The Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education, or FURRIES, Act, filed by Austin-area Republican State Rep. Stan Gerdes, would “prohibit any non-human behavior by a student, including presenting himself or herself, on days other than exempt days, as anything other than a human being.”
The law would allow for exempt days, such as Halloween and other school dress-up days.
The law defines “non-human” behavior as “any type of behavior or accessory displayed by a student in a school district other than behaviors or accessories typically displayed by a member of the homo sapiens species,” with provided examples being:
Using a litter box for the passing of stool, urine or other human byproducts
A personal or outward display, except during a school play or by a school mascot, through surgical or superficial means of features that are non-human such as using tails, leashes, collars or other accessories designed for pets
Using fur, other than naturally occurring human hair or a wig made to look like human hair
Artificial, animal-like ears
Other physiological features that have not historically been assigned to the human race through a means of natural biological development
Students who bark, meow, hiss or make other animal noises that are not human speech
Licking oneself or others for the purpose of grooming or maintenance.
I always tell people, that they won’t stop at LGBTQ+ people, and will eventually go into persecuting other subcultures.
So can’t dress as a Republican?
Only on exempt days like halloween or occations like a school play
I feel they put more effort into coming up with an acronym that into planning the actual act. I’m pretty sure in the early 90s punk phase people wore collars for fashion too.
How about focusing all this effort and passing a bill to prevent officers being pussies during an active shooter situation like in Uvalde??
You could think that reality has no more pressing problems.
It would be so funny if schools start “dressup weeks/months” with rotating theme in protest
Ironic really, given how right here the cuntservatives are just chasing their own tail.
i cannot begin to describe how utterly fucking stupid this is.
I genuinely thought i died and went to hell when i first read this, this bill doesn’t even make any fucking sense. Child exhibiting “non human behaviors” could be considered “child abuse” according to this bill.
How the fuck do you even enforce this?
Overreaching Authoritarianism.
Standard Republican kit.
pretty much.
So they’re scared of people becoming furries. I know a few furries, not in the scene myself but furries are genuinely some of the nicest people I know. And also this bill seems ableist because I knew an autistic person that would growl whenever he had a meltdown. He wasn’t a furry, it was just how he was wired.
I wonder how much of this is borne out of the hysteria over kids supposedly using litter boxes.
I had some gomer on the Denver Post forums that kept insisting it was not only a thing, but an epidemic. I kept asking him for the supposed evidence of this claim, all he could say was that he “talks to lots and lots of parents and teachers” and “the media won’t report on it”.
It’s trivial to verify. Slap 20 bucks on the table and say “20 bucks you can’t list a location with a litterbox for furries”
“talks to lots and lots of parents and teachers” and “the media won’t report on it”.
Ain’t gonna get you 20 bucks. Need a location. If you get a location, call 'em. They’ll confirm or deny. (They’re gonna deny)
That’ll get you a claim that they’d deny regardless of veracity
Too late, the DP killed their comment section so who knows where that troll skipped off to.
I had some gomer on the Denver Post forums that kept insisting it was not only a thing, but an epidemic.
ask him where video footage of it happening is, everyone in school has a phone, everyone in school has a camera, if there ARE litterboxes in bathrooms, there WILL be footage of it, and LOTS of it.
Sadly, DP killed off their forums. DP maybe 20 years ago had a pretty vibrant online comment section. They switched the platforms a few times and the paper itself was getting hollowed out like so many others [1]. I think most corporations don’t really want to be hearing from anyone, least of all their own customers. Seems many, many outlets have closed their comment sections. I’m sure more than a few qons cheered at that fact, because they were regularly made to look QUITE stupid on such forums, if the moderation was even the least bit fair.
Turns out there was at least one magat moderator on there, and you could almost tell when they were on-duty - making a magat commenter look too stupid resulted in your post getting deleted. Oddly, many of the “free speech absolutists” would get a tingle up their leg when that happened, which is so weird because they were crying about how they were being “censored” and “shadow-banned” on other platforms, as well as DP, LOL.
In any case, once it was announced that DP was shutting them down, the usual suspects were positively giddy about it. I know more than a few of the extremists were trying to get them shut down via various means (some of them bragged about this and whether they were lying about it or were not, you get some real insight into the types we are dealing with here). This, from the “free speech absolutists”, naturally.
[1] The idiots on the right think it’s because papers were “too liberal”, lol, and either completely ignorant of, or lying about, how the advertisement model was nuked by things like Craig’s list and so on.
RIP.
[1] The idiots on the right think it’s because papers were “too liberal”, lol, and either completely ignorant of, or lying about, how the advertisement model was nuked by things like Craig’s list and so on.
it’s the fascist rhetoric rule. Unfortunately it’s so incredibly prevalent these days im not sure society will be able to make a comeback from it. I think we’ve reached a point of no return in terms of “why do people care about this shit” it’s gotten to a point where it justifies caring about itself innately. Rather than any sort of external justification, and people keep falling for it.
