Respectfully, I disagree.

Until January, when the next Congress is sworn in, all the Democrats in the legislature can do is take performative actions.

By your logic, the next Congress can only pass legislation performatively, because we can be assured that Trump will veto almost everything. That doesn't mean they should fail to pass legislation. If they "performatively" pass legislation that is popular with the American public, they can point to Donald Trump's veto as a reason why people should vote for the Democratic candidate in the next presidential election.

11 Democrats failed to show up to vote. The vote failed by 7 votes. That's pretty simple math.

This could have been the end of Hegseth's political career. Trump doesn't like it when people close to him get bad press; he usually fires people when public opinion turns against them. And if Republicans are as ready to drop MAGA as the media seem to think, it's possible that a number of Republican senators would have broken ranks to remove him. (We would be right to assume they wouldn't vote to remove, but it's still theoretically possible, and we'll never truly know if any of them have developed a spine or a moral compass.)

The harm to the people connected to the user, if you remove monetary aspects, is mostly grief about their loved one's condition. Not physical harm (usually).

That was basically what I was going for in my reply, but it seems the person I was replying to was just looking for a straw man to attack. Thanks for reiterating.

I don't know what to think in regard to addiction as an illness vs a series of choices. There's so much we don't know about our brains and our genes, and someday we may find that addiction is more attributable to biochemistry than to making choices. (Also, I'm a determinist, so I don't believe "free will" can really exist. But I'm also a pragmatist, so I recognize that it's useful for a society to operate under the assumption that people have agency and therefore can be held responsible for their actions.)

Drug addiction causes direct physical harm to the user. If you remove the monetary cost, the other social harms are mostly resolved. There is very little danger to anyone other than the user if we treat substance addiction as an illness in the way described in this Tumblr post.

Sexual assault, by definition, harms other people besides the person who has the psychological problem. There is not really a way to treat it as an illness that mostly resolves the social harms.

I think that violent offenders should be kept away from the rest of society to reduce their ability to harm others. I think some of them are truly remorseful and can be rehabilitated, and those people can and should receive treatment and be reintegrated after they are no longer dangerous to others. I think some offenders are psychopaths who cannot be rehabilitated, and the only way we protect our society is to keep those people imprisoned indefinitely.

All of these things can be true at the same time, but internet forums are usually not conducive to nuanced conversations about complex topics.

I haven't followed Russell Brand's legal case. Has he expressed remorse and sought help, or has he just denied having committed a crime? I don't think we can help anyone until they admit that they need help.

Your boundary is at hue 188, bluer than 98% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.

Interesting. I should try again on a different device.

I hope researchers somewhere are quantifying exactly how different they are.

The difference is that now he'll be put on trial for that sort of thing. His party refused to hold him accountable while they held the legislature. Democrats won't have the votes in January to remove him from office, but they can force him through a legal process that he would rather avoid. I think he'll do everything he can to save himself.

Republicans set a precedent when they subpoenaed Clinton over the Trump-Epstein Files™, so now Trump can be forced to testify when he leaves office.

It's one thing to have a doorbell camera or a security camera inside that films your front door and foyer or living room. It's another thing entirely to have a hidden camera in the bathroom.

Watching him "speak in tongues" was so painful.

And I grew up Pentecostal, so that shit doesn't usually faze me.

This is sad, but true.

At my first teaching job, a first-grader told her teachers and the principal that the bruises on her legs were from her mom hitting her with a belt. We reported it to Child Protective Services, and when they followed up, the mom pulled her out of school to "homeschool" her instead.

Covering up physical abuse is one of many reasons why homeschooling needs more oversight.

The article points that out:

While humanism is often a non-religious philosophy or a worldview, federal courts have ruled that it qualifies as a religion.