Trump is old. Republicans have been stressing how old Biden is–and using his life-long speech impediment as evidence–but Trump trails Biden by only four years of age. They’re both at an age where you start seeing a sharp divergence in cognitive abilities, where some people take a nosedive into dementia and senility, while other people retain their mental faculties while their body fails. Trump seems to be the former.
Depending on what you’re doing, you absolutely want Festool on a job site. A Rotex sander is fantastic for doing the edges when you’re refinishing hardwood floors, for instance. (Goddamn incompatible sanding discs though… You have to buy the Festool discs if you want the dust management.) For some jobs, there really aren’t any viable alternatives to Festool; no one else makes a domino joiner, which is somewhere between a plate joiner and a mortise and tenon joint. (You can get close by using a precision doweling jig, but the domino joiner is fast. Mortise and tenons are fantastic joints, but a mortising machine isn’t terribly portable, and cutting one by hand is far, far more skill than I have.)
I like huntin’, fishin’, farmin’, shootin’ the revenuers that try to bust my still and steal my 'shine, and I stand in solidarity with my fellow workers against the evils of capitalism.
Is that sufficiently redneck?
(I don’t actually like fishing; I think it’s boring, and I don’t like fish very much.)
I’d argue that the problem isn’t so much saying that you’re a vegan because X, Y, Z, but that very often vegans extend that to moral judgements about people that aren’t vegan, without accepting that there are reasons someone may not wish to be a vegan. Y’know, god forbid that you tell a vegan that you hunt your own meat, and only kill/eat invasive species that are disrupting the ecosystem, like feral pigs, or lionfish in the Gulf of Mexico.
Aside from an episode of Strange New Worlds (and possible in Wrath of Khan, depending on your perspective), space pirates aren’t brought up as a risk to the Federation starships, presumably because they usually aren’t. Shields alone should be sufficient for debris and asteroids, since shields appear to stop physical objects as well as certain forms of energy (obvs. not certain bands of light though, or whatever bands their sensors use). Non- and quasi-sentient species shouldn’t pose any risk to a starship at all (aside from possibly omniscient comets, thank you Stanislaw Lem). The weapons on a starship are appropriate to direct against planetary settlements, bases, and other starships.
Fundamentally, I believe Mao was correct on this; the ability to use violence effectively is the lowest common denominator for all power. Everything else is a veneer of civility intended to disguise the violence that is inherent to all forms of coercive rule.
The conspiracy theory behind this is that Jews control everything, and that’s why anti-BDS laws exist. Jewish media overlords don’t like mean things being said about Israel, so they pull the strings on their puppet politicians, and make them dance.
The reality is a couple of things. First, Israel is an ally of the US, and politicians have burned a lot of political capital propping the country up for the last 60-odd years. There’s a bit of a sunk-cost fallacy there; we need to keep supporting Israel, rather than finding new and less-sucky friends in the middle east (like, I dunno, maybe apologizing to Iraq for fucking their whole country over with the shah?, not that they’re great, but we def. made that particular pile of shit). The other one is that evangelical Christians need to support Israel, because they believe that Jesus is going to return as the Messiah in Jerusalem, to the Jews. Anything that can potentially threaten the possibility of Israel controlling Jerusalem would undercut their religious beliefs, so they really want to dump money into Israel. (No, that’s not a bad joke, or conspiracy theory itself; I can probably find links to sermons of guys like Greg Locke saying as much; they don’t like Jews, since Jews are Christ-killers, but they need Jews to usher in the apocalypse. AFAIK, this is pretty mainstream evangelical stuff.) Evangelicals have a lot of power in this country, even if they’re not that large of a population any more. Republicans are largely controlled by them, which is part of the reason that you won’t see any republicans opposing aid to Israel.
Anyway, BDS would threaten the support for Israel; therefore, anti-BDS is generally favored by Dems, and completely supported by Republicans.
