I just don't know why we're not making better legislation about single-use plastics rather than just arbitrarily banning plastic straws. It's so weird. One fucking turtle video. This isn't even picking low hanging fruit, this is legislators picking an apple off the ground and holding it up like they harvested a whole crop.

Meanwhile, I'm getting served a paper straw in a plastic cup with a plastic lid, neither of which I can recycle because it has food residue, and there are no public recycling bins anywhere anyway, and even if there were we don't recycle that plastic in my district we just dump it directly from the recycling center to the landfill. That's lip service, not progress. I'm throwing away garbage cans full of plastic every week without scrutiny, but the package of plastic straws that would have lasted me years is the focus of attention? Not biodegradable plastic? Not reusable packaging? Not paper packaging for consumer goods? Not analyzing the weight savings in fuel vs the increased weight of reusable packaging made of wood, glass, metal, cardboard, etc? No, just choose the smallest thing possible that still feels conspicuous enough for voters to think progress is still happening. With Amazon orders I'm throwing away as much bubble wrap these days as a retail store.

The topic is so big that any real progress is beyond the capabilities of our current government. The Democrats can't generate political will, the Republicans are obstructionist, and both sides simply report to their corporate overlords anyway. The only levers progressives can pull are hoping that enough moralizing, intersectionality, and virtue-signalling will offset overconsumption. It's the plenary indulgences of capitalism--we can still wastefully overconsume if we only buy fair trade products made out of recycled materials made by a diverse indegenous non-hierarchical employee owned collective of secular humanist queer amputees with developmental disabilities who donate a percentage of profits to protecting charismatic megafauna in developing nations. I can't even afford regular groceries, fuck that.

Why is faggot censored?

formal English

I'm not entirely sure you understand how any of this works. It would be quite a stretch of the imagination to suggest that a human rights lawyer at the UN is in any significant way responsible for the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Guy who can easily retire with a pension because he's past retirement age anyway gives middle finger to his old boss as he leaves because he's sick of things never changing"

Obviously you don't have kids.

I'm gonna need a list of the offensive mods for science

how the hell are you going to shoot a big bunch of people with a musket?

The answer is economy of scale, the collapse of the American manufacturing industry, bloated budgets, especially brand/marketing budgets, and the prices set by OEM manufacturers who themselves have bloated budgets. A lot of these brands arent actually manufacturers but middlemen for manufacturers. They do design, service, marketing and maybe assembly. But manufacturing is primarily done overseas. If it's manufactured domestically the labor and material costs are commensurate. Maybe the frame is made domestically, maybe not.

A perfectly decent bicycle is less than $100 in China.

I think at the high level it's the military industrial senatorial complex, the deregulation and reagonomics under Republicans, the neoliberalism under democratic, globalization, de-industrialization, the modern banking/credit system, the modern media complex, and personalized engagement algorithms.. Downstream of that is a high rate of poverty, debt, illiquidity, a poor healthcare system, reliance on jobs for affordable healthcare, a lack of access to robust mental health treatment, modernization of weaponry, a radicalized and angry society, collapsing social cohesion, division along small tribal lines, lacl of patriotism, and upregulation of the average amygdala. Downstream of that you have homelessness, addiction, mental health crisises, violence, suicide, murder, and the institutional inertia that makes these intergenerational problems.

Yes, we need a multifactorial approach to all of these things both acute and chronic. It isn't as simple or as possible to get rid of the guns, but we can increase gun laws. We could require training of all citizens, we can give a budget to support red flag law enforcement, we can give the alcohol and tobacco regulation to the FDA, and let at the ATF focus on firearm enforcement, or roll it in to the secret service or fbim We can make healthcare free. We can spend a fuckton of money on it. We can raise the minimum wage. We can actually govern the economic policy rather than outsourcing it to the Fed, and focus on demand-side instead of supply -side economic solutions, pay for college, guarantee a living wage and housing.

But not with most of the Republicans in the way and the lobbyists at the ear of our representatives.

We need a modern Robespierre. A charismatic leader to lead the public by uniting them rather than dividing them, who will make such massive changes that they'll come for his head.

Defining words properly isn't gatekeeping, it's categorization.

Meme has come to mean cartoon. Your usage is no different.

Meme doesn't NOT originally mean cartoon, it just means a viral idea.