I think your acknowledgement of examples of when something like the first amendment has been glossed over within reason is a very important factor. Whether or not someone believes gun regulations should be somewhere in the reasonable gray area between both interpretations of the amendment, there's not really much evidence to support that viewpoint. The second amendment was written in a very polarizing way, in which you regard or ignore the part about militias. When you regard the part about militias it indicates that gun rights are purely for state organization, and that individual rights are to be defined by the states. If you disregard it, the amendment declares an unwavering protection of all individual gun rights. Without noticing that something like the first amendment has been limited before, a lot of people are forced to choose a more radical stance. Because of this the issue has become an incredibly heated topic, one which I've seen divide entire families. Most people would agree that guns are dangerous in the hands of everyone, without any regulation or licensing, but until they loosen their grip on the diction of the second amendment they are often pushed to that extreme.

Unimaginative-less language version:

While the constitutional history and the definitions of words at different time periods and the likes help create an image of the founder's original intentions, I don't see why that must be the dictator of how we regulate today. Regulating guns in that time period would have been like, if cars had been invented at the time, regulating the federal speed limit to seventy miles per hour. It wouldn't have made sense to do, because a car could only go ten miles per hour anyways. The key difference between the two is that they created an amendment on firearms, but neglected to create one on the right to transport oneself expediently. When they protected the right to bear arms-- if we're going to talk definitions-- they protected the right to carry an object which could shoot one lethal bullet about every twenty seconds. Did they have the foresight to expect firearms to evolve to where they are today, and make the second amendment with that in mind? Maybe, but instead of guessing foresight we should utilize our privilege of hindsight. It is, after all, 20-20 (damn if only it wasn't 2021.) If the founders did think ahead, they created the second amendment as a best-guess, without any information on the outcomes and technologies that their amendment would eventually spawn. And it was a limited number of minds, hot off the adrenaline of the revolution (relative to today's perspective.) Now we have hundreds of years of information and the collective arguments of millions backing what decision we make. So here it is: Are we benefiting from the second amendment's regulations?

Before you can drive a vehicle you are required to obtain a license to prove that you can be trusted on the road. Before a vehicle can be driven it must be registered. Before you can drive more dangerous vehicles, you must obtain licenses proving equivalent driving capabilities. You cannot drive your car everywhere, and must limit its lethality when the stakes are higher (for example lower speed limits in school zones.) However, barring some obvious exceptions, you may still obtain a car of any color, shape, magnitude of subwoofers, and most importantly, any speed-- even if there's no public road that you can legally drive that speed on. Are there millions of Americans swarming the streets with signs saying that they want unlicensed drivers-- or inversely millions of Americans demanding engines be mechanically capped at seventy miles an hour? No. Cars are a freedom, a culture. People pay millions for cars that can go fast the few times a year they decide to go to a track. People pay thousands in