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@ADreamOfLiberty
Dude, I get you're into goats or whatever, but are you really defending this?
Okay, fine.
It's necessary for the sake of the public good, even if not true in 100% of cases, to uphold the principle that minors cannot give consent to have sex with adults. Were that not so, there'd be a lot of nasty consequences.
Molesters could pressure their victims into saying "Yes, it was consensual" and get off the hook. Young children could be physically harmed, and sometimes die from, by being acted upon by an aggressive adult man. Kids are impressionable and just about every teen girl would be prey to a charming adult man who had no interest in a committed relationship. At best, the later realization that they'd been used and discarded would prove a negative formative experience, and they'd struggle with low self-esteem or trust issues for the rest of their lives. At worst, there'd be a spike in teen pregnancies and STDs, assuming nobody got raped. Where the relationships did have some long duration, there would tend to be a more extreme power imbalance than in most relationships between teen boys and teen girls. The adults would have enough sway to be very controlling, and could amount to psychological abuse of the younger partner.
When people are having hookups left and right, many come to believe they're entitled to sex, and become aggressive when that isn't happening. Teens, especially teen girls, would experience a huge spike in uncomfortable encounters with potentially dangerous adults who harass them and become angry when ignored. Teen boys would have to compete with adult men to have relationships with their female peers, and 90% would not be up to the challenge, producing a spike in frustration, loneliness, and resentment among this age group. This would of course be bad for them, and it'd cause them to act out maliciously against teen girls.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Fun to joke around, but in all seriousness if Trump was elected while incarcerated, and they didn't do some bullshit about "we're suspending his sentence until after he serves his term" or something then he could and should order the US military to quell the insurrection which has abducted the commander in chief.
In all seriousness, the best thing Trump could do at this point is pick a likable VP before he's sentenced, give that guy his ringing endorsement, and then humbly accept his fate (whether deserved or not) while the RNC nominates said person in Trump's place. If he really cares about the people whose voices he's championed the past 9 years then he should take one for the team and step aside.
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@Best.Korea
Trump is a christian.
No he isn't. He might, at best, have the vaguest suspicion that God exists, and there's no convincing proof of this either.
Christians do tend to have much more delusions and mental illnesses than the atheists.
Have you never been on Reddit before?
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@TheUnderdog
If the issue is children’s consent, then why would the age of the adult matter?
The adult has transgressed against our civilized norms. If there were no consequences for that, society would quickly devolve into a hellhole.
The question is of mitigating circumstances. A 19 year old has less sense that dating a 17 year old is wrong than a 29 year old would. The 19 year old's brain is less developed, his/her personality less mature, and rationally it seems to him that the 17 year old is his peer (especially, for example, if he hasn't graduated high school yet and they're classmates). That a person would date a 17 year old under these conditions is more understandable, thus less warranting of punishment, than for an older person to do the same.
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@Dr.Franklin
You don't know French people
Agreed lol. The French gave harbor to Roman Polanski, so I doubt they take issue with that kind of thing.
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18 is fine, but the law should permit nuance.
A 19 year old dating a 17 year old shouldn't land either of them in legal trouble, and the consequences for a 20 year old dating a 17 year old shouldn't be that overly harsh (or at least not for a first offence). The older the adult, and the younger the minor, the more strict enforcement ought to be. Most people, I think, would call this a common sense approach.
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@Double_R
Yes he did, and you can defer to that all you want as a reason to vote for him, but it is not an argument for why anyone who isn’t already part of the Republican base to vote for him.
Fair enough.
Why does Trump get a pass for everything that happened as a result of Covid, but Biden who was tasked with cleaning up its mess does not? Why does Trump’s term economically not include December 2020 but Biden is responsible for what happens in January 2021?
I could ask you the same. Why, in your world, did Trump have zilch to do with the good economy he presided over pre-Covid but also the sole culprit at whose feet lies all of the blame for the global pandemic and subsequent downturn in 2020? And again, why does he get zero credit for the economy going from Mad Max-style hellscape to April 2014 in nine months?
Why is Biden a miracle worker for unemployment dropping 3 points in 2 years, and then the slow upward trend we've seen post-January 2023 gets ignored?
And seriously, why do you think that was?
Because he was a Republican, whose party has a historical track record for being very hawkish. But I take it that's not how you would answer, so let me ask you a question.
Suppose you're Putin. You know that, for a limited window of time, you have a guy in the White House who is favorable to you and might look the other way as you invade Ukraine. He's unlikely to get a second term, since he just barely squeaked out a win the first time. What conceivable reason would you have for not taking advantage while you could? Why wait until he left office to invade Ukraine?
I think we both know the answer to this question.
Biden supporters brag about it because it’s all we’ve heard sent for the past 7 years...The double standard is absurd so democrats got tired of it.
In late 2019, I was sitting in my car one evening, about to get out and run some laps in my local park.
I was on my phone, browsing the web, when I came across an article from a liberal outlet (I don't remember which). The gist of the article was this:
"Sure, technically the economy is doing well right now under Trump, but why does it feel like the economy sucks?"