As others have said, it’s not just men that perceive that negatively; women do also. I can’t recall who said it, but feminism has meant that there are many different ways to be a woman now, but there is still only one socially acceptable way to be a man. The social consequences to men for being emotionally vulnerable can mean the loss of all social connections; I know that I lost about 3/4 of the people I thought were friends when I failed to successfully complete suicide. That creates a very strong disincentive to being vulnerable in the future.
TBQH, I should be able to accomplish the day-to-day tasks required to keep a household from sliding into chaos within 10-12 hours in a day. That doesn’t mean that the spouse that works outside the home won’t have to help with irregular chores. But hey, if I sit around on my ass all day and play video games while my wife is at work, and then expect that we’re going to work together to get general household shit done when she gets home, then I’m a huge asshole.
Yeah, no. I’m an Android user, and have been for about a decade, but Apple makes good products. I think that Apple is overpriced, I don’t like their walled garden, but they’re still good. My wife had an iPhone 8 up until this year, and I’d gone through multiple Samsung and other phones in the same time period that all died due to hardware failures.
That’s genuinely one of the things people look for; iPhones are incredibly dense designs, in a very sleek, smooth, light package, and people love them. A very basic phone case and a screen saver adds nearly half the OE thickness of the phone to the package, and look how many people forgo those, even on a phone that’s $1500. If I added that much thickness to a phone that started out at .5" thick, it would end up feeling like I was carrying a brick on my pocket all the time.
I would still take the brick with replaceable battery though.
Gambling: Legal gambling doesn’t stop illegal gambling. Like dog fights, cock fights (which–disappointingly–involve chickens), or people that are out of money and credit; they’re still going exist. It would be healthier for society to make gambling unpopular, rather than squeezing every last bit of revenue out people that usually can’t afford it.
Prostitution: Legalizing under the Nevada model does nothing to illegal prostitution, because the Nevada model puts it out of financial reach for most of the clientele and restricts the locations to places that the clientele usually aren’t (e.g., they’re a long way out of the city, and you have to drive several hours from Vegas to get to the closest one). An (illegal) independent escort in Las Vegas will typically cost $350-500 per hour, and quite possibly far, far more. A sex worker at a legal brothel will easily cost more than $1000 for the same time period. A sex worker controlled by a pimp is going to be $200 or less, and have less ability–or no ability–to refuse acts that s/he doesn’t want to do. The cost of compliance with regulations is on the sex worker, who passes it on to the clientele; that regulatory model means that legal avenues will end up being less affordable to people than illicit avenues. (And, given that you can pretty easily find escorts working in Vegas despite legal options being available in the state, I think it’s pretty clear that people will be price sensitive.
Drugs: Same issue. Regulatory oversight–which is necessary for recreational drugs to not kill people unintentionally–increases costs, and those costs get passed to the consumer. For a very real-world example, a single 10mL vial of 200mg/mL testosterone cypionate costs about $60 at Costco, and over $100 at Walgreens, et al.. (Testosterone cypionate is a schedule III drug.) You can buy a 20mL vial of 300mg/mL testosterone cypionate on the black market for anywhere from $30-60. You can buy raw hormone powder for under $2/gram (e.g., the raw hormone used in the black market 20mL vial costs the producer $12 or less). A therapeutic dose will be perhaps 150-200mg/week, depending on your own physiology, and what you’re target blood values are. An IFBB pro bodybuilder is going to go through a minimum of 3,000 mg/week during a bulk. If an IFBB pro were to buy their testosterone cypionate legally–if they didn’t need a prescription–it would cost $90/week, versus $15-30. (This ignores all the other shit they take, too.) IFBB guys have been using their black market suppliers for years, maybe decades; what’s their incentive to pay 3-6x as much for something they aren’t going to see a difference in? Legal marijuana has depressed prices for illegal marijuana, but it’s still cheaper to buy a quarter from my local guy than it is to buy in a dispensary.
much like they make tobacco companies do that right now in the us.
