Nineteen per cent of voters said they disapproved of both men

pathetic that less than 1/5 of people are correct

calling it a "high disapproval rating" instead of a "low approval rating" is a journalistic sleight of hand. they're hoping people read too fast and fail to notice the "dis-" prefix.

🫂

I understand completely where you are coming from. There is still so much work to do! And it is a shame that the burden is on LGBTQIA+ and their comrades, because the cishets sure as shit aren't "carrying the cross" themselves, to borrow a metaphor.

not religious but secularization theory is not proven. In some parts of the world there is growing secularization, but in other parts of the world there is growing religiosity. I am still very skeptical of the idea that modernity and economic development is enough to turn everyone Atheist/Agnostic. There are still very powerful religious institutions which are capable of leveraging modern communications technology to indoctrinate people further. Marx pointed this out in the 1800s:

trans and queer folks are only accepted in a minority of protestant churches. That minority is thankfully growing but there are active reactionary movements in protestantism to counteract that change. For example, I saw a protestant youtuber named "redeemed zoomer" or some cringe shit who is actively leading a movement to get cishets to abandon their "liberal" churches and find anti-LGBT "conservative" churches. This isn't terminally online shit either, he is going around doing real reactionary activism, nailing anti-LGBT "theses" to the doors of churches, debating pro-LGBT pastors, signing petitions, etc. So it shouldn't be overstated how friendly protestantism is as a whole to LGBT people. Especially since the change was very recent, and has not yet been cemented and codified into the religion itself. Protestant pastors still quote homophobic verses from leviticus when they feel like it.

And your mileage is definitely going to vary depending on the country.

religions are internally diverse, change over time, and are an active battleground of ideology. People will yell "death to the church" when it does a bad, and "maybe the church is good actually" when it does something good. Is it cringe? Yeah. Does it surprise me? No. Look at Christianity itself. It emerged out of Judaism. It's a very different religion from Judaism, yet it emerged out of it. Christianity doesn't require...

and even modern Judaism no longer requires one of those things... So religions can change over time. The medieval catholic church accepted indulgences and burnt people at the stake for heresy. It is much more likely that they will continue down the road of changing instead of disappearing entirely from society.

(I'm not defending reformism or the catholic church btw, which is an awful institution I'm just observing why people behave the way you pointed out, and speculating that these institutions aren't going to disappear any time soon)

not a theocracy btw, that invective is reserved for iran

i was gonna guess bug fossils and not eggs, so I was pretty close I guess

live audiobooks

a convenient excuse to escalate

CIA agents, NED bozos, and American mercenaries were already there training/arming Ukraine two years ago, so I'm frankly surprised there wasn't already noncombat troops there.