The fuck is wrong with you? Why do you give a shit about what people enjoy? That's pretty weird, bro

Or anywhere relatively rural. I just got home from a long weekend in rural Minnesota/Wisconsin, and there's literally no viable way to run public transit out there in a manner that wouldn't either be so restrictive as to be useless, or would lose so much money it would be first on the block for service cuts (and therefore become useless). I'm talking "town of 600 residents, most people live on unincorporated county land on a farmstead, and the only grocery store in a 50 mile radius is a Dollar General" rural. Asking these folks to give up cars is an insane prospect.

Notable is NPR's rebuttal to this essay: NPR responds after editor says it has 'lost America's trust'

In particular, this portion stands out:

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Nah, he just talked about how "Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace" and how a bunch of employee groups based on identity started up, and then directly linked that to the "absence of viewpoint diversity." Totally different. 🙄

I'm really tired of this weasel wordplay that constantly happens, where someone talks about X and then uses that to lead into a point about how this bad thing happened, and when called out, backs off and says "I never blamed X on this bad thing happening." Fuck off with that shit, we all know what you said and we can fucking read, you just don't want to admit it because you know that saying it makes you look racist as all hell.

I think that's just called informally splitting a mortgage, homie

What you're missing is that it's a step in the direction of establishing fetuses as being treated like humans for things like child support, tax benefits, HOV lane benefits, and so on, with the end goal being able to stand in front of our extremist supreme court and say "Gee, isn't it funny how we treat fetuses as humans for this, this, and this, but not as humans when it comes to the fourteenth amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law? You agree? Great! Now that we've established that fetuses have rights under the fourteenth amendment, let's talk about all these pesky blue states that aren't banning abortion..."

Yeah, one of my favorite depictions of him are the Year One movies/comics, where Batman is fighting corrupt cops just as much as he's fighting the mafia and other villains of the week.

OKAY, time for some clarification as a Seattle local:

• This was NOT an isolated incident. The Cuff Complex, which was one of the bars that got raided, had been raided so many times in the past the owner had to put up a sign warning customers not to wear jockstraps because of the heavy enforcement (which ironically caused him to lose even more business because everyone was pissed at the owner for "policing bodies")

• Gay bars were being targeted disproportionately to straight bars. Remember, there are a LOT more straight bars than gay bars. Raiding 4 gay bars covers a sizable chunk of all the gay bars in Seattle, but raiding 14 straight barsis a relative drop in the bucket.

• A gay cabaret club owner crunched the numbers and found his establishment was raided 1,550% more than the average liquor licensee. The owner of the Cuff also owns another gay bar and a regular straight bar. His two gay bars are frequently raided, while the straight bar has NEVER been raided.

• The board that enforces liquor laws is the LCB. Two funny facts: First, the rule against lewd conduct was created by... The LCB, not the state legislature. Second, the LCB stands for the Liquor and Cannabis board, which means that they are already ignoring a law when it suits their purpose (the federal prohibition against cannabis).

• Finally, after the gay community collectively tore the LCB a new asshole during a board meeting earlier this week, the LCB reversed course and basically said "ah shit we fucked up" and is suspending enforcement of its lewd conduct rules. I strongly recommend this Mastodon thread from someone who attended the meeting, it's truly a thing of glory and demonstrates just how close the LCB was to getting slapped with a discrimination lawsuit: https://partyon.xyz/@nullagent/111851872885551640

...yeah that sounds about right for sergals, tbh

Generally speaking, once you get past the "traditional" species like foxes, rabbits, cats, etc., and start getting more into the esoteric fantasy/scifi species like sergals, protogens, and yinglets, the people who create characters for those species tend to fall into one of two camps:

• super srs "you must follow this lore to the letter or I will end you, by which I mean I will post a FurAffinity journal for my 7 followers complaining about your character diverging from the lore that nobody will pay attention to" types

• "oh this looks cool I'm gonna make one and put my own twist on the design" types

Funny story, the person who originally designed protogens tried to be the first type, but pretty much everyone ignored him and just did their own thing anyway

And the admins (and myself, for that matter) want to exist without the risk of doing a perp walk because Little Timmy saw a peen.

I'm on an NSFW Lemmy instance. I have multiple NSFW accounts spread over the various platforms, and my single biggest fear is that some shithead kid is going to ignore the giant "18+ only" warnings because they're so MATURE for their age, they're going to find adult content (or worse yet, try and message me and pretend they're over 18 so I don't block them), and one of their relatives find out and call the police. Intentionally done or not, I've seen exactly that scenario play out, ruining the lives of multiple people through no fault of their own.

The Lemmy admins all have to worry about this exact same thing too, except they have to worry about every kid and every NSFW account/community, unless they decide to either play whack-a-mole with the various NSFW instances, or move to default deny federation and only federate with known-SFW communities. And that's on top of the existing CSAM spam concerns that they appear to have only recently gotten under control.

I don't give a single solitary flying fuck about whether children can express themselves equally. They're NOT equal to an adult, because I don't risk jail time by showing off my [REDACTED] to them.

Thank you. It's critically important to recognize that each party does do similar things sometimes, but it's also crucial to recognize the difference in motivation behind those similar actions, and to acknowledge that the motivation is sometimes just as important as the action that results from the motivation.

First, it's important to find an instance that caters to your interests, especially if you have more niche hobbies. Once you're set up, search for and follow hashtags related to your personal interests, and use those to find accounts you like. Use hashtags in your own posts so that people can discover you more easily, and browse users that follow you to see if they'd be interesting to follow back and expand your network out. Keep an eye on the local and federated timeline for interesting posts, which includes all posts from people on the same instance and from all federated instances. Eventually, as you build up a follow list (and especially as you follow highly active accounts) your followed accounts will start introducing you to new accounts themselves through boosting posts.

It's more work since you're building the network yourself instead of having it spoon-fed to you by an algorithm, but it's overall much more rewarding, and lets you tailor your experience to your own personal preferences.

Part of it is loopholes, but an equally big part is that we tax the way the rich earn their money differently. Most working- and middle-class earners make their money from a wage or salary, which is taxed as income. However, the rich make almost all of their money through dividends on stocks, low- or no-interest loans backed by assets, and selling stocks through the market or companies (that they have a seat on the board) doing stock buybacks. All of the income made from the above are taxed differently as "capital gains tax," which is usually taxed at a much lower rate than income.