I listen to a podcast by a licensed therapist (Dr Laura Anderson, Sunday School Dropouts) who specializes in helping people recover from religious trauma, and honestly, she does argue that high control religion works a lot like the dynamics of abusive personal relationships. She also notes that when people are used to being shamed/coerced/guilted/etc for religious reasons, they’re more likely to accept abusive behaviors in personal relationships as well–it’s already normal stuff. And most of the arguments I’ve heard in favor of preserving child marriages comes from religious folks asking “what happens when a 15 year old gets pregnant, the baby needs both a father and a mother!” Instead of wanting to use investigation or nuance, child marriages are a quick fix to always complicated situations.

I’ve heard people argue for (age)x.5+7=not creepy. Seems moderately reasonable.

I wonder if all the schools and hospitals and government buildings having to close and/or evacuate due to bomb threats will be enough for the burden of proof. It’s not directly threatening language, but it certainly was a tangible, disruptive result.

You mean that they aren’t just cursed for having made a deal with demons? /s

Though that is a shitty thing that I heard on American (religious) TV 20 years ago. Poison to understanding & compassion.

I have no argument in general for you, you made good points. But it’s also so, so at odds with all the messaging around teen pregnancy that I remember so clearly growing up. Wait until you can afford it, wait until you have a career, a home, wait until you’re married… From basically 8+, my view of pregnancy was that it fucked up someone’s life.

But now, governments want their people to go against all that programming for absolutely no reward and more emotional manipulation (worrying about everything that these tiny humans need, worrying about staying alive and productive enough as one of only two people responsible for the tiny humans, etc). Wtf, why?

In Malala Yousafzai’s book, she credits the Taliban first getting into her community by coming through the radio. As an American, I’ve thought about that a lot over the years.

My local favorite is apple slices+bacon, it’s the best.

Dank memes can’t melt steel beams.

7/11 was a part time job.

No, but I’ve watched Disneys Descendants. A bunch of villain’s kids get to go to school after being cut off from society all their lives due to their parents choices. The kids come in to school dedicated to evil, but the more they learn & get to know people, the more they all decide to be good people.

I have no idea how that relates to anything in the real world in the past however many years.

When I went to price it out at the store, the line for a dumb phone was going to cost $30/mo more than a smart phone. It was dumb.

Why choose? Use electricity and destroy living creatures: https://time.com/6982015/bitcoin-mining-texas-health/

It’s not just nerds with a spare laptop mining anymore. This money wants returns in ‘not being regulated.’

There have been a lot of good books in the last few years about how Christian came to be so culturally interchangable with Republican. One I read and got a lot out of was “Jesus & John Wayne”, and the author does a good job tracking the rightward shift from a lot of different organizations and how they were able to permeate through multiple denominations. Just sharing in case anyone wants to go look at some of these connections themselves.

And who have just relocated their best hostages to within Putin’s power. Yes, bring your nine children and wife along to Russia–now stay in rank on the front line, or maybe your oldest gets to come serve in your place (earlier than they would have anyway)!

Another method: tax is often about 8%, so double that as a baseline and adjust from there.

I mean, there are folks trying, but I don’t really like what they’re trying for.

I commented this elsewhere too, but dude took this expertise with a tough subject and shared it well with the high schoolers he taught: Tim Walz’s Class Project on the Holocaust Draws New Attention Online https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/us/politics/tim-walz-holocaust-class-rwanda-genocide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ck4.FpW4.05czkX9J5r9u

And back in the real world, he went on to use that critical thinking in classroom assignments, helping students understand actions and attitudes that lead to genocide: Tim Walz’s Class Project on the Holocaust Draws New Attention Online https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/us/politics/tim-walz-holocaust-class-rwanda-genocide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ck4.FpW4.05czkX9J5r9u

Tldr, in one of his geography classes, Walz taught his class about how violence rises, class voted on what country they thought likely to deal with that kind of violence, like a year later the Rwanda genocide began.

I think you’re totally right about the permanent underclass thing. And it has been for a long time. This week I was looking into the history of education migrants’ kids in the US. Our current stance of educating kids came from Texas passing a law in the 70s to strip state funding for schools which chose to enroll the children of undocumented people. (Another case of Texas using its state power to bully people; it’s always fucking Texas). That law was challenged and in 1982 the Supreme Court ruled against it; Judge Brennan wrote an opinion specifically citing the creation of a permanent underclass of illiterate people not fit to contribute to any country. He called it “bad public policy.” It was crazy to see like, reasonable ideas about society come through in a supreme court ruling, that’s a long time past.

I think it could be viable to lock up/fine into oblivion employers hiring migrant labor specifically to be abusive/cheap. But of course a lot of monied interests would be against it. America always seems terrified about scaring corporations off. And it’s so much easier to blame individuals and have them internalize the pain than to deal with the systems which set the situations.

God I would totally believe that. This summer, my workplace bought institutional access to the NYT, so for the first time in way too long, I check a single publications’ headlines most days, and it was stark how every day they were calling on Biden not to run. Those were consistently top of page more than any other issue until he did step down. I was surprised.

But I also don’t want to lock up the person employing another one out of goodness. Hiring 1-2 people shouldn’t be the thing to punish.I want the people and the industries who make a habit of using and abusing undocumented labor to deal with a rule like this. Agriculture and meat processing, especially.