For a very long time we had a robust system of public violence that prevented a lot of this. Not all of it, but a lot.

Back in the day if you were a sex pest and an asshole, chances were good that someone who lived in your community would either be firmly escorting you out of the local area never to return, or digging you a shallow hole back behind the churchyard.

Now if you were a royal sex pest then that’s a different story, but guys like Tate? He’s just some dude. In a past age someone would have broken 33 bones in his arms, legs and face and he might have even learned something from it.

He intentionally misgenders his own children so honestly I’m not that torn up about it.

There’s nothing wrong with being a woman, it’s only an insult if Musk thinks it is. We’re allowing him to torture himself with it.

To a better world, free of bigots who feel that they have a right to exist in the sunlight with the rest of us?

I agree.

In a past life, pretty plausible.

Now that Elmo is the First Lady, this is the best TOS that’s ever been written by anyone ever. It’s perfect. It probably trumps the constitution because of how perfect it is.

Sure, but I’ll take the thousand cuts over being shot right directly in the face, pretty much every time.

That’s kind of my point though. The large majority of active voters in America don’t have a damn clue what they’re actually voting for. Many democrats don’t vote, but those who do generally do so because they’re informed and invested in politics. Most Republicans vote, largely because their pastor tells them to and tells them who to choose.

If voters were required to have an informed opinion in order to vote, I bet you’d see a significant change in those percentages.

But none of this is practical anyway, it’s a bad solution to a bad problem. It’s basically unenforceable and any way that it does get enforced is going to be a net loss of rights and representation. I don’t like this idea. I just have a hard time coming up with alternatives at this time. It is clear to me that the situation we have now is not tenable. I just don’t know where to go from here, and it seems nobody else does either.

Ah yes, tell us more about how Russia’s sudden invasion and annexization of Crimea following Euromaidan was the fault of US backed Ukrainians.

Best case, you’re going to blame this on the fact that native Ukrainians staged a revolution to remove their corrupt president that was trying to buddy up with the sovereign that has been abusing and betraying them since 1941. To which I say, good for them. The annexation of Crimea came during the power vacuum following that when Putin saw that his good buddy sycophant Yanukovych had been removed by a hostile electorate. Putin saw his slaves trying to make a break for freedom and decided to bring his fist down on it.

Exactly. America was born as a nation because last time someone tried some bullshit like this we shot them all dead and moved out.

We’ve seen an awful lot of history repeating itself these days.

If they’re smart they’ll take the hint. But we all know how likely that is.

Yeah, EMPs aren’t hard to do. Pretty much anybody could do that to anybody. You don’t need a nuke for it.

Yeah, I agree, that’s why I didn’t vote for Trump.

Things like this are what make me struggle with the question of whether or not some sort of voting license would be a bad thing.

It would, of course, unequivocally be a bad thing. But would it be worse than this? I don’t know anymore. On one hand, every living human deserves a free and fair voice in the choice of their governmental representatives. On the other hand, maybe you should have to prove you know what you’re voting for before you’re allowed to vote. Because a popular vote decided primarily by “vibes” from criminally underinformed voters is not something that any republic is able to survive long term.

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They’re the same picture

Finn didn’t need a badass prosthetic left arm because the cure to male loneliness is Jake the Dog.

You’re supposed to be celebrating the more widespread adoption of federated software and a break away from centrally controlled corpo environments in general. This is the public retaking the internet for themselves.

If you don’t like the particular content, cool, don’t go there. I don’t go on Mastodon either but I can appreciate why it’s there.

There’s quite an awful lot more than that, actually

MARS, Inc? Like the candy bar guys?

I definitely have not, and now I have. I’m unsure if I should thank you for this or not.

I feel like it takes the sport out of it if the fish is dead though. The whole sport of the carp throwing is that a carp absolutely can kick a grown man’s ass and flop to freedom if he isn’t careful. You leave a carp alone long enough and those things turn into damn near coelacanths. They’ll eat your dog. Manhandling one of those suckers into a parabolic arc is going to take skill, strength, planning, and luck.