Hodad

One of the differences between you and I is that I don't have to parrot anyone. I'm quite capable of reading data, tracking what economists say etc. You're the sort of person who needs to look up the difference between deficit and debt, so WTF are you on the internet arguing about the state of the economy?

I'm glad you have seen this work in a couple of instances. I think that's nice. But it's certainly not a substitute for legal protection. A negative review isn't going to undo the trauma of some poor kid denied a restroom or some motorist being denied custom at the only gas station around. These laws exist for a reason. There should be no question. The internet is also not the great equalizer you think it is though. We all imagined democratized access to information and publication would be a great thing. And in some ways it is. But it's also just made it a lot easier for crazies to validate their crazy ideas by finding like-minded people online.

I have been there. I have lived there. It's not hyperbolic. You could pick up the phone and randomly dial any number in that town, and any adult who answered the phone (from whichever side) would know exactly what you're talking about. One decent person's "reputational risk" is a deplorable person's mark of quality. 100 years of " reputational risk" didn't solve the issue, but the Civil Rights Act did. Protective legislation did. And at any rate, demonstrably successful legislation and the resulting civil cases are in no way exclusive of reputational risk. It's a certainty that the cake shop was review bombed by people on both sides of the issue. Ultimately, we've had 50+ years of protecting minority access to places of public accommodation and it's worked. The difference is night and day for minority groups trying to live and function in this country. We can look from the past to the present and see how dramatic the change has been.

But the examples are not hyperbolic. That was just real life in the US before the civil rights act. Those examples are exactly why the law was passed, and why such cases still matter. 🤷‍♂️ Funny that you mention Idaho, I actually had a different, larger Idaho town in mind. Moscow, ID is home to the University of Idaho (and not much else of note). It's a population of about 25,000. But it's been targeted for takeover by an insane ultraconservative church/cult. This has been brewing for many years, and they've actually made an alarming amount of progress toward their goal and have a massively outsized presence, having executed coordinated takeovers of many local businesses and commercial spaces. It's a problem already, but without legal protection, what is life going to be like for minorities in this town as the takeover continues?

In my view, they shouldn't have to do that, but I don't think the indignity of it is the whole--or even most--of the point. Remember that the laws of this country are not written in a vacuum. We made equal access laws for businesses of public accommodation because we have a very real and vivid history of extreme exclusion, and there's not always an alternative. Before we had these laws, the exclusion was so extreme that it often made minorities into de facto 2nd class citizens. And still, today America is peppered with small towns where there are only a few businesses of any kind and they may all be owned by a handful of families or aligned to single church, etc. Should they be able to exclude minorities for the fact of being minorities? Should they be able to exclude minorities to the degree that those minorities are effectively unable to live in that town? To buy groceries? To buy gas? Or to flip it from the general to the specific, should the only gas station for the next 60 miles be able to refuse service to a gay person? Should they be able to refuse black children access to the bathroom? What kind of country do we want this to be? We can't make everyone be kind and accepting or friendly, but we can make sure that everyone has a right to exist and function in society. And that's why people bring cases like this. It's not because they couldn't have gotten a cake elsewhere. It's because they shouldn't have to--so that everyone else shouldn't have to, because that's not always an option.

The "problem" you mention is fictional nonsense. The falsest of false equivalences. A lot of people in Washington have mishandled classified documents. The difference is that when they discover them in a briefcase or office box, they turn them right back over to the authorities. That's how it's always gone, so nobody gets prosecuted. And, of course, that's what Clinton and Biden did. Traditionally, the only people who have been prosecuted are those who have clearly taken them with intent. Trump didn't just accidentally mishandle them. He took them. He lied about having them. He claimed he had a right to take them. And he refused to return them. Surely, even a rabid partisan can see the difference in Trump's behavior?

Sigh. A. The former intelligence officials didn't say it was Russian disinformation, they said it bore the hallmarks of Russian disinformation--warning the public not to buy into it immediately. Which is, frankly, good advice for something crazy like the laptop info with such a sketchy provenance. Remember that even the NY Post authors who wrote the story thought it was too sketchy and refused to put their names (their reputations) on it. That's how unvetted it was. B. Those ex-officials were not in the FBI. They were retired. And, as far as I can discern, not a single one of them was retired from the FBI. So there is no connection to the FBI at all. Let alone to "the Democrats." The FBI also being run by Republicans--Trump appointees, no less. You're just throwing crazy conspiracy accusations at the wall. C. And even if your nonsensical conspiracy theory were true, which if very clearly isn't, judging it cheating would put you in the position of judging that the FBI interfered to help Trump win office in the first place with Comey's October Surprise.

