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Keyser_Soze posted:Lester Holt and NBC just went out of there way twice to mention that today's school shooter was "Trans" and even asked the Nashville Police Chief if that had anything to do with it. I had the same reaction to hearing that. What a stupid loving question. You wouldn't ask the cops if mass shooting #67309 had anything to do with the shooter being a straight white cis dude, would you? Also I was reminded that just a week or two ago, Tucker Carlson did a segment on the danger of trans people who are arming themselves in self defense. This has the potential to get really ugly.
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Mar 28, 2023 02:43
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Discendo Vox posted:Yes, this is indeed the line that the gun lobby promotes. Thanks for the futility rhetoric. Great contribution, A+. Feel free to offer any reason that people shouldn't think that our politicians have failed to address this issue for literally decades.
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Mar 29, 2023 03:27
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I'm asking DV to provide people with some reason to feel hopeful rather than scolding them for feeling hopeless. e: Like I said, mass shootings have been a major problem for 25 years. The majority of the population support gun control, but somehow this has not translated to meaningful legislation. You can't lay the blame entirely on the Republicans, because the Democrats have had opportunities in the past but have squandered them. I'm not saying that people should feel hopeless, to be clear. But I don't think it's very helpful to make sarcastic comments about spreading "futility rhetoric". Fister Roboto fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Mar 29, 2023 |
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Mar 29, 2023 03:46
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Discendo Vox posted:A bunch of gun control laws were passed just in the last year. I know we've had this conversation before, and I know you know I have provided a whole effortpost description of how this framing is used to derail discussion of policy change, including specific examples from the NRA. I also know you know that setting "reason to feel hope" as a standard for proof shuts down discussion because it's unfalsifiable, just like shifting your standard to "meaningful" legislation is. It's also why blaming "politicians" is nonsense when, as we've also already covered, it's overwhelmingly the Republicans and specifically their control of the courts that are keeping gun control laws from happening. I'm not asking you to prove anything. Because yeah, of course hope isn't something you can prove. I'm not trying to have a debate with you. Just... have a normal conversation, please. I promise I'm not trolling you or whatever. I know that you're concerned about the feeling of futility being spread. I believe you. The problem though, as I see it, is that you're not helping to stop it. Sarcastically dismissing genuine concern as repeating gun lobby lines doesn't make anyone feel like things aren't futile, and it might just have the opposite effect. It's good that new gun control legislation is being passed. But it's obviously not enough, because mass shootings and gun deaths are still outrageously high. Again, just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that we should give up on this. We both want the same thing, but where we disagree is on how quickly it should come about. I think that more pressure needs to be placed on politicians to pass more and better legislation. Especially on democrats, not because lol dems suck or whatever, but because they can actually be pressured. And if gop control of the courts is hampering progress, then something needs to be done about that. I know that you are very knowledgeable on legal matters. But I'd politely ask that you consider that knowledge isn't everything. There are many intangible, unquantifiable things, like hope, that are nonetheless important in driving political action.
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Mar 29, 2023 06:24
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I have to wonder when and why "manifesto" became shorthand in the public mind for "insane lengthy screed written by violent terrorists".
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Mar 30, 2023 17:25
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Sir Lemming posted:I'm looking forward to the inevitable incoherent rants of "What about due process?! What about innocent until proven guilty?" after like 4 years of due process proving him guilty "This is AMERICA not a BANANA REPUBLIC!!!" (zero awareness of why banana republics had to imprison their insanely corrupt dictators)
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Mar 31, 2023 00:38
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It's OK for Milton Berle, Monty Python, Kids in the Hall, etc to do drag because they're not drag queens. It's bad for drag queens to do drag because they're drag queens. That might sound ridiculous to people who aren't huge pieces of poo poo, but that's fascism for you.
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Apr 2, 2023 05:15
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sgbyou posted:Voting against your own interests in order to gently caress over some minorities seems self inflicted to me. It's not that simple though. It's not like they're being presented with honest and objective facts and they're just deciding that they'd rather gently caress over minorities instead of have a better life. The problem is that they are being told over and over again that the minorities are the reason why they don't have a better life. They're being told that voting to gently caress over minorities IS voting in their own interests.
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Apr 3, 2023 22:20
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Mellow Seas posted:lol, how could I possibly believe that? You know me well enough to know I’m not that ignorant. I didn’t say “collapse”, I said “collapse into totalitarianism,” which it had fully done by WW2. (If you don’t think that’s accurate then I dunno what to tell you there.) What does "collapse into totalitarianism" mean though? The USSR definitely became more totalitarian, but I wouldn't call what it did in WW2 "collapse".
