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@RationalMadman
If you gain enjoyment from Taylor Swift's music then good for you. My purpose here wasn't to take a dig at you if you aren't among the aforementioned toxic fans.
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@RationalMadman
Fair enough I guess. Though I wasn't professing my undying hatred for anyone who's ever enjoyed her music.
In my first post, I said that such people are "disproportionately represented" among her fan base. Even if there were proportionately as many fans of, say, Rihanna who happened to be jerks, Taylor Swift fans are notorious for being jerks while acting in the capacity of Taylor Swift fans.
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@WyIted
I don't think they are mean spirited misandrists . Where have you seen this?
There was a YouTuber named MeatCanyon who made a video parodying her and her fans. In doing so, he invited a mob of rabid Swifties who liberally hurled epithets like "Incel" at him, which at this point is a male-oriented insult roughly equivalent to labeling a woman a slut or bitch (ironically enough, IIRC he's married). Some were dumb enough to believe that they could magically cause him to die in a month just by predicting that he would.
And yes, the commentators in question were women. MeatCanyon got so much hate mail from Swifties that he made a follow-up video about it. He took the whole episode in stride, which I respect. As for hardcore Swifties, zero respect for them.
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She is indeed a white liberal. That in itself isn't enough to hold her in contempt. She hates Trump but I haven't read anything about her hating his supporters as well. Which, if she did, would of course justify hating her back, but whatever.
She does, unfortunately, have a fan base disproportionately represented by deranged fanatics who'll dogpile on anyone who even mildly criticizes her, proud misandrists, the weirdly superstitious about things like astrology, and the generally mean-spirited. But I don't believe this is her fault per se.
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MentisWave is a pretty good YouTuber. He backs up what he says with sources, but also knows how to think critically and refute a proposition just by pointing out logical flaws with it. A right-libertarian who's edgier than Matt Walsh but at the same time none of his takes come across as insane. I recommend paying his channel a visit.
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@RationalMadman
Rather than assume things about me
Don't take what I said as an insult. My point was that humans in generally are unwilling to make this sacrifice. You, of course, are 1 out of 8 billion humans.
the point is if the country fundamentally incentivises and drives forward the progression via tariffs and subsidisation, for corporations not consumers alone, to provide things that make electric cars, renewable energy and such things easier-access, that's part of it
My question is: why are subsidies necessary? Doesn't this imply that things like electric cars aren't otherwise favored by free markets?
If it's merely a question of catching up with the scale of established industries, then perhaps you have a point. But I don't believe that's all there is to it. This isn't 15 years ago, after all. If electric still isn't in a position to replace fossil fuel cars then that suggests practical constraints beyond mere lack of investment. If you try to fight against what the market wants with free-flowing subsidies then you could end up distorting it and wind up with a disaster on your hands.
In Norway, something like 1/8th of all cars are electric. That's a crazy high number for the EV industry. Same for Iceland to a lesser extent. In both countries electricity is cheap and renewably sourced for the reasons I already laid out. The country in third place, Sweden, has like 1/4th as many EVs per capita as Norway. When you get to densely populated countries with normal geography, such as the Netherlands, it's more like 1/8th. Then it continues to shrink from there.
In short, the idea that EV actually can replace fossil fuel cars to scale in a normal, densely populated country hasn't yet been put to the test. Since new vehicles are disproportionately electric, that could change another 10 years down the road.
When that day comes, it'll raise new questions. Such as: will the electric grid be able to keep up with the existing number of plants? Will enough new plants be built in time? Will those plants be renewable? Can renewable plants sustainably power the country given problems like scaling storage?
When that day comes, the answer to all of the above may well prove to be yes. But the fact that there's still credible doubt in 2024, much less 2014 or 2004, establishes that GP isn't speaking "idiocy".
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@RationalMadman
The issue won't be fixed until the technology's there that can fix it without major sustainability issues. Otherwise, it could probably be done and over with in a year or two. No need to take 15 years or whatnot.
Once the technology is there, and it's affordable, the US will make the transition. To act prematurely serves to pump marginally less CO2 into the atmosphere at outsized personal cost, since it can't be done to anywhere near full scale.
The only third option is for ordinary consumers to consume much, much less in the interim. I'm not willing to do that (at most I'll sometimes walk out of the grocery store without a plastic bag), and neither will you nor the people you know. Hence, the human race has collectively rejected this option.
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@RationalMadman
Scandinavia and most of western Europe just sit and laugh at the idiocy being posted.Get a grip on reality, is America seriously this behind in development?
Says the guy whose home country is powered by like 75% fossil fuels. All European countries either are fossil fuel-dependent, have a butt ton of nuclear plants, or have a favorable geography conducive to geothermal/hydroelectric generation combined with small populations. There isn't one to my knowledge which can power itself on wind and solar alone.
In essence, Europe's de facto energy policies tend to have far more in common with the GOP than they're willing to admit.
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On a related note, being vaguely sympathetic toward Russia because they're "not woke" is not objectively worse than being anti-Russia because they have laws perceived as homophobic or anti-feminist. Which was a serious factor in many Americans hating Russia well before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
"American national values" are largely subjective and up to individual interpretation. To some, the US is rightly a paradise of free love in a global sea of repressive societies. To others, the US is rooted in Christian moral values. To call one side less legitimately American than the other is mere opinion, and they have equal right to talk the same crap about you. All Americans are free to advocate for closer alignment with whichever countries are compatible with their own worldview, a worldview which they'll usually interpret as being what America fundamentally is.
My reason for disliking Russia is that it's an inwardly and outwardly aggressive dictatorship which is actively making the world a worse place and, if left unchecked, will do so on an even larger scale in the future. At the same time I don't dislike Viktor Orban, because so far as I can tell he's none of those things and has merely drawn the ire of western elites for being socially conservative.
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@TheUnderdog
As somebody who's staunchly pro-Ukraine, I say: screw this.
