I think at that point you wander into whatever the architectural equivalent of Zombie Formalism is.

You are unlikely to if you aren’t in Canada. It seems like Indigenous folk down in the States don’t have quite as much success spreading widespread awareness. I produced some stuff and had to explain to a bunch of Americans what a land acknowledgement was. For the past 5 years where I am they are performed before any meeting or performance. Up here 2S gets top billing at the beginning of the LGBTQIA initnialism to give deference to gender categories that were suppressed by European supremacist colonization.

At the same time Stonehenge has some delicate evidence of ancient painted designs that requires special imaging equipment to detect that may have been wiped out bu this. There’s a reason why they tend to keep people at a distance from the thing.

Yup. Bonkers.

It’s bonkers that you have to actively sign up for it. Canada had conscription on the books as an available tool but like… you never actively signed on or were penalized for not doing that paperwork. In 2021 they ended all mandatory military service and two months ago they removed conscription entirely. Not that it’s possible for conscription to not come back as technically it’s not actively banned, but if it did it would have to be written and implemented as law entirely from scratch and be re subject to the full process of new constitutional challenge and could now be subject to gender discriminations to strictly men as required by current civil rights .

There’s something about coercing someone to sign their name to paper to register for conscription that feels wrong to me that just accepting a call to conscription doesn’t. Like they want to reduce your resistance to it by making it “voluntary”.

Democrats are bad at marketing because a lot of them come from the school of political jousting. It’s easy to lose touch with what the regular person believes politics is rather than the reality of the system where you can’t make solid promises because things can go very wrong and playing the game means setting up long term strategy where best case scenario you have to suck short term losses. They are mostly invested in long term preservation of the system so over promising and under delivering is a held fear. In vulgar terms it is shitting where ideologically eat.

Republicans however basically promise the moon the sun and the stars and then when it doesn’t happen they just rile up their base with anti-federal sentiments to make them rabid. There’s no brakes on the anger machine which means there isn’t a cohesive long term strategy. It’s whatever does the job right here and now so they can as a group benefit off the short term gains. It’s why so many of them are individually crashing and burning. No exit strategy - just commitment to scalp what you can out of the system and ditch before you get consequences. They know they can basically say anything and get what they want.

It’s a major FUBAR situation and Democrats are only now learning how to publicly perform a sense of political urgency.

How often do you sit cross legged on the floor? A lot of stretching routines are basic maintenance but getting to actual comfort is a different thing entirely. Getting up regularly and relaxing into floor sitting while watching tv has done me wonders personally. The first while is rough though.

Don’t get an SUV or Raised truck. They might be comfortable but they are dangerous to other vehicles on the road.

It might be more about what vehicles share the road. SUVs and pickups tend to cause the majority of fatalities in crashes because their bumper height basically being non compatible with cars and vans and their larger blindspots… That design might not play particularly well with the Keis in crash situations.

But that being said SUVs and raised pickups are menaces to road safety across the board and we should be looking at phasing them out.

While some of the posters are tackling the loss of constitutional rights through judicial limitations of those rights… Which is part of the design of those rights… I would like to highlight that you are correct in pointing out some unique flaws in the American system. Utilizing non-violent drug convictions to deny voting rights targets vulnerable populations and make your voting base generally comprised of wealthier individuals and exaggerates the power of racialized police targeting. Both the US and the UK have this… But not all democracies practice this. Many countries have zero restrictions based on felony conviction or imprisonment. The intersection of drug use, rights and the churches involvement in 12 step programs are also not living up to a lot of modern discussions of ethics or the separation of church and state implied in the design of the US.

Practice and design are two different things. Canada does not have a specific division of Church and state anywhere in the body of law. On paper its got an official religion. In practice however it is incredibly secular and most of the citizens believe whole heartedly that religion has no business in government which is backed by a constitutional freedom of religion. The use of 12 step programs is being challenged and dismantled as a breech of these rights. ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5391650 )

The 2A rights particularly are more difficult to engage with using international comparison because there are only four democratic countries that have a specific constitutional right to bear arms and two impose further restrictions and deference to law inside the body of right itself. The only countries with so broad a written constitutional right to bear arms is the US and Guatemala. Other countries that guarantee those rights do so inside their body of regular law which means that right is not elevated. It can be more easily ammended and changed by sitting bodies and it interacts with criminal law and licencing programs more fluidly.

This structural difference is important. It is supposed to provide additional protections. However the cultural nature of guns is under public challenge. The US isn’t nessisarily playing by it’s intended design because in part from a written standpoint the 2A is a mess. The issue with old democracies is that they were kind of in Beta and the wording of those laws do not match the modern standardized code that comprises the body of active civil and criminal law and that leaves more than normal room for personal interpretation. The cultural nature to hold the constitution as a holy document that cannot be updated for function sake for mostly sentimental reasons means that you basically don’t get the last word on these things or a solid grasp of whether something is constitutional until a Supreme Court majority interprets the archaic document in basically whichever way they please. There are logistical issues with treating law like a precious artwork instead of a practical tool.

