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@Vader
Congratulations.
A word of advice from someone in his late 20s:
From this point on, while you will age you won't automatically move forward. There is the path of least resistance, in which you can live comfortably and enjoy a good amount of leisure time. Say, a routine where you clock in for 40 mindless hours a week where the only thing on your mind is going home. Without conscious and continuous effort, this is where you'll end up.
The drawback is that you'll stay in one place, as one year rolls over to the next and to the next. You may well wake up at 28 and find that you're not better off than you were at 23. There may or may not be a heaven and a hell, but regarding this present life you only have one shot. If you get a few years older and realize you've irreversibly lost time without accomplishing anything during it, that won't be a good feeling at all.
Another thing: school is an environment where your peers are mostly the same age, and you're forced to interact in a common space that conduces itself naturally to friendships. The "real world" isn't like that. It'll be very easy to find yourself friendless and adrift. You won't see your college friends every day, or every week, or every month. Your coworkers will usually be people in their 30s, 40s, or 50s, and they're unlikely to share your interests and hobbies. There won't be a lot of women your age, nor contexts that are appropriate for flirting. If in high school you asked out the girl who you shared one class and had interacted twice with, then whatever. Sometimes it'd work out, sometimes it wouldn't. Either way the stakes are low. But if you do the same to a woman on the streets, or to the regular barista at your coffee shop, then that's sexual harassment. Now, I'm assuming you already knew this much, but I say it to drive home the point. There are dating apps, but those are dumpster fires and internet horror stories of the dating app experience, especially for men, abound.
I'm sorry to put a damper on the occasion, but that's what you should expect. Plan accordingly and perhaps you'll make it work out despite everything I've said.
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Today, March 6, a 40-day boycott of Target kicked off. This event was declared by majority-Black churches in protest of Target's cancelling of its DEI policies. Presumably, most participants will be Black, while at the same time, the average Target customer in Feb. 2023 was "a woman who is 39 years old, White, married, with a household income of $80,000."
What are your predictions of the boycott's impact on Target's quarterly profits? What, if any, social ramifications of the boycott do you anticipate?
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@ebuc
Congrats to her, as her explanation feels plausible enough that it's probably right. When it's a man we credit him as an individual rather than singing the praises of his whole sex, but whatever.
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@Best.Korea
Even in the best of system, there is 1% to 5% rate of innocents being declared guilty.
I don't believe this is a current statistic. Perhaps there are still guys on the books from like the '80s or the early '90s, back when forensic science wasn't what it is now and DNA testing wasn't widely employed if at all, and they get counted when researchers come up with these numbers.
But new convictions? Nah, I don't buy it. And even insofar as there's still a small handful, I don't buy the whole "Better a thousand guilty people go free than one innocent person is wrongly convicted" talking point. You cannot sacrifice a functioning society at the altar of an unattainable perfect ideal.
As for racial bias, I would argue the opposite is true today. In general, jurors and judges would be more likely to scrutinize themselves for any biases that might cloud their thinking in the case of a black defendant than a white one.
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@Owen_T
Yes. If done right, the death penalty can deter crime, save taxpayers money, ensure that a given profligate will never return to the streets (there have been cases where released killers in their 70s or 80s went on to kill again), and remind the public how morally serious the crime of taking a human life is, since a lot of pop culture seems to cheapen the act. But the right conditions need to be met.
On one hand, if you have a democracy so backslid that the state's throwing people in jail for exercising their inalienable free speech rights, you don't want them having the death penalty as another tool in their toolbelt to clamp down on dissent with. So the death penalty should be reserved for a country where rule of law is strong, and it should be strictly reserved for crimes that either cause a person to lose their life or cross a certain threshold of severity in terms of permanent bodily mutilation dealt to the victim. And if your country is locked in a bitter culture war where one side wants to misinterpret "severe bodily mutilation" to make a slew of lesser crimes death penalty-eligible using spurious arguments or analogies, then this could be narrowed to just homicides.
On the other hand, there are countries with legal systems unnecessarily jumbled and borderline unworkable in the name of rule of law. A death row inmate in the United States can tie up the courts for 10 years trying to appeal his sentence. As a result, the death penalty deters no one, it saves taxpayers no money, and it hardly does more to keep thugs off the streets than a long prison sentence.
The framers of the Constitution, of course, were fine with a man being strung up 24 hours after his conviction for murder, so the relevant clauses of the Constitution needn't be interpreted in such a restrictive way as most contemporary jurists do. So here's how the death penalty could be made workable:
(1). There is only one court of appeal for death penalty cases; if a state government would execute you, then it's a state appellate court; if the Federal government, then a Federal appellate court. The only question this court will consider is whether you were rightly or wrongly convicted of the crime in question, not the fairness of said penalty.
(2). This court works on a rigid timetable. You have, say, one month after your sentencing to submit an appeal to them, or else your execution will proceed as planned. After this, they have, say, 3 months to accept your case. After this, they have a total of 1 year to complete your case. If they fail to meet the deadline, it'll be treated by default as though your death sentence was upheld by said court. If upheld, then you will be executed either within 48 hours of said upholding or on the stipulated due date of your sentence, whichever comes later. As a result, prisoners whose sentences are not overturned will be executed no later than 16 months and 2 days after their initial sentencing.
(3). The appellate court is permitted to decline to hear your case, such as if you're obviously guilty of the crime in question. If it does (and not otherwise), then you are entitled to file in the aforementioned other appellate court. If it too declines to hear your case, then you have exhausted all avenues of appeal and your execution will proceed as planned. So then, an obviously guilty man in a state where the courts weren't packed with ideologue hacks could expect to die within 4 months or so.
