Total posts: 1,502
I mean, there have been recent moves to declassify large caches of what the government has, and make them publicly available on a site whose name I don't remember. Nothing I've seen looks like a smoking gun so far. Just some photos from the '50s and '60s that resemble old timey stereotypes about UFOs, which could've been either hoaxes or odd-shaped prototype aircraft whose existence had never otherwise been publicly acknowledged.
You might say, well there's a conspiracy going on. But how long could this realistically hold? Which president wouldn't rush to take credit for making the public aware about the existence of alien life? There's a whole lot to gain, and it's unclear to me what said president would lose. There've been leakers like Snowden and Manning, and hackers and organizations like Wikileaks. No one has come forward with this purported evidence yet.
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Thett is not generous.
Thett is not kind.
Thett is not a friend to children or to the elderly or the insane.
Thett is weak and hasn't helped anyone lift a heavy object.
Thett doesn't attend many dances and is unpopular with the other attendees.
Thett hates films and owns a machine that can't play them.
Thett is awful and can't swim gracefully or well.
Thett lost a game two weeks ago.
Thett does not value water.
A photo of Thett with a trophy was never in a newspaper, because Thett has never had a trophy.
Thett fears muggers and knaves.
Thett hates the sound of radar.
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@Casey_Risk
The Discord server. Join while you can still find it.
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Farwell, DebateArt. You were never as lively as DDO, nor as integral a focus of my waking life as DDO was in its heyday, but this site enabled a fraction of its original community to stay intact past 2019...and brought in a couple of newbies too.
Now there's effectively two alternative platforms. We'll see how long they can last. But frankly, the idea of "website A's community mass migrating to website B, then six or seven years later facilitating a mass migration to website C" has to be incredibly rare. I don't think I'll ever not be impressed with what happened here.
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I don't know why but Youtube recommended me some videos of blacks beating the shit out of white racists when they throw this unspeakable word that everyone in this forum is afraid of saying, except Wylted of course. You know, this word that starts with "NI" and ends with "ER", or "A", depending on what accent you prefer to say it.
Sounds like you've gone down a toxic rabbit hole. You can refresh your recommendations by asking YouTube not to send you content of that type.
I think nothing justifies violence.
Nothing is a strong word. There are situations where, assuming no one resorts to violence, one person's ability to hurt you is vastly greater than yours to retaliate is. Violence is the last piece of leverage a human being has in these situations. It also has a self-destructive effect and rightly so, but the fact that it's theoretically an option lessens the degree to which the advantaged oppress the disadvantaged. In a sense, it is the great equalizer.
But I would agree that the disparity between how hurtful the n-word is to a black man and "honky" or "cracker" is to a white man isn't enough to justify curbstomping someone. If anything, the black man is more powerful in these situations because he can proceed to call the white man a racist. The n-word isn't a word that, when directed at a black man, turns society at large against him, but the r-word directed at a white man does have this effect.
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The Stella Liebeck suit was in 1994. The manufacturers of any car of 21st century make which doesn't include a cupholder ought to be held fully liable for whatever damages are sustained as a consequence of this fact.
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I still have that poem that I wrote for that game of Survivor like 6 years ago lol
and it's every bit as glorious as I remember, albeit it lacks a steady rhythm.
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@Proletariat
And let’s be real: if neoliberalism actually delivered for most Americans, we wouldn’t be in this mess. What we’ve seen is a decaying middle class
I mean, the price you pay for ever and ever increasing modernity is that you need to learn skills that can keep up with this, and few Americans do. I've even heard it said that the average computer science major took low quality courses and often can't perform basic computer tasks.
That's on all of us, and honestly it's a testament to the current economic system that we still live as well as we do despite this.
skyrocketing healthcare
We have fewer doctors per capita than other OECD countries, because fewer Americans are interested in becoming doctors than their counterparts overseas. Despite that, we spend almost $2 trillion a year between Medicare and Medicaid. What does subsidizing a relatively scarce commodity do? You jack up the price of service for everyone who doesn't have the subsidy. Which creates more demand for the subsidy, and on and on the cycle goes. In 1960, before LBJ instituted his Great Society, Americans spent only 5% of total GDP on healthcare. Now that figure is between 17-18%.