In many ways I think it's completely irrelevant what Trump does. He's an awful human being, and that won't change one way or the other based on a trip to Rikers for contempt of court. (As much as I'd love to see it.) Probably what's more important is what Trump's supporters make of the situation. They've spent months convincing themselves that he's the victim of some legal witch hunt, that he's being persecuted, when in fact his crimes are pretty plain to see. But here, in this case we have an almost scientific experiment. Isolated from politics and even from the gorpy facts of a criminal indictment, we have a judge issuing a plain as day instruction. And it's incredibly basic: don't make public statements about witnesses, jurors, court staff and their families. This is standard stuff for reasons that everyone understands. The judge has been clear about it. Trump was warned multiple times and continued to violate. He's been fined multiple times, and continues to violate. And the judge is begging him to stop, so that he doesn't have to put a past and potentially future president in jail. But the question for Trump supporters, who can see the clear and repeated violations of a simple court order taking place, whether they will finally hold Trump responsible for his own dumb actions, or whether they will try to blame the court for trying to enforce a basic point of law. It's a lot like dealing with a toddler. They will push boundaries until they trigger the ultimatum. As Trump seems likely to do. Will his supporters finally acknowledge that the toddler was at fault for willfully violating a plain, simple and fair directive? Or, like the toddler, will they blame the authority figure for imposing consequences. Should be illuminating either way--but I have my guesses. lol

I know you're just a rabid fanboy, but your crush--even if he managed to win the presidency--wouldn't have any power to fire someone in the Manhattan DAs office.

There's an insane entitlement mentality to this whole "pro-life" perspective. You frame this entire argument around what you think and what you want. Specifically what you want a woman to do with her body. It's an inescapable fact that by trying to legislate your view and your wishes, you are actively trampling on the physical sovereignty, autonomy and rights of women. It should be a woman's choice. You want to strip away that choice and legislate your feelings, and force that onto women. It's 100% and anti-choice movement. Once again, you have zero consideration for the woman--the actual born person and citizen. You're so damn busy arguing that nothing changes with regard to the fetus (despite becoming a physically separate entity, FFS) that you hand-wave away the impact of birthing on the women actually doing the birthing. The misogyny is off the charts. These are people--actual people--and you do not get to dismiss their investment and their choice in this process. Once again, you completely and utterly discount the entire view of the women. Mental health is not a matter of convenience. Physical health is not a matter of convenience. The woman's philosophy and beliefs are not a matter of convenience. This entire post from you could be summarized as "Women aren't relevant in this process or this conversation. They are just incubators who should STFU and do their job." Nooooope. The pro-life movement is not about life sometimes, or life in certain circumstances. You've been droning on and on about what the "pro-life" flag represents, so I assumed you would know what it is you're describing. international pro-life flag will wildly help the movement in its already-unified aim: ending abortion. Not reducing abortion. Not abortion sometimes. ENDING abortion. And the logical point that you fail to understand about that statistic is that many people who find abortion "morally wrong" aren't interested in legislating their morals onto other people. There are people who think that drinking, smoking, gambling, lying--or whatever else--is morally wrong. Do you know how they respond? They don't DO the thing. Have your morals. Just stop trying to force other people to live by them. Grandma is a person. Hurting other people is (usually) wrong. It's an action that harms another, so it is illegal. A fetus is not a person. There is no science to support the idea that a fetus is a person. The idea that a fetus is a person (despite lacking all or most aspects of personhood, depending on the developmental stage) comes from a religious perspective and the notion of souls. So yes, it's a movement based entirely on religious dogma. And again, even if we were to stipulate for the sake of argument that a fetus is a person, there is no argument to make for why this person should be granted ownership of a woman's body, blood and tissue.

Look, I know you're not capable of looking at data, but even you should be able to understand the difference between being the president-elect and the president. The overall health of the economy is a composite of many different metrics. Presidents generally have little control over them in the short term. They can do things to nudge a bit, but the fundamentals take longer to turn than 3 years. The truth is that Trump did nothing to change the upward trajectory of the Obama economy. The metrics trended almost exactly as they had been. And yes, the economy did fall apart on his watch, but aside from his early overspending and mismanagement of the pandemic response, it's not his fault it fell apart on his watch. But it did, and THAT was an economy in shambles. It's also a fact that by almost every metric, the Biden economy is robust. And, this too is mostly the rebound. The rebound wasn't inevitable, BTW, the Trump and Biden stimulus packages successfully staved off a disastrous depression. Biden actually has made some great long-term economic moves. The CHIPS act and IRA (not really aimed at inflation) include the kind of fundamental economy building that we haven't had in a long time. But it's meat, not sugar. It's only starting to land with things like the TSMC plants in Arizona. I don't know who you are parroting, but you sound like a buffoon when you describe it as "in shambles." Look at the metrics. Read a real paper. Listen to the Fed announcements. Email an economist at your local university. Do SOMETHING to put some actual information in your head.