Europe is not, and never has been, a legal appendage of the US. Most of its countries are longstanding US allies but this fact wouldn't make it treasonous to America to hypothetically let them fall. It's not comparable to, say, ceding California to a foreign power. Likewise Russia is a longstanding rival but that's no guarantee about what relations between the two countries will look like in the future.
The US, while a constitutional republic with strong democratic elements, has been allies with undemocratic regimes in the past, such as the Kingdom of Morocco (the first country to grant us diplomatic recognition), and still is with some today, such as Saudi Arabia. It would not be literal treason to side with a bloc of dictatorships over Europe, even though it is true that our national values are, for the most part, more aligned with those of Europe.
One can validly be both pro-Putin and pro-America, even if this is an impractical and rather ill-advised way of thinking.
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Breaking up your text into an excessive number of paragraphs can be just as annoying as a run-on paragraph. I advise finding a middle ground between what you're doing and what you see others doing.
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@Double_R
Section 3 has been adjudicated in multiple legal levels in multiple states and many have in fact ruled that Trump committed insurrection and is therefore barred from holding public office, not one legal arbiter yet has sided with Trump on the basis that he did not commit insurrection.
Don't you think this had something to do with the political lean of the courts in which these cases were heard, as the people suing to take Trump off the ballot were smart enough to go jurisdiction shopping?
The supreme court's decision was essentially that this is Congress's decision, yet when this very question was put before Congress and their final answer was that it's the court's decision.
Congressional Dems know they don't have the numbers to disqualify Trump, so they haven't seriously tried. If they did then their efforts would fall short, because in practice anything impeachment-related hinges on how the public voted in the last election cycle. If it's up to Congress, then the fact that the public voted to give the GOP as many seats as they did in 2022 is a public decision to not disqualify Trump from the ballot in 2024, because it's nearly impossible without a national consensus.
Which is why judicial activists have tried for an easy shortcut by appealing to left-leaning courts. And now the Supreme Court has shut them down.
The fact that no one wants to make this decision as opposed to just saying "he did not commit insurrection" is amazing.
For what it's worth, the majority opinion did state that:
"Last September, about six months before the March 5, 2024, Colorado primary election, four Republican and two unaffiliated Colorado voters filed a petition against former President Trump and Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in Colorado state court. These voters—whom we refer to as the respondents—contend that after former President Trump’s defeat in the 2020 Presidential election, he disrupted the peaceful transfer of power by intentionally organizing and inciting the crowd that breached the Capitol as Congress met to certify the election results on January 6, 2021."
This seems to assert that the allegation of insurrection by Trump has not been proven. The narrative that the Court was like "Well gosh darn, Trump did it but there's a legal technicality so we the courts can't try him" is bogus.
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@Sidewalker
Given the unceasing avalanche of institutional opposition he faces, there is no dishonor to be had in losing provided that his showing is decent enough. But if he wins, it will be the greatest political comeback story in 200+ years of American history.
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@Double_R
Obviously I was being a bit hyperbolic in the OP. It was something of a cathartic moment for me after many months of reading the headlines of articles describing aggressive legal attacks on Trump. So I went kind of overboard in writing what I did.
However, this much is true: not one of the 9 SCOTUS members ruled that Trump did commit insurrection and had to be removed from the ballot. Sure, that's not the precise question they were being asked to answer, but they have in the past issued landmark rulings from narrower questions offered up to them, such as in Dobbs v. Jackson.
The insurrection clause is an unambiguous constitutional question, which is within the uncontested purview of the Supreme Court, but none of them claimed for the SCOTUS the authority to bar Trump from office based on the facts. By handing it over to Congress they were in essence saying "Hey look, you guys try to impeach each other and whatnot for partisan reasons all the time. This is one such instance and it has nothing to do with us." Which, the way I see it, is a damning indictment of the supposedly slam-dunk case for Trump committing insurrection if I've ever seen one.
Again, while the liberal justices did partly dissent, none of them claimed Trump's 2024 candidacy should've died in their courtroom. 1 Biden and 2 Obama appointees sided with Thomas and Kavanaugh in clearing the way for Trump to run in Colorado and other states.
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@Double_R
This is satire, right?
Nope. Just the facts, ma'am.
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It is over. The "big lie"propagated by Dems since the 2020 election, which is that Trump committed or attempted insurrection, has been unanimously debunked by the most authoritative court in the United States. From this point onward, if social media does not label/censor as misinformation any further claims to the contrary, then it'll prove the glaring hypocrisy of the oligarchs who rule us.
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Aren't dwarfs/dwarves considered a similar but ultimately non-human species in most works of fantasy? Same underlying reason for why Caesar from Planet of the Apes was never paired with a human woman despite being sentient.
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Wikipedia defines The Singularity as "a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseen consequences for human civilization." Discourse on the topic often cites Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a probable cause of The Singularity. In this short-ish post, I aim to demonstrate why The Singularity won't happen anytime soon.
1. Energy Constraints
There is, ultimately, a hard entropic limit to the number of operations a computer can perform per second for a given amount of energy input. And that upper limit assumes conditions which cannot be realized by a normal, everyday computer, such as being stuffed into a black hole or existing in a constant low-Kelvin temperature state.
At this time, computer usage consumes 1 percent, or slightly over 1 percent, of the world's electricity consumption. A single ChatGPT-4 query will use between 1/1000th and 1/100th of a kilowatt hour of electricity, and at this time AI is still in an early phase of consumption, with systems like ChatGPT still being perceived largely as a novelty. But imagine, if you would, a world where such heavy data-crunching applications are used on a day-to-day basis by the average person around the world. Imagine, if you would, a 24/7 arms race between criminals and state hackers who use AI to crack cryptographic digital security layers and their would-be targets who add more and more layers to protect their property. To brute force AES-256 would take enough power to supply 50 million American households for billion of years; even assuming resourceful programmers managed to find shortcuts that trimmed this time down drastically, hacking would still be a quite expensive affair. In real life the most efficient operation to mine one Bitcoin will expend 155,000 kilowatt hours; at its peak Bitcoin mining took up more than 7% of Kazakhstan's electricity usage, despite being a fairly rich country of almost 20,000,000 people.