If the economy isn't perfect under Republican leadership, liberal journalists will crow about it. And if it nearly is, they'll opine that it's faring poorly in some vague spiritual sense. Which is to say, this is a two-way street. We are all partisan hacks, whether we want to admit it or not, and none of us want to give credit for the other guy's achievements. Republicans aren't more guilty of this than Democrats.
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@Sidewalker
What "gross failure"? We were on par with other Western countries in per capita terms. Plus, the US has a federated government (50 powerful states, each of which responded to the pandemic on their own terms) and a very strong cultural reluctance to compromise on individual liberty.
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@Sidewalker
The events of Wuhan could've just as easily happened in 2016 or 2024. That's just how the ball bounces, I guess.
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@Sidewalker
You can, there's plenty to brag about, there's most impeachments (2), most felony convictions (34), most felony indictments (88), most lies as President (30,573 over 4 years), most wives cheated on (3), and the list of broken records goes on and on.
Don't forget affordable mortgage interest rates and gasoline even during the height of a global pandemic, fastest economic recovery in American history, first US President since Carter not to start any new wars, first time the US achieved energy independence (in 2019) since 1957, first time since 2011 (in 2020) that the US was able to send astronauts to the ISS without relying on Russia, a doubling in the number of Arab countries which diplomatically recognized Israel, and a strengthening of US defense cooperation with Taiwan.
But sure, focus on his divorces and Stormy Daniels. These are the issues that really matter to Americans living paycheck to paycheck.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Had unemployment stayed at 3.4 then maybe. But it didn't. Trump had a fair excuse why it didn't stay at 3.5, whereas Biden doesn't for his 3.4.
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The reason we know nothing of these jurors is because the judge went to great lengths to protect their identities.
Yes, I know how jury trials work.
There’s nothing to glean from that, so all we do have is the credibility of the process itself which has been revered around the world for centuries.
The process as it's worked for centuries is no reliable indicator for this case. Never has there been so strong a unanimous motive from so many diverse actors to make sure the defendant gets convicted.
The burden to positively prove a conspiracy theory only exists when there's no environment that strongly incentivizes said conspiracies. We currently live in such an environment. The DA staked his entire public reputation, and possible reelection chances, on Trump going to jail. Liberals in general, due to years of oligarch conditioning, tend to feel incredible distress at the thought of Trump being President again and would make moral compromises they wouldn't otherwise make in the pursuit of "defending" themselves and the country against him. This applies to the jurors, the judge, and countless other people who had any degree of influence over the trial.
(And in hindsight yes, there is apparently some evidence that would throw the verdict into question. Like the judge giving jury instructions which downplayed Trump's right to the presumption that he had no criminal motive [necessary for his conviction IIRC] until proven that he did. I don't remember the exact details; I read an article by the National Review yesterday explaining this, but I've maxed out my 5 free articles so I can't read it again today. Perhaps I'll try again tomorrow.)
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@Double_R
It is telling to me that Trump defenders always talk about the circumstances during the time Trump was president instead of talking about anything Trump actually did.
I'll admit it. Trump was a fairly weak President. He tried to build a wall and got like a quarter of it done at the most. He put a dent in the number of successful illegal crossings at the border, but he didn't deport those already here in anywhere remotely close to sufficient numbers. And of course, he joined his recent predecessors in overseeing a huge spike in the national debt.
Nonetheless, he was a Republican president who made the executive branch's policies lean right instead of left. And he made judicial appointments of judges who leaned right instead of left. And until Covid, which was outside of everyone's control and caught the whole Western world unprepared, he maintained stability in our economy and foreign policy at a time when foreign policy challenges were becoming more difficult.
This was, basically, the job he was hired to do, and he did it. Putin didn't do diddly-squat when Trump was in office. Neither did China, Iran, etc.
Setting aside that the job numbers are factually better under Biden,
If you discount Covid, no they are not. Unemployment is 3.9, which is higher than under Trump's 3.5 in February 2020, and it probably would've been lower than 3.5 come Jan. 2021 if not for Covid. Were Trump's economy to take a downturn in the absence of Covid or anything similar then sure, you'd have a point to stand on. But that's not the case.
As for Biden, it's not just a matter of time; like I told IWRA, Biden actually did achieve 3.4 at the beginning of last year...and then it started going up again. By the time he leaves office unemployment could plausibly stand where it did when Trump took office 7+ years ago. A figure Trump himself would've hit had his term stretched on another 9 months, simply Biden simply inherited his recovery.
this bragging about Trump’s job numbers is just taking credit for things he had nothing to do with
I mean, Biden supporters routinely brag about his numbers. Why can't we do the same?
Also, that's not true. Perhaps Trump inherited a good economy from Obama and simply didn't screw it up. But he also oversaw the fastest economic recovery in US history.
What were the Covid lockdowns? You had like tens of millions of American worker from various industries just sitting home not working, for months at a time. That should've absolutely cratered the economy. Indeed, unemployment was a whopping 14.8 percent in April 2020. By the time he left office 9 months later, it was 6.4 percent.