Organized crime makes a fuckton of money by forging tax stamps on cigarettes to evade taxes. Before prices started going up dramatically on cigarettes (which I think was a good thing, since smoking doesn’t end up costing just the smoker), that kind of fraud and tax evasion was chump change. Now it’s millions.
I don’t take a stance on either from a morality basis.
In regards to gambling, I see it as a fundamentally predatory business model that preys on the people that are least able to afford it. If a rich guy wants to blow a million dollars on blackjack, I don’t fucking care, that’s not my problem. If a poor person is buying $500 in scratchers because that’s they’re only hope for excaping poverty, that’s a problem. Or a retired person that pushes a button as fast as they can on a slot machine, burning through their retirement savings, because that’s the only thing that lights up their dopamine receptors anymore. And there’s a lot more of the latter two than the former. There are also a whoooooole lot of people with gambling problems, and a person that’s blowing all their money on gambling ends up becoming a problem for the people around them, as they are no longer able to take care of their own needs.
The only issue I see with prostitution–aside from the fact that a not insignificant amount is from trafficked victims–is the public health risks. Given that healthcare in the US is outrageously expensive, there’s not a great way for people that are usually working at a near subsistence level to treat STIs. And, for certain STIs (HIV, hepatitis C), they are strongly disincentivized in regards to informing customers, as there’s not cure and long-term treatment is deeply burdensome.
did you know that Cocaine and Methamphetamine are not schedule 1 drugs
Yes. Cocaine and meth are both schedule II, which is used for drugs with a high probability of abuse, but still have recognized medical uses. (Marijuana is currently schedule I, but I believe that the FDA has been asked to re-evaluate it an move it to schedule III, which would make decriminalization much easier, and would mean that it would no longer be a prohibiting factor for buying a firearm.) Cocaine is–or was–used for surgery in highly vascular areas (esp. nose and sinus surgery) because it acts as a vasoconstrictor. Amphetamines used to be issued to soldiers, esp. pilots, that needed to be alert and focused for long periods of time. See also: Aimo Koivunen. The fact that certain drugs do have legitimate medical uses doesn’t mean that the abuse/addiction is not a material problem. Try chatting with anyone that has been prescribed anxiolytic medication, and has tried to titrate their dose down, or discontinue their use entirely (same goes for certain SSRIs, TBH). Yes, drugs are a personal choice, right up until they’re functionally not a choice any more because you’ll suffer serious physiological effects from cessation. And it’s not like the US has a great track record of providing effective assistance for people that want to get cleaned up. Full legalization or all recreational drugs, without also building the necessary social supports, would create far more problems than it would solve.
Legalization of prostitution is a problem by itself, because the regulatory costs end up being borne by the sex workers (more on that in a tic). For prostitutes that are working at a subsistence level or only doing sex work occasionally as a stop-gap–which is the majority of voluntary prostitution–that’s not going to work. And what do you do, for instance, when a registered sex worker suddenly tests positive for HIV, or hepatitis C? Revoke their license, and then…? Legalizing doesn’t eliminate trafficking, it just pushes the prices for trafficked prostitutes down, because trafficked prostitutes are slaves.
There are definitely harm-reduction models that can, and do, work for sex work, but legalization and regulation–when that regulatory costs are paid by either the sex worker or the customer–will not work the way you think for harm reduction. For the system to work as intended, you would also need things like national single-payer healthcare (…that isn’t constantly getting funding slashed by conservatives), and licensing that was both on-demand and free to the licensee, and you would need something to deal with the loss of income if they contracted an incurable STI. (Otherwise they would continue working, which would be a public health risk.) Inspections, compliance measures, et al. could not be a cost borne by the sew worker/clients or else you’d see non-compliance with regulatory measures. Most sex-worker advocates call for decriminalization rather than legalization/regulation because that’s the model that moves the most risk away from the sex worker, but you do need to also balance the needs of the worker against the the needs of society to a degree.