I’m surprised they haven’t just started building 5g chips right into the tvs. That’s the end goal here. Just make it so the devices don’t even need your cooperation to phone home.

So send the protester the agent’s dry cleaning bill and be done with it. Make them pay for a new uniform if the stain can’t be removed. Simple enough. The fact this is a criminal matter is absurd.

“ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

Now they have a way to effectively revoke someone’s citizenship. All they have to do is change your status in the app to “noncitizen.” No need to go through the court. Just have some code that lets them flag citizens as noncitizens. They want you gone? Just flag your identity in the app as a foreign national. The agents in the field then scan your face and it reports you as an illegal immigrant. You object and show them all your legal documents, but they’ve been told the app is infallible. You’re taken to detention, and the guards there simply scan your face and report you as an illegal every time you protest. “The app is infallible” they repeat. Before you have a chance to challenge it in court, you’ve rotting in a prison camp in rural Liberia.

Eh. The point is not to ensure everyone takes care of their health. The point is to make sure no one makes the space uninhabitable due to their BO.

States rights were also a profound force against slavery.

If conservatives in Britain can elect a woman as the leader of their country in the 1980s, then the US can elect a woman in the 2020s. We have a problem with misogyny, but I refuse to believe that even though enough conservative Britains could overcome their prejudice to get a woman elected in the 1980s, progressives in the US can’t somehow manage it in the 2020s.

Reality check. A few points swing would have resulted in Hillary of Kamala winning. These were close elections. I’m sure sexism was a factor, but their unpopular policies and corporate fakery were what really killed them.

This wreaks of the centrism “common sense” that keeps losing us elections. It’s built on the assumption that moderates are innately more electable, while history has shown this is anything but the case. It’s a kind of magical thinking completely divorced from reality.

The flaw in this thinking is that it assumes that there is a large population of political moderates waiting to be appealed to. This is what’s cost Democrats the working class - abandoning workers rights and benefits in the hope of wooing suburban conservatives. And it’s failed election after election.

It fails because there aren’t actually very many true moderates. If you poll people who are politically unaligned, it’s not that they’re unaligned because they lie right between the parties. They’re unaligned because their politics simply don’t match to the existing partisan alignment. Think someone that is pro-gun rights but also supports Medicare for All.

Running performative centrists doesn’t do anything to appeal to these voters, it just makes your candidate come off as inauthentic. Some issues just don’t have reasonable compromises on them. If one party wants to greatly restrict the civil rights of some minority group, taking the centrist position of only restricting their rights a little bit still makes you look like a monster to anyone with a conscience.

This is why centrists fail. Almost no one actually had beliefs that are in the dead middle of the political spectrum. Appealing to these mythical voters is a strategy that fails again and again.

Historically, the first step in removing the dictator is letting the fake controlled opposition party burn to the ground. Voting in corporate Dems is no different than voting for the fake opposition parties the Soviet dictators used to let run so they could brag about getting 99% of the vote.

We already tried your strategy, and it failed. We got some short-term wins, but at the cost of long-term defeat. In 2020, we followed your approach. We picked the useless corporate centrist because we saw him as more ‘electable’ and because we needed to get Trump out of office. And of course, what everyone on the left predicted would happen, happened. The centrist did very little to actually change the conditions that lead to Trump in the first place, and predictably, Trump won again with an even larger margin.

You need to start looking beyond just the election in front of you. Short-term thinking is what has got us into this mess. We’re so unwilling to take a short-term loss that we make short-sighted decisions on “electability” that ultimately end up losing us elections in both the short and long term.

Your strategy results in Kamala winning in 2028 and Steven Miller becoming president in 2032.

Oh she could easily be the candidate. She could get the nomination the same way Biden got it: a coordinated manipulation campaign by the DNC. In 2020, they arranged for all the centrist candidates except Biden to drop out at once, while leaving the progressive vote split between Sanders and Warren. Kamala could easily end up with the nomination.

we really need a fresh pool of candidates

DNC: We’ve listened to your suggestions and taken them to heart. We have a new candidate, someone not cut from the old cloth. In fact, he’s even a socialist. Let me introduce you to our new 2028 candidate…Steven Miller. He’s not just a socialist, but a national socialist! Don’t forget to vote blue no matter who!

I’m tired of your modern woke bullshit. Why are you trying to teach kids to read clocks with mechanical hands? Use a sundial like a normal person.

Do you know how to read a sundial?

Nah let’s ditch the analog clocks and instead teach them sundials. That will really stretch their brains.

We should make everyone mad. Don’t teach them to read analog clocks. Teach them to read digital clocks and sundials.

If that was it, they could just have obtained a signed affidavit from the parents and perhaps their doctors

A trans person could take advantage of the same mechanism, which is why it’s not allowed. They care more about hurting trans people than they worry about the few cis kids that fall through the cracks. This kid was just acceptable collateral damage in their culture war.

He’s going to build a desolation and call it a peace.

These laws were written to hurt trans people. They were written to make it very difficult for trans people to find loopholes to get around. That is the problem here.

Let’s say the errors on sex could be corrected with a doctor’s note. But what you’re really asking for is for a sex marker to be changed, simply citing an error in original sex assignment. You are going to plead that your real sex is unmatched to your documented marker. But what is sex? “Sex” is a very fuzzy thing. Is it genetics? Genitals? Chromosomes? Secondary sex characteristics? Conservatives like chromosomes because their inalterability serves the conservative worldview. But historically we used primary and secondary sex characteristics to define sex. We talked about “male” and “female” since the dawn of time, but we’ve known about chromosomes for less than a century. Historically, your sex was simply your observable physical form. If you alter that, in a very real sense you do change your biological sex. There are many interpretations of the word “sex” and the phrase “biological sex.” Some allow them to be changed, some not. And, wherever you fall on that question personally, you can find doctors who follow any of the possible definitions of the terms.

