From what I can tell, it’s based off the state the parent lives in.

Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or doesn’t happen. Another poster already linked the Wikipedia article, but they’re called Filial Responsibility Laws. The states that have them are:

Alaska Arkansas California Connecticut Delaware Georgia Indiana Kentucky Louisiana Massachusetts Mississippi Nevada New Jersey North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oregon Pennsylvania Puerto Rico Rhode Island South Dakota Tennessee Utah Vermont Virginia West Virginia

Iowa used to but they got rid off them in 2015.

Nope, USA does it too.

And the hell of it is, the government can force you to. They have full authority to garnish your wages and give it to your parents, even if you don’t want to support them.

Imagine being told every minute of every day that you don’t matter. That as a woman, your only purpose is to glorify men, support men, breed more men. That it’s the greatest and highest calling of women to surrender your life and your choices to men.

That women are stupid and sinners because of Eve’s actions, and will be forever. So you can never be allowed any kind of authority, because like Eve you’ll just do something foolish or abuse it.

Now imagine everyone and everything around you shows and supports this worldview. All the time.

That’s where it comes from. When something is all you’ve ever known, then it’s normal. And, even if you consciously don’t believe it, it still worms its way inside of you.

It’s definitely more of a ‘The Rapture is coming! The Rapture is coming!’ Type of nonsense.

I mean, they’re kinda right though? Even Bernie thinks so.

Oh, they still have all four branches. It’s just Oregon got a bit more Blue.

To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

-Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It’s a lot easier to blame things than to fix them.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

-C. S. Lewis

If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.

-Robert G. Ingersoll

Yes, but those are the ones that get paid more. So you get rid of a big financial drain, and then you can hire cheaper people and dump more work onto them.

It works great, unfortunately.

Remember, the C-Suites of today don’t give two fucks about the company they’re ‘running’. They want line to go up so their pay goes up, and so they can use line-go-up to golden parachute to the next company where they repeat the process.

The reason for the ban is still stupid though.

It’s based on a quote from Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man.

No-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine they made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.

Grief is love.

And since she was loved, she had a good life.

So don’t just weep that she’s gone, but also remember to smile for all the good times you had together.

Redshirts by John Scalzi. A book about people who realize they’re characters in a badly-written TV show. Near the end, though, the main character starts to realize he’s the main character in a book about people who are characters in a TV show. Very surreal.