Also, the total body of HHS regulations is 7.24 million words, or over 18,000 sections, in length. This doesn't count state-level regulations. The notion that we have a laissez-faire healthcare sector is demonstrably false.
and housing costs,
You can thank NIMBYs for this who will both plop down a suburb wherever they please and veto the construction of multiresidential housing.
gutted unions,
I don't see the issue with this. Workers are best suited to negotiate their own wages, not outsourcing this job to some dude who might be a poor negotiator or susceptible to bribery, and who'll extort a monthly due from you in any case. In an economy where companies are competing for a small pool of skilled workers, all you need to do is make yourself valuable and you won't need collective bargaining to get ahead. And if your labor isn't particularly valuable, companies will find someone overseas who's willing to do the job in your place.
offshored jobs
A consequence of globalization. How are you going to stop this, restrict international trade?
and growing debt burdens
Yes, because we spend 50% more a year than we collect in taxes, and when one guy tried to cut spending suddenly there were millions of Americans who unironically wanted to murder him. Perhaps overspending is the problem?
Both parties have failed to fix this, largely because they’re bought into the very economic framework Musk now wants to turn into a political brand.
If you define neoliberalism simply as the status quo, with the current capitalist-socialist hybrid economy, then sure. It screwed us over. But Musk strikes me very much so as a man who wants to do away with this, his weird flirtation with UBI aside.
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He's like a 60 or 70-something year old man, right? What could he have posted?
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Better milk those stereotypes for all they're worth lol.
But seriously, congrats.
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Five local sheikhs in Hebron, a West Bank city of almost a quarter million people, have penned a letter proposing the creation of an Emirate of Hebron. This microstate, in exchange for sovereign independence (or at least autonomy) and an arrangement where Israel allowed large numbers of its people to work in Israel proper, would recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and have a zero-tolerance policy on terrorism.
If attempted, this would be an experiment in divvying up the West Bank into several Israel-friendly and Israel-dependent governments, letting a kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace process move forward despite the PA's refusal to negotiate. This state wouldn't be a democracy, but to be fair neither is the PA at present, and when a majority of Palestinians hate Israel's guts that's probably for the best anyhow. Conversely, its domestic unpopularity could put it at risk of being toppled from within. But there's also a non-negligible chance that the economic opportunities raised by this state compared to life in currently PA-controlled areas would ultimately outweigh local Jew-hatred.
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@Savant
I wouldn't underestimate the power of a grand idea. A lot of Republicans are fed up with being the Trump party, and probably some moderate Democrats are fed up with their own party but tolerate it because Trump's the only plausible alternative they can see. Your average person who's old enough to remember (re: was old enough at the time to be paying attention to) the golden age of moderate politics that was the 1990s, I suspect, wants to go back to that time.
If the fed up people on both sides can be convinced that there's an actually viable third party rising to prominence, it could inspire the kind of mass defection not seen since Ross Perot, especially since Trump's finally out of the picture for good in 2028 so the perceived stakes of a third party vote would be lower for people on both sides. All Musk needs to do is broadcast this idea in great enough quantity, over a long enough stretch of time, that people see it everywhere and come to believe it's legit and not astroturfed. And he has enough money that there's a greater than zero percent chance of pulling it off.
Also, while people don't like "dark money" in politics (re: the judgeship or whatever local race Musk quietly funded), which denotes secretive manipulation, I think that if Musk is upfront and vocal about his involvement in this movement then in theory it'd be no more of an obstacle than Trump being a billionaire in 2016.
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@FLRW
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Musk is founding a new political party, whose purpose is to champion neoliberalism (balanced budget, free trade, market deregulation, letting in skilled immigrants, etc). While he obviously can't run as its nominee in a presidential election, he could provide a lot of financial support to the campaign of whoever that person ends up being. But there are three lingering issues: first, that no third party has the electoral credibility/strong brand of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Second, the potential for widespread distrust of Musk or any candidates backed by him, seeing how he ticks the boxes of both foreigner and world's richest man. Third, the relative unpopularity of neoliberalism in today's America.
Thoughts?
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#2.
But whichever one ultimately wins, it must be somewhere between #1 and #6. I can't stress this enough.
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#1 is the only serious option. The last thing we need is a Minecraft-esque logo.
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Just a point of clarification about Discord:
In the past I've tried searching for my username and found a log of all the comments I made in various servers. If I were to join this server with my regular Discord account, would other users be able to do the same thing? Would I need to create a second account if I were concerned about maintaining privacy?
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@fauxlaw
will see the same accomplishment with far more evidence than a tired CBO theory, which has been thrice proven wrong. Broken record against gold records. Get it, yet?