I can't stress this enough. The worst unemployment got during the Great Recession was 10.0 percent, and it took Obama until April 2014 to get it at or below 6.4. Five years and three months, or sixty-three months total. Were he a one-term president he would've left unemployment 0.2 points higher than he found it. Lucky for him he got two terms.
Compared to 9 months for Trump. Trump did, or at least oversaw, what Obama's most famous for, in 1/7th of the time. Starting from a rock bottom point that was 48% deeper.
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@Sidewalker
You think Trump's the manager of WinRed?
And it wasn't just the website; there was a spike in Google searches for "Donald Trump donation".
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Dude. My source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Do you see February 2020? That's Trump's lowest figure, 3.5. Biden's lowest was 3.4, in January 2023. Since then it's been on a slow climb. Literally if unemployment goes up 0.1 points in May (the numbers will be announced sometime next month), Biden's touted "longest consecutive streak below 4 percent" will come to an end. From there, it'll have 5 more months to possibly climb further before Election Day.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Three years after Covid let up, sure. But it's still 0.4 points higher than Trump's pre-Covid lowest figure. And it's starting to climb up again; if this trend continues, it'll be well above 4 percent by election day. By inauguration day it may credibly be higher than when Trump first took office in Jan. 2017.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
What are the MAGA MORONS going to say now?
What we've always said.
What will be their excuse for sticking with this convicted felon?
We need no "excuse". Trump has done nothing wrong, and the vain pontificating of this kangaroo court does nothing to change that.
Trump has said he:
“Is a very innocent man”
"Very" is a strange qualifier to add, but true in any case.
Is the least racist person you could ever meet
A hyperbolic statement for sure. Trump was born in 1946, and there was bigotry up north just like down south. We should expect that he inherited some degree of prejudice, and it's no crime to have been born into a specific time or place. Nonetheless, he was president for all Americans. Blacks, Latinos, women, etc. enjoyed record low unemployment prior to the worldwide Covid pandemic.
loves women more than anyone
Hyperbole. And again, look at the unemployment numbers. He was a president for everyone.
had a bone spur that disqualified him from the draft
He was one of many presidents/presidential candidates to dodge the draft, including several Democrats.
No American who hasn't served in the military has a right to judge him, and it's nonsensical for somebody who has served to judge him if they would respect the right of any other person beside Trump not to serve. Throwing your life on the line for your country is an honorable choice, but a choice nonetheless, and no law can make it otherwise.
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Now I'm starting to feel like I've had this entire conversation before. Not an unfamiliar feeling, but still.
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That is why we have a jury selection process to weed out those people.
That's impossible when your average person consumes media which encourages them to think this way.
Besides, that argument cuts both ways. Just as there are people who would disregard any rational argument to convict him, there are those who would do the same to acquit him.
I'll admit that this is true.
So even if there was not a fair juror on the bench, the statistical odds were still in Trump’s favor.
I doubt this. Biden won NYC with 76% of the vote in 2020, compared to 79% for Hillary Clinton in 2016. This would suggest Trump could get 3 favorable (starting out with some degree of pro-Trump bias) jurors if selected at random, assuming that he simply didn't, as small samples deviate from strict statistical likelihoods more readily.
However, this doesn't tell the whole story. Juries strive for diversity. Not political diversity, but diversity of physical characteristics and perhaps religion. This matters; almost 90% of black voters, 65% of Latino voters, 61% of "Asian" voters, and almost 60% of female voters voted for Biden in 2020. As did 69% of "other" religious affiliation and 65% of "no religious affiliation" voters. If, on the jury, diversity required white jurors, they could be white women. Or if diversity required male jurors, they could be black men. And this is assuming there was no push for, say, queer jurors in Trump's trial.
In any case it's easy to see how diversity targets can overpower the result you'd get from sheer random sampling. And of course, while Trump's attorneys could object to a juror with anti-Trump social media posts, they wouldn't dare object to a jury being too diverse. The optics would be unacceptable, even though someone with the most rudimentary knowledge of statistics could tell you this is in fact relevant to establishing the biases of the final jury tasked with conducting an inescapably political trial of an inescapably political figure.
Finally, if you had, say, one or two pro-Trump jurors but they weren't confident about their decision, they could be pressured by the remaining 10 or 11 to not go against the group and throw a wrench in the trial.
But seriously, you really need to set that aside. You focus on a jury whom you know absolutely nothing about because you have no argument defending his conduct.
Fair, I suppose. Typing in "Trump jury" gave me nothing on who those people are. But that lack of info empowers me to question its reliability just as much as it does you to assume its reliability. Any speculation is fair speculation in a zero-information game, especially when there were such incredibly powerful incentives to fix the trial to whatever extent possible.
the fault here lies on anyone that’s not Trump it would be his attorneys. They gave the jury absolutely nothing to work with.
