New Zealand requires eligible voters to register but not to vote. It's also not enforced though.

One former Republican. I was so shocked to see it until I saw he wasn't in office any longer.

You don't have to take anyones word for it, there's plenty of news footage of him speaking earlier in his career when he was a democrat, no foghorn leghorn played up accent to be found. He still was hokey and used tired phrases for low-hanging laughs, but it wasn't until he was appealing to Republicans for elected office that he started using that voice and making it his full time persona. Find cspan footage of his Senate democratic primary debate in 2004, then watch when he's running for Senate as a Republican a couple years later. No remembering hearing required. He just likes power and, like many of the grifters, he found the way to get it.

So wild to me... "Don't call out their violence or they'll be more violent" is such a strange thing for them to say

Wake up song improvised by Marc Rebillet Good morning sunshine by the narcissist cookbook Happy morning - The song from the folgers coffee ad

Woah, it shook the town? How large were these white supremacists?

Outside of North America, and I just switched an old laptop (backup school device for kids) and my secondary computer that couldn't be upgraded to windows 11 (so no longer receiving security updates) to Linux Mint in the past week. I'm a normie, and the process was simple even for me. Over the weekend we've tested a couple games on the secondary computer and while they didn't run as well, they ran. Doing some more gaming this morning under the guide of "testing" haha

So far everything has been easier than Windows, I was very impressed as last time I tried (I think 2015ish I tried Ubuntu?) it was not nearly this easy. Everything just worked: third party controllers, USB devices, etc all connected immediately. The only issue I ran into was the sound in one game cutting out randomly from time to time? Not sure why, didn't take time to diagnose.

I don't know if he isnt as public or I haven't been paying attention, or people haven't been reporting on him, but after the initial series of rants, I haven't seen him making unhinged comments. So that's nice. Maybe he's keeping his opinions to himself now. That said.. he has a right to have a public opinion on this one.

No public opposition, but some very quiet private opposition? No worries, there's a method to end run around an errant legislature in most US states: https://www.ohiosos.gov/office/duties-and-responsibilities/putting-an-issue-on-the-ballot/citizen-initiated-constitutional-amendment

Mine was from Christianity, US evangelical flavour. It happened in stages, but really in the end I just stopped going to religious activities.

What made it happen? A lot of things at each of those aforementioned stages, but the most common theme was other Christians. They just were overwhelmingly awful.

I grew up in the Church, so it was all I knew. Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, youth groups (extra brainwashing sessions from a special church leader for kids) once a week, etc. The only thing outside of religious activities was school, and thankfully I was in public school.

I grew up curious and questioning, which the religious leaders did not always appreciate, but because I was serious about understanding things, I was given a lot of early "apologetics", which I understood to be attempts to prove the unprovable, and quickly came to realise that the point was to take things on faith.. don't prove, believe. And for that, I needed a "religious experience".

Evangelical churches are good at manufacturing believable religious experiences, so eventually I had what I believed was one. This was the first thing to go when I "deconstructed", realising that this experience wasn't supernatural, it was manufactured. Once that was gone, the rest was easy to mentally deconstruct and all that was left was the social.

The social took longer, but I was in the US south, so everything revolved around church activities for me and there wasn't a clear alternative. What encouraged me to cut ties though was my sense of justice. I accepted a lot of the "christ" teachings like loving your neighbour and providing for those less fortunate, caring for those who can't care for themselves like the sick, children and those struggling in other ways, and Christians just seemed to only care for those who were close to them, not everyone, and especially didn't care for very specific groups.

This got very clear with the rise of the alt-right political movement in the US and especially when Covid-19 hit.. all these people who claimed to care about their neighbours wouldn't do the bare minimum to help. For the few years before this I was already in a "missionary" mindset: I was attending these religious activities in order to help these Christians be more christ-like. At that point though, I realised it was a lost cause. These people didn't want to be christ-like, they wanted to "win". So when covid came and nothing around me locked down, I locked down myself, stopped attending everything, and moved out of the US entirely as soon as I could. My own parents wouldn't wear a mask, or even spend time outside to spend Christmas with our kids, and were so deep in the far-right rabbit hole that it made it easy to move. So many people revealed they were just hateful shells, their insides rotted away and either I didn't notice or they never were filled to begin with.

It was sad, but I have a much more fulfilling life now. If you are looking for resources or community to kind of get some confirmation that you're not alone, the freedom from religion organisation is pretty good for some things.. but can be a bit too much so I recommend just dipping in for specific things you're thinking about. I found things in that community well after deconstructing and used it to put terms to what I experienced. Like the word deconstructing wasn't a word in my lexicon until well after the fact.

Good luck!

I can't vouch for the AI result above but I'm from NZ and we had a citizen mom detained with her kid for weeks, Sarah Shaw, who thankfully got out. However another of our citizens, Everlee Wihongi, has been detained for over a month now. ICEs strategy is to move people so they're harder to find and they move them when they have a court appearance coming up so they have to "reschedule".

Good lol, that's our best defensive option anyway