Reluctancy Waltz

I got the Verification Required scam for the first time today. THIS ISN'T FROM TUMBLR. Report and block it if you get it.

As someone old enough to remember when Star Wars canon consisted of one (1) movie that featured a spunky but whiny farm boy we'd only seen driving a landspeeder before taking a one-in-a-million shot to save the day...

Oh! By the way, he's got a T-16 we haven't heard of before the Deathstar mission briefing back home. And two-meter rodents for target practice.

At least Luke Skywalker is an adult.

Do not get me started on a nine-year old enslaved child who doesn't know what the Force is, never mind having a nanosecond of training, becoming the first human to win a race he's never finished and follow that up with hitting a control hub no fully trained pilot in the sky at the time could get near.

That's just them being strong in the Force, naturally.

But let a young adult woman who grew from toddlerhood fighting for her place (that's not a walking stick she's carrying around) among freelance salvage operators digging through literal space-going war machines know how to operate one and suddenly MARY SUE.

Why doesn't Rey get the Skywalker benefit of "the Force is with her"?

Tracing a neat straight line, adept and sure, The falcon heeds the calling falconer; Things hang together, and the center holds; Mere symmetry is ordering the world, The sea-bright tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence proceeds; The best have strong convictions, while the worst Are full of resignation and are sad.

First: THIS RECALL IS NOT STATE SPECIFIC. IT IS NATIONWIDE.

here are the specific products and dates:

FDA page on this:

A habitable, equal and prosperous 21st century is materially possible. The carbon budget allows it and history offers precedents at comparable scales: universal suffrage, the universalisation of healthcare and education, the halving of working hours and the sharp compression of inequality over the 20th century. Technical impossibility is not what is standing in the way, but rather the absence of a shared vision of social progress, at once concrete and radical. What it will take instead is political choice, and the hard work of coalition-building behind it.

—

Ground News - Somali Referee Denied US Entry Before World Cup

He carries a DIPLOMATIC PASSPORT.

Fuck Trump. Fuck ICE. Fuck everything about this. 

A topic that would come up, not exactly often, but regularly enough to be noticeable, was "who is it we should be restricting from voting?" Popular responses included: dual citizens; citizens who live abroad; citizens who were born to immigrant parents; citizens who didn't pay income taxes; citizens who hadn't served in the military; Muslims; and, of course, women.

Two little things that made this even more interesting. One, it was never the actual bloggers who prompted it. I never saw a post titled "How To Improve Our Electorate By Restricting Voting." It always arose spontaneously in the comments section. Two, I never saw anybody push back. Not once did a commenter say "guys, is it really okay to stop people from voting because we don't agree with their politics?" It was always completely explicit: we have to do this because those demographics vote Democrat.

Which says so much about how utterly mainstream and widely accepted this position is in red states.