Not many people know it, but penguins are excellent brick layers and if they were smart enough, ostriches and emus would make excellent guard birds! Also, kiwis are just adorably awkward, so they’re there to keep the morale up 😉

I still have hope emotionally but intellectually I fully expect to be disappointed. Development hell of this magnitude can’t be healthy for the end result 😮‍💨

Oops, my mistake. Good thing we can edit posts!

Not to mention the fact that huge billboards along streets and roads are by definition either ineffective or an impediment to traffic safety, depending on whether or not they manage to catch your attention while you’re operating a vehicle…

Absolutely. Hell, with how much of the heavy lifting they’re doing for corporations destroying most aspects of the world, it should probably be illegal to advertise at all except in strictly limited circumstances.

Remember the good old days when you got ads INSTEAD of directly paying rather than in addition to forking over already extortionate sums to profiteering megacorps? Pepperidge Farm does.

Here’s a tip to get you started

You must

Not according to the regressive dogma YOU’RE spewing 🤦

Progressives

Yeah, those of us who want humanity to progress rather than stagnate or even regress. So awful of us 🙄

who don’t believe in God

Leave your imaginary sky daddy out of it.

support murdering disabled people

Nah, that kind of thing is done by regressive monsters who are religious, superstitious or both. Like the nazis you’re referring to. They were religious, superstitious and not the least bit progressive. They were fascists.

Disabled people with families who take care of them don’t need government assistance

What fucking century do you live in where you think amateurs are better at dealing with disabilities than medical professionals??

Unfortunately there are some people who need the government to take care of them.

Yeah, literally everyone, in matters great and small. That’s what government is there for. To help and support all of the people who need it.

I should also point out that if someone relies on their family for care, they only have the rights that their family allows them

Ah, the century would be the 1700s if not earlier. That’s not how the law works, fundie.

No. Absolutely not.

Terminal cancer patients can’t take care of themselves either, do you want to take their rights away too?

What about people with disabilities that require constant care, should they become “wards of the state” with fewer rights than children again like in the bad old days?

use of drugs should be decriminalized, but it should also come with other responsibilities

Do you want to do that with alcohol and tobacco too, or just the ones that the rich and powerful consider taboo?

For example, a government organized intervention and mandatory rehabilitation.

One size fits all mandates are a recipe for disaster. Depending on the individual case, you end up either violating the patient’s right to bodily autonomy, refusing needed help because the mandate says it’s not time yet or both.

Better to leave the medical decisions to medical professionals. They’re much better at it than even the best politicians and/or parliamentarians.

Depending on how much money the person has, they should be required to pay for it

Absolutely not. Means testing like that breeds resentment and often leads people between a rock and a hard place where they’re too wealthy to get it for free but not wealthy enough that they won’t have make sacrifices they might not think to be worth it.

Rich or poor, cost should never be a determining factor in whether or not to seek needed healthcare.

We should have a welfare state. It should also come with responsibilities.

People have enough responsibilities already without the government making demands in order to give them healthcare that they need.

When someone needs help battling addiction, the caring thing isn’t to check whether they’ve worked hard enough to be allowed to work hard.

Absolutely.

And if they WERE reporting on us, every other article would start with a paragraph explaining how stupid we are as a species in spite of having so many excellent individuals amongst us 🤷

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I was talking about them, but now that you mention it, that assertion is partly true at most.

Apart from being the most incarceration-happy country in the world, it’s also one of the worst surveillance states and the police are mostly there to protect the property of the rich at the expense of such freedoms as bodily autonomy and the rights to peacefully protest injustice for everyone else.

You really shouldn’t be grading something as fundamental as press freedom on a curve, though. Nobody ever became freer by pointing out that others are less free. Least of all the land of the incarcerated!

Except for the fact that every time there’s a Republican president (and sometimes even when there’s a Democrat one), the media have to self-censor true and important stories or risk losing access.

And of course there’s the fact that all of the biggest media outlets are pretty much on one or two political teams, which also restricts the editorial largesse.

And that’s not even counting all the CORPORATE interests making the press less free.

I maintain that"mostly free" is ridiculously generous compared to reality.

I mean that their press freedom rating for the US is far too generous…

Not that I in any way disagree with you on that, but this made me laugh:

Country: USA Press Freedom Rating: MOSTLY FREE

Guess they have a bit of pro-establishment bias themselves…