This article suggests you may be right.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Meaningful steps have been taken to combat racial biases on modern juries. For example, black people serve as jurors and any one of them can veto an obviously unjust conviction driven by racial animosity and prejudice. Furthermore your average black man is nowhere remotely near as hated as Donald Trump.
Few steps were taken to ensure the jury which tried Trump would be balanced, which is the closest we can get to unbiased.
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@Double_R
That’s not how juries work in a rule of law system. The most fundamental principal is that politics has no place in a courtroom, so the last thing they would ever or should ever do is consider which counties are “red” vs “blue”.
The normal rules are inadequate when trying Trump, if you have any interest in a fair trial.
To call him an extremely polarizing figure would be underselling it; people who wouldn't vote for him often have such viscerally negative feelings about the man that they'll readily believe any story accusing him of misconduct. Political biases, such as the correlation between geography and political biases, must be taken into account. Otherwise you'll wind up with a miscarriage of justice.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
The all-white juries of the 1930s, when black youths were arrested and convicted on dubious charges of raping white women, were certainly biased. As was the all-liberal jury that tried the most hated Republican alive today.
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@Double_R
I'll ask you a hypothetical.
Suppose Biden was from Alabama. He spent his life in Alabama, aside from when he was working in Washington. He served in the state legislature for many years before he went to Washington (the closest substitute I can manage here for doing business in New York). He serves one or two full terms, then he leaves office.
A staunchly Republican DA is elected in the city where Biden spent his life. This man pledges to press charges against Biden for his supposed "corruption". Biden's long life is scrutinized unlike any American who ever was, and after a few years of searching a few things come up for which there's wiggle room to pursue civil or criminal proceedings.
They go to redneck alley and pick a bunch of jurors. Perhaps Biden's attorneys screen them for social media posts. In which case, those who aren't outright posting "I love Trump" or "Let's go Brandon" on Facebook pass the test and are empowered to decide the former President's fate. Of course, most of these people are consumers of whatever the latest narrative by Fox. Fox has been unfriendly to Biden for years, and the average person fed a steady diet of this content has biases, explicit or implicit, against Biden. If a case has been levied against him, they assume the case is rock-solid.
The Republican district attorney makes an impressive-sounding presentation that lays out whatever case Republicans have compiled against Biden. This case may or may not be airtight. Your average person can't really tell. Where there's doubt, they err on the side of trusting the case.
Finally, after some deliberating, they find Biden guilty on all charges. But let's say Biden gets lucky and they don't. No matter; the prosecutors will find something else on their bucket list and repeat the cycle all over again, until eventually they get a jury that throws the book at the man.
Does this hypothetical sound like justice to you? Would you object?
To be clear, there's one correct answer here. I wouldn't believe you if you said you'd humbly accept the outcome and not question it.
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@Double_R
The jurors were selected with the veto power of Trump’s attorneys after having the opportunity to have them questioned and comb through their social media posts.
Even assuming Trump's attorney's did any such thing, was it not a group of twelve NYC denizens? Wouldn't a fair trial have 6 jurors from blue-leaning parts of the state, and 6 from red-leaning parts of the state?
Trump is now a convicted felon
A word that has no credibility when used in this context.
because of his own actions and disregard for the law
Again, says who? Twelve Biden voters?
There is absolutely zero evidence that Biden had anything to do with the charges
No, but he is de facto head of the party whose members led the prosecution against Trump. And he stands to directly benefit from the outcome, either by having his opponent thrown out of the race or his reputation unduly muddied to the point where winning is improbable.
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If Trump gets reelected, after the way he was treated, he has every moral right to burn the fcking world down. Whatever happens in Ukraine will happen. Same wherever else.
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The verdict was worth less than used toilet paper.
New York is a solid blue state. NYC is the bluest part of said state. Alvin Bragg, the New York DA, ran on a pledge of nabbing Trump. Every juror was predisposed to assume Trump's guilt; they may or may not have been actively selected to produce this outcome, given the geographic bias was probably enough on its own. Everyone who isn't a partisan hack knew from the start that there would be a miscarriage of justice today, or at least that the outcome was going to be questionable given the circumstances.
I don't know if the election will be allowed to continue after this. If Trump is literally imprisoned, then Biden will officially be a Putin-style autocrat, with political opponents being jailed akin to Navalny. The fact that stooges of the party who didn't take direct orders from him carried out the crime changes nothing.
And if the election does continue, all we can do is cast our vote on election day to save our 250 year old republic from this rising tide of leftist authoritarianism. Who knows if it'll be enough.
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@zedvictor4
Elections don't have to be a one-day, "show up at the polls at the same time" affair. That's the conventional way of doing it, but there are alternatives. They could do a mail-in vote. Or an in-person election spread out across several weeks. Or heck, do it over a phone app, provided there's some sort of verification in place to prevent fraud or citizens in occupied territories voting at gunpoint.
Point is, it's the job of the Ukrainian government to figure out something and then arrange for it to happen, on time or nearly on time. You don't just give up on elections because they're hard.
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Given my track record for supporting Ukraine, this post may come as a surprise. However, this needs to be said.
