TechyDad @ TechyDad @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

They have a standard formula for these things. First, scream about some horrible thing happening that nobody could really defend. Would it be bad if doctors were routinely giving 5 year old kids sex change surgery? Yes. Of course, that never happens but that's not the point. They've created a straw man argument that's so bad that arguing against them means they can paint you as being "for" the horrible thing.

So they ban the horrible thing that never happens. But they do it using such open ended language that it can be applied in other areas. So the law isn't written as "no sex change surgery for 5 year olds." No, it's written as "no gender affirming treatment for kids." If you try to argue against it, they claim that you're in favor of chopping off the genitals of 5 year olds and how dare you be so disgusting!

Of course, they know what they are doing. The cruelty is the point. But they use "protect the children" to shield themselves from any attacks. Not that they care about the children, mind you. Kids are just useful props to them.

Then, once their "we've got to protect the kids" bill becomes law, they push to expand it. It turns out that we don't need to just ban gender affirming treatment to kids, but to adults too. Again, the bill is written vaguely so it can be interpreted as loosely as possible depending on what they want. And they fall back on the unrealistic scenario whenever they face criticism. You're against banning gender affirming care for adults? Well, then you must want every boy to be transitioned to a girl at 5 years old! How dare you, you monster!!!

NOTE: This attack doesn't work with everyone. Those of us on the left tend to see through it most times, but it's sad that it works on so many people. They really believe that the left wants to force every child to get gender surgery when the reality is that gender surgery in kids is pretty much non-existent. (If it happens at all, there's a lot of other mitigating factors than 5 year old Timmy realizes that "he" is actually she.)

And Trump responded to that by sending photos of his hands to the author of that piece for 25 years.

Imagine if someone personally insulted you on a message board in 1998 and you responded to it by continuously replying to that same thread all the way up to today with "evidence" that they were wrong!

And he's been this way for quite some time. A journalist once said Trump has small hands and Trump literally sent the guy photos of his hands for decades afterwards to show how big they were. (And this article was from 2015. If he's still sending the photos, it would be over 30 years now.)

Imagine being so insecure that you feel the need to respond to a personal slight for that long afterwards! If someone insulted my appearance on a message board in 1998, I wouldn't still be posting there in 2023 with "proof" that they were wrong.

Now? During the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump insisted that he had large hands and large genitalia because one of the other candidates said he had small hands.

Trump has never been dignified.

A mass reading would be a cool protest tactic. Get hundreds of kids hundreds of copies of banned books. Have them sit outside a state legislature - clogging up traffic to and from the building as they read to themselves. Have extra books on hand to give out to people trying to get through, while encouraging them to just sit and read for a bit.

My 16 year old has done that. He finds a book that's banned, takes it out of the library (either physical copy, eBook, or audiobook) and then reads it. While doing so, he keeps an eye out for why it was banned.

He noted that one book was banned because one page describes a sexual encounter. It was about 3 lines and wasn't extremely graphic. It just got the point to the reader that an event happened and then the book moved on. But apparently any mention of sex even existing is enough for a book to get banned.

Unless, it's the Bible, of course. Then you can have daughters sleeping with their fathers and it's all good for kids to read!

Some judges are already demolishing standing. The Texas judge in the Mifepristone case ruled that the doctors suing to stop the drug had standing even though they weren't hurt yet by the drug's use. The fact that they claimed that they might be hurt at some hypothetical point in the future was standing enough.

Meanwhile, in another case, a judge ruled that citizens don't have standing to sue over infringements to their voting rights.

If they demolish standing, why not destroy jurisdiction as well? Of course, a ruling from the Supreme Court would likely be worded in such a way that red states could get anything they wanted while blue states had no rights to request anything.

What we need to do is fix the immigration courts. Right now, there can be a long time between "I request asylum" and the court saying yay or nay. In addition, people can be required to be their own lawyer - including if they don't speak English or are three years old.

Also, if we want to slow migrants coming in, we should target businesses that hire illegal immigrants. If there were no jobs for them, they wouldn't come here. Theoretically, Republicans should support this since it would be a supply side solution. Of course, this would target businesses and isn't cruel enough towards immigrants to get the support of Republicans.

If he successfully kept states from certifying their votes, then Congress wouldn't have been able to name a winner on January 6th. At that point, the vote would have gone to the House. In the House, each states' Representatives vote and the winner gets that state's vote. The candidate who wins the most states wins.

The Republicans hold the majority here and Trump would have been elected President regardless of the actual election result. So keeping the election from being certified was a last ditch effort to overturn the election results and "win" despite the fact that he lost.

It doesn't count. It was just a locker room insurrection!

At one point, there was a QAnon conspiracy theory that said that Trump really didn't leave the White House. He got quick plastic surgery to look like Joe Biden and was sworn in again so he was still President. This was between when he "appeared to leave" and before anyone saw him post-inauguration. And, yes, people believed it even though it's completely idiotic. (I'm not going to get into debunking it because there's just SO MUCH wrong with it )

How long until the Q/MAGA folks start insisting that Biden is secretly a master vocal impersonator and that it was actually Biden doing a Trump impression to get Trump in trouble?

From the rumors I heard, it's not even a pee sex tape thing. He was in a hotel room that Obama had stayed in and he was so petty that he wanted two girls to pee on the mattress as he watched in some twisted "get back at Obama" fashion. (I'm sure Obama was really hurt by that. So wounded!)

