If it was ruled unconstitutional you’d think it would automatically be considered repealed
The change in law resolves a lot of peripheral bullshit, because the Legislature can long windedly close the door on municipal bigots who think they can rules lawyer homophobia at the local level.
Similarly, articulating bigotry back into state law can open the door for homophobic municipalities to harass gay couples.
Return it to the Cuban people from whom it was stolen, maybe?
Suspicious that these are places difficult to escape.
It’s just magical realism. Easier to believe in a magical utopia on Mars than to deliver on a municipal government that isn’t overrun by bears.
It’s not Musk being influenced by Cyberpunk nearly so much that Cyberpunk’s development was influenced by Prospera, Seasteading, Balaji Srinivasen’s “The Network State” and other “Startup City” anarcho-capitalist advocacy efforts.
I don’t want to live in that city, though.
The root of the appeal of the Free Enterprise Zone model originally embraced by Singapore, Hong Kong, Manilla, Monaco, and other micro-states is that you can consolidate the financial industry into a walled garden and then strictly control the lives of the inhabitants with a hyper-military police state.
Then the outlands are just impoverished wastes. Real political freedom, but no access to capital. Or real economic freedom, but no civil rights.
It isn’t that you “don’t want to live in the city”, because you absolutely will want to live there when presented with the alternatives. You’re presented with a false choice of proximity to wealth versus social autonomy.
The key to the penny auction was intimidating speculators and outside interests from scooping up property being auctioned away.
Good luck intimating a Blackrock agent at a sheriff’s auction in the modern United States. You’re not going to scare off a trillion dollar oligarch and a paramilitary police state with pitchforks
Do you mean lentils or are you suggesting we’re going to be eating door jams?
Not hypothetical
possibilities
?
And what does that story have to do with generational pressure?
The dead family aren’t around to give better advise
All the adults told us it would be better for us than for them.
All the adults told us that it was our responsibility to do better than they’d done things. Some of the adults tried to help out along the way, while other adults knee-capped us and robbed us and threw us in jail for the crime of becoming poor.
And there’s a real selection bias along the way. A friend of mine was six years old when her dad shoved her out of the way of a speeding car. He died. She and the driver lived. She got to grow up in a world without a father willing to give everything to protect her. But the guy who killed her dad kept on ticking.
As we carve out more and more space for reckless, heartless people, we lose the honest and selfless ones along the way. In the end, a generation that selects for selfish people is going to be dominated by the most ruthless.
It is not unfair to clock the first bit. But you can’t count hypothetical WW3s. That’s like Boomers saying they lived through Hypothetical Nuclear Winter.
Also, if we’re counting recessions as millennials, you can’t neglect the '87 crash and the '01 dot-com bubble. If we’re counting plagues, you can’t leave out AIDS.
Understanding is cemented in one’s original source of information about the world. Shaping a pre-existing understand requires not just accuracy but volume, because you’re not competing against faulty logic. You’re competing against accumulated memories.
If someone is deep into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, what is shaping their opinion is the consistent repetition of orthodoxy over time. Similarly, if someone is highly educated in a particular scientific field, their opinion is shaped by the persistent need to reaffirm fundamental truths in order to succeed and progress. We are not computers. We are not creatures of pure logic. We are the accumulation of our prior experiences and exposures.
You should not be surprised if an individual - when confronted with a narrow band of contrary information - does not immediately jettison all their prior information. Because ask yourself - would you? I mean, if a single guy showed up with a stack of papers insisting he’s proved without a shadow of a doubt that chemtrails are real and the entire professional weather reporting community is lying to you, is there anything they could show you that you wouldn’t greet with skepticism proportional to your exposure to professional weather science?
Because, if the answer is “No”, then why would you expect someone immersed in hundreds of hours of conspiracy theory podcasts and think pieces and social media conversations to behave any differently?
The FBI is not on Trump’s side.