In fact, in states that allow you to change your sex on your birth certificate, traditionally this is how it was done. The state would require a letter from a physician saying your biological sex has been changed. Some states specifically required surgery. Some just left it up to the doctor’s interpretation. If you could convince a doctor that you had changed your sex, then your sex could be legally changed.

And this is the problem. You would think you could correct this error with a doctor’s note. But the Republicans already thought of that. This cis kid could use a doctor’s note to prove that he’s biologically male. A trans kid could use that exact same mechanism to get a doctor to say that their sex is now male. Just find a doctor that believes that sex is largely hormonal. A trans boy gets on T, and, in that doctor’s eyes, their sex has now literally been changed. And they could write a letter to that effect. And the doctor wouldn’t have to lie at all. It all comes down to your interpretation of “sex.”

These laws were written to hurt trans people. To do this, they needed sex to be legally defined in a very strict and unalterable way. They wanted to make the process so ironclad that no trans person could ever weasel their way past them. Thus, they only allow corrections of birth certificates in some very specific ways that no trans person could use. They don’t just leave it up to a licensed doctor. Licensed doctors are the ones providing medical care to trans people. The laws instead require things like chromosomal testing. Chromosomes are one thing that can’t be changed. If you require chromosomal testing to correct an error on an original birth certificate, then you can make it virtually impossible for a trans person to change theirs. But it does have the slight downside of making it very expensive to correct actual clerical errors.

And this will be true regardless of how you want to screen for original biological sex. The tall and strong gate will make it hard for your enemy to pass. But it will also make it difficult to let in a friend that gets accidentally trapped outside in the night.

That wouldn’t work. Conservatives needed to write iron-clad laws that no trans person could find a way around. If you base it on genitals, what happens when someone goes and gets sex reassignment surgery? That’s not done on minors, but conservatives don’t know that. How’s a school coach to know that he isn’t a trans guy that snuck off to Thailand one summer and got a dick installed? This is why these laws reference the original birth certificate. The entire point is to make it so sex is immutable and unchangeable.

which mandates that school sports teams must be designated “based on the biological sex of the students who participate” in the sport.

His biological sex is female. At least, according to the laws that transphobes have written. The problem with the term “biological sex” is that it’s far more complicated than conservatives pretend.

For example, I’m a trans woman myself. If I had been born with an (age appropriate) of the body I have now, I would have been assigned female at birth. And according to all these new Jim Crow laws, I would be required to use the female facilities and accommodations, literally having the exact same body I do now.

You can try to claim that sex is chromosomes, but a biologist would laugh in your face. There is so much variance to human biological development that chromosomes don’t begin to fully describe natal biological sex. And even if you ignored all that and went with chromosomes anyway? You could just genetically test everyone. But then conservative voters would hate that. The purpose of these laws is to destroy trans people, not to inconvenience cis people. And legislators don’t want to force white suburban parents to pay $2000 for chromosome testing whenever their kid wants to join a sports team.

What else could they use? They could use hormones. A very good argument can be made that hormones simply are a person’s biological sex. Hormones are what after all causes someone to actually develop a penis or vagina in the first place. So why not use a cheap blood test and assign sports based on hormones? Well, again, the purpose of the law is to destroy trans people. And it’s pretty easy to alter your hormones. Conservatives need rigid, unalterable, lifelong sex categories. Without those, they wouldn’t be able to justify forcing women to be second class citizens.

What else? You could use physical features. You could have a coach visually inspect the genitals of every student who signs up for a team, but that has obvious problems. The coaching profession already is a magnet for pedophiles. Plus, again, the purpose of the law is to destroy trans people, not inconvenience cis people. And no parents wants the coach looking at their kid’s junk.

That’s the problem with laws like this. That’s what trans people have been shouting from the rooftops for years, but we’ve been ignored. The concept of “biological sex” is hopelessly vague. The use of the term is just a way of putting up a “no tr*nnies allowed” sign while attempting to be legally defensible. It’s completely unworkable as a tool of assigning sports teams or public accomodations. So instead, the laws were written to use the only tool available: birth certificates. Legally speaking, in Republican states, the sex on your birth certificate IS your biological sex. Your actual genetics, gonads, hormones, etc are completely irrelevant. If your original birth certificate says F, you are female, forever. Your actual biology is irrelevant, you are biologically female, legally speaking.

So no, this isn’t just some cruel political statement. This is the law being implemented exactly the way it was written. Trans people warned folks that any attempt to legislate trans people out of existence would have numerous knock-on effects for cis people. But in these states, they were too excited about the possibility of getting to destroy a few trans folks to worry about whatever those trans folks were screeching about.

You cannot just use “biological sex” in a law. You have to define precisely what that phrase means. And as conservatives don’t like the definition of “biological sex” that actual biologists come up with, they have to try to craft a legal definition that destroys trans people without inconveniencing cis people. And that simply isn’t possible. There’s no way to write legislation that destroys trans people without also harming a few cis people as collateral damage.

He should play on all the girls teams, crush it like a total badass, then when conservative parents complain that “a boy is playing on the girls team” everyone can tell them to shut the fuck up because this is the future they always wanted.

He would be killed for doing this.