Just not Axe. Please, for the love of the gods, not Axe
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Of course they did. Cruelty is the point.
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Sadly, that percentage isn’t that astonishing—there’s even a whole subreddit dedicated to it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/badwomensanatomy/
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Please don’t use the word “free” when discussing these initiatives. It’s paid for with taxes, which comes from taxpayers, many of whom are parents to these girls and young women.
Idaho Republicans Refuse to Allocate Taxpayer Money
Nobody ever writes about “the legislature refused to fund free highways” in that vein.
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IDAHO is now an acronym that stands for Idiots Destroying American Heritage Outrageously.
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Didn’t see that acronym before I posted mine and I like it too. For all the wrong reasons.
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“Free” in the sense that they would be free for the students. I think everyone understands that the taxpayers would ultimately be picking up the tab.
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How are there people in Oregon who still want to be part of Greater Bloody Idaho?
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The eastern end of Oregon is about as far as you can get from Portlandia, especially politically. They see Idaho as a kind of promised land, without that troublesome city of wrong-thinking people to ruin things.
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Yabbut . . .
Using “free” plays into the right wing trope of “the libs want people to have free stuff.” And journalists tend to use “free” when it’s related to things that go specifically to right wing bugaboos:
Free health care
Free tampons
Free college
Free housing for poor people
etc etc
Nobody ever writes
Free national defense
Free highways
etc etc
It glosses over what’s happening; We make choices about what to do with tax dollars, and those choices are fundamental to our worldview.
Writing “free” inherently cedes the conversation to right wingers. Liberals want people to have “free stuff.” It’s BS.
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Strikes me that this is a better way to start talking about this stuff, the refusal to allocate tax dollars to help average people…
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I spend a lot of time in Eastern Oregon and Washington. Please don’t paint it as a monolith. That thinking is just as wrong as it is with Southern states like Georgia and Alabama.
There are “In My America Love Wins” and BLM signs in Hermiston. There are Democrats in Baker City. The other BLM (Bureau of Land Management) has wildlife biologists and soil scientists living there who are more progressive than the governor.
Pretending that whole swaths of people are backward and deserve to be shunted off and abused by fascists is just plain wrong and NOT helpful.
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I suppose Jason could have rephrased the headline “Idaho Republicans block measure to provide tampons at no cost to public school students” but honestly I doubt that would make much difference to anyone so dead-set against letting the government provide needed services.
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Are the numbers of those people large enough to move local politics? No area is a monolith, but there is an active part of that population who is eager to at least talk up this idea.
Agreed. I suppose I’m railing more generally against the culture of ceding rhetorical ground to evil people on this and all sorts of other things. This is a common example of how it’s happened though.
This works too:
“Idaho Republicans block measure to provide tampons at no cost to public school students"
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It doesn’t matter. @DukeTrout’s point isn’t about politics, it’s about making broad, sweeping generalizations about someone based on where they live. Not everyone there is a right wing militia member, and that’s more than enough reason to use our language carefully.
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Yes, especially as demographics change over time. One aspect of the Greater Idaho movement (really just a guy in his gararge in Redmond, Oregon) that is particularly stupid and short sided is the politics in those areas are changing in the opposite direction over time, becoming more progressive. A decade ago, Deschutes County was firmly GOP. Now it’s leaning Dem. Ironically, the guy spearheading the stupid movement woukd not be within GI because there’s no way it would even make the ballot in Deschutes County.
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Imagine what might happen if school was a place where kids could take a shower safely and get completely dressed!? I mean who the hell should ever expect that out of life?
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But the “at no cost to students” part is critical for understanding the measure being discussed here. The Republicans aren’t trying to stop schools from allowing students to purchase tampons from on-campus vending machines.
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Less than a century ago, politicians wanted to ban tampons b/c convinced they are a form of contraception, [Ed. Note: HUH?!] which was illegal at the time [Ed. Note: HUH?!].
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