Our cat does similar. Waits for you to throw a fluffy mouse for her. You do. She runs straight past it and upstairs. No idea why. Thinks she's an apex predator the way I used to think I was Wedge Antilles.

I feel that way too mate.

Having difficult conversations with elderly family before they are elderly can save a lot of pain.

It doesn't always work. Long before she got ill my Mum was stubborn and refused to countenance that one day she might not be able to care for Dad.

Hugs to all going through it.

This is pure exterminatory evil. They want trans people not to exist. Trans people whose legal rights and identities have been validated by law for decades.

They want them to cease to exist. They want them to die, rather than have to live with the discomfort of diversity.

Pure evil.

Wow. This isn't good.

...always said more about the realities of the capitalist system than the film did about gangsters, imho.

It's a tell that the Corleone family consigliere, Tom Hagen, is a lawyer.

Anyway, I am wittering, but the Buonsera speech that begins the film - 'I believe in America' - based on a text written at the height of Vietnam, and reflecting the failure of the law to protect the innocent...

...which in the characters' analysis justifies the Corleone family ethos - they are ensuring they are not, as Vito puts it, fools. But it could be applied to the need for power to back up anything in a capitalist society. Workers' rights in law being meaningless without strong unions, say.

Given Trump is regularly (and It think unfairly - on organised crime, that is) compared to la cosa nostra, I remember a quote from The Godfather (novel, not film).

Puzo has it something like 'Society does not protect those without independent power of their own'...

Not having a go at the OP at all who raises a valid point in their own right, just emphasising that this is how it is, it is just more obvious to those of us privileged enough to think we enjoyed the law's privilege previously.

My Lai was never the 'exception', save insofar as it was exposed.

Was what the CIA did over half the globe 'legal'?

In the UK, was what went on in Northern Ireland 'legal'? And if so, by whose lights?

Was 'rendition', which both countries participated in, legal?

...but they both went to war in Iraq together, and service personnel obeyed orders unquestioningly in a war that, put most charitably, was of 'dubious'* legality (*it was illegal).

As ever these things really 'matter' when they 'come home'.

...but what we are seeing now is the sacred profaned; liberals who believe the law has some kind of sacrosanct status realising that - across countries - it is a myth, something working class and marginalised communities have known basically forever.

The UK and the US are different of course...

Yeah we both had to & we could/couldn't afford it (it's yet more debt) when we used to get it on NHS as we are clinically vulnerable. In another sting the NHS were using old vax & the private providers are using updated. We 'benefited' from that, but it shows how little a shit govt gives about folk.

I could do a whole rant on the myth of 'professional society' and the reality being we are all workers, should have solidarity etc but I sort of did it in 2022 when I got booted out of academia the first time.

punkacademic.org/2022/05/23/n...

'Illegal' (no-one is illegal) immigrants are an already-demonised group which Starmer and co now want to conflate with asylum seekers, as the far right has done for ages, but it's the same playbook.

Going back to the OP ulitmately they're right, it's a racist, ableist, queerphobic party in power.