In short, imagine a world with exponential growth in demand for computing intensity, while electricity supply is growing at a far slower rate. After all, it takes years to commission one gas-fired power plant and even longer to bypass the hurdles to build a nuclear plant. Wind and solar entail buying up large properties in certain locations, and have their own issues, such as scaling up battery capacity. Something will eventually have to give.
The average voter, of course, won't tolerate 60% of local power consumption being siphoned away from their homes and toward such enterprises. So the human factor will further restrict the combined processing power of all computers, which makes the unlimited growth of The Singularity impossible.
2. Water Constraints
Related to the above, computers guzzle water. A lot of water. Cooling is used to raise computing efficiency and keep physical components from frying. Every 5-50 ChatGPT queries will use half a liter of water, and one Bitcoin transaction uses 16,000 liters of water. Water supply is arguably harder to amp up than electricity, as groundwater is finite and a desalination plant would take years to build. And again, the average person wouldn't tolerate half their municipal water supply being diverted from their homes to giant computing plants.
3. Other Constraints
Imagine a future where AI can churn out useful inventions by aggregating patented schematics. Beyond-human-control technological progress is a big part of the whole "Singularity" concept. Assuming that world governments didn't crack down on this in the name of intellectual property rights, there are still problems. An invention that's never built is useless, and to do so entails building physical supply chains and infrastructure. 3D printers are limited to working with certain materials and can only produce a certain range of results. Assuming human owners of these enterprises, it would remain within human control. Assuming that governments recognized the property rights of AI, it still wouldn't be outside human control unless all the work was automated as well.
The rate of advancement here would be slowed by physical constraints. It takes so much time to build a factory and build/install the prerequisite equipment. It takes so much money as a startup, and needs to turn a profit that might not materialize. A factory needs to bring in supplies through vehicles that cannot move faster than roadway speed limits. And so on.
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Can a married couple claim 50 embryos as tax deductions, for example?
Under current law, probably not. But ideally? If they're paying bills to keep those embryos intact, then yes, proportionate to said expense (non-refundable).
Can you use the HOV lane if you're pregnant?
Ideally the rules should be applied the same as when a woman is driving with one baby in her car. Provided, of course, that she can give some valid proof of pregnancy.
If someone who has a child successfully through this method then leaves 40 embryos behind, are they legally responsible for paying for the cryogenic storage of same?
Ideally they ought to be, yes. If they didn't want to assume this risk, they should've went with adoption instead.
If they refuse to pay for this, are they now criminally liable as negligent parents for lack of care?
If their refusal leads to avoidable embryo death then yes, ideally they should be charged the same as any parent whose baby died from neglect.
Do the embryos become wards of the state, supported by tax dollars, if abandoned by parents, or if the parents die, knowing they will be stored indefinitely?
Ideally yes, they would be, with the state paying women to become surrogates. And ideally this expense would lead the state to ban IVF or only permit advanced techniques which don't create excess embryos.
What's the current thinking?
My thoughts are above. If you're trying to pull off a "gotcha" that the laws of the land haven't caught up to the practical implications of embryos being legal persons, then it's only a matter of time, assuming that good faith pro-life legislators eventually triumph. But for the time being, the tax status of embryos is pretty low on the list of issues we care to focus our attention and efforts on.
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Navalny never stepped foot in the US, did he? How much could he have known besides what the ultra-biased press told him? A tragedy that he's dead, for sure, but being a political martyr doesn't mean every opinion you've ever held was objectively correct.
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Most people are hypocrites when they accuse someone else of bigotry. There are vast swaths of the US population who you hold in disdain and contempt, and I don't just mean pedophiles or felons. The only way you can, in your own mind, get away with this is because you believe some lofty rule exists justifying all of your conduct and attitudes while the same is withheld from "them".
There are no true heroes and no true villains at this stage. Just two angry tribes flinging poo at each other.
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Okay, fine. I'll bite.
American supporters of ISIS who aren't actively involved in crimes deserve the same free speech rights as Nick Fuentes or any other American. But since a known criminal would normally be imprisoned and their access to the internet restricted, I don't have a problem with curtailing the social media activity of violent fugitives from the law.
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Anyway, that was the first 50 minutes in a nutshell. I'm not sure if I'll watch the rest.
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Medieval and Early Modern History
Here he implies that Ukraine isn't a state because Ukraine spent much of its history under the Tartar Yoke + Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. What this neglects is that, by Putin's own admission, Kyiv/Kiev is older than (or at least achieved prominence earlier than) Moscow. The modern Russian state isn't centered in Novgorod, whereas Ukraine's capital is still Kyiv. Likewise the modern Russian state wasn't founded by Novgorod but by Moscow, which conquered Novgorod in 1478.
I'll follow up that Jewish statehood had been interrupted longer than Ukraine was under foreign rule: almost 1,900 years vs. 700-800 years. Nonetheless, many of us accept the legitimacy of Israeli statehood on the basis that Israel did exist at some point in the past, and that the Jews have a right to a homeland somewhere. There's no reason to think Ukraine has less of said right, given said facts.
Finally, even if pre-modern Ukraine had never, ever been a state, this is a spurious reason for denying Ukrainian sovereignty today. Many long-marginalized peoples have successfully formed nation-states in the past 200 years; for example, Slovakia and Latvia. What matters is that Ukraine was recognized by Russia as an independent country in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, and said independence cannot be whimsically revoked once granted (imagine if the UK suddenly tried that with the US). And Russia claims itself to be the legal successor to the Soviet Union, meaning they're in little position to claim the Soviet Union forced anything on Russia against its will.
