Assault rifles were only banned for 10 years, from 1994 to 2004.

Surely the leopards won’t eat his face.

I hope there are enough students who are willing to take such a bold step together to make their point.

I’m sure the NYT has noticed, but their attorneys probably advise against making medical claims about sitting presidents. Especially since the current one is particularly litigious.

Amen, sister.

Yes, I’m living my best life now in spite of everything I was taught in my formative years.

You’re right about that whole last paragraph. Of the dozen-ish kids from my small, rural church who were in our youth group together, I’m the only one who got out. The rest of them are raising their own teens in the church now, most of them still even in the same town.

I don’t know what made me so different. I always had a keen sense of logic, and I was just rebellious enough to question things. I also had access to “heretical” art that helped me feel less alone (shout out to '90s alternative rock). I wasn’t the only one of us who went to university, but I was the only one who moved out of my family home to do it.

I don’t think there’s anything I could say to any of them now that would make them reconsider their worldview. Of course, that works both ways. I know they consider me a sort of “fallen woman” for having strayed from the Straight and Narrow™.

I am so sorry that happened to you and that the place where you turned for help just added to your trauma.

Unless things have changed significantly at the border in the past few years, there’s no process to leave the US. It’s just the Canadian border guard checking things as you enter their country.

Of course, if the GOP decides to fully enact Operation: Handmaid’s Tale, then that could change.

There is a presumption from conservative/fascist women that they occupy a position of hierarchy over non-fascist/non-conservative women. That by virtue of supporting fascism and patriarchy that fascist men will afford them personhood. They don’t believe in any of the assertions of feminism. They instead believe that women who suffer at the hands of men simply deserve it. That all women are judged in some kind of meritocracy, where belief in fascism and support of fascists itself is a determining factor of merit.

This may be true for some women, maybe in the “tradwife” and white supremacist circles. But if, as you say, it’s critical to understand what these women think, you have to understand that they are not a monolith. There are other motivations to consider.

I was raised in a fundamentalist, evangelical church. Within that community, there was no presumption of a hierarchical position over other women. There was only our god-given position to be subservient to our fathers, and later, our husbands. We could either obey the divine plan to someday reach heaven or disobey it and be resigned to hell. There was no in-between.

Now, a reasonable person would see this as patently ridiculous. But the problem is that reason has no place in this worldview. You doggedly follow a literal interpretation of the King James Bible, or you go to hell.

Many years ago, when I was 16, I had asked for a particular privilege. And my mother agreed to grant it if I would listen to some audio tapes that she had of a series of sermons from a woman. Now, that was unusual in itself, because women are not allowed to teach men within fundamentalist churches (Because The Bible Says So™). So this was definitely a teaching that was only meant for women. What I heard was horrifying.

The entire point of this sermon series was to teach women how to be good, submissive Christian wives. The lesson of one tape was literally that if your husband commanded you to commit murder, you would have to do it, because God put him in charge of you and your duty to God was simply to follow orders from your husband.

A woman would not be judged for breaking a commandment if she followed the direction of her husband. The husband would be punished for causing someone to break God’s commandments, but the wife would be spared because she was simply doing her duty as a wife to follow what her husband said.

Women’s agency is completely removed in this scenario. Which sounds exactly like what the men described in the article want.

Again, the problem here is that reason has no purchase in this worldview. No amount of evidence or argument is going to change their minds or magically give them a sense of agency.

Making sure that women have very little self-respect is one of the primary functions of American Evangelicalism.

I’m in Colombia. My local grocery store has them for 23 mil pesos ($5.58 USD at today’s exchange rate) for 30 eggs. That comes out to $2.38 USD per dozen.

The tienda by my home has them cheaper, but I can’t check their prices online to verify the exact cost.

Don’t forget how hard it is to pay other people to play video games for you so you can call yourself an “elite” gamer.

I live in Latin America, and most of the people I talk to consider themselves to be white.

Race doesn’t have a valid scientific basis, so I guess it’s one of those “eye of the beholder” things. But I doubt that the MAGA crew would look at your average Colombian or Venezuelan and think, “Oh, yeah, that person is on our team.”

Username checks out along with the math.

I’m sorry that was your experience. I’m sure it was hard, but I’m glad you made the choice that means you’re still here to tell your story.

And people don’t seem to notice that more people came out after they could live authentically and do other jobs.

All of this Boomer nonsense about “There were no trans people in my day.”

No, grandpa, they were just too afraid to let you know it, so they lived quietly miserable lives with a socially acceptable spouse and 2.5 kids.

Every time that a conservative equates the mere existence of trans people with sex, they’re just outing their own kink.

Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker shot a cop and survived. They threw him in jail, but ultimately the charges against him were dismissed and the city of Louisville settled with him for $2 million.

This is very much the exception and not the rule.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63953359

If the tunnel has decent structural integrity, Musk will be long dead before he would need to pay the piper on this one.

50 years from now, teenagers in Las Vegas will tell stories about the “secret tunnels under the city.” And at some point a very expensive building is going to collapse into a tunnel and the kids will be shocked that the urban legend was real.

And everyone will have basically forgotten that Elon Musk was responsible for, and later abandoned, this ill-conceived vanity project.

I’ve since left the church and I don’t disagree with you. It shouldn’t be necessary to involve religion in providing needed services to a community.

But I also haven’t seen a lot of non-religious organizations offering practical services directly to the people who need them the most.

Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of great nonprofit organizations that do amazing work. But they aren’t necessarily offering subsidized daycare or affordable housing on a scale that meets the needs of the communities where they operate. And very few of them are reaching out to people in rural areas. Churches still have something of a monopoly in those places.

I think this is largely due to the fact that faith communities have more cohesion than secular groups. All of the small secular groups I’ve been involved with have fallen apart after a year or two because the bonds that hold them together are simply not as strong as those in churches.

The whole bit about giving 10% of your income to the church as a duty to God is a fantastic racket. It means that the true believers think that God is keeping a ledger, and therefore they are more likely to support their church financially. So people in churches are literally more invested in their religious community, which gives their church the resources to provide services as social outreach.

And that’s not even getting into the power structures within the church and the role of a pastor as leader (that was missing from all of the secular groups I had experience with). Or the organizing power of a group of dedicated little old church ladies.

There are a lot of elements that churches are better at harnessing. And I haven’t encountered a good solution for creating a secular organization with the same kind of strength.