It would have been pointlessly petty which is totally on brand for Trump.

I've never ridden a motorcycle, but I have had a bug (and part of its web) go into my mouth and down my throat while biking. Just thinking about it makes me want to gag. If, after that, you offered me a bike helmet with a front visor, I'd have put that thing on ASAP.

Now take that bug incident and make it happen at 30-50 mph? No way would I have my face hole exposed for bugs to invade! (And that's totally apart from the safety issue.)

Right. And Biden still managed to get some student loan forgiveness through.

I get people being upset when politicians don't fulfill all their promises, but campaign promises tend to be aspirational statements. Once the politician gets into office, they run into the cold hard reality of how the government works.

This happens with every politician. It would be interesting to see all the promises that politicians from Reagan on made to see how well they kept them. I know there are some sites that track this, but I'm not sure they go that far back. It would be interesting to see if Biden is on par, ahead, or behind the average Presidential promises fulfilled.

One of the political sites I frequent that keeps track of polling data has a phrase they repeat often "in politics, a week of a long time." It means that a week from now, some scandal or major local/national/world event could occur and the polls from now could be useless.

And if a week is a long time, then 11 months before the election is forever. You might as well poll for DeSantis vs Newsom in 2028. It would be just about as accurate.

By November, there are a lot of factors that could change which could alter the polling figures/voting results. Maybe Trump is convicted. That could drive people away from him or it could strengthen the right as they flock to him to "save" their leader. Maybe once Biden is the official nominee (as opposed to virtually the only candidate officially recognized by the party), Democrats will flock back to him or maybe people will follow through on their threats and refuse to vote in 2024. Maybe in 11 months, Biden will be boosted by a booming economy or maybe something will happen to cause a crash that pulls his numbers down. Maybe the situations in Israel, Ukraine, the border, etc will change to boost or hurt Biden's numbers.

And this is just stuff we know about now. For all we know, the headlines in October of 2024 could be about some major event that we have no clue about now. For example, the headlines in December 2019 were not about a global pandemic. If I was typing this in December 2019, "Trump will be hurt by his response to a global pandemic that shuts down nearly everything" would not have been in my listings."

If Biden is down in the polls in September or October, I'll worry, but I'm not going to worry about polls in December 2023.

You do realize that Biden can't just declare things into law, right?

For the first two years, Biden had a Democratic House that could theoretically pass anything he wanted, but a Senate which was split nearly 50-50. If they didn't get every vote, they could fail to pass a bill. And this doesn't even get into the filibuster which would tank bills unless 60 votes were reached or the fact that Manchin and Sinema frequently acted to sink Democratic bills despite technically being Democrats. Biden could put some pressure on them, but his options were limited. It's not like he could hold a gun to their heads and force them to vote on favor of bills

Since January, Biden has had a Democratic Senate with a razor thin margin and a Republican House. This threw even more wrenches in the works.

And then there's the Supreme Court. Thanks to Mitch McConnell, Trump, and the Republicans, the Supreme Court has a huge conservative majority. So Biden can try to take action for things like forgiving student loans, but then Republicans sue, the case ends up in the Supreme Court and the conservative justices rule that Biden isn't allowed to do this by law. (He's managed to find a way to forgive some loans even if it wasn't as much as he wanted to do.)

Putting all the blame on Biden and saying "he didn't fulfill all his promises" is disingenuous. He hasn't exactly had the Congress and Supreme Court that could support what he wanted to do. Could he have done everything anyway and proclaimed that he makes the laws now? Perhaps, but then he'd be a fascist dictator and not working within our political system - exactly the type of thing that Trump wants to do and is properly criticized for.

I didn't factor in inflation as I was trying to keep it quick and simple. I also didn't factor in any interest he might have received from a bank account. This was purely "he works minimum wage and stuffs all the cash he gets into a big jar - how much does he have after 50 years."

I was also using the federal minimum wage. Obviously, many states have higher minimum wages so he might have made more than the federal minimum wage had he been free to move to another state.

Of course, the $500,000 figure only accounts for money that he would have made. It doesn't include all the suffering he had to endure or the fact that the state basically ended his life at 21. He didn't get to live his life and his future life is going to be rough. Not only does he need to adjust to life out of prison, but he likely has nothing. It's not like many places are rushing to hire a 71 year old with no job experience for the last 50 years because they were in prison. The money he gets should at least be enough for him to comfortably retire.

Are these big strong people with tears in their eyes?

Seriously. We went from "you spelled potato wrong or screamed slightly weird so no presidency for you" to "you're quoting Hitler? Well, no big deal. It looks like you're still the frontrunner for your party."

About 16 years ago, a friend of mine was getting married. I attended his wedding at a former plantation in South Carolina. (Nowadays, I'd question this decision, but it didn't occur to me at the time.) While there, I decided to take a tour of the grounds. After all, it was beautiful there and I wanted to learn about the history of the place.

That's when I realized how much they tried to sweep slavery under the rug. They referred to the slaves as "workers" and never used any term that would lead one to believe that they were "employed" against their will. If you didn't know US history and took that tour, you'd have pictured a group of men getting hired, working an 8 hour day, and collecting a paycheck. This was certainly not what had happened there.

I sometimes wonder if they've updated their tour. Would they today actually acknowledge what took place there or do they still talk about the "workers."