NATO broke its promise not to expand
IIRC this was promised by a lone diplomat who didn't have the backing of his government, much less the governments of all NATO member states, to make this claim. By Putin's admission it was never an agreement on paper, whereas the 1994 Budapest Memorandum was on paper and Russia violated it after claiming for months in advance that they would do no such thing.
Even if we accept that continuing to expand NATO was a poor way to treat Russia, Ukraine is innocent of whatever we in the West did. They did not deserve to be invaded.
NATO wouldn't let Russia join and tried to hurt Yeltsin in the 1996 elections
After just a couple of years in power, Yeltsin proved not a liberal or pro-democracy reformer but a sort of proto-Putin. He literally shelled the Russian parliament in 1993 and laid the groundwork for how Putin rules over Russia today. The values which Russia were re-embracing were antithetical to the values NATO was built to defend, so rejecting them makes sense on this ground alone. So does supporting the opposition in 1996, since a government split between different factions and competing interests would be more democratic than one with uncontested strongman rule, which would also make Russia a more successful country in the long term.
Furthermore tensions remained high throughout the 90s, with a brief nuclear scare in 1996 when a Norwegian civilian rocket flew over Russian airspace. While Yeltsin handled this well and deescalated the situation, it's clear that the period wouldn't have been ripe for a military alliance with their ex-enemies even if Russia wasn't headed down an authoritarian path.
NATO supported the Chechen rebels
This resource shows there is no evidence to support the claim. While it's understandable that the West would be sympathetic to an anti-colonial movement in the Caucasus, given that Russia is the world's last classical empire, it doesn't appear to be true that America or its allies lent material aid to them.
The US shouldn't have invaded Iraq
Tu quoque fallacy. But sure, let's talk about this.
If nothing else, the circumstances in 2003 were morally ambiguous. The country's people were starving under global sanctions, and the international community feared that Saddam Hussein might rebuild his chemical WMD stockpile at some undetermined point in the future, hence the massive effort that went into stopping him from doing so.
Ukraine, on the other hand, did nothing wrong aside from having an internal revolution that replaced a pro-Russian government with a pro-Western government. A government which then won re-election over and over again, making it legitimate even if (for the sake of argument) it wasn't at first.
NATO's missile defense system
Russia was an ally of Iran, which posed said missile threat to the West. If they didn't want the system being built they could've pressured Iran to stop what they were doing. Same goes for the West Coast missile defense system, since that was in response to North Korea, also an ally of Russia.
As for NATO not cooperating with Russia, Putin was a strongman who had invaded free Georgia by 2008. Any "cooperation" that might've potentially compromised the system when it came to an attack by Russia, a country which was a credible threat to Europe, would've been foolhardy. Integration of NATO and Russian military tech poses opportunities for Russian espionage, which is why the US was very reluctant to sell F-16s to Turkey after they acquired the S-400.
We are now ahead of the US when it comes to hypersonic missile technology
I don't believe this, given that their defense budget is a fraction of ours and given that Ukraine has been able to shoot down Kinzhal missiles on at least one occasion.
The "door to" Nato membership was opened to Georgia and Ukraine in 2008
From my understanding, at the time NATO was between cold wars and in the middle of an identity crisis, with it being somewhat unclear why they should continue to exist without a clear enemy. They'd come to view it not just as a military alliance but as a sort of pan-Western civilizational project like the EU. Meaning it wasn't purely for military reasons that said invitation was extended. Likewise, the War on Terror was ongoing so if Ukraine joined it would've meant more bodies to throw at clearing booby-trapped houses in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Still, it's understandable why Russia didn't take this well. I'll grant Putin that. But I think it was a long shot in any event, given that frigging Sweden almost didn't make the cut.
Euromaidan was an illegal coup
No, it was a popular uprising (less than a civil war) because Yanukovych chose economic partnership with Russia over the EU. Given how much of a bigger market the EU is compared to Russia, and how much more lucrative that partnership would've been, it's easy to see why. Ukraine was dirt poor after centuries of being yoked to Russia and Yanukovych was squandering what might've been their best chance to rapidly develop.
This didn't involve the military overthrowing Yanukovych. The people brought the country to the point of unrest in order to pressure the parliament to impeach Yanukovych. Which the Ukrainian parliament did, legally. After this the pro-Russian party stupidly boycotted the next wave of elections, which only served to let a pro-Western government get voted in.
Aside from the fact of ordinary people rioting (which people do in all countries), there was nothing illegal about the whole process.
Euromaidan was orchestrated by the West
The West did not magically brainwash 45,000,000 Ukrainians, without which Euromaidan would've been impossible.
Euromaidan was unfavorable to Russia
True, but Russia's response was vastly disproportionate.
There was a threat to Crimea and Donbass
No there was not. Not until Russia brought in little green men and started a war.
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How is a 15 billion year old universe young?
And honestly the radio signal thing is just a small piece of the problem. The real question is this:
Maximizing the longevity of your species means maximizing available energy. That would mean hopping from star to star and either turning them into Dyson Spheres or "turning them off" so you can convert them to Dyson Spheres at some future point and their heat isn't jettisoned into the far reaches of space. This is the rational course of action to take for any species anywhere in the Universe, assuming they hold to the human value of surviving.
And so, why do we receive light purported to be from millions or billions of light years away, if there exist aliens both self-interested and sufficiently advanced?
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"Manhattan jury". That's all I need to hear. What a joke of a trial.
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Haber-Bosch Process, which enabled the mass production of fertilizer. This, combined with GMOs, pesticides, the tractor, etc., enabled the world to feed 8 billion humans.
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It can be comforting to know something that was there when you were younger is essentially unchanged today. And a little sad too; the same personalities who were having the same discussions ad nauseam on DDO are doing the same on DART ten years later, myself included sadly. It's like we're all stuck in limbo, and I understand why some people simply outgrew the need for this community and never came back.