You're playing a very poor game of semantics. As illustrated, "pro-life" doesn't have anything at all to do with life, writ large. It very simply means that we should outlaw abortion, robbing women of the choice whether to suffer a pregnancy or terminate it. Which brings us back to WHY the pro-life flag is indeed antagonistic. It's not a simple uplifting message. It's a position asserting dominance over have the population and meaningfully impacting their rights and lives. Stop pretending that it's anything other than that. You just look silly. Spoken like someone who's never given birth. Only a callous man could hand-wave away the birth process as inconsequential. The fetus is connected to, dependent on and literally inside a specific person. If you don't think that's a difference--a number of VERY obvious differences--from a born person I don't know what to tell you. What? That's not a contingent condition. It's not a person because it's not a person. It lacks aspects of personhood identified by any philosophical tradition (there are lists). Separate from that it is definitely not a citizen. Yet you would assign the fetus a special set of rights beyond those of a known person and legal citizen. It's a ridiculous, misogynistic nonsense. A) It's very rarely a matter of convenience B. It's none of your business where, when or why a woman terminates a pregnancy. It's her body, and her choice. It's not entering the building that makes one religious. Gallup: Those with no religious identity are much more accepting of abortion; only 5% of this group say abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and only 21% say abortion is morally wrong. ^^There you go. 5% of the non-religious are "pro-life" This is ridiculous. It's like "debating" the color of the sky. The pro-life movement is based in religion and driven almost entirely by Catholics and evangelicals. The sky is blue. There is no debate or controversy. You don't need to pretend that the pro-life movement isn't fueled by religious dogma. If that embarrasses you, perhaps reconsider your position.

No, funding public schools is not negotiable. If people want to send their kids elsewhere, that's fine, but we can't defund and destroy our education system, which is one of our great social and economic differentiators. In the same way that you can't opt out of funding roads and utilities because you don't use them. And the fact that you don't directly use them doesn't mean you don't benefit from them. I don't think there's anything magical about it. Fetuses on one side, babies on the other. And I certainly believe in a legal birth canal. Text. Section 1, Clause 1, of the Fourteenth Amendment, reads: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside Stop trying to give a non-person, non-citizen legal rights superior to those of born persons and citizens. Great, glad that the cohort includes women and men and humans. Now to reiterate, overwhelmingly religious. Every sperm is beautiful. Let's not pretend like that's not the primary impetus.

Lol. Apparently shame is not a feeling in your repitoir. Anyone who can defend that level of corruption is clearly hopeless. I know you have a knee-jerk reaction to defend "your team" but only you can decide if this crooked judge is worth your integrity. When someone loans you a quarter of a million dollars and then forgives the loan, they are "handing" you a quarter of a million dollars. The Clarence Thomas story started badly and end badly. He threatened to quit if he didn't get a raise, so the booster club took care of him. Greed and corruption. That's his legacy now.

Well sure, the administration. And economists. Oh, and the federal reserve. People invested in stocks. People who own homes. People who read the news. But other than that, what have the Romans ever done for us?

It's really gross. Most Jews are Democrats to begin with. Rather than imagining that college students suddenly hate Jews, perhaps it's worth considering that their consciences are shocked and appalled at the idea of 13,000 Palestinian children killed? Can you even imagine what a massive pile of bodies that would be? Like a small mountain. I mean, they're just children, with tiny little bodies,so a somewhat smaller pile, but still. I think "conservatives" will judge these students for their empathy, because the judgers lack it altogether.

I'd even say they aren't necessarily bad people, but they did screw up and they should be punished. I don't think anyone denies that there were flashes of violence and significant property damage in the BLM-spawned riots. But most of those events were protests, legitimate protests, rather than riots. A very small minority turned destructive. Rioters in those instances should be punished as well, but I certainly understand differently and empathize differently with a victim group growing fed up and lashing out than I do with elective political violence.

Nope, that's exactly one of the things that happened. One of Clarence's good pals bought him a quarter-million-dollar "motor coach" attached to a loan--the originating amount of the loan was then forgiven. Here you go, $250K, good buddy!" Or the other "friend" who paid 6 figures worth of private school tuition for Thomas' nephew. The lavish cruises and vacations were really the tip of the iceberg. You could watch the video (which is fun) or read any of the investigative journalism (not as fun) on the topic. Propublica has good coverage. Oh, and don't forget the interlock with his wife's business. You might not mind, but the fact that Thomas has used his office and influence to greatly enrich himself is repugnant, and an embarrassment to the court. We're miles beyond the "appearance of impropriety" here. But they are comfortable miles in a plush-ass free motorcoach!