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Apr 4, 2023 19:17
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Ither posted:I have no idea why my fellow Americans are so obsessed with cheese. I kind of agree with you that Americans use too much cheese in everything, but I absolutely will not tolerate this cheeseburger slander 
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Apr 5, 2023 00:05
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cat botherer posted:A lot of the "glass of red wine a day is good for your health Also iirc, those studies dont control for economic status. Turns out that people who can afford to drink wine with every dinner tend to experience less stress in their lives and can afford to eat healthier food and work out more often.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:20
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" type studies received funding from the booze industry, as the article mentions. A lot of people seem to think that funding sources don't influence our beautiful and objective scientists, but it's just not true on the whole.
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Gyges posted:No, there was absolutely a huge push for the healthy nature of a glass of wine or a dark beer with dinner. It was impossible to get through the 90s without being insisted to that tannins were amazing for your health, and that the best place to find them was red wines and certain beers. I'm absolutely shocked that scientists and doctors could be susceptible to bribery and propaganda like this. It makes me so mad that I need to smoke one of the cigarettes that 9 out of 10 doctors recommend!
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Apr 6, 2023 00:31
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I think we should believe the woman who says that a known fascist governor is using the power of the state to attack her family. It doesn't require a huge stretch of the imagination given all the things we know about Desantis. If it turns out she's lying, then yeah gently caress her. But for now, practically and morally speaking, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by doubting her.
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Apr 6, 2023 14:03
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Vahakyla posted:DADT was an improvement. DADT was very technically an improvement, yes. But it was also a half measure that made things worse in a lot of ways. It put a legal burden on gay servicemembers to stay in the closet. And from an anti-imperialist standpoint, it shoveled more bodies into the GWOT-era war machine. Jim Crow was technically an improvement over chattel slavery, but i dont think youll find anyone celebrating it as such.
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Apr 7, 2023 01:24
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Charlz Guybon posted:I'm not from Georgia. What is Cop City? A big police training facility that they're planning to bulldoze a large section of public forest to build. Protestors have been occupying the forest for months to stop them. A few months ago, a protestor who goes by Tortuguita was shot and killed. Many more protestors were arrested on charges of domestic terrorism and denied bail.
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Apr 7, 2023 04:16
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Mellow Seas posted:I'd be interested to see the effect that becoming a parent has on political alignment. Furries. We're already seeing that freakout, although for now it's more just a branchoff from the general anti-LGBT hysteria. Also don't be fooled into thinking that we can't go backwards on this.
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Apr 9, 2023 16:31
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Its also not really an issue of lack of innovation or good ol fashioned gumption. We already have solutions to a lot of our problems, and we can deploy them at scale. We already have efficient, nutritional, and tasty alternatives to meat. We already have clean, cheap, and convenient transportation alternatives to personal cars. We dont need to invent anything new. The problem is that meat, car, and fossil fuel (and many other) industries have so much entrenched institutional power that they can basically convince everyone, through lobbying and advertising, that the alternatives are worse. Why dont we have a high speed rail network? It sure isnt because we havent invented something that can do that.
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Apr 12, 2023 18:18
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Oxyclean posted:Entranced industries is absolutely the biggest hurdle, but even if they were gone tomorrow, there would be a lot of inertia to overcome. Like so much of america is built in a way that makes good public transit challenging to implement even if the will was there. Enough people live in low density areas or work jobs that alternatives to cars are non-starters. Oh absolutely. I didn't say that this was the only problem. But it does seem to be the overarching one, and it certainly has a lot more to do with the state of things than not having invented a way to produce lab meat at scale.
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Apr 12, 2023 19:18
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Professor Beetus posted:I think most people's brains would break if they realized what the cost was, just look at our climate threads here on SA. Also most of the people in a position to do anything won't ever have to worry about the costs.
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Apr 12, 2023 19:37
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The sad reality is that, for all the talk about "checks and balances", there is practically nothing that can be done about a blatantly corrupt supreme court justice, especially when one of two parties is fully committed to ignoring it if it suits their purposes. Just add it to the pile of reasons why our system of government is fundamentally and deliberately designed to protect the rich and powerful and must be broken down and rebuilt from the ground up.
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Apr 16, 2023 17:22
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Honestly it's kind of silly that representatives have to be physically present in the capitol to vote. Seems like maybe our government should consider taking this newfangled invention of instantaneous global communication into account.
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Apr 17, 2023 05:04
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:this is so weird. do you *actually* prefer the alternative of Feinstein('s aides) continuing to vote for her remotely? I think that Feinstein should step down because she's clearly not mentally capable of serving, not because she's not physically present. It's a separate but related issue.
