Before the internet, librarians were the gatekeeper of knowledge. For your reading pleasure, the New York Public Library released a cache of queries and conundrums called in from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Not only can prisoners not vote in the US, once you've been convicted of a felony (a very large category of crimes that prosecutors like to find excuses to fit people into), you can never vote again for the rest of your life.
Oh that is fucked, that is fucked beyond belief, that shouldn’t be allowed
This is actually not true of the entire US! It depends on the state. When I worked in Ohio, we would encounter people who incorrectly believed they couldn’t vote because of past felonies.
16 states allow people with felony convictions to vote once their sentence is complete.
9 states have restrictions on voting rights for people with felon convictions. Some of these are effectively a ban. One of these states is Florida, which passed a referendum to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions who had completed their sentence, but the DeSantis administration has found various loopholes to continue restricting voting.
23 states ban prisoners from voting but allow people with felony convictions to vote if they are not in prison.
2 states, Maine and Vermont, allow everyone to vote.
OP, I know you’re not American and may or may not be interested in this, but it’s important for any Americans seeing this to know that depending on where they live they may in fact have the right to vote. Misinformation about this is a form of voter suppression.
Also if you live in a state where prisoners and/or felons can’t vote, CALL YOUR REPS. Start talking to friends and family. Network. Get it on the ballot.
“The trannies should be able to piss in whatever toilet they want and change their bodies however they want. Why is it my business if some chick has a dick or a guy has a pie? I’m not a trannie or a fag so I don’t care, just give ‘em the medicine they need.”
“This is an LGBT safe space. Of COURSE I fully support individuals who identify as transgender and their right to self-determination! I just think that transitioning is a very serious choice and should be heavily regulated. And there could be a lot of harm in exposing cis children to such topics, so we should be really careful about when it is appropriate to mention trans issues or have too much trans visibility.”
One of the above statements is Problematic and the other is slightly annoying. If we disagree on which is which then working together for a better future is going to get really fucking difficult.
I think this is something young people in particular are confused about. My dad has always had a slightly off color sense of humor, he always feels the need to privately ask me “boy turned girl or girl turned boy?” if I mention a friend and stress said friend’s pronouns, and yet when we had repair work done in the house and the worker was listening to a podcast discussing the evils of transgender people and how to cleanse society, he went out of his way to contact the owner of the business to discuss his disappointment with that worker’s conduct and stress the negative effect that could have had if there had been trans kids in our home.
Our allies will never be perfect. They will never use the perfect language or have the perfect politics. But we have to appreciate those allies and meet them where they are, especially if they are willing to learn.
I once had someone reply to a post I reblogged, written by a sex worker about the injustices sex workers face, saying they weren’t going to reblog the post because it contained the word “whorephobia” and that made it too problematic to share. So instead of elevating the voice of an actual sex worker on the issues that affect sex workers, they’d rather elevate the voices of non-sex workers who use “unproblematic” language.
Don’t call yourself an ally if you’re more concerned with tone policing marginalized people than elevating their voices.
Always funny when someone has a default angry response to criticism they get so used to using they just automatically fire it off at the most inappropriate time.
There’s a lot going on in that little critter’s head right now.
1. Power move.
2. Why do people whisked away to magical worlds just automatically believe the first creature that tells them what side the person needs to help? Where’s my isekai where the MC slowly finds out they got in with like the deranged zealots and are part of the evil faction, and not the plucky rebels?
I think about this comic once per week. It’s funnier then anything I can conceive of. Mastery.
Man. The annoying thing about depression is how hard it can be to spot. Like no wonder work has been a slog and I haven’t been sleeping and my hobbies haven’t been fun. I thought I was just overworking myself. I’m more annoyed than anything.
Every individual symptom had a completely logical explanation. But the moment I actually said it out loud like “yeah I’m tired all the time and work is hard and my hobbies aren’t fun” immediately realized oh god dammit of course I’m depressed again duh. Could’ve solved this problem MONTHS ago.
