People are disagreeing with you, but as somebody from one of the most liberal states in the US, Massachusetts, it’s very much the same thing here - the cities are as progressive as it gets, but you don’t have to drive too far before you start seeing the Trump flags and Bible thumpers in their lifted pickups. It’s very easy to fall into that lifestyle if you’ve never been more than 50 kilometers from the house you were born in and never seen somebody with a different skin color from yours. And it doesn’t matter if that house is among fields, forests, or coastline.

New Hampshire/backwoods Maine.

New England does not consent to being considered a part of the same country as the Bible Belt/Florida.

Jokes aside, New Hampshire is known as “The South of the North” for its very…“conservative” political stances.

I think this also comes from Keanu being an actor and not a voice actor.

I’ve seen it time and time again, from movies to video games. They hire celebrity actors for the name recognition, but who have no experience in a vocal booth and it shows. Just because somebody is a great actor doesn’t mean they’re a great voice actor. Mark Hamill is an example of somebody who’s both, but he’s spent decades at this point working in voice acting.

It sounds like your job requires no talent and you could be easily replaced. Is it so?

Just because there are other people out there who can do the same job as you (or them) doesn’t mean that it takes no skill, nor that replacing them can be done at a snap of the fingers. But nobody is irreplaceable. That’s how companies see their employees. Even you.

And your logic is bass ackwards. The solution is to educate people about how bad letting cats live outdoors is, not pretend that their pet is a feral. All you’ll do that way is eventually come home to broken windows once they find out who stole their cat. Tell them how much better (and longer) their cat’s life will be if they live indoors vs. outdoors and you’re much more likely to actually change something.

The majority of people don’t know any better. And if they grew up with cats, it’s very likely that that’s how they were taught that you care for a cat. It’s only been in the past 20 years or so that the consensus on how cats should be kept has shifted from outdoors to indoors. Hell, look at how common declawing cats still is.

And I want to cull people like you. A shame we don’t always get what we want.

Cats should be kept indoors for a variety of reasons, including that they’re one of the largest threats to native species in the world and that they live longer indoors anyways due to the lack of picking up parasites and are at no risk of being preyed upon by larger predators. But to say you want to murder animals en masse just because they don’t understand property laws and do their business outside like… some sort of animal would is absurd, bordering on psychopathic. Might as well sit on your porch with a shotgun on your lap in case somebody’s dog decides to pee on your bushes.

Even better. Supposedly, there’s a guy around here who flipped the frame of his pickup truck around so it looks like he’s driving backward down the road. Get creative with it!

You jest, but my dad actually had a friend who did this for a living with Ford Pintos back in the day, and one time an inspector of some kind remarked that he made them safer than they were when they rolled off the factory floor.

Wage theft (when employers don’t pay their employees what they’re owed) in the US accounts for more stolen value every year than grand theft auto, larceny, petty theft, and breaking and entering combined. Yet wage theft is not considered a crime.

It’s the same story all over the world. The real issue isn’t the economic system but rather greedy people in positions of power with no accountability.

There’s a reason they’re called “Human Resources” and not Human Relations.

It’s probably a uniquely American thing, similar to how many malls are dying here while they thrive in Europe. Cities have been dying a slow death since like the 70s here because suburbs are a net loss in terms of revenue because they’re more expensive to maintain than the taxes they bring in, so the only way cities can afford them is to sell more land to developers to build more suburbs, which then cost the city money, and repeat into infinity.

Cities have also had a general decline in the population within urban areas during that time, with people moving out to the suburbs for the “American Dream” of owning your own house with a white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a cat or dog (and to avoid having to look at any poor people, immigrants, or black people). This was exacerbated further during COVID as people fled denser areas. The house prices in my town that’s about an hour away from one of the most expensive cities in the country (comparable to LA prices in the city here) jumped up practically 50% during COVID while prices in the city dropped something like 20% during the first year. Prices in the city have since come back up and are now above what they were before, but prices here never came down.

Cities here also tend to have a business district, sometimes even a “central business district” that’s at the heart of the city, which is made up almost exclusively of office buildings/other companies, with workers commuting into the city. Even my town has people who drive every day to their job in the city. With many of these buildings sitting empty during COVID, there’s been a push for urban renewal by converting them into apartments, but that’s easier said than done. Offices simply don’t have the same infrastructure that apartments need in terms of basic things like plumbing, and would need to be entirely gutted, but it would be a much needed fresh supply of housing that would probably help reinvigorate these city centers.

I may be remembering that wrong, as it was before my time, but I had heard that people moved to cable for the same reasons that people moved from cable to streaming services. You bought one cable package, it gave you access to everything, and there were no ads. Then came the ads, and eventually, the packages you have to buy in addition to your cable subscription for the channels you actually care about.

And the irony is that people switched to cable for the exact same reason. They got tired of the nonsense that broadcast TV pulled with subscriptions for different channels and all the ads and everything, and went to cable because you paid one bill for every channel. Then, everyone moved to streaming because you had to buy 50 different cable packages for the one channel on each you actually cared about, and there were just too many ads to deal with, etc.