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Apr 17, 2023 14:19
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At least unlike Ginsburg, if Feinstein dies in office, her replacement can be appointed immediately and without Republican interference. So of course that's exactly what's not going to happen.
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Apr 19, 2023 03:22
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TheDisreputableDog posted:But certainly aborting female fetuses because you want a boy would be wrong? Driving a car into a playground would also be wrong, but it has no legal bearing on the matter of car ownership. I personally don't care why anyone would get an abortion, I don't think anyone else should, and I think the law should reflect that. And even if someone did get an abortion for some made up, objectively objectionable reason, they could just lie about it, so it's completely moot anyway.
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Apr 20, 2023 01:44
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Counterpoint: the point of abortions ideally being rare is that getting an abortion sucks. Even if a woman makes the decision to have an abortion in the early stages, it's an expensive, inconvenient, and stressful process, and that's even before getting into the various moral/ethical dilemmas—which you may not possess, but many people do. Abortions should be rare because they shouldn't have to get to that point in the first place, meaning comprehensive sex ed and widespread availability of birth control methods. This isn't a reason why abortions should be rare, this is a reason why abortions should be less expensive, less inconvenient, and less stressful. Also a huge amount of the reason why they're expensive, inconvenient, and stressful is because of the deliberate actions of the anti-abortion crowd. Lots of other medical procedures are expensive, inconvenient, and stressful, but nobody makes a fuss over those being rare.
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Apr 20, 2023 03:09
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Killer robot posted:We absolutely do, but usually through focus on preventative medicine* rather than restricting the procedure or shaming people who need it. That's part of what always gives the game away for anti-abortion types, is that you can reduce abortion rates a lot through sex education and easy access to birth control but they don't like that much either. Yeah but that's not really the same sort of fuss over abortions being rare. Nobody wants to make heart bypasses illegal, is what I meant. And if they did, it would be a terrible idea to try to meet them halfway.
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Apr 20, 2023 04:33
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Charlz Guybon posted:Why are you acting like it's a hypothetical when China and India have massively skewed gender ratios because this has been standard operating procedure there for decades? Why does this matter at all to the issue of the legality of abortion in America?
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Apr 20, 2023 14:28
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TheDisreputableDog posted:I brought it up in response to a statement that abortion can never be framed as wrong or unethical. Im not talking to you, im talking to the person who brought up India and China in a discussion about US politics. Your concern over people hypothetically aborting gay and trans fetuses is noted, and irrelevant. A person's reason to abort a pregnancy is 100% private - they dont have to tell a single soul. And like i said, if it ever did matter, they can just lie. If there were somehow a government policy to force the abortion of a certain category of fetuses, that would be bad because it violates people's rights to reproductive sovereignty, not because abortion itself is wrong. Forcing people to get abortions is just as abhorrent as forbidding them from getting abortions.
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Apr 20, 2023 15:14
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Youremother posted:It really is a case by case basis and you have to be very thoughtful about if a person is worth arguing the facts with. The only reasonable thing you can do for someone who genuinely is not interested in the discussion beyond it being an argument is ignore them completely. You are not going to be the person who digs them out of their hole. A couple weeks ago, a guy in a class I'm taking started saying some pretty transphobic things during a break. It started with him complaining that a job application asked him for his pronouns, and it quickly led to him saying that "I heard all the gays and lesbians don't want to sleep with trans people (he did not use this term), unless they're freaks who like kids". He had already said a lot of really lovely things before, so that was the last straw. I walked over to him, and I calmly and rationally explained why he was wrong, and I destroyed him with facts and logic. He was completely stunned into silence. And then everyone in the room stood up and clapped. ...which is what I wish I had done, of course. Instead I glared at him for a while (he didn't get the hint), and after class I talked with the instructor about it. At the time I honestly felt pretty cowardly, for not being able to stand up and defend the people I care about. But I ended up having a good conversation with the instructor (who said "That's just ignorant. Nobody's allowed to be ignorant in my class" and said he'd talk with him), and since then that guy has been significantly less lovely. So yeah, it wasn't immediately satisfying to me, and I almost certainly didn't change anyone's mind, but at least for now, in that class, nobody is spouting casual transphobia. I used the best tools at my disposal to make a difference, however small it might be. Now, on the other hand, if things had been different and I had about a dozen of my best friends with me, I might have chosen a different course of action. Fister Roboto fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 23:26
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DarkCrawler posted:They're aware. Willful ignorance is not ignorance. Don't attribute things that are clearly the byproduct of active malice to unawareness. It is more efficient to take about evil male perverts hunting your daughters when trying to paint transpeople as child molesters, so that is what they go with. Correct. The existence of trans men doesn't impact their rhetoric in the slightest, because ultimately, they want all trans people to stop existing entirely.
