Look at how the Russian invasion of Ukraine was sold to Russians. That's how it will be sold to us. Those cartels are some scary motherfuckers. Legit.

There are a lot of folks who would welcome the idea of if Mexico can't handle them, we will.

What kind of content are you looking for? Reading every random thought of people you like, or reading every random person on a subject you are interested in?

Frankly, I'd like to be able to follow a combination of people and subjects, but that's hard because if I'm a techbro promoting my business by showing off some code, is that marketing or technical content?

One way or the other, you have to mentally filter out posts that don't interest you.

I like subject-based content like Lemmy and Reddit, but it's also nice to feel like part of a community where people (kinda) care about you as a person. In order to achieve that here, you need to be in a small community or a prolific enough poster that people get to know you. I also don't like that microblogging tends to push real names and selfies and stuff—I value my anonymity. I don't have to worry about someone from work feeling a certain way because I play Dungeons and Dragons or have trans friends or have the occasionally cathartic apoplectic political rant.

One nice thing about Mastodon is you can follow a hashtag and sort of get the best and worst of both worlds. I wish Bluesky offered that. Maybe they will in the future. They do offer custom feeds, but it's not as simple as just pinning a hashtag in Mastodon, but otherwise I think Bluesky is a lot easier to use. Creating lists of people is easy. I haven't yet looking into how to create a feed like "Star Wars posts". Other people have but I don't know exactly how they function.

Laws can only do so much. The founders knew that. They are just words and paper.

We the people chose this. Why and how are moot. We didn't hold our leaders accountable. Now, we see how far Trump will go, because there are no actual checks on his power. He can literally drag Congress members into the street and shoot them without consequences. And half the country will cheer.

Do you have a family? Kids? Anyone you are responsible for? Would you be so flippant about making them homeless?

Snek sees what you've done there.

I like subject vs identity because I enjoy discussing issues and I enjoy seeing familiar people in the discussions, but I don't like being followed and following is hard for me. I might love your thoughts on Star Wars but you also post a lot of cat pictures which I'm neutral about and sports which I don't like.

So if I follow you and see those three subjects, two posts I have to cognitively tune out. If I follow a Star Wars board, I get your thoughts and potentially two other people's thoughts in those same three posts.

I like that. On Bluesky (or TwX/Mastodon) I have to find people who mostly post about things I want to see. It's hard and it's not conducive to massive follow/follower counts which is normally the measure of success.

I also find myself feeling constrained to only post things my followers are interested in, because as an individual I'm just not that fascinating. So I post less and less as my follower count goes up.

Because of all that, subject vs identity is the most natural way to divide up social media to me. I'd be happy to brainstorm other ways, though.

Excellent choice. I thought this was a fun movie, though I haven't seen it in over 30 years.

To hear it told on Bluesky, it's the better blocking tools and the culture of "we don't have to put up with these assholes."

shrug

I've been off Twitter for years and even before that I probably posted less than a half-dozen times per year. I mostly prefer subject-based social media (here) over identity-based, but I'm looking to surround myself with people who talk about something other than politics because the last Trump presidency I just couldn't handle the constant tide of horrors.

I just need somewhere to escape all that and if not, I'm going to be in a really mentally unhealthy place for the next four years.

I just bought Govee lights this year and put them up. It was a couple hundred dollars vs $4800 for professional permanent lights. I don't know how long they'll last, but I know I'm getting too old to be climbing on my roof.

Overall I like the lights, but I have nothing to compare them with. They've been up since just before Halloween.

The Supreme Court just publicly called for Congress to weigh in on who is responsible?

What is this, solicitation of bribes? Because these big companies are going to try to swing the vote with cash.

This is something else made so much worse by wealth inequality. The very wealthy have a vastly outsized influence on every aspect of the world. Being a billionaire, no matter how well-intentioned, is inherently a negative for humanity.

Edited with more info. Idk. In Michigan if you hit your wife, my understanding is the cops will prosecute you whether she agrees to file charges or not.

For the record we are both in our fifties.

A woman can't consent to being hit in my state. Or at least that was the common consensus when we were social about it.

I just looked it up and some random website says it's fine with consent so either the entire community was misinformed, something has changed, or that website was full of shit.

That's just how the system is. My wife and I are into bdsm. Legally speaking I'm guilty of spousal abuse because she legally can't consent.

So we just ignore the law. But if we ever divorced acrimoniously she could rake me over the fucking coals.

You will definitely get a lot back. They tax it like you make $8k every month.

Not knowing you, or your dad, or the situation at all makes it really hard to give specific advice. Do it somewhere private and don't set it up with the phrase "I have something to tell you" or anything like that. That just creates anxiety and no one will ever be able to say that for good news again without triggering him.

He might already suspect or even know. Or it could be a total shock. So private is best because his reaction could be intense.

Beyond that, buddy I just don't know. Depends a lot on the people. If you think it'll be a confrontation, don't tell him she's cheating, just present the evidence. I saw this, I heard that, I found this. Let him draw his own conclusions.

Widower-maker.

Always enjoy your posts!

So I didn't have a source, just recollection. I went to look for a source specifically as it pertains to transfolk and bathrooms.

I don't know that it's an easy read, but I thought I'd link to something on congress.gov instead of a website whose bona fides I don't know.

Although legislation may not alter the substantive meaning of the Equal Protection Clause as interpreted by the courts, Congress may define prohibited discrimination in various contexts, such as in employment and in federally funded education programs. The meaning of sex discrimination in those contexts has also been addressed by federal courts, including in claims brought by transgender individuals. Congress possesses substantial authority to alter the scope of prohibited conduct under civil rights statutes, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Likewise, Congress has authority to provide exceptions to the application of those laws, such as the religious exception under Title IX

Harvard Law Review has this to say:

As novel iterations of laws targeting queer identity make their way through state legislatures, an alternative constitutional avenue for challenging them would be to identify and apply the factors that allowed the Romer Court to infer animus and flip the presumption of rationality to strike down a class-based law without applying a heightened form of scrutiny.

I'll be honest, I'm not familiar enough with laws to fully comprehend what I'm reading here.

Also, I was specifically thinking about Bills of Attainder, which punishes an individual or group without judicial process. One might argue this person is being punished for being trans, but I couldn't find anything specifically invoking the protection against these in the case of transfolk and bathrooms.

We've had our democratic say. Anything further response from the people will not be democracy. It'll be the same thing the French people said to their aristocracy. The same thing the Russians said to the Tzars.