That there is no tried and true fix for. The US is an old Democracy with a massive cultural complex around not changing anything a founding father sneezed on. There’s some weird exploits in the 9th and 10th Amendments that could potentially cause a massive melt down if a sitting government decided to ever try and use them but it is just theoretical and anti-originalist so it’s unlikely.

I look at the US government being in a death spiral as a separate but related problem. If your air conditioning isn’t working and your engine is busted, the air conditioner isn’t really your first priority.

Basically pass something through government channels to wrest the service from the hands of individualized businesses wearing the skins of hospitals and the business complex of health insurance… Like every other nation who has a social system did at some point in the past.

It’s kind of easy to forget but like sanitation, fire service, post, police services, hospitals, secular school systems … Those were all exclusively the domain of for profit businesses once. Just because something currently lines someone’s private pockets doesn’t mean that makes it untouchable. It has all been done before. Just wiping out the third party insurance companies alone and socializing the insurance would probably do wonders.

I am not sure that’s entirely it. Like… Those “exclusive neighbourhoods” basically just means “has fence and security system”. If you didn’t care about getting caught - basically spree killer style martyrdom- there isn’t much to stop you. Most CEOs are notorious creatures of habit and they publicize where they will be fairly regularly. Just hang out by the right golf course and you’ll find em.

I think it’s just a different mindset. Maybe picking a specific target is more of a cold blooded logic killer thing not a hot blooded spree killer thing and the two require entirely separate buy ins? Or the target type is the difference. Spree killers tend to pick big populations for shock value or because it represents a wider social movement. They also take a bunch of people with them which probably satisfies a feeling of making it “worth it”. It is kind of a “fuck that guy in particular” kind of premeditation you would need combined with a conviction to essentially light yourself on fire to burn someone else… And a one to one trade isn’t exactly a feel good catharsis.

I don’t think it’s a matter that a couple of isolated incidents wouldn’t cause a panic or not be consequential on a wider scale. I feel like the allure of extreme wealth would lose it’s luster pretty fast if suddenly people felt the need to have extreme security details all the time. I don’t think it would stop people from dragon hording but it wouldn’t take too many incidents before they all would be too afraid to walk to the corner to grab a coffee in person at least for awhile. Generally being rich comes with the idea that it gives you more freedom, not less.

I think it’s something on the horizon though. A lot of the language around the extreme wealthy is pretty dehumanizing. Like “He seems like a robot” or “souless narcissistic dirtbag” or “eat the rich” type rhetoric is pretty normalized. I think it’s just most people value themselves more highly then taking out a single CEO regardless of the differing scope of individual impacts. We are kind of wired to look at the extreme wealthy as both above and apart in ability to impact the world stage… While simultaneously being kind of non-special people who aren’t more or less worthwhile than we ourselves. It might just be that there’s still enough hope around that things will change through non-violent means… But I think it is something more about the basic mental math.

I personally just hope we can tax the everliving bajeezus out of them and start some sensible basic quality of life initiatives and electoral reform before it starts getting properly ugly.

I realize this is gunna make me sound fairly radical and murdery, but it’s more legit curiousity…

I sometimes wonder why out of all the people living in misery why someone hasn’t gone on to just pick a CEO and… assassinate them? Like they are generally not super well protected. They aren’t living like spies with people tasting their food for poison or anything.

People have been losing their patience with Corporate wealth for a long time and talking pitchforks for decades but it’s not like these people are untouchable and unknowable. A lot of this stuff is fairly public information. I figure the prerequisites for stochastic terrorism would be pretty ripe but like… Why haven’t we heard about even one case? Is it just too personal you think? What is the threshold for domestic terrorist incidents? Why do we see all these lone wolf gunman going after schools and clubs because they have been made so VERY angry… but not tracking down singular people? Is it a different psychological requirement?

No prob! Science and frog conservation is cool.

When I was in high school we had this whole chant about babies and trash compactors and other edgy shit we thought was the funniest thing. Crazily enough… none of us ever harmed a kid and if anyone would have actually put a baby in harms way where we could see we would have been traumatized.

Ease off the pearls there. A lot of Queer folks make fun of the rhetoric that Conservatives sling around about being bogeymen after kids , particularly during Pride. A rowdy bunch of party people probably high as kites being dumb and edgy isn’t news in most places. Treating the matter as though every single one of us has to be paragons of proper behaviour without exception every moment isn’t exactly a bar any group of people is going to meet. Moreover why should everyone have to be subject to group punishment for an individual’s transgression? If a boss punished everyone at your workplace because one person came in late how would you react?

A lot of the sentiments inside the community are that it doesn’t matter how often we treat everything seriously, speak eloquently or point to actual studies and literature about how we’re just people who are underserved by beaurcratic structures, children are not harmed by association and we are not monsters… All it takes is a couple of people being silly once and suddenly every nasty bigoted fear is confirmed beyond shadow of a doubt… So why bother? It’s an impossible standard.

