China already took custody of the young Panchen Lama, who plays an integral part in identifying the reincarnated Dalai Lama.

I’d say their attempt to replace him is more than inevitable – it’s already underway.

I’m sure Orwell didn’t really expect telescreens to become a real thing, but we have very literally welcomed surveillance devices into our lives and homes. Now, it’s just a matter of who starts actively using them as a monitoring device.

Insofar as any gerrymandered election has been “free and fair” in my lifetime, yes, I do.

(Sidebar: I’m pretty concerned about some of the proposed legislation requiring birth certificate matching for names because of the potential to disenfranchise both trans people and married women, but I hope there’s enough pushback that it doesn’t go anywhere.)

President Grandpa’s puppeteers are only successful because they’ve manipulated a washed-up reality TV star with name recognition who is more concerned with ratings than with government. Without his inexplicable cachet with the electorate, they could never get their agenda pushed through, and they know it.

The man is not all-powerful. He’s also old and out of shape. A lot of things could happen before the next election cycle that may end his party’s political reign. There’s no clear successor whom the masses of Trumpist cult members will follow. Vance? Don Jr.? I don’t think either has the charisma or reputation to take the reins.

I hope that the rest of the world is taking notes and realizing that they cannot rely on the current US government to uphold its side of any prior agreements (or even the basic tenets of etiquette in civil discourse).

I hope that every country that does most of its trade with the US is quietly looking for new markets.

I hope that Republican isolationism actually comes to pass so that the entire population of the US can feel exactly how painful it will be to cut themselves off from the rest of the world. And then in two years, I hope enough people will get off their asses and vote against the people who let it happen.

I’m sure the NYT has noticed, but their attorneys probably advise against making medical claims about sitting presidents. Especially since the current one is particularly litigious.

Amen, sister.

Yes, I’m living my best life now in spite of everything I was taught in my formative years.

You’re right about that whole last paragraph. Of the dozen-ish kids from my small, rural church who were in our youth group together, I’m the only one who got out. The rest of them are raising their own teens in the church now, most of them still even in the same town.

I don’t know what made me so different. I always had a keen sense of logic, and I was just rebellious enough to question things. I also had access to “heretical” art that helped me feel less alone (shout out to '90s alternative rock). I wasn’t the only one of us who went to university, but I was the only one who moved out of my family home to do it.

I don’t think there’s anything I could say to any of them now that would make them reconsider their worldview. Of course, that works both ways. I know they consider me a sort of “fallen woman” for having strayed from the Straight and Narrow™.

I am so sorry that happened to you and that the place where you turned for help just added to your trauma.

Unless things have changed significantly at the border in the past few years, there’s no process to leave the US. It’s just the Canadian border guard checking things as you enter their country.

Of course, if the GOP decides to fully enact Operation: Handmaid’s Tale, then that could change.

There is a presumption from conservative/fascist women that they occupy a position of hierarchy over non-fascist/non-conservative women. That by virtue of supporting fascism and patriarchy that fascist men will afford them personhood. They don’t believe in any of the assertions of feminism. They instead believe that women who suffer at the hands of men simply deserve it. That all women are judged in some kind of meritocracy, where belief in fascism and support of fascists itself is a determining factor of merit.

This may be true for some women, maybe in the “tradwife” and white supremacist circles. But if, as you say, it’s critical to understand what these women think, you have to understand that they are not a monolith. There are other motivations to consider.

I was raised in a fundamentalist, evangelical church. Within that community, there was no presumption of a hierarchical position over other women. There was only our god-given position to be subservient to our fathers, and later, our husbands. We could either obey the divine plan to someday reach heaven or disobey it and be resigned to hell. There was no in-between.

Now, a reasonable person would see this as patently ridiculous. But the problem is that reason has no place in this worldview. You doggedly follow a literal interpretation of the King James Bible, or you go to hell.

Many years ago, when I was 16, I had asked for a particular privilege. And my mother agreed to grant it if I would listen to some audio tapes that she had of a series of sermons from a woman. Now, that was unusual in itself, because women are not allowed to teach men within fundamentalist churches (Because The Bible Says So™). So this was definitely a teaching that was only meant for women. What I heard was horrifying.

The entire point of this sermon series was to teach women how to be good, submissive Christian wives. The lesson of one tape was literally that if your husband commanded you to commit murder, you would have to do it, because God put him in charge of you and your duty to God was simply to follow orders from your husband.

A woman would not be judged for breaking a commandment if she followed the direction of her husband. The husband would be punished for causing someone to break God’s commandments, but the wife would be spared because she was simply doing her duty as a wife to follow what her husband said.

Women’s agency is completely removed in this scenario. Which sounds exactly like what the men described in the article want.

Again, the problem here is that reason has no purchase in this worldview. No amount of evidence or argument is going to change their minds or magically give them a sense of agency.

Making sure that women have very little self-respect is one of the primary functions of American Evangelicalism.

All samples were negative for common hemorrhagic fever diseases, although some tested positive for malaria.

Looks like at minimum, it’s a strain of Ebola that’s different enough not to register on a test.

I’m in Colombia. My local grocery store has them for 23 mil pesos ($5.58 USD at today’s exchange rate) for 30 eggs. That comes out to $2.38 USD per dozen.

The tienda by my home has them cheaper, but I can’t check their prices online to verify the exact cost.

Don’t forget how hard it is to pay other people to play video games for you so you can call yourself an “elite” gamer.

The Colombian one is pretty accurate, but it should probably have bacon on it, too.

If you’re actually curious about this, Elaine Pagels has a really great book about this. The book of Revelation was just a thinly-veiled series of jabs at specific people and the politics of the time.

Her interpretation is that it would have been blatantly obvious to John’s contemporaries, but it’s opaque to us now because we’re so far removed from that time period.

I live in Latin America, and most of the people I talk to consider themselves to be white.

Race doesn’t have a valid scientific basis, so I guess it’s one of those “eye of the beholder” things. But I doubt that the MAGA crew would look at your average Colombian or Venezuelan and think, “Oh, yeah, that person is on our team.”

Username checks out along with the math.

I’m sorry that was your experience. I’m sure it was hard, but I’m glad you made the choice that means you’re still here to tell your story.

And people don’t seem to notice that more people came out after they could live authentically and do other jobs.

All of this Boomer nonsense about “There were no trans people in my day.”

No, grandpa, they were just too afraid to let you know it, so they lived quietly miserable lives with a socially acceptable spouse and 2.5 kids.