I spent half my life legally smoking tobacco and illegally smoking weed.
I moved a quarter of a country away for the mental health of legally smoking tobacco and legally smoking weed.
I WILL NOT be dragged back into a life where one of my vices give me crippling fear of imprisonment.
Get off your fucking high horse. Mind your own fucking business. Stop asserting your will over others. Live your own fucking life. Let me live my fucking life.
$317.9 billion dollars from 1951 to 2022 plus whatever the total is for 2023 so far (I think we are at about 30 billion this year so far?) plus however much more we will siphon into their police state to enrich American military contractors.
My dog was doing well until a "trained" dog, off the leash, attacked her. Wounded face, badly bruised ribs.
Then, about a year later, a "trained" dog, off the leash, ran up to her and went to sniff her, she took it as a threat, and another fight happened. No blood this time, but still.
Then about a year later... a "trained" dog, off the leash... same fucking story.
10 years later, I am more vigilant and proactive. If another "trained" dog is around (telltale because of the lackadaisical behavior of the owners), I get my dog right up to heel on the other side of my body and get ready.
At least 10 times over those 10 years, I have a dog running at my dog with an owner just standing there yelling "don't worry, they're nice!", me replying "MINE ISNT", and then them jogging leisurely over while I am hunched over trying to keep the 2 apart.
I dont care how well you think you've trained your dog, be a responsible owner. If it isn't your home (front yard NOT included) or a dog park, leash. Also, don't approach a dog you don't know. You don't know their history. Be aware of your surroundings and pick a route that keeps your dog leash distance from the other dog.
For me it was framing "holding a dog preemptively close when nothing happens" as a bad thing and indicator of an "untrained dog" that made me disagree with your characterization.
My dog is wonderfully trained. A wonderfully well behaved little princess everywhere except when a strange dog approaches her in public and sticks their nose in one of her soft spots.
Since she got attacked by another dog, she retaliates aggressively to dogs who were not under proper control and who were allowed to invade her space without consent.
I am proactive about the potential of unresponsive owners with "trained dogs" failing to properly control their dogs.
That doesn't reflect my dog being untrained. The reflects the number of untrained dog owners out there.
The theory that when you smoke, the nicotine binds to surfaces the smoke touches, causing cancer to anyone who comes near surfaces that nicotine has touched.
It was a "truth" run around in the 80s as we were discovering the nature of radiation, so lots of war on drug "research" papers got published functionally saying nicotine and radiation are the same thing.
I actually want to be educated here, because my stance is that there should be a road to cheap and speedy citizenship, and that immigrants should assimilate into the system.
My gut says that seeking asylum isn't paying for someone to smuggle you over the boarder. It would require you going through an actual boarder checkpoint where you would do the paperwork to enter the country as a refugee.
I know Republicans are assholes who have been obstructing that, but my gut tells me there is the legal way of entering the country and the illegal one.
Hiding in the back of a pickup truck and buying a fake Juan Martinez social security card doesn't feel like asylum seeking, it feels illegal.
For context, I invoke the fake Juan Martinez social security card because when I worked at the Arizona Department of Education, there were at least 3000 Juan Martinezes with the same social security number attending Arizona public education, which I thought was HORRIBLE and extremely dehumanizing to those children, and it wasn't the US government that did that. It was the coyotes and parents illegally immigrating that did that.
"Jewish" gets used with the loose definition of "people who have been expelled from their homeland."
Judaism is the religion formed by the people who were expelled from Egypt. They left Egypt to settle in Israel and establish Judaism.
Over the years, Christianity and Islam gained a foothold in the region, until the UN shoved the inhabitants of Israel into Palestine.
Arguably, modern Palestinians, who largely practice Islam, are Jews.
This leads me to the question, is the term "antisemitic" specific to Judaism or does it cover other types of Jews?
Depending on the answer, you can call modern Israel antisemitic against Palestinian Jews, who want their homeland back, or at the very least to stop being oppressed in the place that they were exiled to. This would make anyone who supports Israel antisemitic.
Edit: Bonus funfact, there is almost perfect overlap on how "Jew" gets used and how "Gypsy" get used. The key difference is that Jews TEND to move from an origin to a destination. Gypsies TEND to have an era of transience. Some Jews get displaced more than once before they can lay down roots. Some Gypsies get displaced so many times that they just go full on nomad/caravan lifestyle and never really stop moving around.
"Gypsy" and "Jew" don't have hard universally accepted definitions, and both of them are derogatory terms. People who identified with (or who were identified as) either of the 2 were targeted equally during the Holocaust, Gypsies were just more efficient at getting the fuck out before being loaded into the trains.
You should never say "I really got Jewed/Gypped by that guy." Both are EXTREMELY offensive terms, and people got sent to ovens over those words being used on them. The Holocaust was not all about Judaic Jews.