He didn’t get reelected by people who support the rich, he got reelected by people who want to push people who they feel are below themselves further down. They think Trump will do that for them, not to them. They think he is simultaneously rich and in their side. They are willing to ignore any evidence to the contract because ‘he just needs to act that way as part of his plan, in the end he’s secretly on our side’… As the wolf openly eats the sheep to ‘keep up appearances’.

Statistical significance of what? The number of people who vaguely see that gender identification is important to some people, but who don’t quite get why is such a big deal so they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, which results in some people being somewhat offended sometimes?

What i mean by people taking advantage of the movement for attention has less to do with statistical significance and more to do with the fact that most people hear or experience very little information about gender dysphoria outside of very vocal or exaggerated examples. Is that statistically significant? I’ll try to answer that if you can give me even a ballpark number that you think would define either side of that equation, with the overwhelming guess being that you have no more idea than i do. My examples are anecdotal just like im guessing you’re are.

Your arguing 8 different lines that have nothing to do what i said. You’ve replied to nothing in any grey area, you’ve only taken each example to a black or white extreme and then mocked it. What exactly does statistical significance have to do with 'it’s going to take a bit for the culture as while to understand that, and why, gender is so important.

If you really can’t get you mind wrapped around this, maybe this will help. There are still people violently against trans people existing, and mocking and degrading them isn’t going to help. So you think mocking and degrading people who are at least nominally on you side is a good idea? Do you think driving away people who are almost there is a good way to get people on your side? Or do you think a little understanding on your side might be a better way to go?

So I’m not going to address this whole list of responses to comments you twisted around in order to be offended. I’m not dying on a hill of refusing to treat trans people with respect, my entire comment was aimed at cautioning against getting bent out of shape when people struggle a little bit with a new (to them) bit of culture and language.

Yes, we all understand that it’s not ‘hard’, but no matter how much you want everyone to see it your way, treat it with as much importance as you do, to some it’s going to take a bit and if you take that as an attack and attack back, you’re doing more harm than good.

My takeaway from the entire conversation is that if someone refuses to make a good faith effort at using a preferred pronoun, they’re a dick. If someone understands the importance and makes a moderate good faith effort but struggles getting it right and you judge or mock them for it, you’re the dick. And that second audience is bigger than you give credit for.

That’s where you lose the argument entirely. We don’t have to tolerate the intolerant… Nothing i said suggests that outside of your insistence on being offended. You don’t tolerate the worst examples of the other side, but you at least take a breath to try to understand the well intentioned members who don’t see things your way.

Except for the most extreme cases you can come up with, nothing is black and white, everything is grey, and your insistence that i must be a bad guy because i challenge anything makes you not terribly worth engaging.

Except for those baiting the conversation, everyone has reasons for feeling how they do on a topic, even if it’s just defaulting to it because of their social circle, but you are not a good champion of the cause of all you can come up with is mocking straw men arguments and feigning indignance.

Just a guess here, but are you that desperate to get offended at something that you have to double down on everything you find? Where in my comment did you find an opening for someone politely correcting a preferred name, to turn it into a snarky taking over the person.

I fully understand that it isn’t hard to use gender neutral or specific pronouns, and that they comfortably fits within many sentences, but you seem to be insisting that that there are no circumstances where someone might struggle… Can you really think of no insurance where they sounds at least ambiguous, like when it’s unclear if you are talking about a specific person or a group of people, and then stumbling trying to correct, then wonder if you should correct, maybe that’s offensive… Just because you use a simple example doesn’t justify the snark surrounding how others don’t have to pay to do it.

Just because people in the past (and present) have overreached or minimized groups doesn’t mean no one can have a valid thought in that direction. You may want to dismiss or ignore those that take advantage of the gender topic purely for the attention, or lie about sexual abuse for revenge or money, but that doesn’t make it disappear. Understanding that the bad apples don’t invalidate the group is fair, but you’re using the vocal objections as false flags just as much as the media used the false arguments as reasons to minimize the groups themselves.

You seem to be primed to take everything as bad faith almost intentionally. Not understanding that arguments have two sides is what keeps conversations from happening, not what settled them. Yes, it is not a huge burden to remember someone’s pronoun, but people have a lot on their mind and something that has been one way for the majority of most people’s lives is absolutely going to take some time ‘not to get wrong’ even for people who are honestly trying, yet you act as though it’s rude not to suddenly find it natural. If i told you I’d find it rude not to remember everyone’s favorite color, would you jump to making an effort to learn everyone’s favorite color? Now, was your first instinct when reading that example an indignant response that it was insensitive because ‘favorite color’ isn’t as identifying as a person’s gender?

I understand that many people discount a person’s gender or sexual preference, or even sexual abuse in order to minimize it, use examples of people taking advantage of it, or lying about it in order to dismiss the larger group of people who have real claims and preferences and experiences… But those things come from a real place too, and trying to bully or shame people for it is the same thing you accuse others of.

