30 Comments

This is also not to mention that nuclear families are under strain. Suburbia and exurbia are not the best settings for caring for aging parents, nor (in most cases) for being active and involved grandparents. Duffy's policies are actually breaking up the infrastructure that allows multigenerational families to live near and support each other. He's anti-family, not pro-family. And we need to keep pointing that out.

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Yeah we ran into this. My dad had some elderly relatives in a second house near ours in an exurb where anything was a minimum 10-minute drive (and they didn’t drive). It was ok while both parents are healthy. My dad passed away and it was just my mom trying to deal with two elderly folks without any transportation solo. Eventually, they had to move into more congregate living situations.

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I think their voters are already isolated and unhappy. And so part of this is demanding resources be redirected to them and away from the rest of us. Yes, the question is how the American people respond.

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Another outstanding article Lyz - laying bare the dystopia this administration wants.

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I can’t believe how sick these individuals are who have drafted this thing. Mind-boggling. I know it’s not productive to be tangled in rage and fear. Thank you for your information and I know at some point we will have to fight these fuckers. ✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽

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I am confused. Doesn't the order restrict funding to places with low birth and marriage rates?

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She quoted at the beginning of the article that it prioritizes funding to communities with “marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”

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"A new DOT order restricts funding to places with high birth and marriage rates" This summary of the article right below the title is what I am referring to. I'm not trying to be a jerk or split hairs. I was just confused by this summary after I read the article.

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Ah, I see what it is. Here 'restricts funding to' means limits funding so that it goes only to those places. The same phrase can also mean takes funding away or makes it harder to get for those places. Two very different meanings to the same three words.

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thanks for the explanation. i was also confused.

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I had heard about the order a while ago so I didn't catch that at first because I already knew what it was about. The 'wrong' reading of the phrase is probably the more usual way to read it.

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gotcha. this is the first that i was even hearing about this. as lyz pointed out, it sorta got lost in all the other stuff.

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I think Duffy is some far right guy with 9 kids, right? I live in an area he’d probably prioritize (a heavily Mormon part of Phoenix) and people seem pretty isolated out here if they’re not tied to the church.

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Correct. 9 kids at last count. Also super RW and deeply unserious.

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Oh his official bio lists his time as a reality TV star. We are an unserious people.

https://www.transportation.gov/meet-secretary/us-transportation-secretary-sean-duffy

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The DOT order is an example of social engineering that has no place in a society claiming that it is a free society. It's something that you might have expected to read about in a history of Mao's reign in China.

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All these authoritarian countries want to try and force people to have children, but provide the masses with piss-poor conditions that lead to the opposite effect. It’s so pathetic. See why a truly democratic society that doesn’t run like a profit-driven, multinational corporation is preferable?

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I just want to say I’m grateful for this space. I feel so enraged, sad, anxious, scared and I know I can come to this space to find others throughout the country who feel similarly.

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Thank you, Lyz! The absurdi controlling from the folks who complained about masks during a global pandemic is maddening.

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I appreciate the nod to second-wave feminism. Yes, I know that many in that category were notoriously class-blind and white-focused, as well as fatphobic. But I keep seeing so many articles and essays with the prescription that men in heterosexual relationships do their fair share of domestic chores like it’s a *NEW* idea.

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Wow, didn't realize it was already April 1st...Surprise April Fool, We're just kidd'n 'bout 'make america great again', duh...!!!

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How long do we have to live in such isolation and disconnection? I know I'm just screaming into the void, but I don't understand how Americans are so far away from "oh wow other people really make life better, these apps and products ain't doing shit!"

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And Musk has all us women’s bank account numbers from the IRS - all they need is a wacko right wing banker to shut down our access to our money.

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Feb 19 “ in 1963, journalist Betty Friedan published her first book, The Feminine Mystique, which begins: "The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'" That question would end up sparking a second wave of feminism in the United States, would permanently transform the American social fabric, and the book would come to be seen as a pioneering moment in American history and one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.”

~G.Keillor~

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The Great Replacement Theory at work yet again - White suburbanites MUST REPRODUCE TO MAINTAIN SOCIAL DOMINANCE. All this does is to further subsidize and increase white/hetero-centric/socioeconomic privilege. Or am I off base?

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