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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • No one’s fighting for teens to be recognized as adults at 16, and they will all have the right to vote in two more years, so I don’t see the parallel at all to the women’s suffragist movement who couldn’t ever expect to vote, married or not, and were part of a broader campaign for women’s rights. If there was momentum to make 16 the age of legal adulthood, it would make sense that voting would be a part of it.

    16 is arbitrary. Not linked to any legal status. Not linked to the age at which one can work and pay taxes. Not linked to any milestone being identified. Like I said, open to arguments but it needs to be better than “younger than 18, set it at an aesthetically pleasing number… 16 will do.”

    The most convincing arguments I see are about being able to vote for the president who could draft you, so theoretically voting at 14. But my preferred condition, and where I would throw any activist energy, would be to get rid of the draft entirely.

    I’m also against compulsory voting. Absolutely against it in current state with all the access issues we’ve agreed upon. Even with perfect access though, declining to vote can be a political statement in itself.


  • If I could wave a wand and fix something about voting in the US, it would be to improve access for already qualified voters.

    Kids would vote similarly to their parents in general, so lowering the age means people from groups/locations that have good access would have more votes (not a bad thing) but groups/locations with poor access would still have poor access, possibly even worse access because of the increase in voters. So yeah, fix access first or it only exacerbates what I consider to be a larger issue in need of addressing.

    Assuming good access to voting though, 18 makes sense to me as the time a person is an adult and legally responsible for themselves. I would be open to arguments for younger, it’s just not something I ever felt passionate about, even when I was under 18 years old.





  • I was hanging with a group consisting of mostly older millennial gay men who don’t like that trans people are being included alongside them in conversations about human rights, sexuality, and gender. They think it takes away from the fight their community has gone through over the past few generations.

    I chewed them out. Like, a lot. I am usually not at all confrontational but I pretty much stunned them into silence. Now I’m waiting to let them process, expecting a couple to reach out to me to step back from some of the shit they were saying. If that doesn’t happen, I guess I’m not really welcome in that group anymore and I’m ok with that.

    There are no trans people in this group. I’m not a gay man nor am I trans. But when I hear shit like that, I hear echos of gay men activists not being willing to work with lesbian women activists, white feminists not includig black women, male laborers trying to keep women out of labor rights movements. It’s stupid. It’s tribal and hateful. It undercuts the strength the movement could have if we weren’t asshats about it.

    Rights campaigning 101, strength in unity. This is basic ass shit.




  • Anytime we ask questions about poor people doing things to make a buck, you probably won’t find me talking negatively or blaming the people with few to no options.

    I’ve been in a financial situation where selling my blood plasma was an easy, safe, guaranteed amount of money that kept me from getting deeper into the hole. I’m not going to knock anyone who does it, only the shitty social services that fail people to the point they have to sell their plasma to survive.







  • So he wasn’t cancelled. Some people were critical of how he said some things. That’s the way people work.

    I could post “the best spaghetti sauce recipe” and I would get people telling me I’m an idiot and wrong about Italian culture and blah blah blah. That’s not cancellation. Any opinion, no matter how benign, gets crap on the internet.


  • Vanth@reddthat.comtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlWhy do you care about privacy?
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    13 days ago

    Those details are unnecessary for this conversation. Cops used Facebook private messages to build a case to prosecute an illegal abortion.

    They have established the process and the precedent, next time it will be a woman only 5 months pregnant. Or who has an ectopic pregnancy and is past six weeks. Or was raped. Or isn’t in a financial situation suitable for raising a child. Or simply doesn’t want a child. It doesn’t matter the details, cops have and will use private messages to prosecute women getting abortions.

    The arguments that “because of her one comment about wanting to wear jeans again means she was just a careless, shallow woman who didn’t want to take responsibility for her actions and got what she deserved” is a load of crap. Not saying you are doing that solely, but that is not a good argument for not caring about privacy.



  • Vanth@reddthat.comtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlWhy do you care about privacy?
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    13 days ago

    Law enforcement used Facebook private messages to investigate and prosecute a woman for an “illegal abortion”. This is not a hypothetical, this happened.

    I care about my privacy because I don’t want right-wing weirdos and perverts incarcerating me for controlling my own body.

    There are more reasons. This is just the one most recently in the news as a glaring red flag real-life example.