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The plan explained from one of the embedded links:
"Most Americans believe that insuring people who cannot afford health-care coverage — assuming it can be done cost effectively without reducing the quality of care — is a proper goal of public policy. Such a goal can indeed be responsibly pursued, if we conceive of it in terms of real insurance. We should aim, in other words, to make catastrophic coverage available to everyone.
Outside of health care, there are almost no forms of insurance that cover small and routine expenses. Auto insurance does not pay for oil changes. Home owner's insurance does not pay for house painting. Rather, both of these forms of insurance protect their beneficiaries from only serious or catastrophic financial losses — from costs involved in, say, a serious car accident or a devastating house fire. If otherwise unaffordable health expenses were covered by insurance, and routine health expenses were treated like normal household expenditures, the entire population would be shielded from devastating losses while an efficient consumer market in health care could emerge.
A sensible and affordable health-insurance system would thus be based on universal catastrophic coverage. The federal government could actually provide it to every one of the 209 million Americans who are not already covered by public insurance, and at a cost far lower than that of the Affordable Care Act.
Catastrophic insurance involves nothing more than a high-deductible policy that covers all, or nearly all, health-care expenses in excess of the deductible amount. For today's uninsured Americans, such coverage would offer vital protections they do not now have. For those who are now insured, it would displace the catastrophic portion of their existing insurance policies — whether employer-provided or individually purchased — thereby reducing the costs of those plans.
To be sure, a high-deductible plan could leave some people with higher out-of-pocket costs than they would like or think they can afford. But nothing in this proposal would preclude employers from providing insurance to supplement the catastrophic-coverage plan supplied by the government. Nor would any individual be prohibited from purchasing supplemental insurance in the private market. The key, however, is that the premiums for such supplemental coverage would no longer receive the tax subsidies provided in our current system. Everyone in the private market, regardless of his circumstances, would receive the same benefit and the same catastrophic coverage. Beyond that, the market would be left to work.
It is impossible to lay out every detail of such a proposal here, but a basic outline is not difficult to sketch. It would involve a publicly funded universal catastrophic-coverage benefit, largely funded by a dedicated per-capita tax. Since the new benefit would reduce each beneficiary's current insurance costs by a like amount, the vast majority of beneficiaries could pay the full amount of the tax out of these savings. Those who are needy would receive subsidies (from a series of revenue sources and savings described below)."
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@Shila
True. Also, if Israel holds onto the Philadelphi Corridor then it'll be difficult for Hamas to resupply itself through smuggling.
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All that is sensational nonsense. He is not going to take Canada, nor Panama, nor Gaza. Never going to happen; ESPECIALLY Gaza.
True.
The current power dynamics dictate that the colonial pocket of Israel is a political reality
You wouldn't speak of Egypt, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia only existing because of "current power dynamics". These are countries in their own right, they have every right to exist, and this right has no expiration date. Israel is the exact same way - a permanent majority-Jewish state, in the same way that there are dozens of permanent majority-Arab states.
for it was successfully inserted in the region by relevant Colonial powers after the fall of the Ottoman Empire & the subsequent occupation of the region
The Jews resettled Palestine in large numbers during the late 19th and early 20th century. So what? The Arabs themselves conquered and colonized Palestine, and that's the only reason you consider it an Arab land today. From my point of view, both acts of colonization are ancient history; that one piece of ancient history just happens to be more recent than the other (and the expulsion of the Jews from Israel is the most ancient piece of history of all) is irrelevant to the discussion.
What's relevant is that both Jews and Arabs are in the Middle East today. The question is how to make sure that both groups have a self-governing space large enough to accommodate their basic needs. At present, that question has been answered satisfactorily, with the exception of the Palestinian question. And the Palestinians are, of course, just Arabs.
Gazans under siege for decades came to two realizations early: that the supremacy of US/Israel military is air power, & that the political solution (to achieve a Palestinian state) is a lie
How do they know when they haven't seriously tried a political solution? Actually, scratch that, they did -- there were two successful Oslo Accords, then they went to the Camp David Accords demanding the moon and the stars, and when that one summit broke down they immediately went on a Jew-killing frenzy, extinguishing all prospects of further diplomatic breakthroughs for a generation. Meanwhile, of course, the people behind the violence of the Second Intifada are either still running the West Bank or at the very least have been afforded safe haven inside of it, and the Palestinian Authority is still paying people to indiscriminately murder Jews.
As for Gaza, in 2005 Israel expelled all Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip (whereas millions of Arab Muslims are allowed to live in Israel proper), and the Gazans immediately proceeded to elect Hamas. At literally any point in the last 20 years the Gazans could've tried removing Hamas and then seeing if the Israelis would sustain the blockade in the face of moderate Gazan leadership, but the Gazans never did.
If the West Bankers and Gazans actually put moderates in charge and stop letting their territory be used as a launchpad for terrorism, they could try negotiating for reasonable terms. Not some mythical, non-existent right-of-return (Israeli Jews who parents/grandparents were expelled from Arab countries have no such right of return), nor any concessions of land in Israel proper, but Israeli non-interference in the affairs of these two countries and the removal of settlers from the West Bank. Then they could negotiate with other Arab states for right of travel.
2 million Palestinians who just lost their land on top of suffering & losing everything else, who successfully fought Israel with the full backing of the West, might just be as successful in taking over the country they were moved into, say Egypt or Jordan.
