The upbeat background music is killing me in this video, but I also can't help but think that MGT is saying these things with a positive voice inflection. Like, this isn't the wind-up to a "AND THIS IS BAD" shoe being dropped at the end of her cadence. I'm fully surprised at how benevolent her tone of voice is here in describing anything about Biden given her other howler-monkey tendencies.

Okay so let me offer some context here to shed light on a few things you said. Please know that the Venn diagram between me and DeSantis is razor thin, and the only thing (I think) we have in common is that we are carbon-based life forms. I also see some common sense items in what was described in the article, but I have my larger misgivings, which I'll explain much further below.

Why alimony is important and necessary
Here's why alimony is important for the rest of an ex-spouse's life. I want to be clear that I believe a spouse of any gender should have access to alimony, but the most traditional situation is a woman who forfeited having a career outside of the home to be a mother and homemaker, while a man furthered his career for - let's just say - a long enough time that once the divorce occurs, it's too late for the woman to reasonably start a career and expect to rise to the same level the man is at in his career at time of divorce. Let's use an arbitrary number like 20 years for my example. Let's assume these two people met and married no later than 25 years old for the sake of my example, as well. Alimony is not relevant for couples married for very short periods (less than 5 years), nor is it relevant if both spouses worked full-time jobs.

So in my example here, both people are about 40-45 years old. Retirement age is going to vary by industry, but roughly let's say 65 years old. By this point, the man has paid into either a 401k, pension, a Roth IRA, or some other retirement financial tool for 20+ years as well as a federal retirement program, usually Social Security. One of the stipulations of paying into these financial tools is that you have to have a job in which you're submitting W-2/I-9 documentation. A stipulation of receiving the money you paid into Social Security in specific, is that you have to make enough dollar-amount SS contributions that amount to a little more than 10 years of working a W-2/I-9 kind of job/career. And to boot, the amount of SS you get paid after retiring is based on your highest earning 35 years of your lifetime of work.

So when a woman has skipped college, not worked outside the home, hasn't gained job skills, etc. etc. for 20 years, she is now coming back to the job market with zero tools and equipment to get into a career (though obviously could enter the workforce through a paycheck-to-paycheck poverty wages kind of job), has no Social Security credits for a retirement that is just about as far away for her as it is for her ex-spouse, and has no savings or other financial resources because she was a homemaker and didn't earn money as her compensation for her labor. She is also now going into new situations at a time in life in which we have all lost neuroplasticity and may find it difficult to learn new things or go back to college. And we should also be realistic about the subtle/legal ways in which older people are discriminated against in the hiring process.

This is why alimony exists. It helps to make up for the opportunity-cost in an adult's older career years and for lack of retirement security. When the members of the First Wives Association and other ex-spouses seek lifetime alimony, it's because they either will never have access to their own Social Security benefits, or will have access to extremely scant benefits whenever they do retire.

This article was like... if a YouTuber had a journalism job but no training. Pretty hard to read and editorialized heavily.

Don't believe anything you read about the trump machine imploding.

Vote. Don't be complacent.

Here are my concerns about this bill, regardless of some common sense aspects of it
After Roe v Wade was overturned, there were a series of news articles this past year about what the next play for conservatives would be to further erode women's right, now that a woman's autonomy over her own reproductive choices was no longer enshrined. A lot of writers started pointing to quieter movements in states like Texas and Florida to abolish "no fault" divorces.

Remember a few months ago when Steven Crowder was pissing and moaning about how his wife initiated their divorce and the thing that seemed to really miff him the most was how "apparently in the state of Texas, she can do that"? The issue as far as he is articulating it isn't necessarily the stress of a divorce but that he couldn't exert control over the situation or over her - she had the legal right to dissolve their marriage all of her own volition. That is unacceptable to men who will always want control over women. The fact that conservatives want to come after this legal autonomy after already "winning" the war on women's bodily autonomy shouldn't be glossed over.