I mean… There’s like seven of them and two designs are used by groups that are known to be used by bigots during marches to politically protest a number of LGBTQIA+ civil rights issues.

But here you go, the cis flag colors to fly.

https://gender.fandom.com/wiki/Cisgender

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4586825/

Frogs and other amphibians are actually incredibly sensitive to all manner of chemicals. Heavy metals, trace pharmaceutical contamination in human wastewater… They basically breathe water through their very thin skin and have delicate tissues overall. They provide unique issues for conservationists because they are usually the first water related species to collapse.

Humans have a history of being able to tolerate years and years of direct contact with arsenic, lead and various toxins. Your basic oil paint set from before 1950’s has a lifetimes worth of a modern person’s regular exposure. Frogs are a poor indicator of how humans react to anything.

Plant based estrogens don’t impact humans much. They do sheep… But only because they have four stomachs and can actually sort of process them. In humans they just slip through the system mostly untouched.

I find it very strange as someone as comfortably far away from French Canada one can be while still being on the continent that I technically am described as French by this diagram. I failed French so hard in 8th grade my teacher passed me on the promise that I never take another French class.

Honestly I hear a lot of this complained about in Canada to try and make a Privatized system seem more reasonable…

And seriously it’s grass is greener nonsense. I have American friends with joint issues. They may got their care maybe like two months faster than I did… And some of them are still paying it down five years later. I can afford to hobble for a little longer if it means the bank doesn’t own my soul.

Who wants to deal with people on a day off?

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

That’s kind of my reasoning for thinking this whole bear thing is out of proportion. I grew up knowing how to deal with bears. If you’re talking black bear you make a bunch of scary confusing noise and look big or… If you are already noisy they just steer clear and leave you the fuck alone. You gotta be pretty deep woods to encounter Grizzlies and most of the time they are chill. If they aren’t, play dead or go up a tree.

I don’t care if all a rando person, male, female non-binary whatever - does is try and strike up a conversation, I don’t go to the woods to socialize. Act like a proper bear and gimme my gorram space!

I would argue that the connection is a lot older than Nazis. The era around 1250 responded to a nasty wave of the Black death by Christian leaders collaborating to simultaneously fight the population decline by criminalizing abortion friendly midwifery and ostracize and subjugate gender and sexual minorities because they feared the collapse of society due to a population bust. As such what was taught by the church up to that point began to get new connotations. Jewish populations were persecuted and killed as scapegoats for the cause of the plague. Folk medicine women and non-conforming men were killed and condemned for witchcraft. While women stepped up to fill the roles of men during the plague once the population was rebounding their power of place in society was to be broken as the Church leaned on it’s misogynistic practices and preached of the dangers to society and the family…

Nazisim is just a more modern echo of well established means to break the power of non compliant of groups who can be scapegoated or subjugated into subservience to Christians who feel threatened, a group that centers nominally celebate and wealthy men whose only contact with women is in a subordinate role.

So… The law isn’t static. With the previous Supreme Court ruling lending more power to the constitutional right to own and carry guns all those laws that you mentioned that originally banned him no longer have rock solid ground for existing at all.

Basically a state can pass any law it likes, it’s only once it gets used against someone that it can go through the process of being tested as a valid law by punch testing it’s capacity as constitutional violation. If there is a change to the precedent of the Constitution then then anything still in the appeals process can invoke the law as long as they can bring up reasonable proof that a current trial can support questions of constitutional violations.

His defense was basically capitalizing on a change in the law to bring into question every gun law on the books that was, prior to the new Supreme Court ruling was considered fairly standard… If the Supreme Court judged the state law in conflict with the new established constitutional interpretation basically the arrest isn’t valid and the persecution would have to reconstruct the case from scratch and re-trial… And creating a domino effect potentially destroying all state gun restrictions. It’s not surprising that they ruled how they did. They’d get so much kickback…

If someone’s fundamental rights are violated in the process of enacting the law the trial conviction is considered invalid. So he’s kind of has been under shrodinger’s conviction for a federal crime, neither considered a vaild nor invalid convict until this box was opened.

As a non-binary trans person I gotta say that lines up. A lot of women are not well equipped to intuit men’s emotions as they are set behind a veneer of distance and a lot of men often aren’t able to apply appropriate empathy to women because they don’t afford them the same level of respect and attention as people who have that same veneer. So women get coded to men as over emotional and men often feel angry and isolated because women aren’t trying particularly hard to empathize and there is a lot of times when their feelings are dismissed as not as important. Then everything becomes extra strained when anxieties about heterosexual extra partner sexual liasons means one gets separated from a general population into strictly people whom your partner feels you may safe being around.