The PLO tried to take over Jordan in 1970. They failed.
Unlike in Israel, a resistance force launching a coup against the Egyptian regime, for instance, will not face much resistance from the people, if not the opposite.
Which is it? Are neighboring Arabs scared of Palestinian refugees, or would they cheer them on as they seized power in said countries? If the latter, then what do democratically run Arab countries have to lose from accepting millions of Palestinian refugees?
This might lead to the infamous Samson option. But if the Israelis use nuclear, it is certain that all regional powers will rush to acquire their own as fast as possible.
If a vast horde of crazy genocidal Palestinians were to succeed in overrunning Israel, this outcome would be little different from being glassed with nuclear weapons, in which case the Israelis might as well take their enemies down with them.
It is not farfetched to believe that the resistance factions might 10x their forces after this. Which means 10x the fighting force, 10x the weapons & 10x the tunnels. The resistance is growing stronger not weaker.
I agree with you so far as concerns the manpower, if only because a large number of Gazans are too dumb to stop and consider that Hamas might be principally responsible for their suffering. But not for the weapons or smuggling. If Hamas can ill afford to furnish its new recruits with anything more than a basic sidearm, then this army won't be of much use.
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In 3 days, Germany will be holding its parliamentary (Bundestag) elections. The polls have AfD (right) in second place, and CDU (center-right) in first place. Right now AfD controls around 10-12% of seats, but it could plausibly rise above 20% when this is done.
I predict that if both the CDU and AfD perform well enough to win a combined 50% of seats, then the longstanding "firewall" against AfD will collapse.
This is due to two factors: first, the CDU has to some extent moved rightward in the past few years in a bid to court voters who would otherwise support AfD. Second, an ascendant AfD will cause the German left to panic. They've already psyched themselves into believing that your average AfD voter is a crypto-Nazi, even though this obviously isn't true, and after such an upset loss they'll scapegoat the CDU and start hurling Nazi accusations at them too.
In other words, the CDU post-election will have heightened expectations that the German left parties work with them to pass an at least vaguely right-wing agenda, and the German left parties will be more strongly inclined to refuse than ever before. Eventually the CDU will get frustrated enough to reach across the aisle and work with AfD parliamentarians to pass something.
Once that taboo has been violated once, it'll cease to exist. CDU will grow more amenable to the idea of cooperating with the AfD, while the German left parties will respond to this initial violation by doubling down on its refusal to work with the CDU. At this point, the CDU will be forced to team up with AfD to have a governing majority, and that will be that.
That's my prediction, anyway.
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Looks like this is the House's proposal. The Senate still has a chance to stop it.
March 14 is a date to keep an eye on, since it appears that rather than a normal fiscal year being in effect, the USFG is currently funded by a continuing resolution which expires then. I expect the standard pork barrel to buy the government a few more months, maybe kicking the debt up to around $38 trillion, and then the future of our country will be decided later in the year.
Right now the fiscal hardliners, who are willing to impose the austerity and run the legal challenges that it takes to save America from ruin in the face of a completely useless Congress and heavily politicized courts, have Trump's ear. But Trump is neither a principled nor ideologically consistent man. He could just as easily be persuaded by the establishment to return to business as usual, or by some flight of fancy could persuade himself.
If Trump does stand his ground, then he may compel Congress (which can't count on Democratic votes to override a presidential veto) to pass a balanced budget. If he does so, and it's a precedent-setting move repeated in subsequent years and by subsequent administrations, then he will go down as our Aurelian or Heraclius. But if not, then he is Nero and Caligula wrapped into one man.
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@Mall
If you can leave the relationship without incurring an unacceptable cost (e.g. loss of parental custody or assets you need to live comfortably), then do it. Don't hesitate. Your intrinsic worth and dignity as a person, and right not to be mistreated, is no less than that of a woman. Even if being abused doesn't take a serious physical toll (though some men are indeed murdered or maimed by their wives), it'll ruin your mental and emotional health, which can shorten your lifespan and make the time you do have left hardly worth living.
If you can't leave, then either mitigate or deter the misbehavior.
Mitigation could entail, for example, checking out. In other words, spending as little time at home as you possibly can. Wearing headphones and listening to music or a podcast at home. Taking long phone calls at home so that your wife feels obliged to hold her tongue until you are finished. Perhaps go around with a Bluetooth in your ear so she's left guessing whether you are on the phone or not. Or, mitigation could mean taking care of little things that you know tend to set off your abusive wife. For example, taking out the trash or whatnot.
If you feel sexually dependent on your abusive wife and lack the willpower for sexual abstinence, then pick up a discrete porn habit. Morally speaking, a partner who chooses to seriously abuse you has chosen to sever the marital bond, so it wouldn't be completely immoral to have an affair under these circumstances, but again, it may not be advisable if our misandrist court system makes it prohibitively costly to do something that would cause her to divorce you.
Deterrence means credibly signaling to your wife that there's a price to be paid if she chooses to escalate. For example, filming her and threatening to post the footage online if she goes ballistic. Retain any footage, such as by uploading it to a cloud account your wife doesn't know about/can't access, as evidence in any future court proceedings or for the "court" of public opinion.
Physically restraining your violent wife counts as mitigation, not deterrence, since you've given her no particular reason not to try again in the future. Though, if she feels humiliated by being overpowered, then it might sometimes deter.
