I agree. Eugenics is about harming the rights of the would-be parents. It means telling them, “You have traits we consider undesirable, so we will forcibly prevent you from having any child whatsoever.”

To me, that’s different from parents choosing to avoid having a child with certain traits. Or not having children at all.

If parents decide to cure a disorder in their future child, or decide to abort a pregnancy, nobody is stopping those parents from trying again. The parents themselves have not been deemed undesirable and unworthy to pass on their genes.

I agree. I despise Trump. But removing a lawn and putting in hardscape, in a spot where people often gather for events, is not an insult to heritage or anything like that.

If a president that I otherwise liked did this, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.

It’s not as if a lawn is super environmentally valuable. And I doubt people spread picnic blankets and play Frisbee on this lawn - they put chairs on it and walk on it with heels and hold events and stuff. A hard surface is the right thing for that type of use.

And if a future president decides to put lawn back in, they can! It’s not as blades of grass and sandy growing medium are irreplaceable.

To put joking aside, I have been trying to make a sort of quilt pattern to add to one of my sweatshirts, but I’m not good at sewing and don’t have a sewing machine. So I would probably listen to her talk about quilts and how to make the edges look good.

Your mom.

“Welcome! What brings you to the homeless shelter today?”

“Well, it’s that bench. You see, I was choosing the unhoused lifestyle, and I was fine with all the other stigma and physical discomforts, until I realized that the city wants to discourage my presence in public spaces. Fuck these armrests, I decided I’d just come to this shelter, get treatment for my addiction, get counseling for my traumatic past that fed the addiction, get an education, get a job, rent a house, save money, then buy a home instead. It’s just not worth trying to get comfy on that bench.”

in all nine species of female snakes they examined

I’m sure they actually did the study in an organized way, but I imagined them checking the snake species one by one. “Okay guys, that’s eight out of eight so far. If the next snake also has a clit, we’re calling it - all snakes have clits.”

I choose guilty sex.

It makes it a little raunchy, without explaining why.

Good points, and I think we generally agree. I definitely didn’t mean to exclude anyone in those real or hypothetical situations you mentioned. To me, those examples are more about showing how gender is, or can be, biologically fluid. There are many “odd” situations that aren’t binary. So amongst the many unusual ways that sex can occur biologically, “male brain in a female body” or “I reject the concept of gender entirely” are valid and believable.

I agree with your last point as well, but in the context of this post, would you tell Rachel Dolezal that she says she’s Black, so she’s Black? I guess I was trying to find some sort of difference between gender and race identity, the way the question was posed.

I’m definitely not claiming to have an unassailable argument, so thanks for responding with good points.

I’m no expert on either topic. But I believe humans basically start off as female in the womb, and either become male or don’t. And there are many intersex conditions. The body responds to hormones typically associated with either sex. So gender is fluid in a biological sense. If someone transitions to male, female or nonbinary, they already kind of contained that potential.

However, race is a social construct, usually based on heritage as well as biological appearance. So it’s hard to say how much biology is really involved. Does the human body contain the ability to be any race? Or to cultivate an appearance that prompts other humans to socially categorize you as one race or the other?

Maybe for people who are mixed race, there is a sort of spectrum available to them. They likely know how to present themselves in a way that gets them categorized as one race or the other.

But otherwise, not really. If you’re White, and you say, “I identify as Black,” the question might be: do you have Black heritage? If you don’t, you can’t really create it out of thin air. There wasn’t a situation while you were in the womb where various hormones could have influenced you to appear more Black than you do. If your parents are both White, they were going to have a White baby, no matter what. Race is a social construct, but it’s based on appearance and heritage. It’s about belonging to a group, not about being an individual, the way gender is.

If you’re assigned female at birth, and you say, “I identify as male,” then cool! Your body already has the capability to become hormonally male. You can socially identify as male. Any human, of any race, has this potential. Any two parents could have a baby that is any sex or gender, depending on various factors.

It’s not the same exact plane, but another article mentions a Boeing employee who did have nightmares about specific planes being sold to Air India. This plane was produced shortly after the time when she was keeping track of those ones:

Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager who worked at the Charleston plant between 2009 and 2016, has a binder full of notes, documents and photos from her frustrating years at Boeing, one page of which lists the numbers of the eleven planes delivered between early 2012 and late 2013 whose quality defects most kept her awake at night. Six of them went to Air India, whose purchases were bolstered by billions of dollars in Export-Import Bank loan guarantees. The plane that crashed was delivered in January 2014 from Boeing’s now-defunct assembly line in Everett, Washington, though its mid- and aft- fuselages were produced in Charleston.

Aww, thank you!!

Thank you. I appreciate that you took the effort to give specific compliments and critique.

I agree about the meat stick throne. I wish I had taken a little more time with the watercolour application, maybe so that the red of the meat sticks would be the focus of the last panel, and not be competing with blues and pinks.

I also hesitated to show the trucker on a meat throne, because I wanted him to be less of a king and more of an equal participant in the revelry, but I couldn’t think of another pose for him. Plus… meat stick throne!!

Just for fun, I’m attempting to attach another photo I took of the comic, in sunlight, with brighter colours.

[(https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/2e0a9beb-6753-4e43-adc8-c44f74c1480a.jpeg)

He realizes that the non-sasquatch elf characters are also travelers who veered off the path, and slowly transformed into elves.

New people arrive over the years in various ways.

Whoa. I never thought of that, but it could very well be his dream.

I don’t have a website or social media with comics, unfortunately. I started making these recently to share with friends (as motivation). There is one other comic I posted on Lemmy, but it’s in a different style.

Maybe in the future? :)

You should interpret it as me making this comic quickly and forgetting to fill in his hair colour in the second panel

The magic forest restored his youth.

Also, thank you for the nice compliment!

“oh, Trump wouldn’t do that, it’s illegal”

Phew, what a relief!

Also, when Trump does illegal stuff, people tend to allow it and obey him. If they try to shut him down using the legal system, he goes ahead and does it anyway.

I kind of just roll my eyes when someone says, “Aha, it’s illegal! He can’t do that!” We don’t really live in that world anymore.

I agree. Many people are imagining, “instead of using his vast wealth to fix the world, he dedicates all his money and mental energy to an elaborate bunker that will ensure his survival in a specific apocalyptic scenario he believes is likely to happen.”

It might be more like, "amongst all the random wealthy-person shit he’s bought, there are guns and motorcycles (because he thinks they are cool) as well as a pantry full of canned food (because everyone should have an emergency kit and you never know).

But I could be wrong.

Not even a grown-up book! Read a different magical fantasy book aimed at children or teenagers. And see how good those are, too. Many of them were written before Harry Potter.

I do think HP is good at the pacing and mystery aspect of it. The magical world isn’t really that alluring, unless you are a 12 year old kid in 2001 who never read another book until now.

Reminds me of JD Vance.

Some people first glom onto left-leaning causes and opinions. They advocate for open-mindedness and human rights for all. They might even get really into the righteous purity of it all, where they get to criticize others for not being progressive enough.

But then maybe they don’t get satisfaction out of that for long. Maybe they find that another leftist is criticizing them for their wrong-headed views. Maybe they aren’t getting enough cookies for being a feminist.

So they switch over the right-leaning side of things. Maybe that allows them to be more openly hateful.

Or maybe they just changed their minds.

Honestly, I don’t know much about Rowling’s beliefs other than being a TERF. Maybe she supports all other “feminist” and anti-racist and left-leaning progressive causes. Perhaps she didn’t go all-in on the likes of Trump, the way Vance did.

But you’d never know, since all she talks about is being anti-trans.