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@Mps1213
Also there’s no such thing as a drug that is “so addictive.” All drugs have the same addiction potential.
I'm on one prescription for a miscellaneous health condition. I take about one dose (pill) every 24 hours. If I miss a day, then I might not even realize it. I recently went 3 or 4 days straight without access to it and was perfectly fine. At the end of those 3 or 4 days I didn't feel any worse than I normally do. I probably don't need it to live a normal life, but I take it just in case.
What I can positively attest to is that if I'd spent 6 months as a heroin user, I wouldn't be able to casually manage 3 or 4 days without it. I'd feel very unpleasant, and my thoughts would be preoccupied with obtaining another fix.
So no, all drugs are not equally addictive, so far as addiction=dependency.
Addiction isn’t caused by drugs. Addiction is an environmentally induced disorder not a molecularly induced disorder.
You're suggesting it isn't an addiction if society is set up so that said drug habit doesn't carry consequences? If society at large refused to change along with this proposed legalization of all drugs, wouldn't said legalization do harm? Isn't your proposal only viable if combined with dozens of other changes that are unlikely to happen?
However you need to consider that less than 20,000 people die from heroin overdoses every year. Compared to 75k plus of multiple opioids at once.
This is fair, but the consequences for heroin or meth addiction go beyond overdosing. It's a truly miserable way to live that makes the attainment of happiness virtually impossible for most users.
There's a bizarre assumption that every American citizen would exactly know where to find a drug dealer if they wanted to use. That isn't true; making hardcore drugs available at gas stations would certainly make it available to a lot more people, and double or triple the number of people who use, since there are vast multitudes who would fall into that temptation if they easily could. Furthermore it would lower the psychological barrier to getting started, as the whole enterprise would feel "less risky" despite hardcore drug use being inherently risky.
The question you should be asking yourself is: is preventing several tens of thousands of overdose deaths worth converting hundreds of thousands if not several million people into drug addicts who aren't currently addicts?
Where the supply is regulated less than 1% of people die from those drugs, including fentanyl, dilaudid, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone, etc.
Where the supply is regulated, the quantity you can get your hands on is limited. If anyone could get heroin but with this restriction in place, then a black market would continue to exist, making this a moot point.
I’m also not advocating for these drugs to be sold at a gas station (even though alcohol and tobacco and THC products are which you probably don’t complain about) I want them sold out of pharmacies as most of them already are.
Fair enough. But again, if only "those who need it" could buy heroin from the pharmacy, then street heroin would still exist for those who didn't get approved. If anyone could get it but their supply was rationed, then the same result, since few if any heroin users can bring themselves to stay at their original dosage/frequency of use without upping it.
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No it wouldn't. Legalization could potentially solve these problems:
1. People stealing or going broke/homeless because they can't afford super expensive street drugs.
2. People being reluctant to pursue treatment because they don't want to risk prosecution from admitting that they're using drugs.
3. Drugs being contaminated with adulterants (no guarantees, as even chocolate sold in mainstream retail stores contain heavy metals like lead.)
4. Needle sharing (also no guarantee if the needles are costly)
It would not stop people from:
1. Overdosing on heroin.
2. Not checking into rehab out of fear that a relapse after a month of detox could prove deadly, or because rehab is just unpleasant/expensive.
3. Overdosing on fentanyl because over time they've become so tolerant of heroin that it doesn't give them instant euphoria anymore and they want something stronger
4. Being fired because their drug habit makes them an unreliable employee
5. Going broke despite a job because they're just buying an excessive amount of a naturally expensive drug over an extended period.
6. Trying heroin at 14 because they got their 18 year old brother to go to the gas station and buy some for them.
7. Deadly car wrecks attributable to DUIs as these drugs are so addictive that users are seldom not high but still perceive the need to get in a car and drive somewhere.
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Turkey has ratified Sweden's NATO accession, leaving Hungary as the last holdout.
Should Sweden join the alliance, its control of the strategically important Gotland Island will give NATO control of the Baltic Sea, reversing the balance of power when it comes to a war in the Baltic States. Russia currently has "area denial" capabilities that would block NATO from reinforcing Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia by sea, giving them the upper hand. But should NATO gain the ability to bring in maritime reinforcements then even the least defensible region under their vast security umbrella would suddenly become a lot easier to defend.
The EU has a liberal agenda while the Orban administration has a conservative agenda. This, combined with charges of authoritarianism in Hungary, have led to a growing rift between the two sides, with the EU attempting punitive measures to influence Hungarian national policies. As a countermove, Hungary has sought to leverage its position as an EU and NATO member to veto certain actions by these organizations, such as a $50 billion dollar aid package to Ukraine by the former and Sweden's accession to the latter.
Orban has paid lip service to not being opposed to Sweden's accession, and has pledged to ratify at some point, but in practice the ongoing dispute could prove an obstacle. There's a good chance the situation won't be resolved until Hungary is either cowed into submission or appeased with concessions.
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Science is a closed system, like theology. It can only prove or disprove that which is within its purview. Which God isn't.
This is the solution to the "God of the gaps" problem. Wherever it seems that science contradicts religious claims, the situation is open to interpretation: the empiricist will say that religious claims have to narrow in scope over time to remain viable, while the believer will say we've merely established a limit to the applicability of science in that here it can only turn up the wrong answer.
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MLK's visible legacy was one of championing civil rights and fighting hate. It was one that the average white moderate could view as a good thing. He was able to be presented as a bipartisan public figure, though he privately held views on many topics which were distinctly partisan.
Malcolm X, on the other hand, was a black nationalist who promoted anti-white hate. Your average white moderate wasn't comfortable extolling this man as a hero since his views probably weren't less objectively disgusting than those of the segregationists.
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@Greyparrot
What if it were a nuclear attack? Would you expect Biden to sit passively at his desk and twiddle his thumbs for two or three weeks while he waited for the surviving members of Congress (holed up in some other bunker) to approve a retaliatory strike?