On May the 20th, President Zelensky's term expired. He did not stand for reelection. Nor did anybody else run in an election to replace him. His term simply...expired, and he is still the President of Ukraine.
In effect, he is currently a dictator who rules with the tacit consent of the people. The rationale of "We can't hold an election during a war" is silly. If it's about people in occupied territories being unable to vote, that didn't stop the country between 2014-2022, when Crimea and the Donbass were under Russian rule. If it's about the practical difficulties of people heading to the ballots while bombs are being dropped on their heads, some kind of a mail-in election could be arranged. Granted, this would be an imperfect election but it's certainly better than nothing. For all intents and purposes Ukraine is declining to hold an election because they don't feel like it.
And this is barely mentioned at all. Zelensky's Wikipedia article makes no mention of his term having expired. It acts as though he's still the fully legitimate President of Ukraine when this claim is questionable at best. The article on the Presidency of Ukraine briefly mentions that elections have been suspended during the war, but that's it. The article still assumes Zelensky is the fully legitimate president.
Here's the issue at hand: the Western press, just because it's sympathetic to Ukraine, is collectively presenting the dictator of Ukraine as its elected head of state no different from, say, the British PM or the President of France.
I have nothing against Zelensky, and hopefully he will resume elections after the war ends. It just strikes me as gross how easily they set aside reporting the most basic facts when it suits their purposes. We're not talking about the state-run media of Russia or China, or North Korea. This is the free American press, yet it reads exactly like the mouthpiece of the Biden Administration.
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I actually read two chapters of that.
So far as I can tell, it's a generic "do Republican stuff" manifesto, probably not the first of its kind by a long shot, which a CNN pundit caught wind of and misreported as some kind of master plan to install Trump as dictator for life.
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Hey, Trump mustered a rally of 100,000 supporters in New Jersey.
New frigging Jersey. Either 45 is doing something right, or 46 is doing something wrong.
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@TheUnderdog
It was sarcastic.
After January 6, Dems ran with a narrative of an "attempted coup" and took a sharp authoritarian turn overnight, sending SWAT teams to raid the houses of anyone who was in the building on that day. DC was basically under martial law on the day of Biden's inauguration and he later gave a speech under the ominous glow of a red light warning that Trump supporters were dangerous enemies of the people.
They've backpedaled since then, as nobody really cares about J6 anymore and keeping up the act doesn't score them points like it used to. The party and its mass propaganda apparatuses have since moved on to the "Trump legal troubles" talking point.
But at the height of the post-J6 media shitshow, for a Republican to say "Yes we are all domestic terrorists" was a clear show of defiance to the regime. It was to say "I literally do not care what you accuse me of."
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There's a saying:
"When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
You don't want that kind of society.
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@Greyparrot
Ukraine has lost around 300,000+ men fighting for control over the ethnically Russian Donbas.
If this source is to be believed, then as of last August Ukraine had almost 70,000 fatalities total, and 100,000-120,000 wounded. This is a figure by the US government, which was more pessimistic than some others cited, but also lower than Russia's ridiculous claim.
Assuming that none of those men could go back to war after a stint in a hospital (which probably isn't true), that's less than 200,000 permanently taken out of the war. It took them about 18 months to arrive at that number, so probably less than another 100,000 have been killed/wounded since then, or less than 300,000 total.
But okay. Sure. 300,000 men lost. Ukraine hasn't drafted a single woman, men under age 25 are still exempt, and men ages 25-27 are currently in the process of being drafted after a previous exemption. I'm confident that they could muster up another 300,000 reasonably able-bodied people to fight, if their society was willing to make some harder sacrifices.
They now barely have enough men to man the trenches now to keep Russia from rolling into Kiev.
In the absence of American aid, Russia has been making gains...measured in hundreds, if not tens, of square miles total. That aid has now been approved, so within a month or two the rate of further Russian gains should slow to a crawl. Chasiv Yar, Russia's next big target, is almost 450 miles from Kyiv.
The dreams of Ukraine retaking the Donbas are just that...dreams... no amount of weaponry or additional devastation is going to change the current reality.
In 1968, after the Tet Offensive, it was "just a dream" that the Viet Cong would ever win. The Americans had every advantage. Except that, of course, Vietnam was somebody else's homeland and they had the option of giving up and going home, whereas those who had to live in Vietnam did not.
It's impossible to predict when Russia might get tired of its citizens dying in a foreign country. The Ukrainians will never tire. Most of them would prefer the bloody status quo continue another 2 years to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren living their entire lives under the heel of a fascist state that denies their culture and human rights.
But if, indeed, it's fated that Ukraine will lose, then we have the power to undo that fate by handing them tactical nuclear weapons, which was my original point.
or USA can permit Ukraine to sign an armistice and start rebuilding from the ashes we helped to create
If Russia wins, why wouldn't it just invade again for more territory in another 4 years? They'd know the Ukrainians will eventually roll over and surrender, so why not? Why would future Ukrainians fight to defend their country if they're 100% sure their government will surrender down the road?
In short, how is armistice any different from Ukraine ceasing to exist?
