Thanks. I’ve been on my own for a long time now. I’m glad that I’m still far enough from retirement that my accounts should have plenty of time to bounce back before I need to rely on them.

I really feel for the retirees who voted against this who are finding that their finances are not as stable as they should have been.

My mom retired last year. She also voted for Trump. She made her bed …

I found this part surprising:

He has also established himself as a wellness guru.

Do you also think that saying “Happy Holidays” somehow excludes Christians?

Increasing the size of your umbrella doesn’t discriminate against the people who are already under it. It simply invites more people to join them.

Assault rifles were only banned for 10 years, from 1994 to 2004.

Maybe a “breakfast bar” or an “oatmeal bar.” I think a UK flapjack has a more cake-like texture than a US granola bar.

Surely the leopards won’t eat his face.

I hope there are enough students who are willing to take such a bold step together to make their point.

I feel like GenX said, “The fucking old people caused this mess and are standing in the way of fixing it. We need them to die off so someone else can turn it around, but there aren’t enough of us so it’s probably up to the younger generations.”

We never had a lot of collective ambition, which I guess is good because our parents still won’t let go of power.

I’m sure Orwell didn’t really expect telescreens to become a real thing, but we have very literally welcomed surveillance devices into our lives and homes. Now, it’s just a matter of who starts actively using them as a monitoring device.

I’m sure the NYT has noticed, but their attorneys probably advise against making medical claims about sitting presidents. Especially since the current one is particularly litigious.

Amen, sister.

Yes, I’m living my best life now in spite of everything I was taught in my formative years.

You’re right about that whole last paragraph. Of the dozen-ish kids from my small, rural church who were in our youth group together, I’m the only one who got out. The rest of them are raising their own teens in the church now, most of them still even in the same town.

I don’t know what made me so different. I always had a keen sense of logic, and I was just rebellious enough to question things. I also had access to “heretical” art that helped me feel less alone (shout out to '90s alternative rock). I wasn’t the only one of us who went to university, but I was the only one who moved out of my family home to do it.

I don’t think there’s anything I could say to any of them now that would make them reconsider their worldview. Of course, that works both ways. I know they consider me a sort of “fallen woman” for having strayed from the Straight and Narrow™.

I am so sorry that happened to you and that the place where you turned for help just added to your trauma.

Unless things have changed significantly at the border in the past few years, there’s no process to leave the US. It’s just the Canadian border guard checking things as you enter their country.

Of course, if the GOP decides to fully enact Operation: Handmaid’s Tale, then that could change.

There is a presumption from conservative/fascist women that they occupy a position of hierarchy over non-fascist/non-conservative women. That by virtue of supporting fascism and patriarchy that fascist men will afford them personhood. They don’t believe in any of the assertions of feminism. They instead believe that women who suffer at the hands of men simply deserve it. That all women are judged in some kind of meritocracy, where belief in fascism and support of fascists itself is a determining factor of merit.

This may be true for some women, maybe in the “tradwife” and white supremacist circles. But if, as you say, it’s critical to understand what these women think, you have to understand that they are not a monolith. There are other motivations to consider.

I was raised in a fundamentalist, evangelical church. Within that community, there was no presumption of a hierarchical position over other women. There was only our god-given position to be subservient to our fathers, and later, our husbands. We could either obey the divine plan to someday reach heaven or disobey it and be resigned to hell. There was no in-between.

Now, a reasonable person would see this as patently ridiculous. But the problem is that reason has no place in this worldview. You doggedly follow a literal interpretation of the King James Bible, or you go to hell.

Many years ago, when I was 16, I had asked for a particular privilege. And my mother agreed to grant it if I would listen to some audio tapes that she had of a series of sermons from a woman. Now, that was unusual in itself, because women are not allowed to teach men within fundamentalist churches (Because The Bible Says So™). So this was definitely a teaching that was only meant for women. What I heard was horrifying.

The entire point of this sermon series was to teach women how to be good, submissive Christian wives. The lesson of one tape was literally that if your husband commanded you to commit murder, you would have to do it, because God put him in charge of you and your duty to God was simply to follow orders from your husband.

A woman would not be judged for breaking a commandment if she followed the direction of her husband. The husband would be punished for causing someone to break God’s commandments, but the wife would be spared because she was simply doing her duty as a wife to follow what her husband said.

Women’s agency is completely removed in this scenario. Which sounds exactly like what the men described in the article want.

Again, the problem here is that reason has no purchase in this worldview. No amount of evidence or argument is going to change their minds or magically give them a sense of agency.

Making sure that women have very little self-respect is one of the primary functions of American Evangelicalism.

I’m in Colombia. My local grocery store has them for 23 mil pesos ($5.58 USD at today’s exchange rate) for 30 eggs. That comes out to $2.38 USD per dozen.

The tienda by my home has them cheaper, but I can’t check their prices online to verify the exact cost.

Don’t forget how hard it is to pay other people to play video games for you so you can call yourself an “elite” gamer.

The Colombian one is pretty accurate, but it should probably have bacon on it, too.