Defense isn’t about helping people escape consequences, it’s about making sure they receive a fair trial and the consequences are appropriate for their crime. Even with this system there are still wrongful convictions and police/prosecutorial misconduct.

Many years ago we had a deadly DUI crash that the local news went apeshit over because the story was easy to hype. Drunk driver kills a young mom, dad, and their 3yo daughter. It was covered non-stop, until it came out during the trial mom and dad were high as kites on meth and pulled out in front of the drunk driver when they should have waited for him to cross the intersection. Dude still got convicted, he was driving drunk and killed three people, but his sentence reflected the dad’s impaired driving and what that contributed. Also, as soon as the news couldn’t sob story their coverage they dropped it, barely a blip when the verdict came out.

Political divide is things like budget, use of public lands, roads & infrastructure. We’re split on morality, ethics, bigotry, and child rape. A good number of us don’t even bother talking to family members anymore, why would I waste my time trying to converse with the dude who lives up the street from me that has a t-shirt of Donnie surrounded by bikini clad girls and “Chillin’ like a felon”?

Trump is the poster child of chauvinism, bigotry, bravado, greed, deceit, swindle, and zero self-control. His ability to get away with it has emboldened his supports to embrace their worst inclinations and treat their neighbors like Trump does. Granted, they are not Trump, so the average thief, wife beater, or kid diddler still gets arrested, but a lot have figured out they can be blatantly racist, misogynistic, homophobic, or a plain old dick in public and love that there’s no consequences anymore.

I have no interest in winning over people who have no shame, no remorse, and no empathy. Some will come crawling over when the suffering trickles down and finally affects them, but without any self-reflection or moral awakening, they’ll go right back to their old ways as soon as the burden is lifted. Fuck ‘em.

Lost your job to AI? Good news, shoveling horse shit off the streets is once again in high demand.

On the bright side, robot dogs don’t die when the pig they’re assigned to leaves them in a hot car. Also, nobody cares if a robot dog gets shot/stabbed/kicked.

He opposed controlling one’s aim. Just spray randomly in front of you and you can take down an entire army without getting hit. Dirt bikes with rocket launchers also help.

Demographics mostly. Blue city in a red state. The downtown clubs rarely had hecklers, gigs in the outlying towns were more likely to draw ire for the material. How people handle their drunkenness is also part of it. People who are assholes sober seem to feel more entitled to blast their opinion while drunk, and not surprisingly I found a lot more of them in the suburbs.

“He’s an asshole sir.“

Mirror universe Odo blew up Alderaan.

The Trump admin:

When I was a baby punk I was an insecure try-hard and got dogged on for it by the older punks. I was bequeathed a nickname that while not a total insult, was not the best and sort of an inside joke about my desperation to be “punk”. A lot of those older punks left the scene in their early 20s, but I kept on and discovered that people I didn’t know knew me by that name even if they didn’t know it was originally an insult. It’s still with me 30 years later, simultaneously cringe because it’s so, so “nehhh, PUNK ROCK!” sounding, but at the same time, punk as fuck and kinda badass. Overall it’s been a positive experience, but knowing its origin helps keep my ego in check when I lean too hard into “punker than thou”.

Middle aged American from the mountain west. The people often suck but the scenery is beautiful. I live sorta alone, no other humans but two dogs, two cats, one fish, and four chickens. I work with dogs for a living, training/daycare/boarding/rescue, and I love my career. I live within my means and try and pay the support I’ve had from others forward. Travelled a lot in my youth (the rest of the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe) and enjoyed it even if I’m a bit more of a homebody these days. I have a lot of grievances with the current regime, the people who empowered them, and the capitalist assholes who fund them, but I do admit it’s been a boon for the punk scene. I haven’t seen this many shows a month since the early 00s.

Found the skunk.

Vasectomies and tubal ligation are the ultimate power move in the goth community.

She’s a guinea worm. A creature with no notable purpose in the world except to complete its lifecycle at the pain and expense of others. Literally the only parasite even hardcore animal rights and environmental groups don’t fight to save. Nobody likes the fucking guinea worm.

At the end of the day everything about how we engage with, understand, and define the universe is based off human systems because that’s just how we do. We’re intelligent enough to recognize beyond ourselves and deduce the nature of why things happen and then use our words to describe it. A granitic continent doesn’t know its granite and a basaltic oceanic plate doesn’t know it’s basalt, it operates as it’s properties demand, like they have for billions of years before humans and will for millions of years after we’re gone.

The products of these natural cycles do lend to how humanity has organized itself for thousands of years. River valleys helped establish agriculture and the birth of “civilization”, and mountain ranges, deserts, great rivers, and oceans made for natural boundaries once populations grew to the size they started defining “them and us”.

So I do agree that continents (and natural features in general) shape how we think of the people who live there, and some places have thousands of years of history where those features were the boundaries of their nation. But the physical structure we call a continent exists with or without humans calling it a continent, nations do not. Continents influence human affairs and cultural/national identity at home and abroad, but again, that’s heaping our humanness on what is otherwise a slab of granite that is doing its thing.

I’d point out too, Earth’s plates are constantly shifting, but for the entire existence of humans they’ve only moved a few to a few dozen kilometers. Their importance to our social organizing is partly due to their seemingly static nature. But in 200-300 million years we’ll possibly be all jammed back together Pangea-style. Though I highly doubt humans will be around to see that.

Freed from the responsibility of hiding Anakin’s son from the galaxy, Owen and Beru are able to pursue their dream of leaving Tatooine and move to Alderaan to open a bed and breakfast. Sadly, it doesn’t end well.

My two big ones that get money and my time are a couple of local dog rescues and prison re-entry group that helps the recently paroled. I also give to the local non-religious food bank, our independent radio station, an LGBTQ and AIDs awareness group, a wolf protection group, and a keep our river/trails clean org. I donate my secondhand items to a thrift shop that raises money for low cost spay/neuter services.

Continents are a geological construct, with continents tending to be granitic, and oceanic plates typically being basalt. Dividing continents with geopolitical boundaries is a social construct.

Yeah. I think one of the hardest things I’ve discovered, at least where I live, is that a lot of folks who would also work in fields where they can’t not show up. My mom’s a hospice nurse, I work in animal care. She can’t not attend to her patients and I’m not going to neglect the dogs in my care for a day. We could take the day off symbolically, show solidarity, but the work won’t stop, it’d just be one of our “don’t care” coworkers doing it. Our other struggle has been that, in a relatively union free state, most of the union folks are caught in that “benefits for me, fuck you, go Trump” mentality. Not a blanket accusation of union workers, just a lot of our locals are ladder-pullers.