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This one isn't a mark against Biden. Far from it.
Iran has spent years building a paramilitary network in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and is using it to punish the West for Israel's Gaza offensive. This would've happened regardless of who was president; what's important is that Biden responded in a timely manner. Given that the Houthis have since doubled down on their attacks, I hope that more airstrikes follow.
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It's not an either/or choice. Some level of taxation is inevitable, because some level of government is inevitable. Ideally the latter would not exceed what can be covered.
The rich are getting better and better at finding ways to avoid or minimize federal taxes. Perhaps the GOP makes it easier, but it's lucrative enough that a large industry would spring up without us, and there already is one in the form of tax lawyers. Given that the Feds routinely try to make them pay more than their overall share of the national wealth, there are no moral implications in them trying to pay less. The game, if you would, is amoral. But in any case it's obvious that current levels of spending cannot be sustained through rich tax dollars alone.
We're going to have to cut the Federal budget at some point. The Republican says "Let's do so right now, while we could feasibly recover from the National Debt."
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There are no real winners with the emerging status quo. An increasing number of men are frustrated because their dating prospects are poor if existent at all, a lot of women either become single mothers or have to bear the moral weight of having aborted their own child (and lack an actual loving partner even if they get laid from time to time), a lot of sexually active men and women contract lifelong STDs, and even those lucky few effboys live jaded lives without knowing the happiness of a meaningful, non-superficial relationship.
Because most people aren't winning the love game, I don't believe this is sustainable in the long run. Either there will be a neo-trad generation which rejects the aimlessness of the current one or technology will allow for more satisfying distractions that make single life tolerable for everyone. For example, robots or simulated romantic partners via AI and whatnot. If it boils down to the latter, then fewer and fewer people of either sex will be having live relationships or flings, making the whole "polyamory" thing a moot point.
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It's easy to doctor a study so that it says whatever the politically expedient conclusion is. Pick "a random sample" of some high-income parents with high emotional intelligence, who can successfully raise well-behaved kids without the paddle, and contrast that with another "random sample" of low-income parents with obvious anger issues whose approach to corporal punishment is better described as a beating than a spanking. Poof, science.
All you have to do is ignore two other groups: parents without anger issues who need the paddle to control their kids but don't overdo it, so their kids turn out alright, and parents with low emotional intelligence/motivation as a parent who forego the paddle but whose only alternative is letting the increasingly spoiled brats walk all over them, so their kids grow up to be monsters with severe behavioral issues.
As for a debate, nah. Right now I don't feel like I have enough spare time to dump another commitment onto my plate. But I can discuss it here if you want.
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Get better soon. I don't recall this ever happening to me, but I once ate a flavor of chips (which I'd enjoyed at the time) while sick and I couldn't stand them afterward. Same principle I guess.
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Easy way to end up dead, because on average men are stronger and more aggressive. Their moral inhibitions against killing would be vastly diminished when dealing with a person, perhaps especially a female person, who tried to screw them over like that. And if you leave them a text and a venmo address, then you've left enough information that they may be able to track you down even if you try to keep it anonymous.
And if somehow you get away with it, then you'll have to out yourself in order to accuse them. They probably wouldn't spend all that much time behind bars given the ambiguous circumstances, and afterwards they'd have the rest of their free lives to hunt you down.
If I were a woman, I wouldn't be so dumb as to attempt this.
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@TheUnderdog
The money was taken from the globalist elite silicon valley origarchs and used to fund the mediciaid and education and police services of small town American Patriots
Appeal to the language of class envy and demonizing "the other" is no substitute for a sound argument. A person's rightful property is their rightful property even if you happen to think they have too much.
I will take this to an extreme: during the literal Dark Ages, when landlords collected passive income from the fields and peasants were malnourished despite doing all the work, it was ultimately a good thing they weren't able to overthrow the landlords.
Not good for the average member of that generation, sure. They suffered plain and simple. But in the long run, the inassailability of property rights even when people had 10,000x more legitimate reason to hate the concept than today set a precedent that allowed for the success of capitalism when Europe began urbanizing around the High Middle Ages and afterward. This, I suspect, is also the reason why Japan, feudal until the 19th century, was the first non-European country to successfully modernize.
Americans are richer today than ever. But sure, by some metrics we are currently being "tested" by income inequality and other bad stuff. If we fail the test by doing what seems immediately expedient, our descendants will regret it, assuming that we ourselves won't also. A thousand years of gradually upward momentum will go flying out the window.
I can really see how Scandinavia is a really underdeveloped place
Scandinavian politicians themselves have publicly denied that their countries are socialist. For example, the World Bank reports that Denmark is ranked #4 in ease of doing business (compared to #6 for the US), and Norway and Sweden are #9 and #10, respectively. Similarly this article lists Sweden and Denmark as two of Europe's top tax havens.
As for Norway, they also have a small population and lots of oil money.
What a weird way to support Dr. Fauci.
Believe it or not, I have no problem with Dr. Fauci. The fact that some other republicans cut open their skulls and flushed their brains down the toilet as soon as Covid hit doesn't oblige me to do the same.
What about life from 1940 to 1980? Taxes on the globalists were very high back then and decent technology was still developed.
From everything I've heard, there were a lot of tax loopholes that the rich took advantage of. It's also worth noting that we had like two good decades, immediately following WWII and the Great Depression, and then the economy fell into massive stagnation in the 70s.
This argument can be used to justify extreme corporate welfare. "If we pay people who have a lot of money because they have a lot of money, lets tax everyone at 100% and give all the money to Elon Musk. This way, we encourage people to become as fiscally productive as Elon Musk". I know this isn't your position, but it's the logical conclusion of your position,
No it isn't. Give billionaires free money for no reason and they'll have more money. What's the point of working and investing if the end result will be the same regardless?
