VoxAdActa

It's news that occurred somewhere in the world, I guess. That's what all the "US news is world news!" people were saying in the meta thread.

This is Ohio. The Republicans will just keep calling referendums on the same thing over and over again until they get the results they want. They don't care. They literally use dirty tricks to circumvent what the citizens want every year. Just look at how medical marijuana played out.

First try: The governor gets the bank to cancel the account of the pro-weed side, because the organization had the word "marijuana" in its name. No bank account, can't be a real group, can't put something on the ballot. Sucks to be you.

Second try: The legislature tried and failed to keep the legal weed issue off the ballot. So instead, they put their own weed issue on the ballot that would forever prevent legal weed in Ohio (even if the first issue passed), and then gave it a name that was almost identical to the pro-weed issue. I seem to remember that neither ended up passing because voters were, as intended, confused, and just having the second issue on the ballot split the vote.

Third try: The issue got on the ballot, the polls were high, everyone in the state basically was ready to stand out in the rain and vote in favor of medical marijuana. So the legislature called a special session and passed their own legal medical marijuana law, and then convinced the courts that their law made the ballot issue obsolete, so it was thrown out.

BUT, the legislature's version was a clusterfuck in that the legislature had to personally approve applications for grow ops and dispensaries. A few hundred businesses applied for the permit, and, last I checked, 0 were approved. This led to a situation where it was legal to have medical marijuana, but not legal to buy or grow it, or bring it in from out of state. Which means if you get caught with weed, the cops couldn't cite you for having weed (if you had your med card), but they could site you for buying or transporting that weed, because there's no way to legally get it in the state.

That was like six or seven years ago, and I haven't kept up with it, but if there's a single legal dispensary in Ohio, I will be incredibly surprised. The whole point was to not approve any.

I believe the lack of charges for lying to Congress does lend a little credibility to the story he tells.

The tobacco execs who testified to Congress that nicotine was harmless and non-addictive didn't get charges, either. Does that lend credibility to the claim that cigarettes are good for you?

Fuck no, it doesn't. Because nobody has ever been charged for lying to Congress. Even when they've been bald-faced directly lying to Congress.

And from images of ice cascading into the sea, you genuinely drew the conclusion that Antarctica would be completely ice-free in less than 12 years?

So, nobody actually told you that, you just decided it was true after seeing video of ice falling into the sea. But that decision was firm enough in your mind to cause you to believe that, since there is still some ice in 2023, the doom-sayers of the Discovery channel were wrong and we had nothing to worry about?

Fascinating. I wish I had the ability to make those kinds of amazing leaps of reasoning on subjects I know absolutely nothing about and then believe them hard enough to post snarky shit in public.

What was the name of that program?

The "far right" is growing because the left keeps moving further left, and normal people realize they're now considered conservative.

I guess there really is no floor for how simple an idea can be when it's not beholden to reality. Thanks for the example.

Who told you that? Name, quote, date, and source, please.

Probably has its roots from way back in the day so that women couldnt effectively run away from the men and get very far.

Can't speak to Muslim culture, but European culture way back in the day didn't want women riding horses because of sex.

There are a lot of branches on that tree, but the biggest one is that since horseback was believed to be capable of rupturing the hymen (hymen science has progressed quite a bit since I last looked into it, so I don't know if that's actually a thing), it was the same thing as having sex for women. They believed that women got sexual pleasure from it (which, I guess, was a bad thing), that they'd start craving horses as lovers instead of humans, and all sorts of weird shit that only twisted, perpetually horny dudes would think of.

So the sidesaddle was invented. It allowed women to ride horses while, literally and figuratively, keeping their legs closed.

Unfortunately, riding sidesaddle is a massive pain in the ass, so that fad didn't last long. Maybe about fifty years or so of general popularity (because, obviously, you can still get a sidesaddle and learn to ride in it today, if you want, for whatever reason) over the course of all horse-domestication history.

Of course, like so many things from European history, this primarily applied to rich/noble people. The poor didn't have the luxury of giving a fuck about most of it.

It's not a story a perfectly spherical Jedi in a vacuum would tell you.

I've got a friend who's otherwise a great guy, but his anxiety disorder is just bonkers bad. Climate change is terrifying to him, so he copes by just straight-up refusing to believe that it's a big deal. It can be solved by planting a bunch of trees, or spraying some kind of plastic particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight ("It's been tested in Alaska! It works! But the government shut it down!"), or by some as-yet-unrevealed technology that's just around the corner.

Also, he's incredibly, unreasonably mad at Al Gore for making An Inconvenient Truth and will insist that he was wrong about literally everything and should never have opened his mouth.

I have to make a concerted effort not to argue with him too much, because I'm pretty sure that if I actually convinced him, he'd self-harm out of fear of the future.

I honestly think he's just a more extreme, slightly-more-self-aware version of how most conservatives feel about the climate change issue. It's scary, so it can't be true.

Yes, motherfuckers, I do demand that all of my morals and beliefs be as close to 100% internally consistent as possible, and yes, I actually believe them all the time. Who are these assholes saying hypocrisy and amoral selfishness are fucking good things?

I was planning a long road trip that I could have done all at once, but decided to break into two days with a hotel stay somewhere near the middle. I was on a bit of a budget, so when I found a room for ~$60, I was thrilled.

When I got there, the shower handle was plumbed backwards (so the "Cold" direction was hot), the first towel on the rack had brown splatters that were very clearly old blood stains, and while I was showering a big roach wandered up onto the lip of the shower like "S'up, bro," then meandered off like he did this sort of thing every day.

The bed was about as cushy as a gym floor mat, the pillows were bricks, and when I sat down on the desk chair to put on my shoes, the whole thing just about collapsed under me.

The review I left said: "The best $10 hotel room that $60 can buy," and since then I just make all my road trips in one go if I can't afford to spend at least $100 for a hotel room.