Something something, those who don’t listen to history are doomed to lose profit margins or whatever.

Why do you people keep talking about “the right to exist”? That’s nonsensical. You either exist, or you don’t. No one can take your existence away from you, it’s not a right that can be granted by others.

Because that’s exactly the kind of “anti-LGBT viewpoint” you’re asking about. You don’t have to go far to find people claiming that being Trans is just a fad, or a cult of pedophiles trying to groom your children, or just mentally ill men, or a nefarious group trying to destroy young girls’ wombs through dangerous surgery. The list goes on and on, and that’s just the recent anti-Trans crusade. These are the kinds of views that they want to bring to social media sites and claim their free speech is being censored when they’re punished for it.

And these views are having real-life consequences. It’s now considered a sex crime for a man to wear a dress in Florida. For several years, transgender people were more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than black or Jewish people in the US, and there’s been an increase of hate crimes against both of those groups as well in the past decade. 8 out of 10 trans women in the US will be victims of sexual assault. LGBT people are one of the most likely groups to be refused medical care, often under the excuse that “it goes against my beliefs.” Some of these groups have even outright said that their goal is to “eliminate transgender people from public life, and eventually, existing entirely.” Some have straight up called for a trans genocide.

These same kinds of arguments have been trotted out for gay and black men - “they’re a bunch of pedophiles coming for your kids!” Or for lesbians - “they’re just damaged women.” Or my favorite, said by a 20-something year old coworker to a 16 year old lesbian coworker, “you’re not a lesbian, you just haven’t had a dick in you yet.”

To the neutral observer, it’s quite clear that certain online communities cough are echo chambers that refuse to engage in honest discussion regarding LGBTQ topics and vigorously attempt to expel and shame those who do not adhere to the party line.

I could not have said it better myself. Time and time again, science has shown that not only do LGBT people exist, but also how damaging the anti-LGBT rhetoric is. And yet, the “anti-LGBT” jam their fingers in their ears and scream about “woke indoctrination” before returning to their echo chambers. And eventually, that’s what these kinds of “free speech” platforms become. Echo chambers for hatred, as these people harass and drive off anybody with opposing views. As a wise bartender once said after kicking out a skinhead just for being a skinhead, “You allow one Nazi, and you no longer have a bar. You have a Nazi bar. Because if you allow one, then they’ll bring their friends, and eventually, they’ll force everyone else out.”

Also, you seem to have fallen for the “both sides” rhetoric they use to make themselves look innocuous while villifying their opponents. Stuff like the people encouraging those who who called in bomb threats to Target and threatened their employees for daring to have a line of Pride themed merchandise by saying it was protesting - that it was the same thing as people marching with signs against police brutality. You talk about the in-group and out-group bias of LGBT people while conveniently ignoring the exact same thing from the other side. Ignoring that these “anti-LGBT” people think they’re being unfairly persecuted and anyone who disagrees with them is a “woke” communist or whatever.

And yet “anti-LGBT” was the term used by the comment above to describe the kinds of viewpoints that they’re questioning why they aren’t allowed. It’s also the label used proudly by some of these groups themselves. Like the term TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) which was coined by the group itself, but was later claimed to be a slur by that very same group when they realized how the majority of people viewed them negatively because of it.

Ask the groups of conservatives arguing that trans people are either just a trend, a cult of pedophiles trying to groom your kids, a cult trying to destroy young girls wombs or perform life changing surgery on children, or any of a number of other accusations that say that trans people don’t exist, including the two they mentioned. These are the kinds of “anti-LGBT arguments” that they claim are being censored.

There’s a screenshot elsewhere in the comments of him saying he was specifically removing transphobia and homophobia as punishable offenses from the rules because those rules “were being used to silence conservative voices.” That’s a pretty clear stance to me.

Because these 2 things are not the same, and by conflating them as such, you pretty clearly show what side of the fence you fall on. Debating on whether or not minorities deserve the right to exist is not the same thing as arguing about which brand of magic sky-daddy you subscribe to.

“Anti-LGBT viewpoints” fall along a pretty clear line. The same one that “anti-Jewish” and “anti-Black” views fall on. That these minorities don’t deserve the same rights granted to white people, or even that they shouldn’t be allowed to exist period. There has never been any other view presented by “anti-LGBT” people. They seek to exclude minorities from everyday life and eventually kill them off entirely. The arguments they use today against trans people are the same they used against gay people, which are just rehashed arguments they used to oppose equal rights for black people. There’s no politeness to be found there. Might as well say that we should hear the Nazis out on this “final solution to the Jewish question,” so long as they’re polite in their arguing their case.

As a wise bartender once said, “If you allow one Nazi, you no longer have a bar. You have a Nazi bar.”

Open. The decline of the political climate in this country since 2001 has made me fear for my safety since I was in middle school, so keeping the door open helps satisfy that part of my brain that’s always in threat detection mode by allowing me to hear everything in the house from my bed.

Plus, I live alone. So pretty much every door is open all the time.