While it's not immoral to hit a woman after she hit you first, our law is rife with double standards and you would likely end up being arrested while she gets a pass. If you do elect to go down the road of physically harming her to deter future violence, then I would suggest a strong warning first. For example, if she throws a plate at you, then throw a plate back, but narrowly miss her. If that fails and actually hurting her is the only way to deter her, then choose a method that leaves no physical trace. Something that she could go to the police and claim happened, but she wouldn't likely be able to prove it. So long as no child witnessed or heard this (i.e. it happened while they were away from the house), you should be in the clear; even if the police did arrest you, they would end up releasing you so long as you stuck to your guns and denied everything, and left behind no incriminating evidence.
This should, of course, be treated as a last resort instead of a first resort. And this should only be done in the case of physical abuse; beating the crap out of someone and talking the crap out of someone aren't equally bad, and the latter doesn't justify the former. Verbal abuse, again, has a very simple, non-violent fix in the form of tuning out with headphones or getting into your car and going to a pub.
Ideally, before any of the above, first make sure that your wife is indeed an irredeemable abuser and that the marriage can't be salvaged through counseling. Perhaps you yourself have issues to work out. If she's willing to try this option with you, then try it.
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@n8nrgim
the top one percent own about 45 trillion worth of wealth. a two percent wealth tax would raise about 900 billion dollars per year. we spend about four or five trillion a year, so cutting that would save another 4 or 500 billion per year. our deficit is 1.8 trillion.
That wealth is largely in stocks or other investments they haven't liquidated, and the rich aren't big spenders (over-the-top frugality is a character trait which contributes to becoming wealthy in the first place) with the taxes already in place, not counting the additional taxes you would impose. So my question is, how much would you realistically raise this way?
Assuming you were to impose an unrealized capital gains tax (which would obviously raise a lot less than $900 billion at two percent), what would stop a bunch of whales from manipulating the markets so that they dip on tax day and then bounce back the day after? For example, if Jeff Bezos wanted to deflate the valuation of his roughly 9 percent share in Amazon on tax day, why couldn't he order Amazon to cut down on stock buybacks during and in the month before tax day, or have a million bots trade with each other at low prices, so that demand for Amazon temporarily cools?
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Friendly reminder that multi-year tax cuts are multi-year, while a new budget has to be passed annually. In other words, if you see that the tax cuts are still in effect and you vote for a budget exceeding projected receipts anyway, then you don't get to blame the tax cuts for the ensuing deficit.
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@Greyparrot
Ukraine gives up the Russian speaking Donbas and gets some protective assurances from Europe. Will that be "not to lose"?
It would be at least a partial loss, yes. I'm also not sure if a few hundred or even a few thousand boy-faced Belgian peacekeepers with sparkly rifles would pose a credible deterrent to Russia. Any serious proposal would have to involve the Americans, but Trump breaks deals on a whim and I wouldn't blame Zelensky for not trusting us at the moment.
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There absolutely is a marketplace, which is why I get a chuckle out of salty Anglican/Catholic dioceses which think they can accuse Evangelical church planters of "encroaching" on "their" territory.
You can't stop competition; you can impede it with state violence, but I can attest that Christian missionaries still routinely work in countries where it's illegal for them to do so, and I'm assuming that these efforts are yielding some bang for the financer's buck, which is why they keep getting funded. The best response in the face of competition is to accept the challenge instead of trying to repress it or pretending it doesn't exist.
In Nigeria, Christian contemporary worship draws huge crowds on Sundays. That includes many people from Muslim backgrounds, who like the experience they're getting. Most Nigerian mosques, of course, shake their fists in the air and complain about this development. But a few have started offering contemporary-style Friday prayer services. And you know what? This actually seems to work.
But Islam at large won't learn any of these lessons. It'll double down on violence and repression, and insist that the only path to God is through the cultural trappings of 9th century Arabia, no matter how opaque or unattractive these are to diverse modern audiences. C.S. Lewis, despite hailing from a church of Medieval Latin tradition, wrote a book called Mere Christianity, which boiled the faith down to its simple, universal message for mankind. But Muslims will not promote a "Mere Islam", because they cannot bring themselves to do things differently from the way they've always done such.
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@Greyparrot
Ukraine has lost when the foreign invaders conquer all or most of the country, and have brought all or most of the Ukrainian populace under their heel. Or, more modestly, when Ukraine signs a treaty formally renouncing/de facto relinquishing its sovereignty over the occupied territories with zero credible assurances that Russia won't attack again in the future.
Ukraine has not lost until something to the above effect happens.
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@tigerlord
State-enforced monopolies rarely offer products/services which are competitive in a free market. Same with the free marketplace of ideas; the idea that a religion has to be propped up by violent anti-apostasy laws, or by a credible fear of being lynched even where it's nominally legal to renounce Islam, suggests it cannot compete on its own merits.
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@Greyparrot
80% of the country's land, and around 90% of its population, is still independent from Russia. If we keep supplying them, that'll most likely still be true one year from now.
Also, I said "not lose". This is distinct from "not losing", which very gradually conceding territory doesn't look like but it also doesn't speak to what the battlefield will look like in the future.
Russia is, again, losing soldiers faster than Ukraine, with possibly 2x as many dead. And while Russia has a much bigger population, Putin doesn't want to make this into a war of mass conscription, since he doesn't know if the Russian public has the stomach for that, whereas the Ukrainians have already made that sacrifice and are prepared to keep doing so.
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You're right, by the way. "Ukraine will win the war" is hopeful thinking. But that mantra, repeated over and over, inspired the US and Europe for 3 years to give Ukraine what it needed to not lose. What if the West called Ukraine hopeless in March 2022 and did nothing? It would've definitely been hopeless then, right?
