Vigilante Justice in this case seems a lot better than police justice. How many people do cops murder in cold blood each year?

Remember how the police/Alex Jones kept making big talk about a “manifesto” which never manifested?

Uneducated people in rural areas struggle very much with understanding their experiences of others, and have very strange ideas about how the world works. I told my grandmother I wanted to move to Chicago - she’s convinced I’m going to get gang murdered. (She would be horrified if I told her about wandering around LA on foot)

The idea that there are options other than cisgender heterosexual people is threatening to their understanding of their world. Many have not thought about their gender or sexuality; it’s assumed that you’ll get married to the opposite sex, get gender appropriate jobs, have kids, and go to church on Sunday. That’s what life is in Anadarko or Siloam Springs. Many also struggle with unaddressed trauma from the opioid/fent crisis, or military service - so they think the appropriate response to anguish about your body should just be to just cope with it.

Many of these men are secretly bisexual. Many, many, many heterosexually married men seek out sexual encounters with gay men on the side. They would never want to be in a relationship with a man or someone they perceived as a strange, mentally defective man - for many of them that would also assault their understandings of a relationship as more of a property thing. They feel guilty about porn usage, especially the Christian ones, but externalize it as hatred.

The woman are miserable and are committed to making everyone else miserable as well. You gain power in those communities by policing others, especially young women. They are threatened by the idea that they weren’t locked into compulsive heterosexuality and performative femininity. There was a possibility that they could have graduated college, or not had children.

They get the program though. They’re proper Puritans. If life is suffering then the only joy to be had is in watching other people. And what better target than those who are defying our most basic sociological roles? These are the same people who host gender reveal parties - it matters to them. So it must matter to everyone else.

That’s my guess as a trans man at least, obviously I’m biased.

That is one of the techniques I was taught in a sketching class.

Yes. I have very limited/cheap furniture. Almost everything I own comes from discount stores or thrifts. I don’t have an attachment to any of it. I’m debating going the Peace Corps so I don’t really want to own anything that I’ll have to pay to store.

Something that I’ve found works well for sleeping is a tatami mat and futon mattress. It’s best if you can air out the mattress and mat outside occasionally. But you can fold and roll both. You can also stack up layers of those $4 Walmart fleece blankets to adjust coverage.

Charity can serve as a means of control. This is way Republicans advocate against social services.

The government cannot mandate that you attend church to receive EBT. A church can require you attend a service to feed you.

I’ve heard from friends in Utah, for example, that access to many social services is through the church. Friend was trying to rescue a girl from FLDS - pretty much all job training/housing required she play along with mainstream Mormonism.

Orgs like the Salvation Army are known to require trans people to detransition to recieve services as well.

Another benefit is the rent seeking - Goodwill is a good example. You can still turn a profit with the right combination of PR, and tying access to services based on things that’ll make you profit (Goodwill “provides employment” for disabled people - they are legally allowed to pay them far below minimum wage.)

It’s the two pillars of the contemporary Right - control and grifting.

There’s been deliberate dismantling of social services.

I was married to a wealthy man. He was controlling and abusive, and had the police remove me from our home. It wasn’t legal, but the police have lost the records of whatever they did that night. I couldn’t get a lawyer to help me, he had access to my bank accounts and emptied them. I reached out to multiple domestic violence agencies - there is no shelter, there are no lawyers, there are maybe one or two therapists if you are lucky. But I’m basically completely helpless.

The story of the woman who accomplished this is pretty interesting. Maryam Khatoon Molkara wrote a bunch of letters to the Ayatollah Khomeini asking for advice with her dysphoria. He told her to dress in woman’s clothes and encouraged her transition. Learning about her can be the positive part of this story - one person was able to improve the situation for people like her.

As others have pointed out, it’s not really a win for queer rights on the whole - you can transition from one set of strict enforced gender roles to another. You can’t be gay/lesbian. It might be coercive and fixing the distress of having the wrong set of hormones in your body is kinda the point of HRT.

