Brian Dunning (Skeptoid podcast) went to prison for wire fraud for doing a similar stunt with EBay. Not sure what makes this any different.

Vigilante Justice in this case seems a lot better than police justice. How many people do cops murder in cold blood each year?

Phalloplasty is so heavy duty that you’d be out of commission for several years anyway. Even with the other option, metadioplasty, (basically, they cut loose the clitoris and sometimes reroute urethra) you’d be out at least 6 months. I doubt they’d allow surgeries until after you served for some amount of time, just hormones.

Remember how the police/Alex Jones kept making big talk about a “manifesto” which never manifested?

Uneducated people in rural areas struggle very much with understanding their experiences of others, and have very strange ideas about how the world works. I told my grandmother I wanted to move to Chicago - she’s convinced I’m going to get gang murdered. (She would be horrified if I told her about wandering around LA on foot)

The idea that there are options other than cisgender heterosexual people is threatening to their understanding of their world. Many have not thought about their gender or sexuality; it’s assumed that you’ll get married to the opposite sex, get gender appropriate jobs, have kids, and go to church on Sunday. That’s what life is in Anadarko or Siloam Springs. Many also struggle with unaddressed trauma from the opioid/fent crisis, or military service - so they think the appropriate response to anguish about your body should just be to just cope with it.

Many of these men are secretly bisexual. Many, many, many heterosexually married men seek out sexual encounters with gay men on the side. They would never want to be in a relationship with a man or someone they perceived as a strange, mentally defective man - for many of them that would also assault their understandings of a relationship as more of a property thing. They feel guilty about porn usage, especially the Christian ones, but externalize it as hatred.

The woman are miserable and are committed to making everyone else miserable as well. You gain power in those communities by policing others, especially young women. They are threatened by the idea that they weren’t locked into compulsive heterosexuality and performative femininity. There was a possibility that they could have graduated college, or not had children.

They get the program though. They’re proper Puritans. If life is suffering then the only joy to be had is in watching other people. And what better target than those who are defying our most basic sociological roles? These are the same people who host gender reveal parties - it matters to them. So it must matter to everyone else.

That’s my guess as a trans man at least, obviously I’m biased.

It’s very odd how little Harding and Coolidge’s corruption immediately leading up the the Great Depression is almost never discussed at all.

Also the novels are kinda bad tbh, the first one is tolerable but they really fall off. Maguire is a bit of a hack.

That is one of the techniques I was taught in a sketching class.

Yes. I have very limited/cheap furniture. Almost everything I own comes from discount stores or thrifts. I don’t have an attachment to any of it. I’m debating going the Peace Corps so I don’t really want to own anything that I’ll have to pay to store.

Something that I’ve found works well for sleeping is a tatami mat and futon mattress. It’s best if you can air out the mattress and mat outside occasionally. But you can fold and roll both. You can also stack up layers of those $4 Walmart fleece blankets to adjust coverage.

In this video, she’s using a nice chunky yarn, so it’s easier to see.

The good thing with blankets is that the size is whatever you want it to be. Just stop making your chain when you get one dimension right, and then finish with whatever row makes you happy. A single skein of the cheap SuperSaver/RedHeart can make ~8 sq. feet of area - a nice 2’ x 4’ baby blanket is a good size for a beginner. Blankets are also very forgiving of fuck-ups - which in crochet is usually forgetting a count (as a stoner, this is usually why I knit)

Single crochet is a stitch type. Crochet is about making chains, and then doing different stitches back into the chain. Single crochet is the most basic stitch. (There’s also double/triple/half-double, but these mean different things depending on where you are from).

The Woobles are a little pricey, but having that kind of cute project and video help can be a good motivator. I think starting with amigurumi can still be a little ambitious though. I’d suggest starting with a blanket of single crochets to get comfortable with the hook - all you need is the right size hook and yarn. No need to spend more than $6 at Walmart or Dollar Tree.

There’s been deliberate dismantling of social services.

I was married to a wealthy man. He was controlling and abusive, and had the police remove me from our home. It wasn’t legal, but the police have lost the records of whatever they did that night. I couldn’t get a lawyer to help me, he had access to my bank accounts and emptied them. I reached out to multiple domestic violence agencies - there is no shelter, there are no lawyers, there are maybe one or two therapists if you are lucky. But I’m basically completely helpless.

I’ve read an argument (I think I can cite this to David Graeber maybe) that women were one of the original forms of property. Early forms of marriage are essentially master/slave, or a form of prostitution.

Which makes me wonder - getting stung by a scorpion makes more sense than getting bitten?

(From that same list, my favorite was “brewing beer.”)

The wealthy assholes who destroy our planet and lives can afford to protect themselves. The other poor schmucks who are getting fucked over too can’t.

How would you get revenge against Amazon? Are you going after Bezos, who is probably on a private island getting sucked off right now? Are you going after the faceless corporate types that work in a well protected office building in a city you can’t afford to live in?

The greatest invention of late stage capitalism is that inaccessibility. On a smaller, less violent scale, you’re ultimately going to cuss out the underpaid customer service rep for the shitty store policy, not the wealthy asshole who made the policy.

Look at what happened to David Reiner if you really want to be sickened.

I’m pretty sure that I’m intersex myself and had something done to me when I was an infant, but there is no way for me to ever find out. My only evidence is apparently my dong is pretty massive for a trans dude, which is a nice thing to hear from a nurse.

The state that just hired the LibsOfTikTok person to evaluate school materials… and is going after a principal’s license for dressing in drag on the weekends. Imma be vague because my life sucks enough without getting Chaya involved…

I took out my student loans to get a teaching degree. I worked full time during school, but tuition at my public university was 10k$/year when I was making $16k. My state has effectively made it illegal to be transgender in a public school, so despite a devastating shortage in my area of expertise, I can no longer work in the career I took the loans out for. My option is now to take out more student loans to pay for a masters degree and hope that I’ll be able to save up enough to move out of state, because I want to do the thing that I love to do and am good at. I will be a debt slave for the rest of my life.

There would still be a stigma around being the receptive partner. The idea being that a higher status man can penetrate lower status people (younger men, slaves, women). A high status man being penetrated by a lower status person would be worthy of mockery.

Samurai were gay as fuck though. Sengoku period you could even be romantic with other dudes, women are for making babies. I have an 1940s (iirc) English translation of a book of 16th century gay samurai love stories - the guy who wrote the forward thought it was because “mongoloid” people look more feminine 😅

There are lots of men who identify as straight but have sex with other men. So much so that medical literature often uses MSM as a category instead of gay. There’s an entire DL subculture among African American men.

Anywhere you go you can download Grindr and find oodles of guys who are in heterosexual marriages. The stigma is pretty strong, they probably can’t even internally recognize themselves as somewhat bisexual.