It wasn't a lie or a prophetic prediction. It was and is a rallying cry; or, a declaration that you'll do what it takes to build the future you want to see.
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@Greyparrot
Ukraine might lose now. But it didn't have to be this way.
4 days before Trump's inauguration, it was reported that Ukraine's army had swelled to a total size of 880,000 men, facing down a force of 600,000 Russians.
This is after nearly 3 years of fighting. Rather than running out of men any day now, as armchair experts have been predicting for the last year or two, Ukraine's army is bigger than it's ever been. And they haven't even started drafting their women yet.
Rather than turning into a unstoppable military juggernaut a la the Soviet Union in WW2, like all the armchair experts predicted at the war's onsest, after three years of mobilizing its economy for war Russia is still unable to break the deadlock. This is increasingly a war of guys riding in the back of pickups (or literal donkeys) and being blown to smithereens by drones. They're still importing shells from North Korea, and outsourcing North Korean troops to fill their own manpower shortages. Since, you know, at some point they were going to run out of prisoners who could be goaded to throw themselves into a meat grinder willingly.
In 2024, they seized 1,600 square miles of territory in Ukraine. Which sounds impressive, but remember that Ukraine is 233,000 square miles in size. Assuming 20% of Ukraine's land has been taken to date, Ukraine could sustainably continue to give up land and bleed the enemy at this pace for the next century. America gave up and went home in Vietnam after 8 years. So did the Soviets in Afghanistan after 9 years. Mind you, when a country stops fighting and goes home, all of its territorial gains become moot overnight. The Ukrainians know this.
All they need is for us to stay in their corner. Another year or two of this and Putin might finally blink.
When he's losing 200-250 men a day (and those are just the dead), eventually he'll lose enough men that he either loses the war or has to resort to dragging posh youths off the streets of St. Petersburg and into boot camp. And what then? How long and how far could the Russian public's apathy outweigh its basic self-interest?
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On January 20, a border patrol agent named David Maland pulled over two self-identified transwomen, who were connected to a fringe sect known as the Zizians. This traffic stop turned into a shootout in which Maland was shot and killed.
The group's namesake is their founder, Jack "Ziz" LaSota. The Zizians are known to recruit self-identified, "mostly autistic" transwomen with ties to the "rationalist" online community and have been linked to murders in three states. They espouse radical veganism, and were known to have beef (no pun intended) with the more mainstream rationalist community; otherwise, it's unclear what exactly the Zizians' motivations are.
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What Trump really needs are some friends to privately bounce his random shower thoughts off of, as opposed to the global public. Like with anything else, all you can do is hold your breath and wait for him to lose interest and move on to some other topic. Which he inevitably will.
And yes, it's sad that the office of President of the United States has come to this. But we live in a winner-take-all two party system, so.
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@n8nrgim
Loaded language. For one thing, there is no "unlawful coup". Whether the Administration's ongoing rescission/impoundment of appropriated funds is lawful or not (he's been in office less than 45 days, for one thing; for another, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act's constitutionality will likely be challenged in courts soon), nothing about it has the character of trying to overthrow the government. If anything, he is rendering the Executive Branch, which is his purview, less powerful.
As for moral justification, I would say that depends on whether Trump's serious about slashing the deficit. We are $36 trillion in the hole, and when Republicans enjoyed a trifecta from 2017 to 2019 it went down as one of the least productive Congresses in history. In other words, waiting on Congress to balance the budget is a fool's errand. We know they won't do squat.
To quote Abraham Lincoln, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. And of course, a less prominent law than the Constitution cannot have the effect of a suicide pact either.
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@Sidewalker
In 2018, Trump recklessly disbanded the White House pandemic response team, for no other reason that it was Obama who had put it in place
The Global Health Security and Biodefense unit, established in 2015, was abolished by John Bolton (not Trump), for what Wikipedia (the cited articles are hidden behind paywalls) described as "part of a plan to streamline the National Security Council and merge duplicate offices". Many/most of the personnel who worked for the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit were reassigned to different agencies subordinate to the National Security Council, including those which did pandemic-related work.
Furthermore, the idea that Covid (which plagued Europe at similar per capita rates as the US) could've been stopped had the Fed retained a few extra employees is absurd on its face.
he also made funding cuts to the CDC at that time
Incorrect. Trump stated in his budget proposal that he wanted cuts to the CDC, but Congress did not approve such. The CDC's FY2020 funding approved by Congress, and which Trump ultimately signed off on, stood at $420 million higher than in FY2019. Their FY2019 budget, likewise, was $261 million higher than in FY2018. The CDC's FY2017 and FY2018 budgets, meanwhile, were similar in size.
But sure, Trump wanted cuts, even if he didn't get them. To which I say: yeah, so what?
Before Covid, we'd gone a cool hundred years without a pandemic like it, and there had been such monumental strides in medicine and public hygiene/sanitation since the 1910s. There was stuff like SARS and Ebola, which were quickly contained, and HIV, whose victims more or less chose to infect themselves. Other than that? Zilch. It made intuitive sense up until the microsecond before Covid hit to treat pandemic response as a low budget priority. Every dollar that went into pandemic response was a dollar not spent on something else, or which got added to the national debt.
By analogy, the USFG today spends not a single dime on preparing to deflect asteroids which pose a threat to life on earth, because there probably won't be such an asteroid. And if, against all odds, one hit tomorrow and killed a billion people, the president(s) who oversaw said lack of investment in asteroid deflection wouldn't have been at fault. Why not? Because normal, rational people don't go to great pains to prepare for fringe anomalies which they have no reason to think will happen.
