I read most of that (think I missed the last few chapters, but he was out of Elan and had done some traveling)--it was horrifying. There's also a 3 episode documentary on Netflix called "The Program" where the documentary maker revisits the now closed school where she went (The Academy at Ivy Ridge) and by episode 3, she's followed the money to one family behind a lot of these institutions. But as she and former AaIR students actually see other facilities far from where they were locked up, they're all carbon copies of each other, they're all just the same punish-for-everything camps with no escape. Fucked up that there's like a formal recipe for how to do this to families and not get caught. And that there are so few legal protections for children.

Your comment reminded me of this gem of a candidate. Some of y'all gotta remember--the 2010 candidate for Nevada's Senate seat who thought a reasonable alternative to Obamacare was bartering chickens and the like.

“A lot of guys are worried that in five years, seven years, you’re only gonna have a Bowlero,” Big Mike says. “And when that happens, what happens?”>

Well, in my smaller town, our only new bookstore was part of a large chain. When the owner sold the company, the idiot who bought it drove the chain into the ground. Then that guy sold to an investment type group to be shuttered and liquidated. So now we don't have a new bookstore, roughly 8 years out.

Bowling seems to occupy the same type of niche that bookstores do. It appeals to a small dedicated following who really rely on that space. Watching so many big companies go out of business over the last couple decades makes me really not want local businesses sold to bug conglomerates, especially, for example, the way it played out for Toys-R-Us.

Wait till they demand contractor rates!

Men in real life (in my experience) are mostly lovely folks. Men in places like Lemmy and Reddit can be pretty decent too, depending on the thread. But honestly, at what point has it been 'safe' to self identify as a woman on the wider Internet? Like to have a female voice in a game chat? Or in a random chat room? Between a lot of online harassment (which only needs a small slice of men participating in to be felt much more broadly) and the political and cultural attempts to strip women of power, I get this kind of outlook happening. It just really fucking sucks.

Friendly reminder to everyone that the rest of the world has signed on the United Nation's Connvention on the Rights of the Child; the US doesn't like that it could prevent children from being spanked, because God wants us to spank our children (spare the rod, spoil the child).

Religion is often a basis for the suffering of children.

I'll contend all day long that the 'Texas Miracle (TM)' is largely built on the backs of underpaid Latin/Mexican labor. (I would say totally, but that oil $$$ does its work too.) Republicans shitting all over immigration does, in fact, rob their localities of economic gains. I hope migrants in Mexico are treated more humanely than the United States has done. Hell, that's still quite the low bar.

Something I didn't learn until this week, but James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family (wrote "Dare to Discipline", a book about how we really needed to start hitting kid again in the 70s), was an assistant to a counselor who was a eugenics-loving, racist marriage counselor. Dobson wrote/published materials for Popenoe (the eugenicist counselor) as his assistant. Very few years later, Dobson started writing many of those same ideas as himself, but wrapped up with religion.

So these young whippersnappers might be trying to bring back eugenics, but that's largely because for the last 50 years, eugenics have been evangelized to many, many (especially Christians) in all but name.

I had a young woman, maybe 17 last semester, turn in a paper --it was a 12 page research/argumentative paper about why gender complementarianism (ie woman and men have different, distinct roles with men at the top). She's a good student, a good writer, but literally she's heard this set of morals from the pulpit her whole life... So like... Yeah. I read another young man's paper where his takeaway from 12 Years a Slave was "wow, not all slave owners were abusive monsters--some were pretty kind and treated their slaves like family." The kids are as alright as the rest of us are.

Not DeSantis, but red states are really getting records for out of state care their people seek.

I know it's a whataboutism, but I really can't stand that we can't have something like a gun registry because "MuH gUnz!?!!" and the government might take them or whatever, but we can't buy or borrow books without government agencies being able to secretly procure that information. Now private medical records from the doctor's office, not just like a person googling around, are being hoovered up for overtly political reasons against vulnerable people. Why are guns so much more sacred than people being able to live?

I'm sure there are plenty of podcasts that cover this group and happening. This is the one I like.

They are doing the same playbook. The longer I'm an adult, the less inclined I am to defend parents' rights so strongly. Children are people, not property.

The start of your comment reminded me of the exchange between Trevor Noah & Tomi Lauren where Trevor asks her, okay, so if this protest isn't good, and this kind isn't good, how should black people protest? How should they make their grievances known? And she just could not answer that question. Protests aren't comfortable--they're disruptive by nature. If protests don't challenge anything or make anyone uncomfortable, what are they even doing?