Step 1: lie
step 2: gaslight people
step 3: gaslight and legitimize
step 3: you win
Man they are still caught up on that fake story somebody sent to one of these morons claiming kids were using litter boxes in school. It never happened but they’re going to try to legislate it away anyway.
The lesson here is don’t troll these idiots, they’ll fucking believe it and then start passing idiotic laws for non-problems.
I always love using that example to dismiss some concerns about deepfakes sparking national conspiracies.
Nobody even tried to fake a picture of it. I’ve seen photos on lemmy of people shaving their heads in weird ways or making some horrible bean-themed food just for the karma. Throwing an empty litter box in an empty classroom takes much less effort yet nobody even bothered.
Ok, I’m new here and I HAVE to ask what’s up with beans. If it’s not too uncool to ask
Beans were just some sort of meme that popped up randomly. I think it was one of those “mods are asleep quick post [x] before they wake up” types of things, and it quickly spiraled until half of everyone’s feed was just beans.
I was around when it happened, and even I don’t understand it.
There’s not much more to understand. It was just a fun thing that happened. Sort of like all the void kitties that expIoded everywhere a few months ago.
Ugh. So uncool. ~j/k I dunno either~
It is uncool to ask. Fortunately that doesn’t matter as none of us are cool.
Beans are a lemmy meme. As are jeans. And German sturgeons though the last one is the least enduring and mostly just was an ich_iel meme that happened to coincide with the last exodus
Beans are amazing. What else do you need to know?
Go beans
The lesson here is don’t troll these idiots, they’ll fucking believe it and then start passing idiotic laws for non-problems.
Exactly this. Just like flat earthers (and that super bizarre one about time cubes or whatever), the rubes will gobble it up and eventually people will get hurt over it.
Another one is the Birds Aren’t Real meme, which I think is pretty funny, but you just know that an innocent birdwatcher will get shot some day because an extremely mentally unwell person will assume that they’re some government spook checking on the “drones”.
The lesson here is don’t troll these idiots, they’ll fucking believe it and then start passing idiotic laws for non-problems.
Throwback to when 4chan started memeing about pizzas, and the resulting chain of events led to a real pizza parlor being shot up by a right-wing nut job who thought it was full of pedophiles.
I don’t see how they ignored an actual case of sexual assault at a pizza parlor…oh it’s because he was a Republican mega donor.
Also, the Google results for ‘Vander Esch assault pizza ranch’ have at least five different “digital newspapers” pushed to the top of the results with a different story that does not match the record of the legal proceedings.
troll them, troll them relentlessly, and this is coming from a furry, this shit is fucking hilarious.
The more they live outside of reality, the harder it becomes for them to exist. The quick the fall, and the harder they fail.
The lesson here is don’t troll these idiots
Maybe the lesson is to troll harder until they legislate themselves into ruin?
These are the same sort of dumbfucks that absolutely believed the “LSD stickers/tattoos” bullshit way, way back and would insist on schools passing out flyers based on that stupid urban legend.
I remember being in sixth grade when they had a bout of that going around our school, and I was like, wait, what? And I had a lot of doubts. And that’s when I was in sixth grade. Years later, you could look it up and see what nonsense it was. Anyway, I was at TWO different jobs where someone was trying to “inform parents” with some printouts they had about you guessed it, the bullshit LSD stickers nonsense. The first time, I told them “you know, this is urban legend, right?” I get immediately treated like I’m some kind of criminal that does not want to protect the children.
I suspect the bullshit around litter boxes will have a similar lifetime among those that are hard of thinking.
It’s funny a Portuguese person just told me the same story happened in PT to justify anti-trans positions. So it’s the same bullshit story, localized, and repeated.
Yep, we had the exact same fake news story spread in Canada, and used as cover for anti-trans policies. Can we put some tariffs on disinformation please?
This hoax actually started out in PEI and then spread everywhere.
Huh I didn’t know that! Fine, export taxes on disinfo then
Just like how antisemitic stereotypes with no basis (blood libel etc.) have been repeated in many countries for hundreds of years. Even before the internet, memes were used for the effective spreading of suspicion and hatred.
I did a small dive and found an account of an apparent legit case of a litter box in a school, but it was for an option for extended school shooting drills
https://www.denverpost.com/2018/03/03/school-shooting-preparations/amp/
That’s how this whole “kids are identifying as cats and using litter boxes at school” shitshow started.
Yup, camp toilets are a similar concept. It’s just a 5 gallon hardware store bucket with a snap-on toilet seat lid. You line it with what is essentially a trash bag, just to make disposal easier. Then you use a gelling agent (just like what is in disposable diapers to allow them to soak up a bunch of moisture) to reduce sloshing and smell. It’s handy for when you’re going to be away from toilets for a day or two, but don’t want to (or aren’t able to) dig a hole to shit in.
