Why do you think they want everyone uneducated and saddled with more kids than they want/can afford?

I’m willing to bet there’s millions of women who didn’t vote/voted for the male candidate in part due to internalized misogyny.

For a brief recap of just the Soviet Union part, this is a fun little song.

You mean that they aren’t just cursed for having made a deal with demons? /s

Though that is a shitty thing that I heard on American (religious) TV 20 years ago. Poison to understanding & compassion.

In Malala Yousafzai’s book, she credits the Taliban first getting into her community by coming through the radio. As an American, I’ve thought about that a lot over the years.

When I went to price it out at the store, the line for a dumb phone was going to cost $30/mo more than a smart phone. It was dumb.

God I would totally believe that. This summer, my workplace bought institutional access to the NYT, so for the first time in way too long, I check a single publications’ headlines most days, and it was stark how every day they were calling on Biden not to run. Those were consistently top of page more than any other issue until he did step down. I was surprised.

Fiscal conservatism should have never been conflated with severe austerity. Starve the government is a bad plan, thanks so much Grover Norquist 😤

A lot of them are raised to be that way though. One of the big pushes in a lot of Christian circles, for example, is the push to raise kids believing in complementarianism instead of egalitarianism–simply put, that god created men and women to have different roles, and that men just so happen to be in the role of leadership. Combine that with extreme purity culture (at times involving courtship instead of dating, for example) and a fervor to push for big families, and you get a bunch of grown ups looking up after 5, 10 years in a marriage going, “wait, I was promised happiness, why am I so miserable?” Divorce is a huge tool to help. We need to give people, especially women and children, a safe exit from high control spaces.

My small city is getting a new Christan Nationalism school next year. The neighbors aren’t thrilled that the adults will all be in armed to the teeth at this school in the middle of a decent neighborhood. One of my kid’s friends is going there next year, and told the class that her dad is draining her bank account for the tuition. For an elementary school year education.

Another fun fact: private schools don’t have to take all applicants, so they regularly turn away students with disabilities or special learning needs.

I pointed that out to friends of a friend visiting from Ohio, after they told me how their state did a great thing, making vouchers available to all families in the state. I pointed out how the public schools need the ‘regular’ kids to help subsidize the special services needed by other kids. When the non-special needs kids aren’t there, funding for the specialists gets too expensive for public schools to be able to maintain. The lady clearly didn’t know what to say to that, and after a minute she just said how their children’s private school was too small to be able to have specialists like that. Not sure how that invalidates my point about accessibility of education for all students… It was too sensitive an event to voice that I don’t think public money should be going to institutions that are tax exempt churches. If churches don’t want to pay taxes, their organizations shouldn’t have their hands out for the public coffers. Simple.