The director of the FBI is absolutely on Trump’s side. And anyone downstream of him who isn’t is getting weeded out.
That’s what Trump wants.
It’s win-win. Either Dems don’t sign a blank check, and Trump uses this as an excuse to hand more power to the DHS. Or Dems do sign a blank check, and Trump uses it to fund an FBI dedicated to further dismantling the democratic state.
President Xi, I am sending you Trump’s golf schedule by way of TikTok coded message.
Please, President Pooh-Bear, you’re our only hope.
Mendacity.
He knew. He didn’t care. He just put out his hand and dared the Senate not to give him a blank check.
And he’s going to get that check, because Democrats more are terrified of looking obstructionist than of looking like they can govern.
it’s all a magical story about a dude who didn’t exist at all probably
No shortage of self-proclaimed messiahs and apocalyptic prophets running around Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Less a question of whether Jesus existed than which one you’re talking about.
American Christian resists the message but embraces the magic.
That’s hardly an American thing. All the Abrahamic religions and the pagan ones, too, were obsessed with the magical realism of their personal mythologies.
Neither were people blind, deaf, and dumb to the social message of the gospels. But people do lose sight of them as you become less like a 1st century apostle and more like a 1st century Pharasise.
What Republicans have come to realize (and Democrats refuse to accept) is that you can just DO THINGS at the executive level. And if the bureaucrats follow along, then you’ve functionally established new policy.
The Iowa legislature can pass a rule saying “No more issuing marriage contracts to gay couples” and the state courts can say “Okay, we’ll stop doing that and we’ll also stop recognizing existing contracts”, and all the low level county officials can just ignore the legal status of gay married families and then private businesses can follow suit. And then that’s it. No SCOTUS decision is going to pay out on insurance benefits claims to a legally de-certified no-longer-spouse.
On the flip side, the Iowa legislature can author this act and the people of Iowa can rise up in protest and say “Fuck you, we won’t do what you tell us.” Private businesses can continue to honor marriage contracts. Low level bureaucrats can continue to treat gay couples as married. Mid-level bureaucrats can defend and promote them. High level bureaucrats who continue to force these abhorrent laws on people can be removed from office.
The problem is that… the fish rots from the head. More likely than not, we’re seeing this push because Iowa’s basket of deplorable plutocrats want to expand the number of minorities they can piss and shit all over. Just like how DOGE gutted the “Woke” federal bureaucracy, I suspect we’re going to see Iowa state leadership tearing the spine out of any state or local government agency that refuses to accept gay rights are expired.
Do you have the courage to stand up to your boss? Do you have the support of your friends and coworkers to call a strike in a business that singles out the LGBTQ folks who work there? Will you march on your city council and demand they take your side or get out of the way? Will you march on your state house? Will you stare down a bunch of bigots in badges when you do it?
This is a big ask and its not easy to find enough folks willing to stand up for what is right.
In fairness, the thing he said that got everyone upset was “I am the King of Kings, abandon all your worldly ties and join me on a pilgrimage to the capital city of the Levant. I will fulfill the ancient prophecy of a new independent Jewish state blessed by the One True God who may or may not also be me, we’ll sort that out in another 300 years.”
But the “Good Omens” line makes for better dark comedy.
That was a bullshit twist ending and if dragging out an aging Schwarzenegger to do some of the stiffest line-reads in his career hadn’t spoiled the franchise, I’d say this was what put it out to pasture.
The thing that made the first two films (and the short-lived TV spin off) cool was this idea of a modern day insurgency against a dystopian future. As soon as you concede Judgement Day is irreversible, it sucks all the drama out of the story. Now you’ve just got What If Rambos Were Robots And They Were Fighting: The Movie, minus all that social baggage about Vietnam.
They want a policy and they’re loudly advocating that any politicians standing in their way get removed.
The thing they’re asking for is awful. But God Damn, this is the kind of FDR/LBJ style titty twisting that any major legislation needs in order to happen in this country.