But the same concept applies for when you’re going to be trapped somewhere (like a classroom) for an extended period of time. Like, for instance, during a school shooting. When you have 30 kids in a classroom, there’s a very good chance that at least one of them will need to piss after an hour or two. And nobody wants to deal with human waste in something like an open trashcan during a lockdown.
And as an added bonus, the bucket can be used to store all of active shooter supplies when it’s not in use. So everything is in a single location to quickly grab and prep. Active shooter happens? Great, just grab the big bucket out of the closet, dump all of the supplies out, and you’re ready to go. Now all of your tourniquets, styptic bandages, etc are accessible.
But it quickly got distorted into “they’re making kids use litter boxes to indoctrinate them” instead.
As usual conservatives take something that makes them look like the evil shitbags they are and lie about it for political gain.
Meanwhile a percentage of the underpaid teachers are living in vans and shitting in buckets.
The we give these heroes a raise already!?
IIRC it did have a hint of truth, like most things do. They then spun a totally different story from it. The hint of truth is it was for school shootings where they couldn’t leave the classroom for an extended period of time.
Instead of addressing the real issue, which is that school shootings have become so common that preparations like this need to be made, they spun it into a story that the schools were pandering towards furries. As always, it’s all smoke and mirrors to keep people distracted and give them an enemy, so they don’t force representatives to actually help them.
i don’t even think it was a litterbox even, it was just litter in a bag, or a bucket. That was it. Someone then probably made the joke, somewhere online, 4chan or something, that it was litterboxes, and furries, because haha funny, look how stupid everything is, and then it exploded.
And when you try and tell anyone who bought it they say there is evidence, while never being able to provide any.
They will say this legislation proves its real. Why else would this legislation exist? I’m sure the lawmakers have all the evidence.
If there’s one thing we can be certain of with Texas legislators it’s their competency
I’ve just taken to saying “provide me with evidence or shut the fuck up” usually followed closely by “how about one that’s from multiple independent sources and not from a fox opinion piece or personal blog”
how about one that’s from multiple independent sources and not from a fox opinion piece or personal blog”
and oops it isnt actually proof its just a headline because the article debunks it immediately.
While you’re right about that being fake, it’s just pandering to their base who do take issue with forms of self-expression that are common amongst queer, trans and/or autistic students. Things like wearing a collar, a tail or cat ears are absolutely relatively common and this bill targets those all the same.
My daughters love wearing cat-ear headbands. It’s cute, they like it, end of story. Nobody has thrown a fit about it yet… 🤞🤞
The weird thing is for some reason people will lie to perpetuate these falsehoods
Like I do therapy and I talk to teenagers regularly because teenagers need mental health support, obviously. And sometimes they’ll bring up shit like this: “my school installed a litter box because of these woke kids”
But even the most basic of prodding: “did they really” with a tone of like “come on” and they’ll backpedal, “well no, but like there are kids that have fursonas and shit”
It’s crazy to see it start so young. They’re realizing at like 16 they can get adults to gang up on the kid they think is weird by being dishonest, and adults buy into it because it’s a chance to bully someone weaker and politicians jump on it because it’s a new wedge issue to distract people from class consciousness
And what’s crazy is that by some perspectives if I call them out on this dishonesty and point out this cycle I’m indoctrinating them
Like I do therapy and I talk to teenagers regularly because teenagers need mental health support, obviously. And sometimes they’ll bring up shit like this: “my school installed a litter box because of these woke kids”
this is literally just how fascism works btw.
Step 1: lie, make it as preposterous as you can
Step 2: if you aren’t called out, further it, legitimize it, make it real, gaslight people into believing it ACTUALLY happened.
Step 3: If you are called out, downplay it, gaslight the other party, it’s such a preposterous claim that it couldn’t possibly be fabricated, otherwise why would anybody talk about it, it’s so easy to immediately disprove, surely you must be wrong if you haven’t already seen the proof, i mean everybody, EVERYBODY is talking about it? Haven’t you seen it? Would be a shame if you got caught up in the legislation (or similar legislation) yourself wouldn’t it?
Step 4: win.
what? absolutely troll these idiots now that you know they are very susceptible.
just do it in a way they pass good laws out of fear instead.
This idiocy must be weaponized
The lesson here is to actually troll these idiots, but with stuff that lead to idiotic laws so inconvenient that even their voter base will hate them for it.
Give them enough rope, and they’ll hang themselves with it.
Or they’ll lynch us.
So a furry suit made from human hair is ok? Asking for a friend
Oppress furries Get cyberhacked
Furries are the ultimate dorks. I know I am very furry affiliated and most of my friends are furries… but this makes being a furry badass nyao.
Forbid child to play animals, they will do it when grow up, just see how much Trump likes to be Putin’s dog.
fReE sPeEcH