It's time to adapt to the new world. Good fences make good neighbors, and it's time to start respecting those fences instead of tearing every single one down and demanding NATO hegemony.
Russia didn't respect Ukraine's "fences". What reason do we have to think Russia and China will respect ours? Isn't America most secure from encroachment when our fences are pushed back all the way to Eastern Europe and the Western Pacific?
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Premise A: All societies have an elite class. This can be hereditary or meritocratic, or a combination of both.
Premise B: The US is a society.
Premise C: Therefore, the US has an elite class.
Premise D: All human individuals are mortal, and will die. All groups consist of many individuals, all of whom will die. Groups with long-running continuity can be divided into generations, each of which dies when all of its member individuals die.
Premise E: The US elite class is a group of human individuals.
Premise F: Therefore, the current generation of US elites will die out, upon which, to continue existing, they'll have to find replacement members.
I think everything I've stated above is pretty uncontroversial. You'll likely agree with all of it. But what I'd like to focus on here is the "replacement" bit.
US elites have a lower than average birth rate, because per Statista families that make over $200,000 have the lowest birth rate of any demographic cohort.
This is likely an understatement, since people with extremely successful careers are less likely to prioritize the life goal of having a family. For example, musicians and actors, journalists and political pundits, heads of government departments, etc.
Furthermore, white liberals have the lowest birth rate in the US of any demographic. This is the group from which most elites hail.
The recipe for future elites is threefold: [1]. Access to networks of existing power, influence, and expertise; [2]. A fair amount of personal discipline, from which talent can be cultivated and damning mistakes can be avoided. Yes, that's two things, but one has to be divided into two qualifiers. You need geographic proximity to these networks AND your personality must mesh well with theirs.
[1]. excludes right-wingers from a small Alabama town who'll never move to the big city in search of better job prospects. Excluded also are most blacks, who have similar politics but usually inherit major behavioral problems from their disfavorable cultural backgrounds. Likewise, your average black man is disinterested in frequenting cafes or, say, attending bohemian poetry events; thus, while he makes a suitable political ally to white liberals, he's unlikely to join their inner circles.
So what's the point of all this? Well...
White liberals have poor birth rates, and the process of becoming an elite is sufficiently competitive that merely being a number on a census won't cut it. They can fill some, but not all the elite slots by themselves. For the rest they must look outwards. But to where?
Conservative Christian households. There are, of course, a lot of poor white people who have pro-NRA bumper stickers and vote Republican, but they're not what I mean by "conservative Christian". I mean middle class whites, typically from red states, who gave their children a Christian upbringing. There's a somewhat weaker correlation in their case between income and fertility, as I can attest from personal experience.
Of the three elite factors I mentioned, the conservative Christian demographic leans toward one: a fair amount of personal discipline. However, they're hampered by staying in their low-opportunity local areas and not meshing with white liberals.
But, there is an exception: those raised in conservative Christian households who reject the values of their upbringing in favor of liberal irreligion, or at least liberalism with religious apathy. They will tend to move to big blue cities, bringing with them the hardcore zeal of a convert to liberalism. This, combined with the discipline their upbringings instilled, give them good prospects of breaking into the elite class.
Paradoxically, then, in the future Republican families will increasingly supply America's elites without those elites being Republican.
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@RaymondSheen
Christianity in general became apostate in 325 CE with the political influence of Constantine the Great and his blasphemous Nicaean Creed
The Nicene Creed simply reiterated the positions on theology that mainstream Christians took for granted. To this day, there's not much disagreement with it, save perhaps the "Harrowing of Hell" part which had no scriptural basis.
It is true that Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, and that Roman armies would march under the banner of this creed against non-Christian foreign enemies.
No religion has ever remained true to itself.
Doubtful. Christians have the exact same religious texts today as 2,000 years ago. Most apply a plain language reading to the New Testament, which is most likely to be the accurate interpretation. Unless you're suggesting that an esoteric "true meaning" was at some point lost.
Nationalism, which, of course, is of no use to a true follower of Christ.
Nationalism is a secular political ideal, sure. But you can't prove it's unchristian except so far as politics in general are unchristian. Paul teaches that one ought to associate with Christians and not be "unequally yoked" with non-Christians, which suggests a Christian ingroup and a non-Christian outgroup.
Racial/ethnic nationalism might be unchristian, but if there's a correlation between race and religion then that correlation would naturally lend itself to a mild expression of racial bias. Likewise, if some countries have governmental policies better in line with Christian values than others, then this fact would lend itself to an expression of national bias.
Christianity is used by conservatives for their fake sociopolitical ideology.
An extreme, inflammatory take, but sure. Whatever you say.
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It's no secret that of all Western countries, the US has retained the highest level of religiosity in modern times. Today I figured out why. It has surprisingly little to do with Americans being inherently more receptive to religious messages, and more to do with the manner in which America changes religion.
