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I don't personally think gray was responsible, but i have noticed that whenever him and a couple other users post here on the forums all of a sudden the like dislike counters change by like 3-5 now I don't think it's him because it doesn't seem like he'd complain about dislikes and draw attention to himself while doing that, but it was a thought

anyways back to normal posting

To go back to… I think it was chewbunny's question about wins for the left, minnesota basically just went absolute batshit in passing progressive legislation. Highlights are cementing roe v wade, a bunch of financial and legal protections for teachers and other school employees, tons of money to fight homelessness, a panel to regulate drug prices, a right to repair act that forces tech companies to make repair kits available, allowing inmates to vote as soon as they are released from jail, and a fuck ton of other good shit.

The xs indicate things they successfully implemented as well, not just the checks

https://twitter.com/SydneyJordanMN/status/1661092702014849042

Minnesota dems with a one vote margin:

I don't believe you, but okay.

Apparently there's been some nasty wildfires up in Canada, and some of the smoke is blowing south into the continental United States. I saw some air quality alerts in the northern Midwest earlier today.

I was speaking primarily in the realm of international geopolitics.
I've been deep diving this on my own lately, and I am struggling to find any coherent modern "left wing" framework to describe modern geopolitics. Overcoming South Africa's Apartheid seems to be the last major victory.
But it's more of trying to ascertain a world view. I personally think that post-colonialism, and Third-Worldism has proven itself obsolete and, extremely simply, insufficient.

Nice. (Except the abortion one and the fact legalized pot a la lassiez faire. Fucking cinge on this last one)

A win for the working class is a win for the working class no matter how bittersweet it is.

A few of these raise some red flags but otherwise that's pretty cool. I'll look into the ones that are raising alarm bells real quick so this post has purpose…

First possible red flag: 2023's HF7 bill, on Minnesota going carbon-free by 2040. The biggest problem I see with it is that it, for some reason, accepts the burning of trash but not nuclear power. It's a bit unsurprising, as the limitless power of the atom is a constant blind-spot for environmentalists, and the construction of new nuclear power plants isn't currently allowed in the state. Hopefully they wise up and reverse course on this oversight, lest they run the risk of accidentally increasing their net carbon output.

Second, HF14. Requiring people to get a special permit to transfer ownership of a firearm is… interesting. I don't see anything glaringly wrong with it, outside of the problems innately caused by adding more and more bureaucracy to everything. Let's hope it's not abused.

HF15. I disagree with "red flag laws" on principle, since they're so easy to abuse and give the police more power that they don't need. Doesn't help that the bill constantly uses a nonsensical scare phrase, either. Interesting that being an illegal immigrant is considered grounds for gun seizure, which doesn't seem very "progressive" to me. This shit will be abused.

I find some portions of HF16 to be questionable, but keeping in with the principles I stated on the previous page, I won't discuss it further here. If you're really curious, you can ask for my Discord and we can discuss it in DMs there.

And with HF28, my only concern is that there could be ulterior motives to this, though I'd have to have stats on the voting demographics of convicted felons in Minnesota to confirm. Otherwise it seems pretty reasonable; time spent in jail is supposed to be the bulk of the punishment. I'd be, perhaps, a bit more extensive with my restoration of felon's rights, but it's still not bad.

The rest don't seem to have anything interesting going on with them at all, so that's good I think.

Well most of these sound good except for
"allowing inmates to vote as soon as they are released from jail" which is utterly idiotic

One of the easiest ways to suppress a populations votes is to criminalize them more then other groups so they can't vote anymore. Its why Reagan started the war on drugs and then proceeded to spread drugs in black communities.

I mean sure, but rapists and murderers should not be allowed to vote
and I don't think drug possession should be a felony

Looks like that fascist has officially announced his running today for president

The problem is that mostly only poor criminals go to jail, look at Eipstein island

On a stream with a quite frankly absurd amount of technical difficulties even for an audience of that size

Meatball Ron never fails to bemuse me

target is pulling lgbt related products because of nutcases threatening them

Bit of column A, bit of column B. Their stock price started to take a hit this past week, so they may be trying to do damage control in hopes that it doesn't get too far out of hand, like what is happening with Anheuser-Busch.

Don't know if they fired their literal Satanist designer yet. I feel like that might help a lot, since that seems to have been what caused people to go from "this is kind of cringe" to "hey wait what the fuck".

I gotta wonder, how many times has "X is absurd, X ain't gonna happen you're just overreacting" been said (or remotely said) in these threads only for them to happen?

Rapists are such a small basket of wastes of space that their votes won't matter compared to the rest of the population. It's no issue to allow them to vote.