lifts, hydraulics, paintjobs, and obnoxious subwoofers. So tell me, why can't guns be a culture? Why must they be locked behind closed doors, with four inch steel walls, and hidden from liberal family members? Or inversely why must they be lawless, convictive, and brandished with conservative-reeking indignation? Certainly a car can be just as lethal as a gun. One angry truck driver could plow straight into a crowd of a hundred-- and they'd be in a getaway vehicle. There's an irrational fear of guns, as they were pushed into the public as the tools for killing people. But they have a new intention now. How many people buy guns because they want to kill people with them? None. Even the most psychotic people don't buy guns with the intention to kill; they find themselves with one when they get the urge (obviously that's not wholly true but you get the idea.) People see them as a means to slaughter humans when in actuality most people want one for sport, art, independence, or protection. Literally people get them to prevent themselves from being killed-- to prevent human slaughter. Yes, obviously you should need a license of varying degrees, registration, and reasonable regulation, but why should we banish them as the cause of the United States' murder issues? Do you really feel oppressed by having to be sufficiently learned and justifiably deemed responsible to carry a firearm? No! You point to the second amendment and wine "b-but dad said I could have one!" If you want a firearm for your own safety, then you should be glad only safe people can carry them. No one is mad about the year and a half long process it takes to obtain a driver's license, but driving is way more freeing and essential to life than a firearm. Almost everyone gets a license within the first few years that they can-- they wait their childhood in anticipation of the responsibility. Why shouldn't firearms be celebrated in a similar way? Again, they have just as much lethal potential. The twenty-one year olds of the United States should be running around with glee, flailing their bazookas around like nerf-guns; but they should be damn-well qualified to do so. We should be glad to prove how capable we are to utilize something of great responsibility, as we should be confident in our ability to prove said capability. I don't mean to go all 'guns don't kill people, people kill people,' but I mean... Really, if there wasn't such a fear around guns, and more money was spent on changing their public image from tools of murder to cool collectible bangy sticks, I think we'd have a lot less murders by firearm: we'd just have the same number spread across every other way to kill someone (there's a lot.) I'm not going to preach that we have to fix the mental health of the American populous, but if murder's what you're mad about then you know where to look... people don't kill because they've got a gun in their hand, they kill because they're mad or depressed or down on luck or bored or unsatisfied with their lives; guns are just one of many ways they can homicidically take that out. Screw the second amendment; who cares? It's the one time the founding fathers slipped up and defined the freedoms of a specific technology which could evolve. It's a mistake. If it was built off slave-owner intentions than even less power to it, but in today's society that shouldn't really matter all that much. Other than stubborn American pride there is no great reason to care about the second amendment. We don't fight wars on American soil anymore, we fight them with impressive nukes, malleable economies, information regulation, and proxy land. That it's a necessary means to protect citizens from war; that its unhindered access is necessary to freedom; that its continued existence could spell death to all school children-- It's just a bias; realize that.

