The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature

“It feels a bit off-balance,” said Rogowski, who went on to point out that children already have many other damaging freedoms online where they are more exposed to danger and not protected.

So, there's a chance something could be getting lost in translation and I don't know the context here, but just taking this article's description at face value,

[Paraphrasing], "Kids can voluntarily be exposed to explicit content on the internet, so why do we need guardians around when I act creepy towards them (it's my job, no really)" seems like both a tellingly weird rant trigger for this guy and first line of argument in defense of it

e; I should have kept reading the article,

For Rogowski, though, the efforts now made in Britain are in danger of inhibiting creativity. His scenes in Bird involve several small children and teenagers who are depicted in situations of social neglect and even imminent harm. “It’s true that Andrea is very careful and respectful, but it would have been great sometimes if there was a bit more trust – and I think that’s a cultural thing,” Rogowski told the industry journal Variety this weekend. “We are so scared nowadays to expose our kids to maybe a swear word – which is ridiculous, because we allow them to use social media and YouTube.”

Ok, yeah, so maybe spoilers for the movie Bird (I haven't seen it but I've read a few things about it now), but it seems like this actor plays an abusive father figure type, and I could kind of imagine how doing that work would have you running into these regulations a lot and they might get kind of annoying, but a) they are there for a really good reason b) if I was your publicist I'd be writing a profanity filled resignation email right now, because you just created a PR headache for yourself

That all said, I think this guy is more dumbass than creep at this point

This comment has the sort of broken cynicism and utter indifference to our shared humanity you normally only see in CNNs coverage of foreign wars

They think he'll be good for them, so they lie and say he'll be good for us

Yep, and this is all also applies to the Republican party as a whole

Thank you for the sincere and thought out reply, that was honestly really refreshing.

I'm really, truly, glad for your people and that they're doing better and doing more good in the world, and very much believe that's exactly what healthcare can and should do for people and society. However, I know one person who spent years dealing with medical debt because their insurance basically did a bait and switch (hospital was in network but the doctor wasn't), probably a dozen who spent years at jobs they hated because they needed the insurance, and one person who worked in healthcare and basically had to switch jobs and move to a different specialty because having to fight insurance companies for her patients and losing those fights was destroying her mental health.

Also - and this feels kinda petty and I'm sorry if it comes off as disrespecting your story but I've just gotta say - I'm pretty certain dental coverage isn't mandated for employers under the ACA, or for adults on state Medicaid plans. So, though the ACA certainly may have helped or played a role in the people you know getting dental care (like, some states do provide dental, and there's probably matching money or a grant or some other mechanism somewhere in the ACA to support that), it didn't do it alone, and there's all too many people who don't get that treatment because they have a lousy employer plan and/or live in a red state.

And my problem with the ACA is that it really serves to lock a lot of these problems in and just completely neutralize any political will to change them. Beyond shoveling money at health insurance companies, it's made them a central player in healthcare policy, both through their lobbying work and through the kinds of influence they're more able to exercise over healthcare providers (e.g. what health insurance will and won't cover determines what departments get what kind of staffing, let alone the impact it has on what individual providers can and can't do). The deeper these things set in to our various bureaucratic and political systems the harder it becomes to even imagine another way to do things because the administrative and intellectual resources to do all the nifty gritty detail work of healthcare are owned outright or deeply intertwined with this inefficient and unjust market system.

Also, there's a deeper historical conversation to be had about how the politics of 2008-10 played out, and how bank bailouts and the ACA both gave Tea Party assholes material to work with, but frankly I don't have the mental energy to disentangle that from the fact that straight up racism and lies did a lot to propel them. Like, to discuss that 2 year period properly really would take a whole book, but the harm that was done to this country by the 2010 election and the census and gerrymanderings that came after it is really hard to overstate, and I really think that the mishandling of policy and messaging around the foreclosure crisis and healthcare reform by Democratic lawmakers really set the stage for that disaster.

That all being said,

If we survive November, we’ll meet back up and hassle the newly-electeds together

Hear hear, that's something I'll look forward to while holding my nose and filling out my ballot. Good luck to you and your people, whatever may come.

Because a lot of what the claim as success is a half measure at best and actually makes things worse in a lot of instances. For example, thanks to the ACA we now have more people giving health insurance companies more money than ever before, money they use to lobby and lock in their political advantages, but meanwhile lots of insured people are still being crushed by healthcare costs because the insurance they get is crap.

But, just to prove I'm not just a Democratic party/Biden hater -

e; actually, nevermind

Yeah it did help some people?

It helped insurance companies. The uninsured rate is super low these days but tons of people still can't afford premiums and our of pocket costs and skip healthcare anyway

with some Democrats being very conservative

And whenever people try to call out conservative Democratic party members for screwing things up they get shouted down in comment threads just like these

In the Spring of 2021, The Biden administration reinterpreted the American Rescue Plan Act so that local and county governments could give the COVID recovery money Congress has approved to their police departments for basically anything

In the Summer of 2021, The Biden administration approved Memphis' plan to use $13mil on various "public safety" initiatives

In the Fall of 2021, the Memphis PD used their influx of funding to create the SCORPION Unit

In January of 2023, officers from the unit beat Tyre Nichols to death

Perhaps we all should do better when it comes to caring about the physical safety of marginalized people

Also, their much touted climate change bill is almost entirely just handing out money to wealthy for profit companies (including fucking oil and gas companies for carbon capture programs that probably won't work) and hoping they do good things with it, instead of just prohibiting them from doing bad things like we should be doing

He could have descheduled it entirely with the exact same process that rescheduled it, but Biden still wants it to be illegal federally because it's a great tool for cops, border guards, human resource departments and other shitheads to fuck with people they don't like and preserving that kind of crap is a through line for Biden's whole career back to the 70s