Murderers can be much more nuanced depending on the individual than the rest, and are still a small basket of individuals compared to the rest of the population. Of course, they were convicted because they were charged with killing another. Regardless, very few people ever kill another person compared to the rest of the population, so again no issue.

There's not going to be a lot of chances for criminals to turn a vote by single numbers, and legislation can be voted away again, so it is a waste of time trying to suppress voting rights. Remember, felons can't run for or hold public office, they can't own or possess firearms, they can't join the military, can be barred from federal employment temporarily or permanently depending on what position, travel can be restricted depending on the charge, etc. Those are the rights that are lost across most felony convictions.

I am starting to DRASTICALLY change my mind I dont think humans are at all equiped to deal with global warming effectively.

I mean…what are we going to do about it? Past experiences are showing me that the answer is nothing, nothing at all…we arent going to do anything even if it gets disastrous.

When do goverments do anything besides caving in to corporate interests after all

On the anniversary of Harambe's death the Turkish dictator completes his reelection rigging

There goes Turkey…

Lira has fallen to records low and for better or worse Erdogan, the autocrat islamist has gotten the mandate to continue his rule. I am not looking forward to the continued diplomatic spates and horror stories of a democracy slowly falling.

Also, it's been a while since I posted here ! It seems a lot has happened. I'll try to read up on the discussion.

@Greyblades

I guess my last response would have been something along the lines that it's the continued slippery slope. Same as the recent news of the death penalty in Florida, it's worrying that a state has given itself the power to imprison and take away kids to this extent.

Of course, the argument is that it's "justified", there are edge cases, but I've heard that same argument for Abortion and for the Book Bans. Than those actions went beyond their stated limits, they were given an inch and they took a mile.

Do you expect one to let themselves be fooled a third time?

>No rights lost, merely privleges rescinded.

I'd like to point out that's a very dystopian thing to say. So much so that if we changed the context, I wonder if you or anyone else would agree with that phrase.

No one has any rights, except the ones we make and everything can fall apart. That's the impression I got after speaking to someone from Izmir.

Anyway, I'm also reading there's been drama here, so I'd understand if this topic is closed. I've just wanted to say something that should have been said a week ago.

We can start counting, biased as it may be.

I'm sure everything going on about Religious Extremists probably falls within that banner.

At this point I get terrified and distrustful the moment a politician starts talking about god

Discussions on rights and privileges are always infinitely complicated, as everyone has different opinions on what's what and which ones are more important. It's also further influenced by culture; for example, I've observed that Europeans, on average, value the freedom of speech significantly less than Americans, despite being more liberal on paper.

Is it a right to use whatever bathroom you want? Is it a right to make a right turn on red? Is it my right to wash my my balls in the Burger King soda dispenser? Who's to say, really.

Well, that's why there's this forum for one, isn't there? It's fundamentally a discussion on what our priorities should be.

You make light of it with flippant examples, but that's you. Was it a free speech issue when a soldier leaked a bunch of documents in what's known as the Pentagon Papers? Do you have the right to try to enter public buildings? Is there a standard in how you should talk to officials? To what extent do you have a right as a parent?

Is there a right to guns? Is there a right to education? Is there a right to a clean environment? Is there a right to religion in schools? A right to a school free of religion? Is there a right to self-determination? To bodily autonomy? To life?

I'm sure some of those have been debated here. Who's to say? Us and our own judgement, we don't have much else.

I'd also like to push back on this easy "America has more free speech" statement (and not in the usual sense of trading rights). I've heard it multiple times, and I've becoming less convinced of it.

Does the US have more free speech? There's still the two big monolithic parties which forces discussions down a binary (to the point it's becoming two cultures which hate each other). I recall quite a few times where the administrations cracked down on discourse (ex: Bush again) and the US seems to be the only ones who have administrations who've banned the usage of the word such as "climate change". That and there's apparently fights with people showing up to libraries with guns, among other things.

Seems to me that speech is becoming dangerous there. Quite a few European countries seem to have Lèse-majesté laws, and Germany has stringent hate speech laws (which I get why, but still). There's a lot of issues as well, no one's perfect and it's debatable.

However, there is one thing I won't budge on, for example:

The US is also on a book banning spree, may I remind you? That is unacceptable, and while it's going on I don't want to hear any preaching about "Free speech"

I think I typed that a few weeks ago.

Beware of assumptions is my point. The fact that it's easy to assume one right is important and unassailable and that something else is trivial and easily dismissable is the heart of the issue.

Nothing is obvious, it's why they are complicated.

Rightfully so