In Europe, before Martin Luther, there were Catholic Churches. And then there was the Protestant Reformation. Or should I say, the Magisterial Reformation, because in practice the big Protestant sects merely replaced Catholicism as the state religion. With that came a high degree of uniformity. Lutheran churches looked alike, worshiped alike, prayed alike, and sermonized alike. There was no "religious marketplace", because these conditions made for a monopoly.
Since religion, outside of compulsory attendance, is an optional good that one might choose not to engage with, one might compare it to eating out. If the only option you have for eating out is one mediocre hamburger joint, odds are you'll cook for yourself more and eat out less, if at all. But if you're surrounded by tasty restaurants? Well, that's a different story.
Since the 19th century, religion in the US has been less of a monopoly and more like a marketplace. Does your town have a single church whose pastor bores you to tears? Well, one day a traveling Methodist tent preacher shows up in your area. His style of religion is different. His message hits home different. You happen to find it more compelling. So you have a conversion experience.
With time, of course, the range of options expanded dramatically. At least if you live in the Bible Belt, one can "church shop" with unprecedented ease. This fosters a very competitive environment between churches. Anyone can call themselves a pastor, which means anyone can try to one-up the neighboring church by offering a product that draws in the most people. If you're dull and nobody likes your church, you'll go belly up and somebody else will take your place.
America, in short, is a laboratory that produces excellent churches, or at least if we measure it by mass appeal. And it's not "just" conventional churches either. There are parachurch organizations; for example, religious radio or publishing houses which put out religious literature with lucrative sales in mind. A pastor named Rick Warren, taking a page from the self-help industry, wrote a book titled The Purpose Driven Life, which to date has sold more than 50 million copies.
The most competitive churches skew Evangelical (loosely speaking, "non-denominational"). That's because, not being tied to a well-defined church model, they are comparably freestyle and you see a lot more variation between them as opposed to, say, a random two Methodist churches.
In 1990, a Pizza Hut opened in the Soviet Union, and this was a big frigging deal within the country. Everyone wanted to eat there when it first opened. Decades of competition in the fast food industry produced one of the greatest American restaurant chains. When it arrived on the shores of a country where everyone was eating government-issued cans of borscht, slices of pizza sold like hot cakes.
By now I think you can guess where I'm going with this. American churches aren't limited to America; instead, they routinely try to proselytize overseas and plant churches in their own image in foreign countries. Assuming that local regimes don't curtail their freedom to operate (e.g. in Russia), American churches fine-tuned to efficiently draw crowds will brush up against longstanding local monopolies that've never had to earn their keep, or so to say. And it's just like taking candy from a baby.
Whereas the old Protestant churches struggled to penetrate the Catholic landscape of Latin America, about 31 percent of all Brazilians were Evangelical in 2020. One source projects that the number of Evangelicals will be nearly on par with the number of Catholics in 2032, and after that they may become the largest religious group in the country. Brazil, of course, is not the only Latin American state undergoing this demographic shift.
In the Philippines, Evangelicals went from 2.8% of the population in 2000 to 14% in 2017. In Ethiopia, an Oriental Orthodox country (the most historically insular of all Christian branches), nearly 23% of the population is P'ent'ay (lit. "Pentecostal", but now a catch-all term for Evangelicals).
In Europe, it was reported c. 2022 that a new church is planted in France every 10 days. Assuming the average congregation has 200 members, that corresponds to about 7,200 new converts every year. This pace has been ongoing since at least 2017, and presumably continues today.
What I'm describing is a seismic shift in global Christianity. It is evangelical-izing, which is a cultural export of the United States. Forget Coca-Cola and Hollywood; America is enough of a soft superpower that in another 20 years the world's largest religion will have comprehensively and irreversibly changed. The new church is less traditional, less doctrinally focused, more experiential, aesthetically modern, more media-driven, and more organizationally fragmented, with each being an island unto itself.
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If Trump is, in fact, "brought to justice", then that'll mean his full acquittal for all the politically motivated lawsuits filed against him by the oligarchs and their lackies. It'll mean that all the illegitimate court-imposed fines he has had to pay in the last 12 months are thrown out and he's recouped for every penny. It'll mean the end of the careers of every judge, prosecutor, and attorney involved in these recent mockeries of justice.
And finally, it'll mean that Trump is rewarded for this ordeal with the support of the American public and gets re-elected.
It'd be nice if we lived in a just world.
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Well, March was nice while it lasted.
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Well, I thank the doctor for responding. His answers were both well-reasoned and easy for a layperson to understand.
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I had one terrible run-in with the police. My only "crime" was trying to cross a street on foot, though he thought I was suspicious. This happened about 5-6 years ago, but ever since then I have an instinctive fear response every time there's a police car behind me.
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@Savant
"Hi, Dr. Huemer. How do asymmetric regimes affect the immigration issue? For example, the WTO makes free trade largely reciprocal and limits the scope of trade wars between member states. But there's no agreement of this kind for immigration. If Country A restricts the flow of migrants from Country B, is it acceptable for Country B to have an equivalent policy toward citizens of Country A?"
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Israel, in prosecuting its war in Gaza, has relied on an AI system named "Lavender".
