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bonnieblue

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Posts posted by bonnieblue

  1. 2 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

    I see Ana is still dropping by to make ambiguous posts hinting without saying that we're all still wrong to be pissed off about abortion bans that threaten women's lives. His allergy to saying what he actually thinks must be a really terrible one.

    While I’m sure he spends most of his day flogging himself while starting at a life-size rendering of the Original Sin, he did need another hobby to fill up the rest of his time.

  2. 1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

    With the voters obviously upset about abortion rights, it will be interesting to see how it impacts non-referendum elections and if poorer communities recognize the impact to them.

    A voter in Highland Park is barely impacted with a loss of abortion rights in Texas. An unexpected pregnancy can be terminated with only a quick flight as a barrier, or they take their teenage daughter on a "shopping trip" to NYC for a week. They might be motivated to vote differently but they didn't lose their rights.

    The poor person in the Brownsville basically lost complete access to an abortion. Driving or flying to another state is most likely out of the question. Even though many in South Texas are Catholic, people frequently justify disagreements with their church. I know people that sit in a pew every Sunday but don't follow the Catholic teachings.

    Note: A search surprised me that Coahuila (across the border from Eagle Pass or Del Rio) in Mexico has legal abortions for the 1st 12 weeks. Like the US, Mexico let's their states decide. However I don't know if there are many (any) legitimate clinics in those cities. I'm sure unregulated clinics are available in Mexico for the women that have no choices.

    I disagree with your Highland Park voter take. Sure it checks out for the above scenario (and I would probably agree if republicans hadn’t decided to go batshit on some of these recent laws and hospital response to them), but I think even someone with means has to be a little freaked out for their wanted pregnancies right now. I certainly am. There are a lot of things that can go wrong for the whole length of pregnancy. Once you start miscarrying / have an ectopic, do you have enough time to grab a flight to denver? What about in your last month? You’re not supposed to fly. Will your doctor prioritize your life? Do you need to have your delivery in another state? Some scary scary stuff that money can’t necessarily protect you from.

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  3. I was able to get my requested value (~$250k off). I went in person and gave a speech channeling Otter from Animal House and it appeared to work pretty well.  Would highly recommend figuring out a way to emotionally connect with the panel members that seem more sympathetic. I bypassed the obviously unsympathetic member, found my guy and got him so worked up in my favor that he convinced the final guy to side with us. I should’ve been a litigator.

  4. 7 hours ago, fattyflattie said:

    This is where I get hung up too. I guess the end game is someone will get paid at the expense of others’ kids educations (or lack thereof). Not very religious so I don’t really follow the whole Jesus needs to be in school theory.  

    That’s kind of a short summary of most of the issues with Texas these days. We’re breaking institutions that served us pretty well (not perfect), for the benefit of a handful of people (you and I are not any of those people).

    As to schools, it’s not like taxes will go down, they will just be funneled to these bullshit religious schools. I went to one of these schools to avoid the dreaded “bad public school”. It was not a complete education (evolution isn’t real, Jesus walked with dinosaurs) and the voucher didn’t even completely cover cost of admission. My mom regrets it immensely.

    From a selfish dollars/cents standpoint, this shift is bullshit for the bottom line. Whereas before your kid could previously get a pretty solid education and social experience (provided you were in a good district),  it’s now looking like your taxes will stay just as high (gotta make those 10 rich people more wealthy and Jesus), but you now have to hope you have the honor of paying $30k + per year per kid if your kid is one of the handful that actually gets in to the (increasingly competitive) privates that actually provides a good education. It’s a completely sham and fleecing of the middle and upper middle class.

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  5. 16 hours ago, UpperWestside said:

    This right here. This is what “charter schools” are all about. They are taking our tax dollars while completely undereducating children on purpose.

     

    I am going to give a specific example. This past year I did Teach for America. I imagine that many here are familiar with this organization and others like it. I was placed in a 4th grade charter school classroom as the special education teacher. FIFTEEN of the TWENTY-FIVE kids in that class in Washington Heights read at a first grade level. There was exactly one that read above grade level. Most of them could not legibly write or do simple math equations. The social studies curriculum was made up on the fly by one of the teachers because there was none. To say I was incensed at what I walked into and witnessed is an understatement. Instead of focusing on better ways to reach the kids socially and emotionally to help bridge this massive education divide we had pointless meeting after pointless meeting that was an apropos of nothing. I lack the ability to hide what I think and I asked the principal a question I knew the answer to. I knew it would lead to me leaving. I asked her “Who was responsible for passing these kids each year when they clearly were learning nothing? She said “I make the final decision to pass them” I told her “Exactly. You failed these students educationally and it is on you that they are so far behind. You cannot blame COVID for something from 2018 and 2019.”

    I left and have since decided that the best way I ca help these children is through finishing a degree in Clinical and Mental Health. I discovered I could connect with them through SEL learning sessions. The school bully went from walking in and ignoring me and doing whatever he wanted to within three months he came in everyday and gave me a hug and wanted to sit and do math with me as much as he could. 
     

    I say all of that to say that these children are capable of learning and one day overhauling a system designed to fail them. We all have to do what we can to aid them in whatever way we can. The priority should be pushing back on charters and getting more funding back to public schools as a starting point.