While the constitutional history and the definitions of words at different time periods and the likes help create an image of the founder's original intentions, I don't see why that must be the dictator of how we regulate today. Regulating guns in that time period would have been like, if cars had been invented at the time, regulating the federal speed limit to seventy miles per hour. It wouldn't have made sense to do, because a car could only go ten miles per hour anyways. The key difference between the two is that they created an amendment on firearms, but neglected to create one on the right to transport oneself expediently. When they protected the right to bear arms-- if we're going to talk definitions-- they protected the right to carry an object which could shoot one lethal bullet about every twenty seconds. Did they have the foresight to expect firearms to evolve to where they are today, and make the second amendment with that in mind? Maybe, but instead of guessing foresight we should utilize our privilege of hindsight. It is, after all, 20-20 (damn if only it wasn't 2021.) If the founders did think ahead, they created the second amendment as a best-guess, without any information on the outcomes and technologies that their amendment would eventually spawn. And it was a limited number of minds, hot off the adrenaline of the revolution (relative to today's perspective.) Now we have hundreds of years of information and the collective arguments of millions backing what decision we make. So here it is: Are we benefiting from the second amendment's regulations?

Before you can drive a vehicle you are required to obtain a license to prove that you can be trusted on the road. Before a vehicle can be driven it must be registered. Before you can drive more dangerous vehicles, you must obtain licenses proving equivalent driving capabilities. You cannot drive your car everywhere, and must limit its lethality when the stakes are higher (for example lower speed limits in school zones.) However, barring some obvious exceptions, you may still obtain a car of any color, shape, magnitude of subwoofers, and most importantly, any speed-- even if there's no public road that you can legally drive that speed on. Are there millions of Americans swarming the streets with signs saying that they want unlicensed drivers-- or inversely millions of Americans demanding engines be mechanically capped at seventy miles an hour? Hell no. Cars are a freedom, a culture. People pay millions for cars that can go fast the few times a year they decide to go to a track. People pay thousands in lifts, hydraulics, paintjobs, and obnoxious fucking subwoofers. So tell me, why can't guns be a culture? Why must they be locked behind closed doors, with four inch steel walls, and hidden from liberal family members? Or inversely why must they be lawless, convictive, and brandished with conservative-reeking indignation? Certainly a car can be just as lethal as a gun. One angry truck driver could plow straight into a crowd of a hundred-- and they'd be in a fucking getaway vehicle. There's an irrational fear of guns, as they were pushed into the public as the tools for killing people. But they have a new intention now. How many people buy guns because they want to kill people with them? Fucking none. Even the most psychotic people don't buy guns with the intention to kill; they find themselves with one when they get the urge (obviously that's not wholly true but you get the idea.) People see them as a means to slaughter humans when in actuality most people want one for sport, art, independence, or protection. Literally people get them to prevent themselves from being killed-- to prevent human slaughter. Yes, obviously you should need a license of varying degrees, registration, and reasonable regulation, but why in the flying fuck should we banish them as the cause of the United States' murder issues? Do you really feel oppressed by having to be sufficiently learned and justifiably deemed responsible to carry a firearm? Hell fucking no! You point to the second amendment and wine "b-but dad said I could have one!" If you want a firearm for your own safety, then you should be fucking glad only safe people can carry them. No one is mad about the year and a half long process it takes to obtain a driver's license, but driving is way more freeing and essential to life than a firearm. Almost everyone gets a license within the first few years that they can-- they wait their childhood in anticipation of the responsibility. Why shouldn't firearms be celebrated in a similar way? Again, they have just as much lethal potential. The twenty-one year olds of the United States should be running around with glee, flailing their bazookas around like nerf-guns; but they should be damn-well qualified to do so. We should be glad to prove how capable we are to utilize something of great responsibility, as we should be confident in our ability to prove said capability. I don't mean to go all 'guns don't kill people, people kill people,' but I mean... Really, if there wasn't such a fear around guns, and more money was spent on changing their public image from tools of murder to cool collectible bangy sticks, I think we'd have a lot less murders by firearm: we'd just have the same number spread across every other way to kill someone (there's a lot.) I'm not going to preach that we have to fix the mental health of the American populous, but if murder's what you're mad about then you know where to look... people don't kill because they've got a gun in their hand, they kill because they're mad or depressed or down on luck or bored or un-fucking-satisfied with their lives; guns are just one of many ways they can homocidically take that out. Screw the second amendment; who cares? It's the one time the founding father's slipped up and defined the freedoms of a specific technology which could evolve. It's a mistake. If it was built off slave-owner intentions than even less power to it, but in today's society that shouldn't really matter all that much. Other than stubborn American pride there is no great reason to care about the second amendment. We don't fight wars on American soil anymore, we fight them with impressive nukes, malleable economies, information regulation, and proxy land. That it's a necessary means to protect citizens from war; that its unhindered access is necessary to freedom; that its continued existence could spell death to all school children-- It's just a bias; realize that.

