Apparently there was a guillotine on the French Flag that had the word spez below the blade. Admins cheated and replaced it all with white pixels to match the background of the flag.
To be fair, Facebook employs a man named Joel Kaplan as their head of Global Policy. Formerly their head of US Policy, Formerly a Bush White House Toady.
Kaplan is the reason who all the right-wing conspiracy websites pretending to be news orgs weren't banned from Facebook news feeds. He personally exempted them all from community standards and Facebook terms of service about lying and shit. He then ordered left leaning news to be scrutinized more heavily.
He's been stuffing the ranks of Facebook's middle and upper management with loyalty tested conservatives.
Kaplan also refused to make changes to the algorithm that would have helped fight hate speech, because anger and outrage drive higher engagement.
He's also ignoring at least three ongoing racial cleansings that are being actively powered by Facebook, because they're happening in countries that are not the US.
So in a way, it really is a vehicle for the fascist control of the population, or at least a fascist friendly media stream.
14th Amendment Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
One could easily argue that an attempted coup qualifies as rebellion, or the January 6th insurrection, which qualifies all on its own.
It didn't originally exist in the Senate either, but the worse Vice President we ever had, decided that the Senate had too many rules and got rid of most of them. One of those original rules allowed any senator to call for a vote, even when someone was on the floor speaking.
This rule, called the previous question for some reason, still exists in the House, along with the Hour Rule which limits the time a Representative can spend holding the floor.
So we already have the framework to end the filibuster, but conservatives on both sides of the aisle like it because it means that they can thwart progress.
Of course, when it gets in the way, Republicans quickly carve out an exception for themselves, like they did with Judicial appointments.
Progressives know damn well that Republicans have already stacked the court. It's the establishment Democrats that are whining about an imaginary retaliation. You know, the centrists who are basically Republican lite, the assholes who whine about how extreme the Left-most parts of the party are, while ignoring how extreme the entire right-wing has always been.
We've seen this shit play out dozens of times in the past, the centrists say we progressives need to moderate ourselves to appeal more broadly, that we need to compromise or lose support. The reality plays out that any compromise we make is what loses us our support, and the centrists then side with the extremists on the right to hurt us more.
The left doesn't say that one man doesn't have the power to pull strings, the left says that there's no evidence of Soros doing it.
A subtle distinction, but an important one.
Leonard Leo literally hand-picked every judge that Donald Trump appointed, all 234 of them, including 3 supreme court justices.
Leo then paid for nonsense cases to be filed in jurisdictions with friendly (read his own hand-picked) judges. These cases were all based on lies. Because it never mattered if there was any truth to them. They then get kicked up the chain to Leo's hand-picked supreme court, where the justices rule how Leo wanted from the beginning. Well, 3 hand-picked, and 1 bribed, all that's needed from there is to get Alito to fall in line, and that man has Fox News brain so bad that it's scary.
And that's how one man can shape the law in any way he wants, even if congress and the presidency are controlled by Democrats
I don't know, I'm always in favor of banning transphobes. Their arguments are always based in hatred, not any verifiable science. I gave you the science.
They already said quite clearly that they're transphobic. The "I don't think children should undergo gender or sex transition" is almost verbatim an anti-trans talking point.
Here's some actual research on the subject of trans people, including trans youth, and suicide risk. With citations;
Bauer, et al., 2015: Transition vastly reduces risks of suicide attempts, and the farther along in transition someone is the lower that risk gets.
de Vries, et al, 2014: A clinical protocol of a multidisciplinary team with mental health professionals, physicians, and surgeons, including puberty suppression, followed by cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgery, provides trans youth the opportunity to develop into well-functioning young adults. All showed significant improvement in their psychological health, and they had notably lower rates of internalizing psychopathology than previously reported among trans children living as their natal sex. Well-being was similar to or better than same-age young adults from the general population.
Gorton, 2011 (Prepared for the San Francisco Department of Public Health): “In a cross-sectional study of 141 transgender patients, Kuiper and Cohen-Kittenis found that after medical intervention and treatments, suicide fell from 19 percent to zero percent in transgender men and from 24 percent to 6 percent in transgender women.)”
Murad, et al., 2010: "Significant decrease in suicidality post-treatment. The average reduction was from 30% pretreatment to 8% post treatment."
De Cuypere, et al., 2006: Rate of suicide attempts dropped dramatically from 29.3% to 5.1% after receiving medical and surgical treatment among Dutch patients treated from 1986-2001.
UK study: "Suicidal ideation and actual attempts reduced after transition, with 63% thinking about or attempting suicide more before they transitioned and only 3% thinking about or attempting suicide more post-transition.
Heylens, 2014: Found that the psychological state of transgender people "resembled those of a general population after hormone therapy was initiated."
Perez-Brumer, 2017: "These findings suggest that interventions that address depression and school-based victimization could decrease gender identity-based disparities in suicidal ideation."
Here's a study showing that children know what gender they prefer and don't change their minds on it.