Honestly this conversation has gotten far too broad to even address all the differences of opinion we have, but if there’s one thing we might be able to agree on is that people don’t like being minimized, whether it’s about their gender, or if it’s their struggle with understanding sometimes struggle with gender. If you insist on insisting that the only valid argument is that everyone takes it as seriously as you do, you’re accomplishing a net negative for the cause.

Until you’re that rural person dropped into a convention center with people wearing name tags with their preferred pronoun and almost no understanding of how to actually use those pronouns appropriately.

For the most part, it’s amazing how seldom pronouns actually get used in referring to any specific person. Even if Bob uses he/she/they relatively often, the he/she/they being referred to is a specific person and the number of times Bob uses the word ‘she’ when referring to Sally is related entirely to how often Bob talks about Sally, specifically with other people. That might literally be never/once a year/once in his lifetime/etc.

If the vast majority of the time Bob talks about other people, they’ve not mentioned any preference, it’s understandable if he struggles when the need comes up, mid conversation, to substitute a ‘they/zhe/xer’ where he has only every used he/she (they still sounds plural to most people), and to remember off the top of your head a pronoun you’ve only seen on a name tag one time, roughly amounts to remembering everyone’s name and their hometown. Of course the impact is lessened by the fact that you will rarely have to refer to some specific person in third person when you don’t even remember their name, and in that case ‘they’ is kind of a fallback anyway.

Perhaps an undesirable outcome is that if the pronoun is a hurdle to overcome, it’s easier for Bob just not to bring Sally up at all, a possibly unfortunate result because it might have been an interesting conversation that is now simply avoided.

We’re still in the growing pains version of it, though, where there are far too many people taking advantage of a legitimate position just for the attention. This isn’t unique to the gender conversation, but it definitely suffers from it.

Another issue is that there is a component of needing to be vocal and firm or no one will take you seriously, but it’s a fine line between that and being obnoxious and over-asking…reminding someone who wants to be considerate is good, being offended at someone intentionally mis-labeling may be necessary, but being offended by honest mistakes or berating someone for not realizing zhe or zher or some newly defined label was a thing definitely hurts the cause.

Guessing that is Assad in the second panel, and he’s mocking them, as though their statement means nothing because they are powerless, like ‘sorry, did you say something? because I can’t hear you’. And then the 4th panel is his reaction when they actually speak up.

From one perspective, per capita is fair, but from another perspective it isn’t. The Constitution actually did a reasonable job of trying to address both cases, it just didn’t adequately account for such a huge swing in population and technology. One could argue that that is a failing of the people that came afterwards, since the Constitution also provided mechanisms for modification.

For an example of where it is not fair, consider an agreement between three groups and we all agree to vote on decisions that affect all three of us, say ‘how things are taxed’ or how often elections are held. Each group gets a vote, and 2 out of 3 wins. If that’s the agreement we entered into, my group would expect to get a vote now or a hundred years in the future even if your group grows it shrinks, it’s an agreement at the group level. Especially if we made considerations for a different type of vote that does take group membership size into account. It would be pretty shitty for your group to get big and insist that it should make all the decisions for me.

Land doesn’t vote, but groups do. The Constitution was written to accommodate both points, the Senate so each state has an equal vote, which is fair in respect to the fact that the Constitution is and agreement between states, and Congress where states with more people get more votes, because that is a legitimate perspective as well. It’s not perfect to start with, and it’s been modified poorly over time (representation hasn’t been kept proportional in Congress), but it is fair to say that each state having an equal vote is one valid point of view, and the founders realized that it wasn’t the only valid point of view.

Don’t attribute the ‘states rights’ phrase to me as though I’m on the wrong side of the civil war or something. The country can’t be entirely directed by states regardless of population, but the states can’t be directed by other states based solely on population either.

To be fair, it is the united ´states´, not the united ´people living on the continent´. It wouldn’t be any more fair if California was making the decisions for 20 other states, just because they happen to have a crap load of people. The federal government is kind of supposed to be making decisions and maintaining things between states, not all these decisions affecting the people so directly.

I know it’s going to last a long time because the old lady said they used it everyday and it still looks practically new

For sure, anyone who has seen some of the videos of drink carts and luggage bouncing off the cabin ceilings during crazy turbulence shouldn’t have any questions about the utility of seatbelts in less than catastrophic events… Which of course is the goal even in ‘crash’ landings. There are crashes where seatbelts would obviously be worthless, but in anything short of that, you’ll be happy that you weren’t in a box with 300 human shaped dice being shaken up.

Imagine that actually goes through and one of the Republicans actually gets a conscience and falls on his sword and throws in for Kamala.

Also a separation so the smell can’t be directly attributed to him.

Not that there isn’t a lot of creepiness going on with this in general, but it wouldn’t be crazy to remodel without emptying a freezer. Assuming they weren’t on top of the rest of the food, stuff in the bottom of a freezer can easily be overlooked for years

Hey, where’s all the water going all of the sudden?

This picture of the apparent tornado, with alleged clouds and, i guess, some type of ‘land’ was captured with what has been reported to be a camera of some sort.