No-fault divorce is an alternative to fault divorces. For states that permit no-fault divorce, people can still cite a fault. A no-fault divorce means that either party can initiate divorce proceedings without having to cite fault of the other spouse, usually physical abuse, infidelity, or inability to bear children.

However throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s, if you were a woman being abused or raped by your spouse, it was exceptionally difficult to prove that abuse or to gain sympathy over that abuse in order to follow through with a fault divorce. And if your husband isn't cheating on you and you have children, you can't cite the other typical reasons for divorce. So a lot of women were trapped in domestic violence for hundreds of years in America because of these divorce laws.

Only in the late '60s, when California enacted a no-fault divorce law in 1969, did women's rights around this matter advance. This is why divorce "skyrocketed" in the 1970s. I want to be clear that I believe that no-fault divorce should power all genders of spouses, but relating to the Women's Empowerment movement of the 1970s, this was absolutely key to women starting to rebuild their lives away from being daddy's little girl who was transferred like property to becoming Mrs. John Smith. This is one of a few key moments in American history that allowed women the opportunities to eventually become CEOs, Supreme Court Justices, congresspeople, and homemakers.

Though people tend to focus heavily on divorce rates as a metric of failure of a relationship (or failure of "family values"), the reality is that women in today's era are technically better positioned to willingly enter into marriage knowing there are legal mechanisms in place should that marriage turn sour. If women understood that by entering into a marriage, there would be an almost impossible chance to escape it if something arose, then I think we will see many more educated women never accepting marriage at all for themselves. Educated women were already less likely to marry as young as uneducated women. The most vulnerable population affected are uneducated women who marry young to conservative spouses and are manipulated into (or socialized into valuing) being homemakers.

Hence even though there are common sense elements in this legislation coming out of Florida, there are very real harms that will come out of this 20 years from now that impact conservative women getting married in 2024. I also worry about the larger "give them an inch, and they invade Poland" posture of the Republican party as this alimony law could eventually lead to an erosion of no-fault divorce laws, as well.

Absolute lack of self awareness. Like, what does it mean if the criticism is coming from both the left and now the right about how blind the loyalty is to this orange fascist? They're desperate to link DeSantis and Hillary, but don't you think DeSantis also stands to benefit from conservatives' blind loyalty. When even he is trying to be the wake up call, and they reject it... Good God.

I am aware that this has been covered, but I have to maintain the belief that much like the US Postal Service, the federal government will continue to foot the bill regardless.

I am hoping that the new users are coming here with the intent to learn how this community works, before we try to remake the community we just left.

I counter this part of your post by throwing in there that for me and my time on reddit, the worst parts of the broader experience were the fact that communities of neo-nazis (r/conservative, r/conspiracy), Donald Trump cultists (r/the Donald), incels (numerous subreddits including r/incels and r/theredpill), and pedophiles (r/just18 among other porn based subreddits that were quarantined and banned several years ago) were allowed their own communities on the platform for as long as they were. This gave these horrible ideas time to draw attention and build a userbase that then degraded the quality of reddit across multiple other communities.

If kbin or lemmyworld immediately start banning or defederating these instances or communities/magazines, then to me that is how this larger community works and it is inherently not former redditors migrating here to shape the Fediverse in the image of reddit.

I liked the episode!

But I was going into it with expectations that it was going to be kind of mid like the first season of Disenchanted. I was very pleasantly surprised that there was like a legitimate plot line, even though it was kind of silly. It seem like the same level of incredulous shenanigans that Futurama has always gotten itself into.

It's surprising the new flexibility these mental gymnasts are demonstrating.

8 years ago it was, "But he goes to church. He says he loves the bible, so yeah. He closed his eyes when we prayed for him and laid hands on him and he didn't burst into flame. You know, it's all a wash after you've asked for forgiveness."

Now it's "We are smart enough to elect a president, not a pastor."

Ya sure about that one, biscuit?

They're not even hiding the fact they think he's a piece of shit. He's just a piece of shit who falls in line with their view of social dominance and control.

America. Where others' enjoyment of looking at your pregnant body is more important than what you can do with your own body.