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@Sidewalker
I didn't say it directly caused the DC crash, but it is the kind of uninformed recklessness that will increase the likelihood of further aviation disasters.
Any radical organizational shakeup will produce chaos and harm its efficiency in the short-term. This doesn't make them not worth doing.
For example, see the Air Traffic Controller Strike of 1981. Reagan fired more than 11,000 skilled employees whose job was to keep planes from crashing into each other. If there was ever a time for Democrats to scream bloody murder and accuse the Republican President of being a crypto-fascist who wanted to kill people, it would be then.
But in the long run, Reagan's firing vastly improved the efficiency of air travel by preventing disruptive strike actions which grounded much of the United States and created uncertainty as to whether the towers needed to help planes already in the air land safely would be manned at the pivotal minutes in question.
My point being, the long-term ramifications of Trump Administration's shakeup of the Federal workforce remain to be seen. Right now the media wants you to panic and suppose that only horrible outcomes will result from whatever Trump is doing, but you shouldn't.
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@Sidewalker
Mind you, this is al-Jazeera. Not exactly a right-wing source. In any case, whatever the optics of Trump making that call right before this accident happened, it has no actual bearing on such.
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Let the matter be duked out in the courts. Only when there's a singular consensus by the judiciary that Trump may not proceed with his plan, upon which he attempts to do so anyway in the same unmodified form, can this accusation be reasonably levied.
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There were two groups on January 6: "the walkers", who are guilty of nothing except trespassing in a government building they didn't have permission to be inside (democracy can be a little messy at times), and "the scum", who are guilty of vandalism, assaulting cops, attempted kidnapping, etc.
While most of the walkers are probably decent people and it wasn't unreasonable to give them pardons, I will agree that the scum needed to be held fully accountable for their actions, and that it's a travesty this didn't happen. Trump could've taken this slow, reviewed each individual case, and made a decision (or left this up to a team of advisors to make final recommendations to him), but instead he rushed the process and went with an undeserved blanket pardon.
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To clarify also, the wording of his ban had to do with the specific content (defending Musk) of what I was arguing for, rather than any pattern of excessive argumentiveness on my part. I probably could've made that more clear in my original post.
I've gone since joining the site, which was 2+ years ago, without any moderation action against me (albeit with one completely unrelated warning back in mid-2023 because I used the word "trap" to describe a cute male character), but today they were apparently so triggered by a defense of Elon Musk that they stopped giving a crap about fairness altogether.
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@WyIted
I can tell you from experience, leftists are having the brain meltdown of the century over Musk's supposed sieg heil.
I'm active on a different forum, dedicated to a certain video game series rather than debating. It does, however, have one thread where political commentary gets a pass; whether or not it does officially according to the rules, that has been the de facto situation for quite a long time. Anyway, yesterday evening I dared to suggest that, based on a number of differences between the historical sieg heil and Musk's gesture, there's no reason to assume that Musk intended to do a sieg heil, and that the only way to prove Musk's intent one way or another is to ask him.
The far-left users of that site, who were strangely quiet on inauguration day itself, lost their fucking minds over what I was saying. People got triggered that I was supposedly pushing "Nazi apologia", whatever that means. One guy declared "I'm not going to post in here so long as he's here", and of course I was being wolfpacked from several different angles and being verbally abused well beyond what I was dishing out.
To reiterate, I wasn't arguing "Nazism isn't bad, actually". I was saying "Musk's gesture is ambiguous and we can't prove it's a Nazi gesture". That's literally it. I said not the slightest thing wrong or ban-worthy. Mind you, I will admit that in at least one instance in the past, I deserved an internet ban imposed on me (on a different website). But that emphatically wasn't the case this time.
I could've forgiven the verbally abusive exchange, because I've had exchanges like it before; not all the time, but maybe once every couple of months or half a year, or even longer than that. But then that absolute mouthbreathing cvnt-wipe of a mod, apparently the only active mod on that forum, imposed himself into the conversation as if he was solemnly confronting some disturbance to the community's peace (I was arguing civilly, aside from once saying that X user was "slandering an innocent man", and in fact had already publicly stated that I was going to end the argument) and gave me 8-9 days for some fabricated crime, and told me I was "on thin ice" for this supposed crime and that "this is your only warning". Again, for doing absolutely nothing. In his delusional mind, of course, I did do something, but that doesn't change the actual facts. And of course, he took zero actions against the myriad of people who talked shit to me.
"Snowflakes" is beyond trite at this point, but liberals 100% deserve the label if this is how they treat merely disputing that it was, in fact, a sieg heil and not something else (as it plausibly could've been and probably was). It seems to me they're increasingly unable to cope with normal everyday reality where different viewpoints coexist, hence their needless gravitation toward echo chambers like BlueSky despite not being the victims of mass censorship on platforms like Twitter.
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@Greyparrot
He shouldn't. Sounds like it's not a good deal.
Israel would end the blockade (needed to keep Hamas from smuggling in weapons/materials needed to manufacture weapons) and Hamas, still in charge of 100% of the Gaza Strip after Israel's withdrawal, would pinkie-promise not to rebuild its arsenal. Of course, after lifting the blockade and it having been lifted for a while, the diplomatic blowback to Israel from reimposing it if Hamas reneged on its end would be considerable. Meaning Hamas could probably get away with a slow rebuilding of its capabilities. And with unrestricted access to the high seas, who knows what sort of fancy toys they could import?
