round of Voting Rights Acts that can be used to guarantee voting rights federally even if states don't want to do it themselves.
The US Constitution, on the other hand, does not oblige the federal government to recognize the electoral votes or congressional delegates of a state that does not enfranchise its citizens and submit to their will in the form of their votes.
The Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution requires that state governments take the form of a republic, versus that of a theocracy or monarchy or dictatorship. (All republics involve some degree of democracy). Section 2 of the 14th Amendment says that if states deny citizens the right to vote, those states shall lose their representation at the federal level- that is, if you're not a democracy that submits to the will of its voters, you can do that but in the process your electoral college votes and ability to send congressmen to DC goes away- and your state will lose its ability to influence federal law and to elect federal officials.
Of course, the current SCOTUS is likely to find some way to assert that anything giving the GOP political advantage must be what the framers would have wanted no matter how many ways they told us unambiguously they fucking wanted government derived from the consent of the governed.
For your consideration, here is the text of section 2 of the 14th amendment:
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
A literal reading of this text, apart from the anachronism by which voters must be male and 21 (which should be overridden by the 19th amendment, which enfranchises women's vote, and the fact that voting age today is 18) says that if your state doesn't let its citizens vote and abide by the result, its electoral college votes won't count either, and neither will its congressional delegation be seated.
Isn’t the requirement only that the government be “republican”? A republican government doesn’t necessarily have to be representative. It only needs to not be a monarchy.
That's the requirement of the Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution- in its time, it was about barring non-democracy states from statehood, it was a guarantee of protection of any state from foreign invasion, and protection of any state from internal coup or rebellion.
But, if you look at section 2 of the 14th Amendment, it's a banger: if the right to vote is denied to citizens qualified to vote, the state doing it will lose its federal representation (as in, it will not just lose its electoral college votes in federal elections, its congressmen will not be seated). The purpose for this section of this amendment was to prevent confederate states from denying the formerly-enslaved the right to vote, and it should certainly apply today if Red-State legislators try to use their power to strip their citizens of their ability to meaningfully vote
OK, so now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it
But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they'd be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow
While on the one hand I can agree there's a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it's so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on 'control them' as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.
I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn't a trivial ask, and it shouldn't be undertaken lightly.
...thus showing that the "Law and Order" party was never about law, they just want a particular kind of order- that is, a hierarchy wherein people below them on the status-ladder know not to try to hold them accountable to anything, including the law or even plain decency.
To them, the law is the cudgel to keep the poors and plebes in their place- low in the order- never to be applied to them.
It's as if they all think that they'll be rewarded for their loyalty to him.