This is a victory against which essentially appears to be Redlining 2.0.

Very surprising coming out of Texas.

Having acknowledged the positive in this, the cynic in me can't help but read in between the lines of how this maybe reveals what revenue streams in Texas wield power versus what doesn't.

Ban water breaks for construction workers = lucrative contracts for my industry cronies.

Ban Section 8 discrimination by HOAs = not an industry that can make me money as a politician, so screw them.

This reminds me of when I started a rewatch of King of the Hill when I was in graduate school for media analysis. It struck me that nearly every conflict in the first few seasons is based on insider/outsider identities. Sometimes Hank and other main characters learn and grow from it, but there are several times in which the Other is shouted down for just not getting it.

• Something with either Bobby or Luann gets the attention of the hippy dippy school counselor (characterized by really west coast or PNW sensibilities) who starts poking around in the home as a stand in for CPS trying to impose more modern approaches to child rearing: the outsider who gets shouted down at the end

• The new neighbor is Laotian and bickers with Hank until they find common ground: the outsider embraced

• Hank throws his back out and workers comp will only pay for yoga classes, to which Hank turns up his nose for being too different. Eventually his pain drives him to giving it a chance and he not only gets better but vehemently defends it afterward: the outsider embraced

• A Native American recurring character named John Redcorn is always received by Dale as just having such a mysterious and ancient mystical presence by virtue of being Native even though Dale and John Redcorn had the same kind of upbringing together: the outsider always held at arm's length

• ETA: I almost forgot my favorite story line! Hank Hill learns about growers co-ops promoting a natural food movement, which he associates with hippy dippy communism until he starts buying produce there and it's so fresh and flavorful, Peggy Hill delivers my favorite punchline of all time. Hank becomes a convert and sees this as a return to the land for country folk and starts volunteering at the co-op: the outsider embraced

There are so many ways that this theme of the big city (usually in the form of white characters) or the racial minority (usually representing the larger world) encroaching on their little suburb of Arlen, Texas, is the source of conflict. I don't think Mike Judge pulled that out of thin air.

I don't begrudge you for saying out loud like this, but I'm not sure who was at all under the delusion that this would ever be anything other than the worst outcome possible.

The reason left wingers don’t have the presence the right does on Facebook, YouTube, etc isn’t because of a lack of voices or audiences - it’s because of deliberate manipulation of what is put in front of people.

I recently have gotten into wasting tons of hours on YouTube shorts, and I was very surprised that after a grand total of maybe 12 hours of using the platform, Andrew Tate content was just shoehorned into the algorithm of shorts being presented to me. Up to this point in time I was watching cosmetics, baking cookies, comedy, cooking, just funny hot takes, but then completely out of the blue one day that guy's ugly ass monkey face was on my phone, and even though it was so quick that I couldn't even think of his name, my lizard braid already recognized that he is very dangerous to women, so I opened the menu to select the feature on YouTube that prevents those channels from being promoted to me ever again.

There is 0% chance that the content that I had previously been watching links up in the algorithm to Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, or Andrew Tate. This leads me to believe that YouTube intentionally carves out space for these content creators and makes promises about getting their content in front of everybody's eyeballs, regardless of level of interest in that type of content.

There is a single user who is posting dozens of times a day in my magazine (for which I am a moderator). Another mod on my team has raised the alarm about the user, like surely they're going through a personal crisis to be so terminally online and posting so frequently.

I'm realizing now they might be a bot. The sources of articles are varied, and quality of article is like 30/70 serious/bullshit. The user occasionally comments on the submissions and I'm realizing the comments are generic rabble rousing instead of being complex language or referencing complex details from the articles shared.

Could anyone speak more to how to identify bot accounts? Many thanks!

I guess you missed it when the story was broken that apparently Nancy Reagan used to give epic jobbers.

I can't help but think that people who describe the Fediverse as complicated joined reddit after the redesign...

Kbin is exactly like an old, stripped down version of old.reddit.