Lavender uses data on known Hamas affiliates to direct strikes on them. At its peak, the system identified 37,000 men as being such, though it was so overly broad as to include police officers and people involved in civil defense. It was eventually scaled back to entail a narrower set which only includes Hamas fighters, leaders, etc.
Imagine you're a low-ranking Hamas fighter. Lavender tells the Israeli air force where your home is, and they decide to drop a bomb on it. You have family members living with you; the system determines that no more than 10-15 people would be killed in this strike to kill you, so it approves the operation. Of course, if you were high-ranking, a much higher death toll could be justified. Ironically the opposite often turns out to be true, since imprecise but cheap "dumb bombs" are used on low-priority targets, whereas more expensive "smart bombs" are used to fry bigger fish. Imprecise bombs run a higher risk of collateral damage.
Hamas-controlled organizations in Gaza estimate that over 33,000 Gazans have been killed thus far. Hypothetically, 30,000 civilians could've been killed in the process of neutralizing 3,000 average Joes who are fighting for the group.
It's true, then, that Israel is killing the families of terrorists as part of its official policies.
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It's funny, because I was indoors and completely missed the last one (which Trump infamously stared right at with the naked eye). But today I'll see for myself whether it looks like a scene out of the Book of Revelation or it's a big nothing burger, since I live outside of the ideal viewing zone.
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Gee whiz, what a visionary this guy sounds like. It must've been because of the cultural degeneracy and LGBT of the country he was attacking. Surely this guy's a savior of Western civilization. The West should stop stirring the pot by sending weapons and logistical aid to the defenders, since they're only prolonging an unwinnable war, causing death for no reason, and bringing us closer to a world war. Okay, maybe this is a war of one-sided aggression but hey, Stalin once said something mean about Germany. He should've known better than to say mean things about Germany so this is his fault.
We can totally trust this guy as an ally in the future. He definitely won't turn out to be a genocidal maniac down the road. There definitely aren't signs already of him having genocidal intentions and implementing policies to this effect.
If this guy had the 1940s equivalent to an OnlyFans account, I would simp to it, because I'm an antiwar republican.
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Assuming this isn't a shitpost:
Seek medical help. I say this as someone who had an experience a few months ago where my brother exhibited what might or might not have been paranoid delusions. It's scary what a slight chemical imbalance in one's brain can make one believe to be true.
Sometimes a simple dietary supplement can make you feel better. Contrary to pop culture, it doesn't always equate to "meds that'll make you depressed all the time and you don't want to take them". Sometimes there really is a simple fix. It's worth looking into, in any case.
If you don't want us prying into your personal life, then you don't have to follow up to this post. Just know that 90% of people who believe they're being gangstalked or whatever are imagining it, and the odds are good you are as well.
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@Greyparrot
Maybe. If Kiev killing hundreds of thousands of people in the Donbas for daring to ask for independence didn't outrage people in 2014
There were like 15,000 dead total from the combined pre-2022 war and these were overwhelmingly soldiers/militiamen.
As a Republican, it pains me to say that my party has totally screwed the West by blocking further military aid. It's unclear if Ukraine can still win without nuclear weapons, which means they probably need us to give them some. This wouldn't have been necessary had we not dropped the ball.
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Your average child molester victimizes what, more than a hundred kids? What if, to prevent them from testifying 5-10 years down the road, he killed all of them and dumped their bodies in the woods?
Now instead of a hundred traumatized kids, you have a hundred dead kids. Now consider how many child molesters there are in total.
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YYW once did a post on this topic. He put it like this:
Imagine if you're the kind of person who's immoral enough to commit a rape but not a random, indiscriminate murder. Suppose that, despite knowing what'll happen, you succumb to temptation and commit a rape. Now you can't let your victim go, since any testimony they give could end your life. So what do you do? You resort to murder, and in your mind you justify it as halfway self-defense, so you're able to bring yourself to do it.
Hence, a person who would've "just" been raped is now dead as well.
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I wouldn't be opposed to Biden handing them a few tactical nukes, restricted to use on the battlefields of Ukraine unless the Russians happened to retaliate with nukes of their own.
It wouldn't be the provocation that some people imagine. Ukrainian soldiers are already killing Russian ones every day (at least 83,000 total), with Western weapons, and this hasn't caused WW3. If anything it would give Putin an off-ramp by allowing him to say "Hey look, we're withdrawing for the sake of world peace" and "We didn't lose the war conventionally".
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@Best.Korea
1. New users who are men hate being on this site because its full of men2. Women run away from this site because its full of men who come after them, and they have no other women to talk to.
I don't believe either of these assumptions. Joining debateart is not an either/or. You can both frequent here as a "general discussion" space and, say, be active on a dating website or whatnot. Men aren't giving anything up by being here whatever the gender ratio.
As for #2, I've seen no evidence of that. The kind of guys who simp in DMs would likely leave some trace of their activities in the forums, but I've seen nothing like it. I think there's like one female user here and from little I've seen, she's treated no different from anyone else.
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