If I really did define my position on abortion right now then tommorrow I would probably look at it like heresy. My opinion on it depends so greatly on whatever was just said that it’s almost disappointing. Obviously, parents shouldn’t legally be able to kill their baby. Right? Like when I baby is inside someone’s womb it’s the same baby that could come out the next day or-- if it had been borne before its due date-- the week prior. Its position outside of your body when you’re holding it versus one foot away inside your belly should not be the factor between it being a person versus a process that can be aborted. For this reason maybe it would be helpful to imagine the fetus as a baby. Take the fetus outside of the belly, conceptually, and think about when it would be logically okay to take a knife to it. I mean we’re allowed to take a kidney out of our bodies and cut it up and eat it, right? In fact forty-nine of the fifty states have no laws against cannibalism. But-- like-- you could consume your own epidermis, so why not some little blob of your own cells in the middle of your belly. Well you can’t cut up the living breathing child, but it would be pretty insane to state that you can’t cut up a blob of cells. So when do we allow it. Right. I feel like basing it off of some arbitrary heart-starts-beating or could-survive-without-motherly-nutrients bullshit is pretty stupid in a perfect world. In a perfect world we know all of these facts to a T, but none of them really get to the core of the issue. So like, you’ve got a fully functional, walking, talking, breathing… teething robot, right? It’s made of steel and its got a computer for a brain. Can you cut that thing up? Hell yeah, you can unscrew every bolt and writhe in its insides if you’d like. Now throw a sheet of human skin on top of it… still cool, right? Okay, then make its body identical to that of a human’s with lab grown cells’n’shit, but its got a computer brain. Still fine. But a brain is just a computer. It uses little electrical impulses to store and retrieve information. So you make a brain out of flesh and neurons and shit-- but it uses the same methods to function just under a different medium. See my point? That robot-- and I feel most people would agree (unless we’re talking can a robot derive consciousness from logical reason alone)-- would still be pretty okay to kill and, I guess, consume. Well, an abortion’s pretty similar. The robot would only be not okay to dice if it were an actual person who would experience said diceage. If it can’t then it’s the same exact thing as cutting up a ball of copper and silicone and lead and steel, just maybe a bit more intricately designed. I feel like it’s only reasonable to say that the only point in which it’s okay to cut up a baby is once it’s conscious. Conscious and viable are two completely different things, and any justice worth their seat should realize that. But that’s in a perfect world. In a perfect world abortion wouldn’t even be a concept, so we’re obviously not there. We have no clue what consciousness is. Some popular ideas are that an all-powerful human-esque being created a near-infinite universe for a handful of hairless apes to explore one-fucking-septillionth of-- and that’s consciousness (also the most popular theory… somehow); that reason is the ‘language of the universe’ and we happen to be the only creatures capable of ‘speaking’ it-- and speaking it is consciousness (thanks Mr. Thames, stoicism’s pretty cool); or that consciousness is a plane of existence, and using reason pulls down on that plane-- similar to mass pulling on space-time (and that’s the most convincing one, to me, which is saying a lot); you get the point: we’ve got no clue worth basing something as important as abortion off of. So what do we do? We’ve got to figure that out, maybe? Can we? I feel like the closest study to it is philosophy, which is, with all due respect, spitting out baseless concepts on life, reason, and reality until they make some sense at first glance. Maybe we need philosophy 2.0-- philosophy and the scientific process, combined at last. I mean I really don’t think we’ll be figuring it out anytime soon, there’s literally no place to start. What, poke the brain until your finger slips into the consciousness dimension? So what can we do about abortion? I say we stay on the safe side-- god-forbid we spend the next millennia putting babies through torture every few times some pregnant woman wanted to practice unsafe sex-- or some fucked up guy wanted to practice nonconsensual sex. I mean we’re all pretty sure you can’t feel pain or think without functional nerves and neurons, right? Dead people would agree. To me those are the features that would cause a baby to undergo negative emotions if they were to be aborted. So maybe we should do further research into when those parts of the brain begin development, or when those nerves start having a full connection to the brain. If we can’t find a definite point, we should err on the side of caution and ban abortion a little bit before it. Anyhow this is my opinion right now, it’ll probably be different in a few hours, so maybe I’m wrong about this ‘point at which babies would be disposed towards being slaughtered.’ In fact I’m pretty sure I’m probably wrong, this is the point in the discussion where a medical professional’s opinion would be a lot better than mine. Either way I think you get the thought process behind it. The idea for when we should consider it okay: when a baby would prefer not to be dead (obviously this is sarcasm but I hope you do understand what I’m getting at.) There’s always the argument of morals, but I think that’s a very clouded term in this case. Whether killing is okay is a moral issue. Maybe you decide it is okay to cease someone’s experience of life in extreme situations, maybe you don’t. The point is you’re ceasing someone’s experience of life. A little blob of a mother’s cells that is in no way conscious-- I hope we can agree-- is not ceasing someone’s experience of life. If you have a problem with ceasing an entire potential life, then I think you should reconsider. The sperm and eggs inside of every healthy and young individual are direct predecessors to a fully functional man or woman. Fetuses and babies are just intermediate steps between cell and coffin. If you have a problem with ending a life that could happen than you should, if you think it through to any reasonable extent, have a problem with people not putting all of their sperm into all of the eggs in the world before each sperm dies. I know that sounds exaggeratory and rude, but unless you can refute it I’m inclined to think it’s a realistic statement. By not having sex at all times we are ending potential lives. Moral is an ambiguous word, it’s kind of like a religious problem with something but without the part where it’s based on something you believe to be true. By saying you have a moral problem with it you’re saying that at first glance it puts you in discomfort and that you’re going to stick with that assessment without further thought as to its validity. I get it, that’s probably not wholly true, and probably a rude way of putting it, but I think there’re better ways of arguing your point than you have a moral problem with it. That’s like the least powerful form of validation. Also… religion. Listen, I get that you wholeheartedly believe it to be true, and only want good upon the other people of the world by acting based on your religion, but there’re a lot of other people that feel that way for different belief-sets. As a humanity we’ve got to just accept that no one thing that can’t be factually proven, or at least the closest thing circumstantially to it, should be applied to everyone as a whole. Also animals. I mean maybe this detracts from my point and points out some hypocrisy in me, but we’re animals. We kill fucking every fucking thing under the moon. But the second it applies to humans we act like it’s the most sacrilegious thing fucking ever. A fucking fetus is less important to the world, will care fucking infinitely less, has done nothing to contribute to anything, and is uglier and dumber than any living animal under the sun, and has one person that has ever interacted with it in any direct way, and we’re not okay with it going through a little discomfort. I mean I’m no vegetarian but what the hell are we thinking? This is the most self-centered way of any living population conducting itself, yet we have the gall to go and act like our ‘moral’, or ‘religious,’ or ‘logical’ fucking beliefs are at all deserved. We’ve got one perspective on any one issue: a human perspective. The perspective that the human brain comes up with. Yet we’re going to go and decide the fate of everything else with it. Ever fucking heard of science, y’know, where you get more than one viewpoint. Our science is unscientific, because we only look at things through human senses and human thought. Kill all the fucking fetuses for all I care, they’ll go through as much pain from it as any single human/animal on earth goes through in maybe a day. Whatever underlying problem you’ve got with that stance is just some evolutionarily advantageous way of looking at things; it’s self-benefitting in nature. I fucking hate talking about things like abortion. Mr. Thames, I hope you didn’t have to endure the pain of reading this whole thing, maybe then you’d’ve felt more pain than a fetus would fucking feel from its entire future life being stripped away from it: very fucking little.

Voting Rights:

Although state governments are given the right to regulate voting in the constitution, various amendments have been passed since which change that. One such amendment, the fourteenth, states that citizens of the United States shall not have the privileges of being a citizen abridged. This includes the right to vote, which is currently being threatened by extreme voting laws in lieu of the recent election. One such law, passed in Texas, makes a large number of previously

As a full-time McDonalds employee, I can vouch for the cleanliness of the McDonalds dumpster. Where some may throw drinks or ice cream into the trash, I attempt to reduce the bacteria-nurturing soupiness of the garbage by pouring out said items in drains. I also make sure to tie off bags before compacting them, and double-bag bags which leak. Although none of this applies to all trash taken to the dumpster, it does affect a portion of it. In contrast, however, I have never met a Taco Bell employee, and therefore have no good word to stand by their cleanliness. Additionally, where McDonalds deals more often with beef patties from a tray, Taco Bell specializes in selling ground beef from a meat hose. This is much messier, and likely ends up in the trash far more often. Alongside this, the consistency of ground beef is far more prone to seepage through trash, and may run through holes in the bags.