Heaven forbid TwoXChromosomes not be a default subreddit. I remember when not every OP was badgered so badly in the comments that she had to go back and ETA "not all men" to the post text. Or how women with scathing and accurate insights about the patriarchy didn't have to always have reddit cares reports filed on their accounts!

I wonder if Cannon is panicking on the inside from imposter syndrome every day of her life in her appointment, or if she has like, a calm sense of self-assurance that this is right, she was appropriately promoted to this role, this is God's reward and blessing for a loyal servant?

Haven't even directed my browser to reddit since migrating to kbin in June, but it's never fulfilled the same dopamine hit for me. I've supplanted my online addiction with YouTube now, which because of what I flit past and what I actually pay attention to has been extremely educational because of the algorithm!

Pretty early on, I ended up becoming the head moderator for a magazine on kbin, which then made me feel an ethical sort of guilt about commenting there anymore, so really the only place I wanted to be part of the dialogue is now gone for me here on kbin. Our magazine has a much larger mirror community on lemmyworld, so our magazine is barely holding on by a thread even after an initial burst of new subscribers. Discussion is almost non-existent in the magazine, and I'm not sure if it's because we tried to instate common-sense community guidelines early, or if because we missed the momentum of growing userbase after the rexxit since most people migrated to lemmyworld instead of kbin.

I'm not even sure why I keep my account. (I know I sound like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh in this post.)

Next bad decision: no usernames, you must use your actual government name and verify not by email, but with a photo or photoscan of a government-issued ID. This will be done in the name of cracking down on bots and troll farms, but will have the unintended consequence of driving off anyone with half a brain cell about how your internet history can come back to haunt you straight off the platform.

I myself was enamored with vampire stuff and in high school met an online boyfriend who really committed to the shtick of being a vampire - though a significantly weakened in bloodline so he could walk in sunlight. I think at one point he was also claiming to be a vessel for the archangel Michael. Please know this was all happening in 2000/2001, so long before Supernatural!

I caught up with him briefly about 15 years after high school, and he's still claiming to be a vampire. A divorced vampire who smokes a lot of weed, but still a vampire.

If Pence did in fact follow up at Trump's behest, he should also be charged. Even without the charges, this should disqualify him from running for President (though we know it won't).

Ah - yikes. I was really not anticipating you seeing my mini pity party here, ernest. I know you and the team have been really working hard on kbin and I've seen massive changes with the modding panel and functions as a result of the latest instance update. I have a ton of respect for what you all are accomplishing on the fediverse and I was originally a very vocal early adopter after the first reddit migration in June. I trust that you all are shouldering a major responsibility with this instance, and I'm grateful for the fediverse at the very least. I hope when you read this you didn't get the sense that I had any criticisms of kbin as the particular user interface I use for the fediverse - just that even across the federated instances (mostly lemmyworld), my ability to doom scroll for hours a day outpaces the userbase.

I think I feel a personal sense of failure(?) or disappointment(?) that I wasn't able to usher in a similar sense of community and activity to the sub I moderate compared to reddit. I think moving over here, it felt like my sub would be the natural beneficiary of inheriting the volume of users and content that existed on reddit, but our mirror community on lemmyworld got the lion's share and it isn't even scratching former reddit heyday numbers. Also, the people in their community are... suspect. I don't care for the comments section.

I hope you didn't take umbrage to my comment. I'm eager to see what new features the kbin dev team will roll out.

I commiserate with you on this. I miss my crochet and knitting communities from reddit, but I did make the severance anyway. I also don't use my Facebook account at all, so I don't have an online fiber arts community anywhere.

I belong to a small social knitting group, but I'm the most advanced knitter there, so I don't feel like I have any outlets for finding and appreciating master knitters other than YouTube. But I only turn to YouTube for tutorials/entertainment, not for a sense of community.

Whenever moderation gets sorted out for some of the bigger instances, this practice of changing the headline from the news site has to be one of the first things established in the community guidelines.

This sort of slant belongs on other instances.

I'm surprised you're referencing Geocities and MySpace because your post really smacks of young-person naivete.

