Charity can serve as a means of control. This is way Republicans advocate against social services.

The government cannot mandate that you attend church to receive EBT. A church can require you attend a service to feed you.

I’ve heard from friends in Utah, for example, that access to many social services is through the church. Friend was trying to rescue a girl from FLDS - pretty much all job training/housing required she play along with mainstream Mormonism.

Orgs like the Salvation Army are known to require trans people to detransition to recieve services as well.

Another benefit is the rent seeking - Goodwill is a good example. You can still turn a profit with the right combination of PR, and tying access to services based on things that’ll make you profit (Goodwill “provides employment” for disabled people - they are legally allowed to pay them far below minimum wage.)

It’s the two pillars of the contemporary Right - control and grifting.

A lot of suicide prevention has to be community based though.

Affordable housing, accessible and good quality mental health services, career development programs… some people are suicidal because their situation legitimately sucks.

For all the talk about ending stigma, I also think there needs to be a discussion about the way suicidal people are treated. In the US, involuntary holds can be hell and fucking expensive - especially when we consider how many people are suicidal because of finances. Lose your job because the 72 hour hold, during which you get to see a psychiatrist once. (From my personal experience, no guarantee they got a great score on their TOEFL).

988 is a great idea, but patchy in execution and assuming a lot of other systems are already in place. It’s a can of fix a flat when you haven’t changed your oil in so long it’s starting to look like tar.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with seeking help; I just think we really need to recognize that help is not always readily available. It’s not free, appointments aren’t always readily available, and you can end up with really bad providers. Services like BetterHelp are preying on that gap too, and have cooped the destigmatization of mental health into their ad campaigns that are uncomfortable.

Teenager I was traveling with couldn’t figure out how to use the turnstiles at the metro. Random French guy, in English: “you disgust me.”

Also got scammed by an Uber. The Louvre was worth it though, we hated Paris so much we spent the entire day inside the museum.

I have fairly severe social anxiety; when I went to France, the negative response to the French I was able to stutter out ensured I’d never try to speak French again. (I read it fairly well, because Candide was good enough to read ten times)

In high school, I had an assignment to go to a local Chinese restaurant and order in Chinese. The response to my “我要broccoli 牛肉” was so enthusiastic that I still do a set of Chinese flash cards everyday.

There has to be a motivating force for you to learn something. Whether that is social approval/encouragement, needing to be able to ask for certain things… Some people can be motivated by an intrinsic love of learning things, but for most I think this is confined to specific topics.

For language, I think you need a show that you want to watch, a space you can navigate by only using that language, something that gives you meaningful feedback and places to go that a grade simply doesn’t.

People who don’t use gay hook apps simply do not understand. You can hop on and find nothing but “straight” men, or blank profiles which are most assuredly married “straight” men. It can be frustrating if you are looking for a relationship/human beings who are okay with themselves.

We just need a black hat slutty queer to record themselves taking it from Mr. Couchfucker or some sufficiently big name Senator. It’s bound to happen eventually.

I can’t be friends with someone who votes against my ability to access my medication, and my rights to access healthcare and employment without discrimination. If you are voting for people who think of people like me as subhuman, then you don’t respect me enough to be my friend.

That was a false allegation made by her ex boyfriend as revenge.

I have to use a windows 11 machine for work, and it genuinely surprises me how terrible it is. I don’t understand the opposition to local accounts - if I’m working somewhere with public WiFi/capture portal, I have to use my phone as a hotspot first.

The PIN log in seems to roll a random number and decide each morning whether it is going to work or not.

I also got a laptop with 11 on it for gaming. So much spyware I’ve had to uninstall, configuring anything is a nightmare. I was trying to adjust my mouse sensitivity/figure out why the scroll wheel is either 0 or to the moon, but even when you dig into the control panel, half the settings are missing.

I also had to turn off my WiFi and google commands to make a local account, because otherwise Microsoft accounts are mandatory.

Every change seems to make the experience actively worse for the user.

Biblically, there isn’t an antichrist. It’s not a proper noun, there’s not just one. Most Americans’ understanding of eschatology comes straight from Left Behind (and further back, Scofield), which has little connection to the actual text. (The number of Christians who refer to RevelationS, when the tittle of the text has no “s”….)

And I’d say Trump is definitely “anti-Christ.”

The original definition goes back to the 30’s

I’ve reached out to multiple federal agencies, and no one can agree on who has jurisdiction. And my local ACLU won’t do shit, because as you pointed out, the Supreme Court is itching to set lots of fucked up precedents.

I took out TEACH grants - agreed to serve as a teacher for four years. After three years they ripped the ground out from underneath me.

I’m a transgender teacher that can’t work in public schools because I’m trans.

In fact, Oklahoma has executive ordered trans people out of existence.

Can I get news coverage please?

The idea is that if you deliberately fuck up a basic household cleaning task, you won’t be asked to do it again. Loading a washer was itself an interruption of FIFA/most recent Ubisoft game, and that stunt was an attempt to get out of it.

My ex bought FIFA/NBA every year as it came out like clock work. Set the game to the easiest possible settings, but complained about rubber banding and reset the quarter when he lost.

The one time I got him to do laundry, he threw away half of our socks. He didn’t want to find pairs. My fancy dress socks, my novelty socks - all in the trash when I get home from work.

Liking certain video games isn’t itself a red flag, it’s that mindless, video games as avoidance/wish fulfillment that’s concerning.

Art project from 2020 - intended to provoke the conversations here for sure. Still involves some animal products in production it looks like.

I don’t think this could be feasibly upscaled to sustain a dystopia.

Palahnuik has written an auto cannibalism scene. In Haunted, girl passes out, other people decide to eat her (framing story is that it’s a reality tv show, but they all want it to go wrong and kill each other, it is extremely fucked up and is where “Guts” is from if you’ve ever been subjected to that). She wakes up to the smell of her own ass in the microwave.

why are people obsessed with coming up with scenarios in which it could be okay to have sex with children

They’re planning on attacking birthright citizenship anyway, so it matters less. The angle is going to be that both of her parents were immigrants.

It was a guy on TikTok making the claim, and he’s only like 90-99% sure. That’s not solid evidence by any means.

But it’s certainly more plausible than the guy who claims to have done coke with Barry, lol. And the details just seem right. It’s not over the top.

There’s a guy saying that they went on a date together at an Applebees in high school. Pretty detailed story too.