The reality is that most people are terrible people, especially when we look at them years later, once the dust has settled.

(Look into what Dr. Seuss did to his first wife)

I’ve read an argument (I think I can cite this to David Graeber maybe) that women were one of the original forms of property. Early forms of marriage are essentially master/slave, or a form of prostitution.

The nostalgia boner is that it was a very unique game, and nothing has come out quite like it since. It’s not even like Daggerfall or Arena. For someone looking for that experience, Oblivion and Skyrim were massive disappointments.

Going from a volcano that is spewing flesh mutating disease while riding giant bugs around to Tolkienesque Medieval Fantasy Landscape #3045 gave me whiplash. (The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine save the package though.) And losing the ability to kill whoever I want? Spears???

Skyrim is better. It mangles what could have been a good story by retconning lore and making Alduin into big evil bad, just as Oblivion was about basically Satan invading the world. Morrowind’s villain may not be right, but his motives are 100% understandable and he has a good point. (In Oblivion: why would you join a cult dedicated to killing everyone for no reason?)

As a Morrowboomer, I’m willing to accept the series changed, but there just hasn’t been something to replace what I hoped for ES4. They don’t make games with that vibe anymore. The closest thing I’ve had to scratching that itch would be Planescape Torment, Pathologic, or Zeno Clash.

The wealthy assholes who destroy our planet and lives can afford to protect themselves. The other poor schmucks who are getting fucked over too can’t.

How would you get revenge against Amazon? Are you going after Bezos, who is probably on a private island getting sucked off right now? Are you going after the faceless corporate types that work in a well protected office building in a city you can’t afford to live in?

The greatest invention of late stage capitalism is that inaccessibility. On a smaller, less violent scale, you’re ultimately going to cuss out the underpaid customer service rep for the shitty store policy, not the wealthy asshole who made the policy.

Look at what happened to David Reiner if you really want to be sickened.

I’m pretty sure that I’m intersex myself and had something done to me when I was an infant, but there is no way for me to ever find out. My only evidence is apparently my dong is pretty massive for a trans dude, which is a nice thing to hear from a nurse.

Doesn’t Apple tend to be very anti-porn? Not allowed on the App Store, and they tend to have lots of restrictions on the content that apps can show. It seems like you’d have to jailbreak it, which Apple probably makes as difficult as possible.

Sometimes it helps to log off. The internet is a machine that constantly spews shit, there will always be terrible people to argue with. There’s no guarantee any more that the guy you were arguing with was even real. “Touch grass” is a meme and sounds callous, but spending time outside helps.

Problems with the Jedi Order are more explicitly discussed in the EU of the series, especially pre-Disney. Iirc even Luke Skywalker finds something of a “middle way” in the force.

Original draft of Empire by Leigh Brackett had Luke meet a force ghost of his dad. Obi Wan pretty clearly says in the original that Vader killed Luke’s father, which you can certainly claim he was being metaphorical, but I’ve never really gotten that vibe. Luke and Leia are also infamously handsy. I suggest hunting down VHS rips of the originals to see what you think. It’s a shame we’ll never get the unaltered versions in HD.

George Lucas claims it was always his plan, but he also has waffled on so many things (was it always planned to be 6 movies? Or 9? Or just a one and done?) One aspect is that he did have just a shit ton of random, unhinged ideas that never made it in.

I don’t think Tarkin has to be a Sith - more that he’s a smart cookie and knows how the politics work. He knows that if he could find some way to take down Vader, it would make him look more powerful/valuable in Palpatine’s eyes.

Vader wasn’t originally planned to be Luke’s dad. One of the producers came up with it halfway through Empire.

Part of being Sith is fucking over others, even those you are “allied” with. The way to become second in command is to kill the current second in command. Tarkin is at the point in his career where killing Vader would probably be a good move if he could manage it.