And for the most part, what's called "corporate welfare" isn't. Letting someone keep more of their own money isn't welfare. The mental gymnastics needed to justify this way of thinking are insane. As for corporate bailouts, they aren't partisan and President Obama was more than happy to bail out General Motors.
Well with economic theory, the elected left isn't advocating the use of heroin, but instead, the use of something like music; it reduces pain and it's not addictive.
Except government spending is addictive, as I've demonstrated.
That's because the American public is fiscally left wing.
The American public is fiscally selfish. Everyone wants more benefits for themselves. And everyone wants lower taxes for themselves. This is what's popular, and it's also what is destroying us.
Now me personally, if some stranger I know dies from lack of healthcare, I'm fine with that, I prefer tax cuts to saving their life because I don't love the poor enough to be willing to take care of them and their pain is irrelevant to me.
Personally, I think it's hypocritical to call somebody else evil for not wanting to pile on more government debt to service the poor and sick when you yourself give very little if anything to charity. Not calling out you specifically, but the left in general.
How would you cut government spending by $1.7 trillion? Conservatives don't have a plan
If Democrats made a binding promise that: (1). the conservative plan will be implemented; and (2). whatever necessary steps will to be taken to ensure Republicans don't lose any congressional seats in the aftermath of said implementation, then Republicans could come up with a plan in a matter of weeks or months. It's strictly because of Dems' refusal and willingness to electorally profit from unpopular reforms that Republicans haven't done so.
The vast majority of this debt was because Reagan cut taxes for the globalists and every president (democrat and republican) since then has followed suit.
The vast majority of the debt is because spending gets approved with full knowledge that enough taxes won't be collected to make up the difference. The most I'm willing to concede is that both parties have blame, and I'm of the disposition that the lion's share of said blame falls on Democrats. But if I'm wrong about that, then it still isn't a Republican-exclusive blame.
More taxes means a smaller debt (assuming government spending stays constant).
That may be true for one year. Or two. Or three. But eventually it'll mean an appetite for more spending, since lawmakers would now perceive that they can get away with it. Again, the federal budget is like heroin. Maybe you start out taking a pill four times a week or whatever. But eventually you'll be injecting it into your veins like twice a day.
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@TheUnderdog
I'll put this another way.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that it makes immediate utilitarian sense to redistribute wealth from the rich and put it into welfare. That still doesn't mean it's a good idea.
That's like me saying: "Hey look, using heroin one time will be an amazing euphoric experience, despite the downsides of repeated use, so the most rational thing is for everybody to try heroin once and never again." What this misses is that our behaviors are habit-shaping and character-forming. If we cross the line into trying heroin once, then we're at risk of trying it again. And again. And again.
And if we cross the line of disregarding property rights once, and if we scapegoat a few rich people and confiscate 50% of all their stuff as an act of compassion for the poor, then cross our fingers and say "We promise we won't do it again, it was a one time thing because the poor needed us to do it", then who would believe us? How could we restrain ourselves from doing it again? What self-control would we have?
I mean, think about it. Every time a new welfare program (e.g. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP, etc) is put in, it becomes politically unthinkable to not reauthorize funding for it each subsequent year. The popular appetite for dole money never shrinks. It only grows. Forever and ever more, even as fewer and fewer people are actually paying for these programs.
We're now more than $30 trillion in debt. That number will only continue to mushroom out of control. Because at some point our ancestors made the "utilitarian" choice and compromised their moral character, and now we their descendants can't shake the habit either.
The only way to avoid this is to uphold property rights and trim the size of the government beast even when it hurts. Even when it's hard and will make life harder for many people in the short term.
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@TheUnderdog
To be left wing is to be against people enduring pain that they don't want to endure... If the GOP takes the opposite approach, it either means they would support people enduring pain that they don't want to endure either for pure sadism or for a consistent reason (that I'm trying to find out).
This is political messaging. Nobody in either party has said: "Manna is coming down from heaven and providing for everyone's needs, in limitless quantities and with no strings attached, but we're such HUMBUGS who hate the poor that we'll make sure they can't tap into it!"
Anything that can be distributed to the masses was taken from somebody else, either with or without their consent (i.e. theft). There are no free lunches except for those freely given.
What can be done is to expand the size of the economic pie. I'll give you a hypothetical.
Suppose that it's the year 1890. You seize control of America at gunpoint and proclaim: "Come all ye poor, I will give you free food and free housing." The urban and rural poor are given dirty cots to stay in, free of charge, and barely expired gruel to eat, three meals a day. They get a bar of soap a month to clean their five pairs of clothing, and a free sewing kit to patch up whatever holes emerge in their clothes. They get a free cow and a free milking pail. They get free crutches whenever they catch polio. House visits by their leech doctor who balances their humors by draining blood and black bile are free of charge.
In short, let's say you have redistributed all of the resources in 1890 America "equitably". The price, in this hypothetical, is that, 134 years later in 2024, they're still living the same way. No private property means little to no economic growth. Think North Korea.
Now, imagine the average poor person in today's America, real life. By American standards, their lives aren't very good. But that's because we keep setting the bar higher and higher and higher. What would their ancestors in 1890 say if they could see it?
They'd conclude that the poorest (non-homeless) Americans, who can eat a huge variety of meals and drink beer while watching TV in their air-conditioned living room, were inoculated against many deadly illnesses as children, and only work 40 hours a week on a job which isn't back-breaking labor in the fields or factories, are living like royalty. And they'd be right, minus the palaces.
You might think this is an extreme hypothetical, and you'd be right. 90% of Democrats aren't literal communists. Nonetheless, anything that negatively skews the cost-benefit of putting in effort and resources ("conducting commerce") to turn a profit will harm the economy through disincentivizing commerce. So-called progressive taxes do this, as do NIMBY-style restrictions on doing business. It's common sense that penalizing something will get you less of it, and rewarding something will get you more of it.