I recently got an advertisement on my work email (don't remember who these people were), claiming to have proof that CBO was biased and had been blatantly wrong before. I wish I'd clicked on that to see if they had a decent argument. By now it's buried deep enough that I have no interest in trying to retrieve it.
So do you have any helpful citations that would back up what you're saying?
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Is this both a repository for old DART data and a new hangout site? Or just the former?
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@AdaptableRatman
Imagine someone who is young and naivd taking the debate to troll or just experiment.Now if they ever go to Germany or sonewhere, they can be deported and banned. Furthermore, idk how clear it is to all yoyng teens that this is not a legally tenable stance to even jokingly defend.
And? What of it?
I've critiqued China and the Uyghur genocide enough that it's questionable what'd happen to me if I ever tried to visit the country. I've been even more virulent on the subject of Russia. I've called out Armenian genocide denialism by Turks, so I guess that takes Turkey off the menu too.
Should any of these topics therefore be off-limits on DART? Just because an authoritarian regime halfway across the world has banned it? Why are foreign governments entitled to a veto over US cyberspace?
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@Barney
The moderation team includes a survivor of a slavery network run by Neo-Nazi and Anti-Abortion extremists, which gives us an advantage in identifying the genuine article
What?
Edit: The Twelve Tribes cult, maybe?
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Proposition 1
Part 1: Yes
Part 2: Savant
Proposition 2
Yes
Proposition 3
No
Proposition 4
Polls, Forum Signatures
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@David
Advocacy in favor of terrorism and/or violent extremism, especially as related to hate groups as generally defined by the SPLC, is likewise prohibited.
For clarification purposes:
1. Should this clause be taken to mean "hate group as the general term is defined by the SPLC", or "organizations that the SPLC considers hate groups", which includes mainstream conservative Christian organizations (e.g. the American Family Association or the Alliance Defending Freedom)?
2. If the former, then what is the Southern Poverty Law Center's definition of a hate group?
Honestly it's troubling to see any part of this site's Code of Conduct tied to an organization that blatantly takes sides (and only one side) in the modern US culture war. They shouldn't be regarded as neutral experts because they aren't.
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I thought Sir.Lancelot was already a mod?
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This moral obligation absolutely does exist, and if God exists we'll more likely than not be punished harshly one day for all of the surplus that we consume rather than giving to the needy.
The only thing I'd add is that we must be free to make that choice in this world, even if it damns us in the next.
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@AdaptableRatman
As harsh as this may sound, that's a problem with the censorship-happy British government, not with this predominantly American site. Use a VPN and a new handle if you're that concerned.
I promise I won't report you to your country's crumpet-eating gestapo lol
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Honestly holocaust denial by itself is shitty and disrespectful to the memories of those who were murdered but doesn't amount to advocating for another holocaust, nor does denial that it happened amount to claiming that the victims warranted being killed (incitement). I don't think espousing the viewpoint warrants an auto-ban unless it's accompanied by something worse.
With an ongoing genocide (assuming that there obviously is one), I could see genocide denial as being a roundabout way of arguing that no action should be taken to stop the genocide, which is a roundabout way of arguing in favor of the genocide. But the Holocaust ended 80 years ago. The regime that orchestrated it doesn't exist anymore. The people who orchestrated it are overwhelmingly dead now. There's no credible short-term risk of it happening again at the hands of a Western government at least.
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Has anyone preserved the posts he was banned for making so we can read them and make up our own minds?
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The loaded partisan language of the OP aside, I'll give this a fair shot.
-Americans no longer agree even on basic facts, because Americans no longer agree on the credibility of claimed experts who claim to lay out basic facts. There have emerged two separate major "canons of fact" in the US, whose respective intelligentsia report their own news and have compiled their own tellings and timelines of recent history. According to one, Trump is guilty of tens of thousands of felony crimes, raped a child, orchestrated a plot to murder VP Pence on J6, is weeks/months away from consolidating dictatorial power like what Hitler did in 1933, and plans the mass murder of LGBT and brown people as soon as this happens. According to the other, none of that is true, as the sources of these claims aren't considered to be credible. Regarding Trump, the only basic facts both can agree on are: (1).unambiguous matters of public record; (2). things that Trump or the Trump Administration has unambiguously admitted to; or (3). verbatim televised/recorded/social media statements by Trump not plainly taken out of context. The absolutely overwhelming majority of allegations of criminal behavior by Trump don't fall into any of these three camps, and what's left may or may not exceed the criminality or misconduct of other recent presidents, who haven't been anywhere as closely scrutinized as Trump.