I am very lucky. I exist in an excellent personal community. The cis folk I am friends with are all friends across any concept of gender and there’s other trans folk in my cohort which create additional inroads to understanding different experiences. We also don’t specifically gender anything, nobody is ever teased for not living up to gendered expectations and discussions are frank and open. I only experience this anxious distance between the genders in groups of co-workers or at family functions.

Conspiracies that require absolute lock tight secrecy to function at a basic level aren’t generally tenable to be sustained for longer than a handful of years at a time at most. Somebody always fucks up or basically was just lucky nobody checked for awhile. The nessesity of any large scale collaboration creates inefficiencies and potential error points in the system. Even the best of the best spy agencies fuck up and get caught rather routinely, particularly when operating on their home soil. A lot of investigative journalists accidentally trip over stuff all the time but have good faith arrangements (or in some places laws) to not disclose the active manoeuvres of the state to the public.

It’s just really hard for humans in general to accept that events that effected them or things they care about very deeply personally weren’t somehow also grand in design. Grocking sometimes it really is just random chance or stupid mishandling is not something we’re well wired to handle. Stories of all powerful conspiracies masterminding the world scratch that itch… But logistically speaking the conspiracy aspect is completely unnecessary. If someone is trying to blame a nebulous bogeymen who exists as nameless, numberless ultimately wealthy but also totally off the books super spies… chances are they are just trying to capitalize on making you feel flattered, smart and empowered by something “only you are smart enough to believe” - while feeding you bullshit they can personally profit from in some way with you none the wiser.

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.

Yes you did do it right, lol…and pokemon is pronounced Po- kay (or like Quay) and the same mon as in monster.

And I absolutely don’t intend to put you on blast. It’s just you can kind of look at language as a kind of technology. That tech can be used to spot minute differences to inform people of a lot of things… Trans people often have to live a little bit like spies in high risk situations so dogwhistles can actually be helpful technology to us assess an environment and risks. Muddying the water can actually make things harder.

Like I for instance pass mostly as a cis person… though not in the way I would hope for. I am not physically transitioning for partner related reasons so while a lot of people can suspect I am some kind of queer they often falsely assume my gender and pronouns based on my body.

Because I am always working with new people I basically take mental hits every all day at work that other people are entirely unaware of. It tends to absolutely wreck my self esteem and makes me feel really isolated…But it’s sometimes safer than being “out”. People who make a mistake because they don’t know are trans are a lot easier to deal with then people who know and aren’t adapting well. Like when someone is making a bunch of mistakes with my pronouns it brings way more attention to the fact their brains do not register me as my gender and they are undertaking an artificial process. When they undergo that process I have to work a little harder to teach, and let them know that I am okay, that I understand, reassure them they are doing fine… It takes a lot out of me to do. EVERYONE fucks up pronoun changes. Coming out and getting people used to me is work that I am gunna be doing over and over and over. If I am gunna have to do that I am gunna pick candidates who I know will be worth the personal effort of onboarding or who make my job easier who already have the playbook down and just haven’t put it into practice.

Currently I am out selectively only to people I judge as safe. How I judge rather people are safe are not is by how they comport themselves. What sort of language they use, how attentive they are when I use they/them pronouns when referring to friends of mine when trading stories, how they react to different conversational topics, what do they find funny and how willing they are to defer to someone else’s needs… It could be veganism, or a religious practice done for comfort or making adjustments for a person with a disability, if you show that you are willing to make concessions or small behavioural changes because you value other people’s comfort that’s a MAJOR green flag.

It sucks but I am literally running an active risk assessment of everyone I meet in a professional setting. I do this because even if they aren’t actively bigoted they can make my life a hell.

I had a boss who just wanted to debate trans talking points all the time while we could not leave our posts and I lived in constant fear he’d figure me out… because becoming his personal entrapped ambassador for a community he had zero understanding of was going to add way more patience and effort just to get through my day than any of my coworkers would be required to muster. I would likely lose my job because even if he was not intentionally mean dealing with being the subject of his intensified curiosity and questions that are generally invasive would drive me to either need to leave or do something that would get me fired.

We trans folk are generally skittish of folk who take a little too much interest in us because of our transness. It’s can be a lot of work to just get people to calm down, not be self conscious around us like you’re scared doing of something wrong and not treat us as special. Just making us feel like comfortably normal people doing regular people things is a wonderful gift. In the case of your store based acquaintance it’s generally safer to like compliment her clothes or jewelry or something. It’s like saying “I think you’re cool” without making her feel self conscious that people are staring at aspects herself that trigger that fear of being observed as something abnormal.

So if it helps think of the adaptation as learning to speak trans safety code. If you are saying “trans people” in an office full of co-workers who use “transgenders” you are using language technology to fly your green flag in a sea of ambiguously checkered red. We’ll spot you.