I just don’t see the point in calling ourselves a united nation if we aren’t going to produce a minimum standard of educated workers across the board. Why not just Balkanize at that point?

I’m not saying some states are “too dumb”. I’m saying some states are too poor, and the poor shouldn’t be left to suffer compounding negative results because their citizens can’t shoulder the burden of higher state taxes. Because I promise you that federal taxes will not go down. Once the government has gotten used to milking you for X amount, they aren’t going to give up that cash flow. All that will happen is that poor states will just get worse and worse as education falls and they fail to produce a workforce qualified for anything other than menial labor.

We are too dumb to set our own standards!

It’s not about being “too dumb”. It’s about having skills that transfer across state lines. There’s a reason we don’t let doctors and lawyers from other countries just set up a shop and start practicing in the US without meeting American standards first. Now imagine that happening from one state to the next. In your naive attempt to reduce the size of government, you’ve actually increased government bureaucracy and red tape by orders of magnitude.

And again, where are states going to make up that 15% of funding provided by the federal government?

The problem with this is that there ends up being no national education standard. You take a state like Alabama, which ranks dead last in so many education metrics, and remove those federal standards. Now Alabama can just change their state standards, and suddenly they have a 100% graduation rate with all straight A students. Guess what happens when Cletus the Alabama valedictorian tries to get a job in the medical field or the tech sector.

And that’s before we ever even talk about funding. States get about 15% of their K-12 funding from the federal government. Where are the states going to make up that difference? Higher state taxes? Higher property taxes? Or are they just going to let already struggling schools go to shit? Guess who that affects the most?

You really haven’t put a lot of thought into this beyond “federal gubmint bad”.

Is it though?

ZACHARY, La. (BRPROUD) – The Zachary Police Department says they arrested a former student after Zachary High School was tagged with graffiti.

Police say that Shyron White was arrested at his home in Livingston Parish for drawing a triangle with a symbol in it on the exterior doors. Graffiti was found in several locations around the building, and police were alerted on Tuesday.

“It’s always important to not damage someone else’s property. It costs money and time to, you know, to actually fix,” Zachary Police Department Chief Daryl Lawrence said. “And then you’ll have people like us out looking for you.”

Lawrence said an incident like this is not common for the Zachary community. White is booked in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, charged with terrorism, criminal damage to property, aggravated assault and criminal trespassing.

This is the Orwellian shit you’re advocating when you start classifying vandalism as terrorism.

It’s property damage that was done specifically to avoid hurting people. By that interpretation, Banksy could also be classified as a terrorist.

If you read the Bible with a purely objective mind and come away thinking God is the good guy in the story, I have some serious questions about your morality and ethics.

Probably both.

The question mark won’t matter. It detected the word “fight” and that’s all the removal was based on.

Is this the same House GOP pressuring universities to expel students for protesting and pushing police to arrest and imprison protesters? That House GOP?

Sometimes it takes me forever to get these, if I ever get them at all. This one though… It immediately clicked.

If you traveled back in time and told J. Edgar Hoover that in the future, the American public voluntarily wire-tapped themselves, he would cream his frilly pink panties.

The techbros all support Fascism, and any kind of free expression is a roadblock for them to make it happen.

They actually deserve it

You understand that Russians are just people too, right? They aren’t all a bunch of drooling savages who want to murder Ukrainians or anyone else. Not sure how you can say the Russian civilian population deserves to be punished for what their shitty government does. Have you applied that same logic to your own country and its people? Or is that just something you say about faraway places from the comfort of your own home?

Having been to both countries, and made friends in both countries, this whole war really hurts to see. I hate the Russian government, but the Russian people don’t deserve this any more than the Ukrainian people deserve being invaded. I can’t give an opinion on how strategically “necessary” this was in the eyes of Ukrainian military leadership, but it’s sad all the same.

You can openly call for the death penalty for people seeking an abortion, or for the extrajudicial execution of immigrants, but Satan forbid you up vote a cartoon of your favorite green hat wearing Nintendo plumber.

It’s wild. You can go on Reddit and openly discuss why you think Hitler may have been the good guy, but if you up vote some AI art of Luigi, you get banned.

I’ve had two accounts on Reddit, one got permabanned a few months ago, and I deleted the other a few days ago. The first one was my oldest account. Over a decade old, and massive karma. I also had my own sub where I shared my writing, and had a few thousand subscribers.

Back when that incel neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes got doxxed on Twitter, I made a joke saying “as an incel, he should be glad that women know where he lives now in case they want to share a cocktail with him”, with a gif of a Molotov cocktail. Permabanned for “promoting/glorifying violence”. I thought it was funny, but fine. That one is on me.

My other account, which was seven years old and had high karma, got banned from probably half a dozen subs in the past week or so for just mentioning Luigi, or even just up voting posts and comments mentioning him. That was when I decided Reddit was no longer for me.

It’s one thing to ban someone for the kind of joke I made. While it was obviously a joke, it was still an overt glorification of violence. So I get that. But just for up voting a comment mentioning Luigi’s name in a nonviolent context?

FUCK. THAT.

Also keep in mind that the chuds have been making a concerted push to go around Reddit and report every anti-fascist post and comment they can find. Between that and the recent Reddit crackdown against anything Luigi related, the place is quickly turning into StormFront 2.0.

Dude. Reading package labels is the same for me. I end up having to take a picture with my phone, then zooming in.

I have my PC screen size zoomed in to 125%.

Getting old sucks.