Country western music, I assume?🤷‍♂️

The vast majority of kids access online pornography. If you don't want to allow schools to counterprogram and provide materials that model healthy and safe sexual relationships, then you are simply condemning kids to a dangerous ignorance. But that feels more comfortable for a lot of you. Feels like the "abstinence only" idiocy recycled. And yes, we may be worlds apart. I live on Earth in 2024. What reality are you posting from? The nihilists delight: "Tolerance means tolerating the intolerant!" Nope. That's not what it means, and it never had. It means live and let live. It means giving tolerance of whatever personal weirdness you exhibit, and expecting the same in return. The entirety of western philosophical exploration of liberty is based on this simple principle. Non-harm liberties do not affect you, so don't try to curtail them and we'll all get along. Nonsense. Pure nonsense. I am 100% tolerant of you not wanting an abortion. More power to you. But when you're abusive to others and seek to curtail their liberty we have a problem. I don't respect or tolerate that in the least. MYOB. Sex and gender are different. Always have been. That they've been recently-and incorrectly-conflated is a shame. If a biological male wants to live as a woman, what's the harm to you? What's the harm to anyone? Why the need force them to do otherwise, and to what end? Nobody is asking more of you than basic courtesy. Does it cost you anything to treat the follically challenged with courtesy and decency, to indulge their presented state? Same question for a trans person? Does it cost you anything? Nope. The truth is you juts think it's weird and "icky" and that the "otherness" gives you license to antagonize them. There are always some people who get off on picking on marginalized groups, when it takes a lot less time and energy to just be courteous to everyone. Yo, it's the pride flag. Pride in one's self, comfort with one's self, tolerance. That's all that's in it. No negative message for anyone. You may think that gay people are icky, but unless you are represented by one of those stripes of color, that flag says nothing to or about you. Again, that's a stark contrast to a flag that explicitly represents dominance. A. Autism is very often a different ability, but not a disability. Sometimes it's a goddamn superpower. B. Nobody asked you to pretend that someone with autism doesn't have autism. Nobody asked you to pretend that gay people are not gay or trans people are not trans. The only thing you were asked to do in either case is to tolerate their expression of personal pride in their diverse status. If you wouldn't rip down the autism poster, you shouldn't be ripping down the pride flag. Neither of them have any negative impact on you. Let them be proud. Treat them with courtesy. Easy peasy. This is not a serious argument. Completely disingenuous. The flag of the pro-life movement represents... the pro-life movement. We know what those values. We know the hostility and the oppression--even the violence that sometimes comes with it. It's alarming that you can't distinguish between matters of non-harm liberty (Pride) and matters explicitly focused on taking someone else's liberty (pro-life). That's just a straight up lie. The cake that was requested was a simple wedding cake, no different than any other cake he makes. The cake requested was not a special “cake celebrating same-sex marriage.” It was simply a wedding cake—one that (like other standard wedding cakes) is suitable for use at same-sex and opposite-sex weddings alike. See ante, at 4 (majority opinion) (recounting that Phillips did not so much as discuss the cake’s design before he refused to make it). The proprietor refused them service because they were gay, not because they asked him to do anything he wouldn't do for another customer. Its wrong. In exactly the same way that refusing to sell a cake to an interracial couple because the proprietor is an anti-miscegenist. It's no different than the gas stations in the south that would turn away blacks. If he operates a business of public accommodation he should not be allowed to discriminate against protected minorities. And the fact that you would use this example is further evidence that you don't understand the concept of tolerance at all. I'm fine tolerating someone with his bigoted beliefs. He's welcome to use any place of public accommodation. That's what tolerance is. But when he manifests those beliefs in illegal ways to hurt others there is no reason to respect or accept that. Tolerance doesn't mean "tolerating" intolerance. It doesn't mean condoning his cruel and abusive actions.

What about heterosexual literature? Probably best to just avoid anything with human relationships. Orrrr, we could go the other way and allow the full spectrum of human relationships, because that's the world we live in.

Lol. Sure you do. Everybody forget about the "freedom convoy" and, oh, some little thing that happened on Jan, 6. Nothing says "respect for the rule of law" like a howling mob smashing through the capitol, assaulting police officers and pursuing our lawmakers through buildings and barricades until a LEO finally had to pull the trigger.

Yeah, it's usually Alex Jones-quality analysis. All protestors are paid. The bad ones are false-flag plants. Ray Epps works for the government and all the dead kids and grieving parents from Sandy Hook are "crisis actors." In other words, nutball conspiracy nonsense.

Sure. No big deal. "Hey, Clarence, here's a quarter of a million dollars. But remember to vote your conscience in court!" "Okay, but I won't disclose this massive gift, just because it's so casual, you know?" Who could have a problem with that?!?🤪

My favorite part about this lunacy is that she taught and encouraged a predator to hunt birds, and then got pissed off when the pup caught birds. Off with its head! What a loon.