Yes it does suck on your end but on the other side of the phone your perspective date is probably having a whole mental breakdown about it. For a lot of trans folk disclosure is absolutely nessisary as early as possible and preferably for safety reasons not when you are face to face…

Buuuut they also are very likely to get really vile transphobic backlash from a perspective date as much as they are honest rejections based on genital preference which sucks to be rejected for but is nobody’s fault. There’s a lot of trans people out there who feel like they are never going to be given a chance. Either way steeling themselves for one form of rejection or a vile reminder of the awful people out there who think you are subhuman and are offered up a nice juicy target on which to let loose their bigotry does tend to make for disordered social niceties. Once someone has been burned enough they get pretty damn shy and the procrastination is more of a case of battling personal traumas until the last possible second where one absolutely must do the right thing.

I would advise not taking it too personally.

Yeah… If anyone starts talking too much about the shape of the human skull as if that means anything whatever they are selling ain’t worth the pitch

Are you kidding? It’s a comedian’s job to read the room and tell when their set isn’t landing for shit and change tactics on the fly. Maybe he’s got his own shit niche but he should learn the basics of tact if he wants gigs.

It’s not the audience’s fault when a comedian bombs. It’s his own damn fool self.

Truth, Saskatchewan tends to echo a lot of the transphobic legislation of the States. They passed a law requiring parents to give consent to use requested pronouns in schools. The place isn’t what one would call “trans issue forward”. I could totally see some ass backwards planning committee thinking it would be great before belatedly remembering the sort of people who attend these sorts of charity events actually tend to be fairly empathetic to their fellow humans…

Branding. Democrats, for all their ills, do care about playing by the rules and optics of potential unfair conduct. Republicans generally know their base will believe anything they feed them but Democrats know people at home who make up their support are following along with the rule book. If they ditch their brand as the moral high ground between the two choices their goose is cooked.

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.

Social democracy is a subsection inside the umbrella of Socialism. So she’s both.

Mostly paint. Once you get that sweet sweet high pigment paint and all the fun technical paints it’s hard to go back. One little bottle will set you back like 8 bucks. 3D prints generally don’t have the detail of the character models and while lots of people use prints for terrain the actual models exist under severe copywrite and you can’t participate in tournament events unless you have official models fully painted at least three colors (This exists basically to keep the core a painting based community and funnel more people towards the part of the hobby where gamestores make more money).

Like I said… Gaslands or if you really must - Mordheim. If you go Gaslands your local Toys R Us will supply you with everything you need for a game for 5 bucks. Your entry level Killteam is about 70 bucks just for the models.

I’ve played my share of MTG but dripped out of it pre covid. I could only ultimately afford one money sink at a time. Warhammer is very good at creating an addiction to paint. I would warn you off it if you wish to safeguard your funds. There’s ways to go about it responsibility supposedly. Necromunda or Killteam are toted as such options… Probably just a gateway drug though.

Dollar for dollar though Gaslands is where it’s at. Way more fun at the table and you play with whatever Hot Wheels and Matchbox you want to mod into Mad Max nonsense. Game takes about the same time to play as a Warhammer game but is way more entertaining.

Diplomatic Immunity is granted by a host country and by the country the diplomat came from. It’s not automatically extended. The US historically automatically grants a President diplomat authority but a country can refuse even the highest ranked ambassador if they so choose.

I might be mistaken but whether or not Trump would be admitted to a country with one of these policies it would likely go to a individual vote or decision making authority of whatever governing body runs the country whether or not to grant him a personal exemption due to his political position.

It is also worth mentioning that Trump made some really petty and genuinely awful political decisions that created a lot of hardship for some of the countries on this list. A lot of his wheeling and dealing has been picked apart in courts and actually caused the US some issues since in international trade courts. It may be entirely possible that a country with a grudge would disallow a US president entry which could be quite the setback for the US in multinational bargaining and soft diplomacy.

I have a lot of compassion for people who have been poisoned with toxic masculinity. The toxicity comes from a place quite abusive to men. It demands a vision of a man who is what I think of as emotionally castrated. Completely denied any exhibitions of passive sadness, outward facing compassion, grief, fear or desire for anything outside a small range of approved desires. In return they are given tools of violence, silence, denial and anger to express virtually everything. To ask for help is framed as failure. The people whom they love have to interpret their sense of love and compassion only through grandiose acts or through that narrow conduit of allowed emotional reactions… But it is so hard to connect with someone through the medium of anger.

When people are told “suck it up! Be a man!” it make those things aspirational… But it’s just the sugar around the outside of the conditioning. The inside is bitter isolation. I will always remember my Mom telling me that my Dad was so scared to have sons. He didn’t think he could do right by sons. He struggled so hard with his own conditioning but it never suited him. It never suited my grandfather to whom my Dad always felt like he communicated with always at a distance, the mask only cracking when he was sick in hospital and my Granddad never left his bedside. A deep reservoir of feeling that could never be expressed except in silence between men except under extremes. A strict taboo of self denial… For what?

Undoing that damage is so hard even when you are aware of it. The toxicity can’t always be healed and some of that damage is permanent.