What did Hamas and the people of Gaza get out of this? Everything and nothing. On one hand, they were ultimately rewarded for the murder of 1,200 Israelis. Hamas will be able to tell its constituents "See? Extreme and indiscriminate violence against Jews works! It got the blockade (in place since 2007) taken down! Let's do more of that in the future!"
On the other, they'll still be living under the thumb of totalitarian jihadists and Israel's going to have to do this all over again in 5-10 years. They'll have to kill another 50,000 or so Gazans, and sacrifice however many of their own soldiers were killed doing urban warfare again. The 50,000 or so who died this time around died in vain, because their deaths did not secure any sort of lasting peace.
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@Savant
Nazis are a small club of centenarians living obscure lives in Europe.
Neo-Nazis identify with the Nazi label, or ascribe to an explicitly pro-genocide (which here necessarily means mass murder, and doesn't include ideas like bloodless/nearly bloodless "cultural genocide") ideology targeting groups traditionally hated by the right-wing, especially Jews, and which is informed by a racial hierarchy with whites at top and non-whites at the bottom. Communists have traditionally supported the murder of clergy, landowners, etc., but these are standard targets of the left-wing, not the right, and such is uninformed by belief in a racial hierarchy. Hence, one can be pro-genocide without being by definition a neo-Nazi.
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@whiteflame
#1. Mairimashita! Iruma-kun! - You may've seen stills of the anime and been turned off by the weird, perhaps cheap art, but this is actually really good, and it's the only non-romcom I've been reading consistently for the last few years. It's like early-entry Harry Potter that doesn't get too dark, while still being serious and fresh enough to be entertaining for the adult reader.
Plus, it'll last you a heck of a long time, with 377 chapters. Don't be intimidated by this, and remember that you're free to drop any manga you find boring. But my guess is you won't be bored.
#2. Takarakuji de 40-Oku Atattandakedo Isekai ni Ijuu Suru - This is about a random dude who won the lottery in Japan, found a portal to an isekai world that he can cross into and leave at any time, and he spends his fortune helping this primitive civilization develop itself. Like, at one point he's teaching the Medieval princess how to fill out spreadsheets on Excel, though for the most part he helps them gradually move up the tech tree by their own efforts. My only warning is that the English translation basically stops around Chapter 66, leaving this story incomplete.
#3. Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - I discovered this one a few months ago, and it was weird and amazing. It did the Kara no Kyoukai "broadcast out of order" thing about a year before Panoramic View came out, and it did it well. My only regret is the lack of new content after the movie. Watch the anime for this one, and do not skip the "Endless Eight".
In a nutshell, this eccentric chick is God and doesn't consciously realize it, so aliens, time travelers, and psychics from across the universe have converged on her location to quietly monitor her and keep her from destroying/remaking the universe on an unconscious whim.
#4. Kanojo mo Kanojo - A trashy romcom but one that's fun and clever. Read the manga, not the anime.
#5. Milgram - An anime music video series that you can find on YouTube. There's a group of 10 "prisoners". Each sings a total of 3 songs, hinting at the murder they committed.
#6. Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War - A video game released for the Super Nintendo in 1996. An old-school Japanese RPG with incredibly deep lore, albeit constrained by the low memory and storage of the SNES.
You can play it online by downloading a SNES emulator, such as Snes9x, and then a ROM for this game with an English translation patch. Trust me, I'm a complete blathering idiot with zero computer literacy skills but I figured it out by myself in one evening, and you can too. I played it on a laptop, but reportedly you can set it up on mobile if that's more up your alley.
The game took me about 2 months to finish (I mainly played it at night), and then it had a 99 chapter manga by Mitsuki Oosawa, which is a deep dive into the events of the game. The manga does get a little freaky at times, as it's done in the style of a 1990s shoujo and the game itself does have some weird plot points which the manga heavily emphasizes, but if you can stomach that, then it's a pretty good read up until the end of the game's first act (c. Chapter 60). The chapters are pretty long, so don't let the whole "60 chapters" bit fool you. This will take you a little while.
#7. Silver Plan to Redo from JK - A story about a woman who wasted her life, and entered her 50s in a state of homelessness. She dies and reverts to her teenage self, back when her family was still rich (the 1990s economic crash bankrupted them). Her original self was a heartless spoiled brat but she resolves to be better and live frugally. Basically a real-world take on "reformed villainess" storylines. I enjoyed this manga quite a bit, and it hasn't ended yet.
#8. No, Miyahara, Not You - An innocent fluff-piece about some kids. An enjoyable read, though there's not a lot of chapters.
#9. Ascendance of a Bookworm - Just try it. It was different and fun.
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@WyIted
The media reports suggest that the company was knowingly using AI that denied claims incorrectly and I guess the insinuation was that it was intentional. Have you looked into the intentional lly employing defective AI accusations?
This doesn't surprise me, but like I wrote, they need some excuse or another to deny a high percentage of their customers or else they'll go bankrupt. At least using AI lowers clerical costs and potentially lets that number be a little lower than it otherwise would.
For reference, see this article:
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At first, and for a good long while, I was firmly in the camp of "Brian Thompson is a murderer, the law that declared his actions legal voided the right to reasonably expect that a vigilante wouldn't take him out to avenge his tens of thousands of victims, assuming his killer wasn't one of them". After all, UnitedHealthCare does deny a shocking 32% of all claims. That appeared to me like fraud and indirect murder.