These things add up over great stretches of time. For example, if country A had a GDP growth rate of 2.5% over 100 years, and country B had a rate of 3.5%, and assuming they started out with evenly matched economies, then 100 years later the average citizen of country B will have nearly 3x as much wealth as their counterpart across the border. The difference between 2.5% and 3.5% doesn't seem that big, but the consequences can be dramatic. And no, this is not fiction or a hypothetical. This has played itself out across the world the past 100 years and will continue to do so in the future.
Let's say free market capitalism by itself cannot lift a given person out of poverty. That's a big if, but just for the sake of argument. Even if that's true, then his suffering is not "for no reason" but so that his children and grandchildren will enjoy a better standard of living than he ever did.
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The GOP is America's right-wing party, just as the Democratic Party is America's left-wing party. And yes, America has both a right and a left, as the political spectrum is subjective and varies by country. Europe is not the objective benchmark handed down to us from heaven and much of Asia has mainstream politics which are far more reactionary than the GOP ever was and ever will be. Likewise, there are reactionary parties in Europe itself which have achieved mainstream success as of late, such as the Sweden Democrats and AfD in Sweden and Germany respectively, and more generally in countries like Russia, Belarus, Serbia, and Hungary.
The GOP's name, "Republican Party", comes from the fact that America is a constitutional republic. A republic is a rules-based system of government that balances the need for democratic representation with allowing whatever group is in the majority at a given time to destroy neither stable rules, nor freedom and civil rights, nor political and cultural pluralism. Representation within a republic is as much about the right to veto as it is about the positive right to govern, as even uncomfortable compromises mean that everyone can basically live with the final outcome.
Our republic is a mixture of "novel 18th century political experiment", thousand year old norms and traditions which we inherited from countries like England, and countless innovations made in the past 200+ years.
In the mid-20th century the GOP underwent an ideological synthesis and has since constituted a "three-legged" coalition between proponents of economic liberalism, foreign policy hawks, and Christian conservatives. At the time all of these interests converged in the form of a communist threat, but post-1991 different factions have vied for power. Post-2016 all three of these groups have taken a backseat and a fourth faction, defined by opposition to mass (especially illegal) immigration, backlash against recent gender and racial identitarian movements on the left, and skepticism of left-controlled institutions, has been largely embodied in the person of Donald Trump.
At present the party doesn't have a clear identity. Just about everyone can agree on what they're opposed to, but their next blueprint for how to reform the country has yet to be written. Notably the GOP did not release an official platform in 2020, and it's unclear if they will in 2024 either.
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I mean, there are crazy people in America saying stuff like this who are from Christian backgrounds they haven't formally renounced. Why's it different when said crazy person happens to have a Jewish background?
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@FLRW
All of the several thousand people present were involved in constructing a gallows?
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Since I can no longer edit my first post, I'll add this:
If Biden loses, I anticipate that some left-wing brownshirt groups might riot a little but this would be restricted to big cities where I don't live, and it shouldn't last very long, so I'm not personally worried about that.
Basically we're at a stage of sheer bitterness where it's "damned if you do, damned if you don't". But that's not to say all outcomes are equally bad. Admittedly there is some temporarily heightened degree of risk to our republic if Trump wins, but assuming he dies/retires on cue it's also the scenario that gives us the best long-term odds of avoiding a one-party state. Things have escalated too far for us to have the luxury of playing it safe, nominating someone else, and passively onlooking as the system metaphorically buttrapes the former president.
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It's worth noting that Trump is barely younger than Biden, America's oldest president ever. Trump is obese and has led a hedonistic lifestyle from cradle to near-grave. I don't see him being around longer than one more presidential term, assuming he can finish that without dying. Even if somehow he had both the will and the means at his disposal to suspend elections and keep ruling indefinitely post-January 2029, it's questionable if he'd be alive to carry this out, or stay in good enough health to keep going as opposed to just retiring.
The GOP's long-term forecasts should be planning for a future after Trump, not a future with Trump still in it.
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If Trump wins, this will come to an end.
The elites have thrown everything at Trump they can possibly throw. If they succeed, they could hypothetically try the same thing against Trump's successor, even if he's a vanilla moderate with a relatively spotless record like Mitt Romney. But if they fail here, there's zero possibility of it working on a future Mitt Romney guy and the Republican Party post-Trump will be safe from its candidates being successfully prosecuted as punishment for running for/holding office as a conservative. The elites will observe the limit of Democrat power and conclude that their political strategy of exclusively backing Dems isn't more profitable than hedging their bets between the two parties, so Republicans will reap a windfall.
Trump wouldn't be in a position to try January 6 again if he loses, since he isn't President and Congress wouldn't go along with it, but he probably has enough clout to incite civil unrest through a bunch of incendiary tweets. The elites are key beneficiaries of the current regime and are unlikely to try to destabilize it when they could simply adapt to a President Trump. Biden himself, I think, is tired and would rather step down peacefully than try to fight a dangerous fight.
The final question is one of Trump's retaliation if he wins. I don't see this happening violently, but it could mean the "2025 plan" or whatever it's called. As for this I wouldn't be too worried. Trump was barely able to finish like 1/4th of the wall's length if that. Sweepingly ambitious plans mean little when you lack the means to pull them off. Trump's first two years saw a GOP majority in both houses of Congress and they still didn't want to cooperate with him more than they had to. Imagine if there's a split Congress, or heaven forbid, a Dem majority in both. If Trump is able to put some aspects of this plan into effect, we can assume that he has the rightful legal authority to do so and it wouldn't amount to a coup.
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Cool. Here's my list:
Movies:
1. Birth of a Nation
2. The Room
3. 120 Days of Sodom
Anime:
1. Boku no Pico
2. Oreimo
3. Redo of Healer
4. One Piece
TV Shows:
1. Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood
2. Super Why
3. Tomorrow's Pioneers
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