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Apr 23, 2023 16:47
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Mooseontheloose posted:when a trans man starts getting close to breaking through professional (say the NFL, MLB, ect.) than we will hear about how it's not right. I agree with you but I just wanted to add this wrinkle. Isn't there a trans dude MMA fighter who nobody wants to fight because they don't want to risk being beaten by a "girl"? I'm not into that scene but I thought I heard about it somewhere.
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Apr 23, 2023 17:33
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It's not surprising but still disappointing. Biden was barely elected in 2020 in large part due to the massive rising tide of radical anti-Trump sentiment. Bernie did his part by directing that tide into Biden's camp. And now it feels like they've spent the last two years trying to calm that tide, to get things back to "normal". But under Biden's presidency, we've seen a repeal of Roe v. Wade and multiple state bans on abortion, a growing backlash against LGBT rights, anemic action on domestic policy hampered by members of his own party, a busted rail strike, and increased funding for the police and military. Yeah, Trump winning again is bad news, but once again "not being Trump" is all that Biden has going for him, and he has a lot going against him. I'm not confident that that's going to be a winning case in 2024. Biden is going to need to energize the radical wing of the party again, but he's spent the last two years doing the exact opposite.
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Apr 26, 2023 16:04
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FlamingLiberal posted:This is mostly because fascists are super incompetent Also because physically seizing the capitol doesn't really matter that much in terms of power. Like what was going to happen, they sit in the senate and say olly olly oxen free and now they control everything? It made for a big spectacle, but ultimately it never could have been an actual threat. So yeah, kind of weird to blame it on leftists not wanting to put their lives on the line for a bunch of politicians.
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Apr 29, 2023 05:27
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James Garfield posted:Obviously it's not the leftists' fault for not fighting the mob in the street, they collectively made the right decision not to oppose it. It would have been much worse if there had been leftist street fighters present (and at least some of the organizers were clearly trying to make that happen). But the leftist street fighters weren't an important part of stopping it, since it was stopped without their help and it would have been worse if they had been there. Why should they be though? This is like saying that dentists weren't an important part of stopping a forest fire.
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Apr 29, 2023 15:34
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James Garfield posted:Right, they aren't. Leftists fighting Proud Boys in the street are largely irrelevant to whether or not the Proud Boys achieve their goals (except "fight leftists in the street", obviously). The Proud Boys' goal is to terrorize vulnerable communities though. That's what leftists try to stop them from doing. Bringing up the Jan 6 putsch is a complete non sequitur.
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Apr 29, 2023 16:06
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Fell Fire posted:Churchill would like a word with you. India and many other nations once under the boot of the British empire would like a word with you over how much of a fascist Churchill was. Other than WW2, when have capitalists ever allied with communists for anything? You're going to need to provide some evidence for that claim. Meanwhile, I can point to the entire Cold War and all of the little proxy wars that were part of it as examples of capitalists propping up fascist regimes to crush the communists. Salvador Allende would also like a word with you. And yes, many leftists work within a capitalist system. This is because they have no other choice. Fister Roboto fucked around with this message at 05:19 on May 1, 2023 |
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May 1, 2023 05:17
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Queering Wheel posted:Florida keeps getting worse. Just openly going after all trans people, including adults. Guarantee that this will result in more cis women being reported than trans.
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May 4, 2023 14:27
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For this discussion it's important to keep in mind that direct action can be radical and disruptive without being violent. The problem is that this requires a sustained mass movement of people who are willing to face violence committed against them. Most Americans' idea of a protest is showing up with a sign and yelling for an hour or two and then going home to pat themselves on the back. And even then it would be insanely stupid to talk about specifics here, because the authorities would be just as happy to lock you up as if you were planning a violent attack.
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May 5, 2023 00:46
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That's right. e: but seriously there's no reason to jump immediately to openly talking about violence when there's a whole spectrum of action that hasn't even been tried. The Floyd protests were a step in the right direction, but that energy seems to have completely dried up after Biden was elected. Fister Roboto fucked around with this message at 01:16 on May 5, 2023 |
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May 5, 2023 01:08
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Kalit posted:Just a reminder that the Floyd protests absolutely did get violent in Minneapolis. 2 people died in burning buildings here Cool, thanks for the reminder. It has nothing to do with what I said though.
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May 5, 2023 04:51
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