-In 2016 a plurality of Republican voters wanted a more hard-right presidency than had been offered in recent years, and their unity behind one candidate versus the disunity of the rest of the GOP which backed multiple candidates let him edge out a primary win despite carrying only about 45% of the Republican vote. After this, the rest of the party had the choice of either backing Trump or giving Democrats a third consecutive presidential term.
-His first term was actually rather close to a normal Republican presidency in terms of the policies it implemented, and obviously Republicans would consider a normal Republican presidency to be a positive rather than negative thing, save for those who think normal Republican presidents don't go far enough right. It was a safe bet, even if a wrong one in hindsight, that a second Trump term would also be mostly normal.
-The years after 2020 were unprecedented at least in recent decades. There had always been a great deal of reluctance to criminally prosecute ex-presidents (and the existence of Bill Clinton proves this wasn't because none of them had done anything wrong), but Trump was facing trials left and right by courts across the nation. Some of it was for January 6 or whatnot, sure, but a lot of it wasn't. Much of it was pushed by prosecutors who, before they had the facts, staked their careers on public pledges to convict Trump of crimes they were already certain he was guilty of. The whole spectacle was shocking to a lot of undecided voters. While for some people it had the desired effect of making Trump seem damningly corrupt, for others it had the effect of making the political system that'd been playing so dirty to bury Trump seem corrupt instead of him, and Trump was elevated to a martyr figure, an impression that the whole nearly-successful plot to murder him when he was surrounded by Secret Service agents under President Biden's employ didn't exactly hurt.
-There was also a post-Covid economic slump that harmed incumbents around the world in elections held during this rough time period. While Trump was in charge during the initial crash, more of the recovery happened during his last 8-9 months in office than in the following several years under Biden. People were expecting that, 3 years after the worst of Covid, things would go back to how they were before, and when this didn't happen it served to rehabilitate Trump.
-For better or worse, Trump's name had become tied to the GOP brand. If he was remembered to history as a failed president (since he had the misfortune of his presidency coinciding with a once in a century pandemic), that would harm the GOP for years going forward. The only short-term solution was to double down and support him for a second term that'd let the Trump White House be remembered better, since a smaller chunk of its length would then consist of terrible years. Granted, this begs the question of how he got successfully re-elected if such an effect was bound to happen.
-VP Harris was not a well known or particularly well liked public figure before phoning in for Biden at the last second. She had a fraction of his name recognition and decades of statesmanly experience. Her public image was carefully crafted, inauthentic, and prone to fluctuate wildly based on who she was talking to. During her brief stint in Congress before 2020, she'd been among the least productive of her Senate colleagues in terms of legislation passed. Biden picked her after intense pressure within the party to pick a black woman as his running mate, which made her extremely vulnerable to charges of not being the most qualified person for the job. During her debate with Trump she put on a very theatrical performance filled with the sort of phony outrage and platitudinal speech stereotypical of "strong female lead" characters in film, which didn't lend itself to coming across as a sincere person.
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@AdaptableRatman
Perhaps they like for these qualities to subtly manifest themselves in a man who nonetheless respects her as his equal and knows how to show humility, but they don't want a man who, at best, loudly announces he is these things without a hint of self-awareness, or at worst treats the first Zoom call like a round of phone sex and waxes poetic about all the degrading things he'd make her do that he saw in a porn video.
Women who declare their intent to be the submissive partner tend to attract men who meet the above description. I would make a possible exception for if they're dating in a tight-knit Christian circle, but on Tinder? Yeah no.
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@thett3
"Antivaxxer" and "homeschooler" aren't on the same level lmao.
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@thett3
Paradoxically the guys most eager to take women like this up on their offers are the ones least likely to meet the expectations set for a husband in return.
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@badger
Ah of course. You are struggling to pay your rent. Of course the answer is to instead buy 10 houses and rent them out.
Not what I said. If you want an extra source of income, you could pay a relatively small amount of money (say, $500) that the average person has the disposable income to part with or at least would if they chose not to spend it on other stuff, and get together with a large number of other people to jointly finance an apartment. Let say that, per this source:
It would take roughly 3,000 people to chip in to construct 6,800 square feet on a single story, a prospect that would be easily manageable over some kind of widely used mobile app. This would get you roughly 10 one-bedroom apartments, which on national average goes for about $1,700 a month, or $204,000 a year, meaning the investment would pay itself off in 7 and a half years. While obviously there are other expenses that go with this, we're still talking a decision that makes financial sense over the course of decades, and one that would make the world a better place by increasing the supply of housing.
