Hillary Clinton is pushing an insidious cat GIF agenda

@Luxbelitx,

I’m sorry that so many awful things are being done to women and girls in South America. I hope that your voices are heard and that change can be made!

Is there anything that those of us outside of South and Central America can do to help?

Catching up on the conversation a little… I can’t pretend to have great advice to share, but my heart definitely goes out to everyone getting through hard times.

@LG: Well done sticking to your guns and getting a safe space for yourself. I hope your gentleman friend gets the help he needs, but you’ve definitely gotta look after your safety first.

@Ooglyboggles: Naturally, I might be in completely the wrong ballpark, but my first idea would be suggesting to your dad something along the lines of “I appreciate your spoiling me, but how about we do something simple and relaxing to have some quality time together.” Grab some sandwiches and sit somewhere nice for a picnic, something like that.

Re: doges: I regard the political figure from a Mediterranean city-state as an entirely separate linguistic entity from the lovable canine trying to pronounce its own name.

Re: 30: Having turned 30 relatively recently, yeah, it was no big deal. Much less traumatic than the transition from early to mid 20s, for instance.

Re: 30. For me, 32 was the hard one. What had I accomplished in my five bits of life? I was such a failure!

I got better.

@Dali

She didn’t take it as badly as she could have

🙂

She’s also doing a lot of passive aggressive cic bullshit, which I’m just putting up with because at least she’s trying

http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/giphy.gif
Can’t even imagine. Sending love <3 <3 <3

@Axecalibur: Middle Name Danger:

Parliamentary system is wild, yo…

Well, yes. The most powerful person in the country is what in the U.S. would be the House Majority Leader, and the structural equivalent of the U.S. President (the Governor-General) has next to no actual power and rarely acts without the Prime Minister’s request.

Re: Voter Initiatives
While I live in Ontario now, I grew up in British Columbia. British Columbia politics has a long history of weirdness (one of the earliest politicians there officially changed his name to ‘Amor de Cosmos’), and it is one of the few jurisdictions in Canada to officially allow such voter initiatives.

This came up a few years ago when B.C. tried to transition to a ‘Harmonized Sales Tax’ at the same time as Ontario did. Fundamentally the HST means that the federal government is responsible for actually collecting both federal and provincial sales taxes, and then it remits the provincial portion back to the province; this is mostly the same as is already done for income taxes. From the province’s standpoint, this means accepting a slight delay in getting the money, but no longer needing to have their own collection and enforcement people.

So B.C. was halfway through transitioning to this when ex-Premier Bill Vander Zalm (only the second person in Canadian political history to be actively thrown out by his own party) started rabble-rousing and convincing people that their taxes were going to go up as a result of this, and managed to successfully lead a public referendum go get the changes reversed. So now B.C. is exactly where they were before, minus the expenses of running the referendum and having to reorganize their tax departments twice.

On the other side, Ontario completed its transition to the HST, the previous PST-specific exemptions were kept in the HST, and things have for the most part gone on just as before.

So, yeah, public voter initiatives are a horrible way to make policy, because the public can often be swayed far too easily by short-term fear-mongering.

(I see from the Wikipedia page that Vander Zalm is also now a chemtrails truther. I wish I could say I were surprised. This is a man who, before he was elected, had a political cartoon done of a cartoonist at his easel praying ‘And I’m sure all of us cartoonists down here would be ever so grateful if you’d let Vander Zalm win’…)

@Axecalibur:
It would have meant having Nancy “Badass of the Century” Pelosi in charge of the country. That would have been nice, especially for the people of Iraq. Paul Ryan and John “The Orange Overlord” Boehner are probably too high a price to pay though.

I take my dad clothes shopping with me. He doesn’t give me shit for shopping for shirts in the men’s section, and he at least tries to call me by my real name, all in contrast to my mother.

@Axe, Kupo
Thanks

@PoM
I don’t really see shopping with my dad happening; he’s much more the sort of person who’d just give me some money and tell me to find my own damn clothes. And given that it practically takes physical violence to get him to wear anything besides white t-shirts, battered khakis or sweatpants, and a layer or two of flannel shirt in the cold, I can’t say that he’d be wrong to do so.

@Jenora Feuer
Eugh, voter initiatives about taxes. Prop 13 in California and Measure 47 in Oregon both put a (very low) hard limit on property taxes, and more to the point on property tax increases, with the upshot being that many properties in California are still being taxed based on their 1980s value, and in Oregon their 1990s values, despite the ecnomic changes that have happened since then, to the great detriment of both states’ ability to maintain appropriate infrastructure.

@kupo,

Show him this First Dog cartoon that just arrived in my inbox this morning:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/18/a-how-not-to-guide-on-mens-violence-against-women-thanks-donald-trump?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=First+Dog+on+the+Moon&utm_term=195286&subid=7706759&CMP=ema_1732

@kupo, yeah I know – I was being facetious 🙂
First Dog usually preaches to the choir, but he does it so adorably. Just thought it might make you smile. Sorry!

@Mish
Gotcha! I would actually share it with him because humor actually would be an effective way to get him to listen but it would have to break it down a lot further.

@Dali
He seems to think taxes are the only thing anyone should vote on because he goes back to that every single time (I believe I mentioned before how he actually compared raiding taxes to taking rights away). He’s actually said he is voting for Clinton but he’s apparently very bitter about it and very bitter that people are so upset over what is, to him, “just politics.”

Oops. *raising, but I kind of like raiding.

@kupo

He seems to think taxes are the only thing anyone should vote on because he goes back to that every single time

Then he’s thrown logic straight out the window, I’m afraid. Unfortunately, he’s got his head way too far up his ass to be convinced of that; I genuinely don’t know how to get through to people like him