I am very typical earthling. I like earth food and earth drink and earth sports and earth media. Im all about earth things because I am so typical and earthling. so typical as to be very boring and not worth investigating or looking into because I am definately from earth.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • wow. just wow. with the earlier articles I assumed what would actually pass would eliminate the crazy but:

    During its state convention this past weekend, the Republican Party of Texas approved a platform that lays out a Christian nationalist vision for the state, which would be maintained through an anti-democratic elections process that would create a permanent, one-party system.

    Party platforms are meant to give voters an impression of what that organization’s principles and goals are. While not binding, they provide a basic idea of the policies a party will pursue should its members win control of government in an upcoming election.

    The 50-page platform from the Republican Party of Texas suggests that the party will seek to instill a number of far right policies, including:

    Restricting in-person voting to just three days prior to an election day;
    Adopting a so-called “parents’ rights” view of schooling, which would forbid any schools from teaching about “sexual choice or identity…in any grade whatsoever” and passing a law “even more comprehensive than the Florida [Don’t Say Gay] law,” effectively stamping out LGBTQ students’ right to feel safe in schools;
    Restricting even further the right to obtain an abortion, and banning methods of birth control that the far right considers “abortifacients,” such as Plan B (“the morning after” pill);
    And mandating that the state legislature and the state Board of Education “require instruction on the Bible” in all public schools throughout Texas.
    
    

    The party platform also calls for vast changes to how statewide officials are elected, urging for the creation of a system that would be an extreme version of the federal Electoral College by giving equal voting weight to each county, regardless of population size.

    In the proposal, candidates for statewide office would have to win a majority of counties in the state, rather than a direct majority of voters, to win the position they’re seeking. Per the platform:

    The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county.

    Democrats have not won a statewide office position in Texas for decades, but the proposal would almost guarantee that they could never win a position ever again.

    The last presidential election provides an example of how extreme this plan would be. Former President Donald Trump won the state against President Joe Biden by a margin of 52 percent to 46 percent, respectively. But under the Texas GOP’s proposed changes, Trump would have won 91 percent of the total counties compared to Biden’s 9 percent.

    Even if a Democratic candidate has a majority of voters supporting them — likely through obtaining large margins of victories in highly populated counties — they still wouldn’t win the election. In Dallas County, for example, where Biden won with 598,576 votes compared to Trump’s 307,076, the outcome would be canceled out under the GOP’s proposal by the outcome in Loving County, a sparsely populated jurisdiction where Trump won 60 votes total compared to Biden’s nine votes from people living there.

    In short, the Republican Party would likely become the only party in the state under this scheme, although far right third parties could potentially do well under it, too.

    On his Substack, historian Kevin Kruse described the proposal as a “throwback to the decidedly undemocratic systems that southern states had before the civil rights era.” Indeed, several states, Kruse noted, had similar voting systems in place that Republicans in Texas are now proposing to bring back; such systems served as a means to prevent Black voters from obtaining any real representation in the state legislature during the Jim Crow era.

    Those systems were invalidated by a series of Supreme Court rulings that created the standard of “one person, one vote” in state elections. If Texas tries to reimplement the plan, however, it will likely return to the Court, which has taken a decidedly right-wing turn over the past two decades, and may give reconsideration to those past precedents.







  • I mean if i get to maximum out of pocket its a bit over 7 grand now which tends to be about the same as my monthly cost on the insurance for the year and one kid will raise my monthly cost from spouse only to family (although keep em coming as after that they are all free). One decent surgery can pretty much push to max out of pocket. Of course that is max out of pocket for what is covered. Like this machine that automatically ices and puts pressure on an area and is proven to have better outcomes from surgery is not covered (one of the many health insurance chicken contests. sure we will pay more because you will have more issues if you don’t get it but you will have to live with lower quality of life). Anyway just some perspective on cost because while not 22k it can get up there.


  • This is outright wrong. Physical attractiveness is way bigger of a deal in women than men and there is a lot of hypocrisy around it. I had a friend in high school who was, without beating around the bush, fat. He would bemoan how women would not give him a chance because he was fat but then he himself would not go after women of his same build. He preferentially went after thin hot women. Worse he was when he finally was in a realtionship with a woman of equivalent hotness he started one up with her hotter friend. Im way hotter male wise than he was and he could not figure out how my more sincere approach to relationships was likely a bigger factor than my relative looks. Now that is anecdotal but I have a second hand thing to. It was a news piece and I don’t have the reference so take my word or not but it was a study on tips between male and female servers. They both had to be cordial and pleasant and provide good service but controlling for those factors they each had one factor that would increase the tips. For women it was looks. For men it was making their customer laugh.



  • im not sure I would call the last point anxiety. As existential threats go its not like nuclear war. Which might or might not happen based on our actions. Its something that is definately happening and extreme good action by us might mitigate it but we by and large have been taking worse actions or at best our beneficial vs non beneficial actions cancel each other out. Heck even without climate change pollution alone has the same ending.