You are old and infirmed and can't afford to pay the costs of the nursing home, well, build your own nursing home! How obvious!
Not one person, but everyone in the nursing home together. Shop around for the cheapest space big enough to accommodate everyone, or get a quote from various contractors on what it'd cost to build one on a plot of land from affordable materials. Again, this kind of stuff is doable in large groups even if a lone individual couldn't afford it.
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@badger
A good economic system must do two things, create AND distribute wealth. Communism failed the first. Central planning was too cumbersome and not transparent. Capitalism is failing the second and fast. How this isn't beyond obvious I don't know. Drastic correction is needed.
Capitalism does no such thing. It's people who create wealth, and capitalism only provides stable rules and then lets people do their thing. The distinction is an important one, because it allows for a phenomenon called inertia.
Inertia happens when people aren't motivated or well organized enough to behave in the most economically rational fashion. High rent should literally solve the problem of high rent, because people looking to get in on the action build new houses to rent out, which would increase the housing supply. You might counter, "not everyone has the cash just lying around to build apartments", to which I would counter: why don't a large number of people pool their resources to get this built and each shareholder gets a chunk of the rent profits going forward in a way that's proportionate to their contribution? This is rational, but also not a lot of it happening.
Why don't old people respond to shrinking social security checks by moving in together and splitting the cost of rent? Why don't they come together and open their own communally run nursing homes (and hire their own staff) instead of moving into overpriced facilities? If doctors make so much money (and currently get generous scholarships from the state), why aren't more Americans going to medical school, thus alleviating healthcare personnel shortages? Why don't poor people use their surplus time and learning what they need to learn to get better jobs (there's a lot of free resources out there to get them started, and in any case even most poor people do have some disposable income)?
The answer is that too few people are motivated to do this stuff. Do you how billionaires made their billions? By organizing the masses in a highly efficient way. Billionaires wouldn't exist if people got off their asses and organized themselves into workers' cooperatives, which are perfectly legal under capitalism provided that nobody's forced at gunpoint to join one. Do workers' cooperatives suffer from issues that more hierarchical businesses don't? Hire a lawyer and draft the best corporate bylaws you can. But nobody wants to do this. Instead, they subordinate themselves to a leader who manages the whole affair and takes home the lion's share of the earnings.
Does regulation solve this stuff? No, you just make people even less motivated to do stuff because there's more hurdles to jump through for the most basic shit. Would a centrally planned economy? No, because the motivated few would be running everything just like they are now.
There is no answer but to cultivate a more motivated and better organized citizenry. This entails building a new national culture from the ground up.
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#justiceforlashwnda
#stoptheerasureofqueerblackwomynsvoices
#stop45fascistpolicestate
#thisisathreattoourdemocracy
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If two dudes in prison are simultaneously trying to rape each other, are they having consensual sex?
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@FLRW
Hmmm, I wonder why Eisenhower had a top tax rate of 91 percent. OMG, he didn't want to bankrupt the USA like Trump does?
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@Savant
Not sure how to answer this. I'm pretty sure it was the fault of the rich until capitalism lifted the economy out of a zero-sum game based on rent extraction.
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@Savant
People can already donate to the government and they don't take it as a moral indictment of themselves if they don't. Why do you think they would say anything other than to tax the rich? That's what they say now, I don't see why it would change just because you lowered taxes for everyone.
Because right now people have the luxury of just not thinking about how programs are funded, since the funding is assured anyhow. The national debt doesn't feel like a "real" problem to most people, or at least it doesn't register as an immediate one.
But if nothing at all happens without a donation, that puts the ball in their court. Sure, they could insist until their face was blue that the rich should be made to fund X or Y, but if the fact is that they aren't, and won't at least until after the next election cycle, and time is of the essence to keep X or Y program funded, then the average person will be forced to take a good look in the mirror and confront their own personal willingness (or lack thereof) to sacrifice for a stranger's sake, and the absurdity of demanding a duty from another that one does themselves shirk. Ideally, there will be a national conversation over the question of what degree of government they're willing to pay for.
But lofty moral lessons aside, this would ensure the survival of the nation. The budget would be balanced, since spending beyond what Americans were cumulatively willing to pay for would simply not happen instead of being passively added to the debt. That could prove disastrous for some people, especially in the short term, but it's better than for an irrecoverable disaster to befall the entire nation and ruin it.
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Don't want to get fired because some petty lowlife tracks down my employer. Not saying you'd do that, but once the information's out there it's out there.
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