You're severely overlooking overhead costs and multiple revenue streams for reddit in terms of profitability. Yes, it costs money to employ people, but servers and data costs money too. I remember when reddit was NOT its own photo and video hosting site, and everything that was posted as OC was hosted on imgur, flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and other content hosting websites that were prepared to scale. Instead of defending why Spez has to find more money, why is cutting costs for probably reddit's biggest expense not on the table? Seems to me that reddit took on all the cost and liability of content hosting without there being any asset to the website for doing so.

Additionally, there are multiple revenue streams for reddit. Yes, ad revenue is one thing, but also reddit coins were another stream. I can't even remember the layout of the reddit webpage right now because it's been so long since I've logged in on a laptop, but does anyone else remember the years in which every day, the front page had a progress bar of how much of the daily cost for reddit had been met through the purchase of reddit coins?? Why didn't reddit just become a subscription model? I would have gladly paid $3/month to keep the lights on. Multiply $3 by the massively addictive nature of reddit and its multiple million userbase, and reddit could have set the Guinness book world record for social media profitability.

You raise a great point of view here on investment on behalf of the homemaker. Stay at home spouses pursue this avenue over a career under the assumption that they will be financially provided for for the rest of their lives, including at retirement age. Homemakers wouldn't opt to do this for 20+ years if there was the guarantee that they will be dumped and abandoned in their twilight years, and there goes the financial plans and security as well. Even when you talk to young adults about all the "What if...?" scenarios that are anything other than both spouses dying peacefully side by side in their sleep at age 95, the socialization in favor of "family values" creates such a deep resistance to believing it could ever happen to me.

I also have been very intentional to stay as gender neutral in this discussion as possible because I think there is a slowly rising tide of stay at home husbands/dads in American society that are also opting out of a career in order to be homemakers, and they could eventually be harmed by the erosion of ex-spousal rights. I don't think anyone is really talking about the implications on this dynamic. For a connection to history, the first gender-discrimination case Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court was Moritz to expand a tax refund program "for care takers" to include men because it is discriminatory to assume that only women are caretakers and deny access to federal rights to men because of it.

This is something that I've been putting more thought into which has previously been a generalized "the patriarchy hurts men, too" concern. But this Florida law in specific could have surprising consequences for a demographic in society (men) who haven't historically accepted being screwed over by the system this damn badly.

By virtue of the fact that up until just a few months ago, you could even go there and casually peruse security sensitive and classified information if only you found the right bathroom, I guess you could say it was priceless.

I agree but that's so far down the line and "the damage will have been done," by then so to speak.

The two big issues of this article are 1. Start time of the trial, which Cannon has agreed that mid-December (5 months from now!) is too early; and 2. That Trump can't get a fair trial while he's campaigning (Cannot didn't agree to this).

Let's say the trial doesn't start until after March when Trump is the obvious front runner for the RNC after Super Tuesday. His next ploy will be "I can't campaign enthusiastically while this trial is going on, so delay it," and Cannon may/may not allow it. Then heaven forbid Trump is elected president again, he will claim his position is now completely beyond reproach (there's another submission in this magazine to a video explaining that this is his stated goal) and so now he's exempt from being held accountable through this trial at all.

Even if this court case was wrapped up before November 2024, he's going to challenge any outcome that doesn't exonerate him. And yes, a higher court would comment about how this shouldn't have ever received the first delay and should have started in December 2023, but what all machinations have transpired in the background while that appeals trial is happening and being decided?

I saw an ADHD influencer recommend wearing ear plugs in public to block out environmental noise to keep conversation directed at you still audible.

I get distracted in public when my ears pick up conversation around me - especially people who are fighting or gossiping and I find it very entertaining compared to the discussion I'm in - so this is something I'd like to try the next time I have a dinner out at a busy restaurant with others.

