I live in Idaho and guarantee this will be used by chucklefucks to not only harass trans people, but cis women who don’t fit their standard of beauty and effeminate cis men. Not that they don’t already, but now they can really fuck with someone by calling the cops and disrupting the person’s day rather than just snide comments.

I guess I’d always taken balls to be more like a bouncy ball than a ball of yarn, but TIL. Also added “my balls unraveling” to the list of lurking fears.

In high school I got one kicked back into my body by a wild kick in a soccer game, dude straight punted that thing into my guts. Then it swelled and refused to drop. Almost had to have surgery but it did descend on its own. I’ve had some other serious injuries in life but that, that was a level all its own.

His acolytes have not just normalized what he is, they celebrate it because they’re so invested in “if libs hate it we love it”. This guy was at CPAC this weekend and I’ve seen similar, if not quite so explicit, messaging floating around. The news will downplay it and MAGA will get aroused by knowing their guy’s perversion offended someone.

Her: “Babe, just use the map.”

Him: “I know what I’m doing!!!”

/proceeds to furiously grind her vulva into her pelvic bone

Username checks out.

See, there it is! You still care enough that when your pride is poked you’ll take action and defend yourself. You’re not entirely apathetic. Dare I say… there’s hope for you yet?

Don’t mistake awareness for comfort. We catch a lot of heat for our ridiculous levels of gun violence, but living around that many guns, in a nation where cops, ICE, and counter-protestors armed with assault rifles are just looking for an excuse to unload, you learn how far to push without causing a situation where strays are flying into the crowd. At Defund the Police and Pride we’ve had jacked up pick-ups filled with armed red necks roll coal and brandish on us in full view of the cops; nothing happened. At BLM one of them popped a shot off to spook the crowd; caught, claimed he accidentally turned the safety off, no charges. How many videos are there of monster trucks plowing into crowds? Plus, the new tactic is to show up covered in cameras, incite a fight, play victim, get the protestor arrested. Our courts are theirs and our prison system is egregiously punitive. And don’t doubt that a lot of us protesting are legally carrying. You really don’t want to see an American protest turn into a shootout, and the closer it gets to becoming one the more cautious we are about setting it off without a safety plan.

IDK. You did seem to recognize that you were getting shamed, so either you took a shot in the dark and were right or you read it. But, I’d rather type bullshit than sit at home like a chickenshit.

Well, this is a recent shot from CPAC, so they’ve moved on to full-blown normalizing it, so I agree that your hat is quite safe.

Same. Next time we’re in nuclear holocaust dreamland I’ll wave!

No, you’re apathetic, I assume you can’t be troubled to read.

Single use and flushable.

I down to see the mutants, the zombies, the hot rod racing war bands, the increasingly intelligent apes. But if it just ends up being cancer and eating rats… meh, I’ll bail.

The shaming is for the self-awareness that you are know of the problem, have the ability to act, but chose not to care and do nothing. Nature doesn’t care about hope. As far as we know humans are the only animals with a concept of “hope” because we deeply understand that our actions have consequences, good and bad/short term and long term, excel at pattern recognition, keep detailed histories, can plan for the future, and can build or destroy to such an extreme we’ve changed the climate of the planet itself. We know our personal nature has a very ugly side like selfishness, hate, greed, lust, and that we often treat each other like commodities or barriers to our own success. Hope is the mentality that comes from being self-aware of our own limitations and is how we convince ourselves we can do something, personally or collectively, when everything says “it’s not possible”. There’s a fine line between that and bashing one’s head against a wall trying to get a different result out of the same wrong method, but innovation is what made us succeed. Hope isn’t a bad thing, but you don’t need it to attempt to do anything since hope does nothing but make yourself feel better about your odds of success when the struggle is real. Lacking hope doesn’t make you helpless, just unhelpful.

A better chance is relative to the action taken and the ability of the person taking it. If I watch a house burn from across the street I have a better chance of not getting burned than if I go in to try and help someone escape. If I go in to help someone escape I have a better chance of helping them than if I stood outside and watched. Now the best chance they have is if the fire department is there, as they have the skill and equipment to do it the safest, but sometimes you have to make a choice and do the best with what you’ve got.

In Trump’s America, I have a great chance of avoiding the worst of his policies because I’m a cis white dude. If I embraced it there’s a good chance I can get ahead. If I continue to loudly express my opposition to it there’s a good chance I’ll get arrested/assaulted/killed.

Not every action needs to be monumental, nor does it all require risk. It takes next to no effort and poses minimal risk for me to pick a worm up off the concrete and toss it into the dirt. The worm’s got a better chance at living, even though whether it does or does not has no affect on affect me, the world, or the universe in any meaningful way. Nobody will ever know what I did, the worm doesn’t understand, and if I didn’t do something the only consequence would be pondering “why didn’t I help when doing so cost me nothing?”

I ain’t here to convince you because apathy is a choice of selfish convenience. You’d take action (or I guess if you’re really invested in apathy, die) if outside forces threatened you, but you’ve got to will yourself to do it on behalf of others.

America is only in a decline because you choose to see it as declining. Conservatives saw the progress that was being made as the decline of their version of “how it should be”, proposed an entire Project book of solutions, and have rapidly stopped the decline of their way of life at the expense of everyone not in their camp (well, a lot of them are fucked by it but they never thought it would happen to them).

Sometimes progress is revolutionary and rapid, sometimes it’s tunneling through bedrock with your fingernails. You might not see the other side in your lifetime, but what you achieved makes the job of the person who comes after you that much easier. Right now conservatives are filling every hole we’ve ever started tunneling- from women’s right, to minority rights, to civil rights regardless of what race/gender/or orientation you are- with concrete and they’re not going to stop until they erase what we have done.

There’s a lot of things that happen in the world that neither you or I have the power to change. But every day you chose to let something you could affect be trampled unchallenged, your apathy is their gain. Conservatives banded together despite their differences and showed they were willing to commit violence to get their change, and they empowered the most selfish among them to be their figurehead. I really don’t know what left-wing Americans want, their own super-lib version of Trump that will use authority to make all their dreams come true, or to sit around and be well-meaning victims who blame a decline on the inability to find a dictator of their own. You have agency, go use it even if it’s not going stop every wrong currently happening.

This encapsulates why it’s so hard to get the majority of Americans to care. The cycle of war, price increases, dwindling quality of life, crumbling infrastructure, growing wealth inequality, racism, misogyny, bigotry; it’s all normalized over decades. Americans don’t get shocked by anything unless it happens directly to them. And not “oh gas prices are up again, that sucks”, but “a cop gunned down my child”. Without having to suffer personally a lot of us will continue to abide the suffering of others and act like being made aware of it is an affront to our right to blissful ignorance.

“ICE Out!” varies state to state. Minnesota and Portland are targeted with an increased presence because the regime wants to control the kickback. In my state there’s no mass presence even though the arrests are still occurring. They’re less visible, harder to track, don’t build castles that can be sieged, and the vast majority of the work is being done by local/state police officers because state leadership are boot-lickers. ICE creates bonfires for attention but a lot of the work is being carried out dimly and discretely. It’s a lot harder to take action, organize counter-protests, make local chats, and follow them with whistles when it’s one or two unmarked cops trolling vs a squad of them going door to door.