No, we need hard-ass fucking laws to protect children because our moral-fiber as a nation has been eroded away deliberately by capital forces that would absolutely package underage children for consumers if they could get away with it.

We are in a country where the average American thinks that one out of five people is transgender and many think that they are a threat to children, people who think our biggest threat comes from people in drag stalking public bathrooms, and yet are giving passes left and right to actual predators in positions of power. The conservative base in America broadly believes children are property, to be owned, enslaved, abused or used as desired. Right below this post is an update on Florida’s efforts to bring back child-labor on factory farms.

We absolutely fucking need better, harsher, stronger laws to protect our vulnerable people, be it children or handicapped or elderly. Particularly from fucking PRIESTS who are one of the biggest groups of offenders who protect each other from consequence. Fuck off with this stinking mess we call “Christianity” in the United States, if Jesus came back he would be flipping every last table and smacking every “Christian” into last century.

Your entire life is built on a 4-billion-year chain of death and suffering. You wouldn’t exist in a modern world with antibiotics and childcare and plumbing if not for the exploitation and suffering of countless people.

This is just a conflict you have to figure out. You can be a person with values and ethics and still exist as a product of suffering. If you just can’t make that work, be an advocate for better practices, alternatively go live like the person in your story and just revert to subsistence farming with the land you surely have and the vast amount of knowledge how to spend every waking moment turning dirt to food. Nobody will give you a medal or care about your suffering though.

Satan reading that like: “Your resume looks good, I am impressed with your career goals, I think we can go forward with the interview process, unfortunately Hell is strapped for cash right now, can’t keep up with the influx, so we can only pay $19.00 an hour, but you get bargain rate healthcare after 90 days.”

A great many pathogens can be “weakened” with various processes, heat is one, but also the surviving strains in a living being that beat the disease via immunity may also carry weakened strains and this is where we learned to deliberately contract smallpox via poking someone’s skin pustule and poking ourselves with that pus.

Gross but highly effective. This is how George Washington inoculated his army. (Which of course he learned about through a Reverend in Boston who learned about it from his slave, Onesimus, which makes sense as smallpox was ravaging Africa for over 10,000 years, they figured it out eventually.)

Whether or not if you can garden to survive and if makes you a good person or not (You literally can’t, and it no, doesn’t) is not on debate here, we’re talking about eating at restaurants or getting take-out.

The best incentive here is that you can save a lot of money and force unethical businesses to change their models and pay-gaps by learning to cook at home. There are a million tools and resources for learning how. Once you break the habit it stops feeling like mental and physical effort to have your own meal plans.

Conspiracists have been stranded to figure out their own chosen “other” to fear and hate since Israel stepped into the scene and the Republicans (and most dems) made any criticism of their genocide “anti semitism” in a playbook move straight out of internet trolling tactics.

So you can turn your back on “God’s blessed war against the Muslim beasts” OR you can suddenly start softening towards the idea that Jewish Cabals are running our whole country.

It’s been kind of spectacular to see the right splinter around the edges over this even before the Epstein stuff.

Too bad none of it will actually make a real dent in a political ideology that is already built on cognitive dissonance.

Then you shouldn’t buy there. Really, if not being able to afford to tip a business that should already be paying for its employee labor is too morally repugnant, do the objectively worse thing for the employees and not go in there at all.

Our country’s obsession with eating out and being served has created a lot of issues for the workforce.

The discussion around why tips are an expected or “required” part of this transaction is another story. B

No, it’s the same story. The reason there’s a tip economy is because there’s no pushback against it. We have allowed tipping to be expected for PICKUP ORDERS because we haven’t punished businesses for trying to subsidize paying their employees.

The best tactic of all for changing this culture would be to not buy from places that expect tips, put them out of business… but why does that seem less socially frowned-upon than just not using the tip button?

and everyone knows you’re using the no tip button.

How socially insecure do you have to be for this to be a concern?

Don’t answer that. I’ve come to realize that we’ve long since crashed through the basement floor in regards to how well socialized and confident our populations are.

The next part of that lie is the fallacy that we have some kind of intrinsic “freedom of speech.”

People think our “freedom” gives us a view into the rest of the world and how it’s still the best thing in the world to live in the USA.

All you have to do is open your web browser in the airport of another country. We have a sliver of perspective here, we don’t get to see what challenges other countries have overcome, from healthcare to housing the homeless to giving people actual freedoms by giving them peace of mind about their future.

If nothing else, you get to see how much the rest of the world really hates the US government and would be happy if we stopped building bases and blacksites in their countries.

I do feel the same. Somewhere around 2012 - 2015 life just stopped for me. I lost track of media and current hip topics and then life just spiraled into one long series of disasters, both personal and global and now I feel a thousand years old but can’t detect any time that’s passed. When I watch the news and current events, even though logically I know what’s going on, some part of my brain screams that everything looks “wrong” and like we’re in the wrong world.

Kimmel has already said this is his last season, voluntarily.

Remember that when Conan was forced out, he had specific gag orders about what he could say or not, so take the “voluntary” part with a few grains of salt until that potential gag order expires, if it ever does.

Really what’s happening is fascist censorship of opposition voices and satire is a powerful tool in speaking truth to power, making comedians highly threatening to fascists. Corporations like Skydance don’t care about civilization or a better world, they need line to go up, and the fastest, most efficient way to get that line up is to buy some fascists to run the country you’re located in.

Late show was also just nominated for an Emmy.

Kimmel and John Stewart are in fact being targeted next.

I predicted that this would happen if the country started an irreversible slide into fascist warlord dictatorship, I just thought it would be much further down the road.

Watch, in about a year all of these comedians and liberal pundits are going to be replaced by right-wing grifters and podcasters capturing the stupid, populist attention spans of people who just want to stare at flashing lights and listen to people screaming about how evil trans children are interrupted by ads for essential oils and testosterone supplements. This isn’t an exaggeration, this is what we can expect.

If it makes you feel better, this has nothing to do with normal Hollywood celebrity shuffling and contractual disputes, this is entirely targeted political censorship. Colbert is/was the highest rated talk show on network television and was just nominated for an emmy.

makes being alive American worthwhile

FTFY.

We deliberately don’t get news about it, but China is making entire cities for the well-educated looking to return to China from the US. They are “taking the solar system” right now according to some experts, and are on their third space station among multiple lunar missions. ESA and other countries have also taken grand steps into space. International science and medical research forges ahead without us. There are countries effectively expanding their social safety nets and other than US involvement in Israel/the Middle East broadly, the world is at an all-time peak of peace and personal safety.

You are being fed a cultivated image. This entire “free speech” catchphrase that we’ve been taught to scream at any offence is an illusion, a lie reinforced by every branch of media, which are in turn branches of the corporations that have long since nailed the coffin closed on actual democracy.

Remember Dead Internet Theory? Dead America Theory. We died around Reagan, the country has been running on momentum and money. We won’t feel it until the money runs out and that’s why this current administration is a pile of bottom-feeding bilge rats scraping off whatever they can from taxpayers. They know the value of the American dollar is about to start plummeting, and climate change and other technological changes to the global stage will be the final flush of this toilet we’ve been trying to pretend we’re not spinning around.

Our progress and species will go on, just not without America leading the way. Even if we got a “perfect” president and administration tomorrow they wouldn’t be able to undo this reverse-snowball that’s currently evaporating out of control.

I would probably get banned from this site and get my own FBI file if I suggested what we should do to credit agencies.