    While several of the current issues affect my day-to-day more (marriage equality/ abortion healthcare rights, etc.), I think I find this one to be the most depressing.

    I suppose I understand why the mouth-breathing morons would support this (although if you don’t think schools will raise their tuition once the gov is writing voucher checks, I have a bridge to sell you), but it’s the upper-middle class people I just don’t get. If you look at Austin, there are only a handful of private schools worth a damn and those are already very competitive. If you removed public schools (Anderson, west lake etc) from the equation, they’re only going to get exponentially more competitive. After that, you are left with a handful of anti-vax schools and charters/non-elite religious schools that don’t have to adhere to any sort of minimum standards and are often advancing a very particular agenda of their founders.

    They’re unwittingly killing their own children’s futures, not to mention the greater societal implications of having generations of undereducated or uneducated children across all strata of society (except the most wealthy and/or connected).

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  6. 1 hour ago, fattyflattie said:

    Glad you asked. Let’s put it like this. Biden’s tax plan would have actually affected me. Entire project scrapped immediate after election.  Now I get to live on half of that and travel a few hundred days a year. And add a decade back to my retirement age. So, yeah. 

    Then you don’t seem financially stable enough to afford an expensive watch. You should really practice fiscal responsibility.

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  7. Well I sure am glad that my marriage cert will be set on fire all so you can continue your toy hobby and “save on taxes”.  I’m sure you’re not at all an upper middle class squeaker who doesn’t realize he’s getting fisted in 18 directions from the powers that be in amounts that far exceed any perceived tax savings.

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  8. I’ve come up with a brilliant solution for the US gun problem (in lieu of actually doing something about guns). 
     

    Require that to carry, use or otherwise pick up a gun, you must be attired in an English fox hunting outfit. Gun culture would disappear overnight (tops and tails clash with goatees and oakleys), you could instantly recognize who is packing, and it would class up the place a bit.D8CFAD6C-881A-4E01-8B84-9CFEDDFF50E7.jpeg.e2ce3aa0ae204bf1a4e253020d4fbe87.jpeg

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  9. 9 hours ago, fattyflattie said:

    Because I didn’t remember that. I did remember it discussing him “burning out” like oh, I don’t know, every fucking person with a stressful job does at some point.  Iirc, the heart shit started with stress after left work due to “burnout”.  I’ll watch it again sometime. 

    I’d you can’t understand burnout and the very real health consequences that can arise as a result thereof, then it’s clear that you’ve never had a high-level or stressful job. You’re welcome that our taxes are subsidizing your apparent mediocrity.

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  10. 25 minutes ago, fattyflattie said:

    Nope.  Just stuck out of town and would rather talk with Sawbonz and twice than watch another repeat of the first 48.  Too scared to look at my equities.   Didn't realize it was this particular thread when we got off on a tangent.  Mea culpa. 

    Well, no. I was grown by then.  But I grew up surrounded in it in the late 20th century. I learned enough that know that it not being an option was priority #1.  

    I saw brisket bring it up for the first time about a week ago.  Not sure I agree.  Rich kids with parents who are never home and leave them fucked up emotionally might have a rough go at things as well.  You can have the most loving parents in the world but if they dont teach you shit, not good.  But maybe yall are right.  I say this not picking at you, but I'll spend my entire life trying get afford the neighborhood you were brought home to.    

    So you were brought up in a two-parent household (one of which is a doctor), but grew up near poor people, so you think you’ve earned some sort of “bootstraps” designation?

    Good grief, the untalented and entitled offspring of upper-middle class people will be the death of us all.

     

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  11. 3 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

    Am I reading correctly that you only need to show your vax card to get into Italy?  No testing?

    Over here right now and we didn’t even need to show the vax card. I wouldn’t necessarily count on that, but there wasn’t even someone to interact with on a covid-related basis.

    Definitely bring a KN-95 mask for ferries and whatnot. They were really enforcing that.

     

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  12. 5 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

    Especially from the bitter childless single women on this thread.  They have mainstream views and really have their finger on the pulse of what parents think.

    You are a sad sad man. I hope you are able to heal the gaping void in your soul someday.

    As the above so aptly demonstrates, some parents are bad people, and sometimes children of those bad people need the freedom to make decisions about their body/lives without notice or consent from those bad people.

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  13. Abortion rights (and other similar rights) seem to particularly aggravate entitled and narcissistic people. All the discussions around it always come back to how it makes them “feel”. The women, the unborn, and any larger societal forces at play seem to have little to no bearing on their analysis of the situation. It always filters back to the lens of “how it makes ME feel”. I’m not sure whether the abortion issue is so triggering to them because it provokes them into thinking “what if I didn’t exist?” and that thought is too much to bear to the narcissistic and overly-entitled mind.

    I think a well-adjusted mind can reason that if I didn’t exist, I would have no way of knowing that, and it wouldn’t be so terrible. I digress.

     

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  14. I’m convinced about 75% of forced-birthers are just insufferable assholes whose actions prompted their mothers to frequently declare that they wish they had aborted instead.

    That’s why they’re so sensitive about it.

     

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