It isn’t just that. Any job seen as a ‘woman’s job’ is going to pay less. And it isn’t just for the ‘traditional’ women’s jobs, like grade school teacher or secretary. If women enter a field in significant numbers, then wages overall will fall. See veterinary work for one example.

Pisses me the fuck off.

Men who are inferior to their fellow men, are always most anxious to establish their superiority over women. -Mary Wollstonecraft

Many billionaires are not only morons, they’re racist morons. They also love the trappings of fascism—as long as they get to be the ones on top.

Have you seen that article about that one techbro rich boy and how he wants to structure San Francisco? How the techbros would wear grey shirts, and their Republican friends would red shirts, and everyone else would be forced to wear blue shirts, and those with grey and red shirts would get preferential treatment, because they would buy out the cops?

It’s a chilling article; I recommend reading it.

I mean, it’s supposed to be.

Probably still won’t stop future humans from opening the vault, sadly.

We used to have a thriving rail and trolley system in the US; in most major cities especially. The automakers destroyed it. When they were caught, they got a slap-on-the-wrist fine and the nation went with the automaker’s suggestion of building the highway system up.

So yes, there is a fundamental reason we can’t. It’s the auto makers and the politicians they own.

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ― Stephen Roberts

Could be worse… could be like the old Japanese fine dining, where you’re just supposed to stare at the food and pretend to eat it.

No, its even worse. One side reacted by saying ‘how horrible!’ and offering sympathy and support to the victims, and the other side said ‘it never happened, and all those so-called dead kids were just paid actors!’

How can you unite anyone when a good chunk of them live in an alternate reality?

A lot of misogynists like to throw out how ‘women don’t have to suffer the draft’ (like we’ve even had one of those in forever). So if it’s just for men, probably giving that old tired jaw teeth again?

Um… none of the things they listed have barriers to entry. You can take classes for them, and for something athletic like Lion Dancing it’s recommended to at least have some gymnastics training so you don’t get hurt, but you aren’t required to in order to perform.

Same with things like painting or playing instruments. Do you think Yo Yo Ma has a license to play his cello or something? Or Van Gogh had a painter’s license? He didn’t even have much formal training, for heaven’s sake. Do you also think their works are ‘low skill’? Would you object to Yo Yo Ma reading to kids?

Pretty much all art has no barrier to entry. What matters is how hard you work at it and how skilled you can become. And drag, as a performance art, is work.

Anyways, where did you get this weird idea that only things with a proper ‘barrier to entry’ (which, historically, has been expensive schooling that denies minorities proper access, btw—see what’s going on with PoC and trying to work exclusively with braiding textured hair, for example) is the only way to judge quality or worth? Why can’t art especially be judged on its own merits?

…And, um, did I read that right? You don’t like it when people empathize with others? Or are kind to others?

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

-C. S. Lewis

Yeah, a couple family members converted a few decades ago and the Mormons sent us all a request to list all our ancestors so they could retroactively ‘save’ them. Most of my family being Lutheran, that didn’t go over well lol.

My grandpa, my uncle, and a few other family pranksters got together and gave them the most outrageous list they could come up with. I had a Mormon kid as a friend when I was young, and some days I wonder if they looked me up, and actually believed I was related to the King of Sweden.

Given my ideological enemies want to kill every person in drag that they see, I think drag queen reading hour is a perfect thing for my children to engage in.

Drag is not the same thing as trans. It is its own thing.

And just because you think drag doesn’t take skill doesn’t make that true either. Quite a few people have pointed out that it’s a performance art that takes skill, and you refuse to believe them.

Because you are, darling.

Drag queen reading hour is fun for kids and drag queens, and teaches kids tolerance.

You are the one fighting against it, because, and I quote, ‘I don’t want my taxpayer money going towards teaching kids to do low skill and low talent things’.

So that shows:

1. You think being a drag queen requires neither skill nor talent
2. You seem to think reading hour involves teaching kids about jobs they should have in the future instead of, you know, just reading to kids
3. You want reading hour to be the exclusive provence of top experts in ‘high skill’ fields

Since those three points are quite nonsensical, it would seem you are either a very silly person, or a bigot trying to skate around your bigotry. Possibly because you don’t even know it’s there.

To be fair there might be a bit of techbro style ‘my child is only allowed to see things related to ‘high skill’ jobs and training for those jobs because little 5-year-old Timmy isn’t too young to be thinking about colleges and internships!’ nonsense too, I suppose, but that’s just as bad in a different way.

Dude, this isn’t tribal. This is everyone saying that drag queens reading to kids is fine, and you hating on it for no good reason. Seriously, ‘I demand reading hour be only conducted by top STEM doctors’ is not a good reason.

You don’t seem to like them or respect them—or actually know how much goes into being a drag queen, for that matter—if you think they’re ’low skill and low talent’.

Showing kids you can dress up like that and it’s okay is a very good thing, actually. When I was in grade school there was a kid who liked wearing dresses and stuff. And most of the kids mocked him relentlessly, to the point he had to switch schools, because for us a guy in a dress was ‘weird’. Maybe if we’d had a drag queen reading hour, we would have been more understanding.

Some drag queens do make a career out of it. And have fun doing it, I might add.

Or people just take it on as a fun hobby. Do you also have a list of approved hobbies kids can learn about?

And you do realize that it’s not a zero-sum game, right? You can introduce kids to drag queens and firefighters and doctors and astronauts; there’s no rule where you’re required to just pick one.

And, y’know, oh no, Heaven forbid kids don’t get read to by one of your ‘approved’ roll models once or twice in their lives. By that ‘logic’ should regular librarians be banned from reading books too? And maybe most parents, if they’re not in STEM?

You may need to take a step back and look, really look, at your beliefs here. Because you’re veering very close to the helicopter parent attitude of controlling every single hobby, habit, and interaction of your kid to force them into your mental ideal, and that is way, way more unhealthy for kids than a one-time Drag Queen Reading Hour.

Even places like Switzerland, which have a high gun ownership rate, don’t.

When my dad was young, he and his brother found one of great-grandad’s old revolvers in a storage trunk, and brought it to school. Once lunch rolled around, they took it out and showed it to the teacher, who thought it was a very cool antique, and they and the teacher spent the lunch period oohing and aaahing over it. A school shooting wasn’t even something people thought about. It just didn’t happen.

Schools here also used to have firearms clubs and drill teams; my high school actually had an all-women shooting team if I remember correctly. And it was an inner-city school.

Somewhere, something changed here in the US. I don’t know when or why. But a good deal of gun owners and 2A supporters grew up in those days and remember them well, and I think they don’t want to believe that change happened?

Maybe it was when people started fetishizing guns? I don’t know, but I wish it would stop. No other countries deal with this kind of nonsense.

Ignoring bigots makes them bolder. And throwing a drink does not excuse a punch.

Or they’re nuking chicken. Snakes this size generally eat rats, chickens, or rabbits. So if they’re making chicken then that could get the snake interested.