Rozier is more straightforward because his crime is participating in gambling while being in a position to influence the results (like by pulling himself from the game early). Billups and Jones were apparently involved with rigged mafia-run poker games designed to extract money from rich marks.
I think at least in part it's an error of falling for a sort of cargo cult- copying the aesthetics and trappings of authoritarianism without understanding their actual point (beyond that libs hate it), and so thinking their fascist state will simply conjure into being.
Plano has become significantly more purple in the last 10 years; it went for Biden in 2020 and O'Rourke over Abbott in 2022. We also have a massive Asian/immigrant community (I'm a second gen Indian myself).
In fairness, if an F-150 owner says of the truck "her name is Aura" and he regularly talks to it like it's a person, it's just quirky. With a Cybertruck owner though
Saudi Arabia has been investing into renewables, such as by massively increasing solar panel imports from China. Unfortunately they also have wildly stupid mega-projects like the Line, so...
I think there's more nuance there than he accounts for (if nothing else, people can be built very different), but... well it's applicable enough in a lot of situations, I have to admit.
I know it's not exactly what you're driving at but I think it's related- I have a friend who insists that the number one way to kill motivation while writing a novel or doing creative work is to talk/post about it.
I mean even on a mechanical level, people are interested in it because it's a person doing it. A guy pulling off a goal-scoring bicycle kick is cool because it's a human being managing to pull that off.
I guess in this regard I'm more sympathetic to something multi-disciplinary: I get wanting to make a video game but not wanting to sign up for becoming a coder/designer/artist/whatever. But on some level you gotta eat your veggies when doing creative work.
This part I get- people would like to say "I've written a novel" because it feels nice to be able to say that. Sense of achievement or prestige or whatever. But writing a novel is hard!
Yeah this is my sticking point- it'd be one thing if we were talking about a hypothetical future where childless people could be made to feel lesser based on this policy. But ignoring the reality that they already are, and have been, made to feel lesser is wild!