Editing to add: I just listened to about a minute of the femtanyl song you linked and I realized that I also get in the zone productive with some types of music in which I can't understand the lyrics. I listen to a Pandora station built around Sigur Ros because I can't understand the language lol

I agree with @picassowary, but I also read this as complicating the virtuousness surrounding motherhood. We put mothers on a moral pedestal for being sacrificial, yadda yadda, but here is a mother violating that expectation of purity, good sense, decorum, and sacrifice. What questions can we now invite?

How vile are mothers on the far right? How tantalizing is the Kool aid on the far right to seduce virtuous mothers into debased insurrection? How troubling is white supremacy that white women participate in it because they are rewarded for being complicit?

The list goes on if you read the inclusion of the word mother as a way to violate the expectations of motherhood more than read it as a pull for sympathy.

As much as I (a woman) would love to find literallyanyone else in my real life to commiserate about reddit, I can't help but feel bad for the woman in this brief story! LOL

Also, since most of my colleagues and social contacts are women, I've been the person aggressively explaining and cornering them inadvertantly!

Yeah, it's a 100% self-imposed moratorium just because I don't want to appear to have a modding bias. There was a period where I was trying to enliven the community by posting a few articles each day, especially from sources not submitted to our mirror community on lemmyworld, but then my real life job was draining my soul for 3 straight months, so that endeavor fell by the wayside. Also, unless it's an article dumping on one key player, our user base doesn't tend to comment on news articles. It's a weird phenomenon I've observed.

I will add though that my hobby communities that I belong to never make it to my feed, which seems to imply that those communities are stagnant, too. I would probably comment more in those spaces, but it's rare that new threads are created, I guess.

Let's pretend Trump abruptly dropped out of the race (willingly or unwillingly) before January.

Do you think DeSantis would absorb the voter base?

Thanks for adding this info!

For what it's worth, this still happens in the 2020s, but as you point out, only for affluent couples. I'm picturing here how high earners can (or may be required by state divorce law) take a trial separation for a predetermined amount of time and establish residency in a new state. That second state may have more favorable laws to one parent over the other for child custody or may have no-fault protection whereas the first state doesn't. Alimony is less of a concern for these scenarios, but family law for child custody usually gets very complicated when two states are involved.

Obviously spouses who have been homemakers can't access these relocation measures, which further highlights who exactly is vulnerable under this law.

I, too, am a size queen.

Jokes aside, I was telling irl people about how even if I post something to the craft communities, there just isn't a critical mass to make me feel validated from posting.

I made kind of a big overture in many comment sections agreeing with others that kbin felt kinder and different from 2017-present reddit, but then a lot of folks came in and started up the same low-effort content communities and fell back into the same patterns of memes, so now it kind of feels grubby.

And the places on reddit where I loved lurking and reading analyses and hot takes (news, world news, politics) all are total ghost towns in the Fediverse (at least, what early magazines I've subscribed to last weekend).

Whatever the perks are here - and I'm aware it's all a work in progress at this stage - it lacks robustness for me.

But no school district in Texas who stupidly thinks that chaplains should work in public schools would knowingly hire Satanists when there are probably many Christian denomination chaplains available.

Different story if the only applicant is a Satanist, but the district just declares the search as failed without interviewing the Satanist. Then it's a matter of religious discrimination in the hiring process for that one individual.

I can't think of any situation in which the actual chaplain at any given school could challenge this law to the point it starts moving through the courts.

To get into the court system, some parents are going to have to sue. I'm predicting a Jewish family, Muslim family, or Bahai family raising suit after the WASP chaplain starts evangelizing to the non-believers.

I'm surprised!!!

Of course he said that because if Trump is disqualified because of J6, then so would also half the GOP's varsity team from Congress. I think if all of Trump's in-government co-conspirators (just to name a few, but not an exhaustive list: Meadows, Scott, Hawley, Boebert, Gaetz, Greene, etc.) were expelled and never allowed to return to government, I'm pretty sure at least half those seats would go to middle of the road Democrats (I mean at least Boebert's seat, minimum) and the GOP would lose their razor thin margin in the Senate.

I think this is one of the many major reasons Pence keeps towing this line for Trump.