But I happened to dig just a little bit deeper, and here is what I found. In 2024 UHC had a Medical Care Ratio of roughly 85%. This means that, of all the premium money they collect, 85% of it gets paid out in the form of medical care, meaning only 15% is available for administrative costs and profit. With 85% of revenue covering just 68% of claims, then at a hypothetical 100% (e.g. no company employee gets paid and they're all literally working for free out of the goodness of their hearts) that'd still leave UHC with a roughly 20% claim denial rate.
So what's the real problem with UHC? It's cheap healthcare, catering to a low-income base who can't afford better than its premiums (or who enrolled in UHC as a benefit of low-skilled, low-paid jobs in industries like retail or fast food whose employers won't pay for better) but customers expect that their medical bills will be taken care of the same way BCBS or whatnot would. But UHC can't afford to pay out the same as BCBS, because it has a dearth of richer clients paying into the system. They're enrolled in better insurance, which exists on a separate, segregated plane from UHC.
So what could UHC have done differently? Nothing, really. Had they paid out more claims, they would've run out of money. Had they charged higher premiums, fewer people could've afforded to be enrolled with UHC. Popular rage should be redirected toward the root causes of expensive medicine, and not toward a framework that rose to such prominence as a mere reaction to such. This is my understanding, anyway.
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@Reece101
Under the ideal system, prisons would be near-net-zero cost. Able bodied prisoners who could work but refused, assuming they had no money, would not only be denied food and water but their "cell" would be an outdoor space surrounded by walls. At most they'd have their basic needs provided for one or two months, long enough to collect a paycheck.
Prisons would contract out with companies to have factories adjacent to the prison grounds. People working there would make at least minimum wage, with a deduction equaling rent, utilities/amenities, and whatever it costs the prison to guard them, with those in lower security wings paying less and those in higher security wings paying more. Any prisoner willing to work 60-80 hours a week could make ends meet and perhaps save a little money. If your family outside prison (or some charity) was willing to pitch in, or if you had ample savings at the start of your imprisonment, then you might not have to work that much.
Prisoners would be allowed to seek work outside of prisons if they consented to have a tracker implanted under their skin. Then, in theory, they could hold down any job they wanted, assuming they were able to get transportation for it. Those who kept their heads down, diligently pursued career development, and climbed the ladder could end up living in roughly middle-class condos in the prison's low-security wing, and perhaps have their families stay with them if they were willing to do that. Low-security prisoners who had the money could buy any good that was vetted first and not deemed a security risk.
Prison jobs, or good jobs that prisoners found outside of prison, could include health plans among their benefits. In theory also, prisoners could apply for things like Medicare/Medicaid so long as these programs continued to exist, or any state programs like it. But if, in theory, their imprisonment left them unable to stay insured, I wouldn't lose any sleep over this, since choosing to commit a crime is effectively consent to take the risk that this might happen.
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I don't. The millions of Jews who live in this world are strangers who've done nothing to me. Their religion seems compatible with secularism and liberal values, Israel's strange mixing of rabbinical and governmental authority aside.
From browsing r/Judaism on Reddit it appears that some of them hate us for ancestral grievances, refusing to acknowledge it was mere historical luck of the draw that put our group in a dominant position to oppress theirs and not the other way around, and that Jews were not endowed by nature with a nobler character than Christians or ethnic Europeans. But I'm guessing an overall minority of Jews feel this way. The internet always draws out the opinions of a vocal fringe.
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@Dr.Franklin
The English Peasant lived way worse off than their Continental Catholic counterparts because the landowners were of the mercantilist class and engineered enclosure to drive them off in cities to become laborers which ALSO grossly enriched the mercantilist class.
The British peasants were the first, or among the first, in Europe to escape pre-industrial mass poverty.
I suppose the British economic model was an abject failure for centuries and centuries, and then one day poof it succeeded out of nowhere? Nah, I don't buy it. I think that person for person, late Medieval Britain was more productive than most of Europe, and this translated to more job opportunities and upward mobility for the average person.
Case in point, England's heavy involvement in the lucrative wool trade, which was a heavy driver of enclosure (so that the land could be used for raising sheep instead of farming). That wool could be sold abroad for a profit, so instead of toiling in the sun all day and throwing out your back at 26 for a pithance you could find work as a dockhand or in a factory, and find the best deal. Granted, this is assuming you were legally allowed to leave the fields long enough to hold down work, but by 1574 (by act of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth) the last serf had been freed.
By the late 1700s, Napoleon commented that England was a "nation of shopkeepers", suggesting a large chunk of the population was employed in non-agricultural professions.
The only reason that so many more Brits moved to the New World is because the rural English population had nowhere else to go-they were deeply impoverished.
Or, you know, because England was overcrowded and that would've been the case regardless of the island's religious creed.
But the conceptions around sex in general is different. In Catholicism sex is considered as something inherently good but can be corrupted. Total Depravity doctrine means that Protestants view sex as inherently bad.
Setting aside your blatant strawman of what Total Depravity means, I'll ask you this question: which group, Catholics or Protestants, allows their clergy to marry? Which group's priests wear fancy gilded robes as if to brag about their elite spiritual lifestyle, while in truth being sexually frustrated and having secret gay flings with each other or molesting adolescent boys as their only outlet?
And if you retort "some Protestant pastors are guilty of sexual misconduct", well sure, but that's in spite of them being married, obviously not because of it. They have a non-sinful outlet for their natural drives. Catholic priests do not.
Even today with the Sexual Revolution complete across the West, Catholic countries don't really care, whereas in America there is still a stuck-up "we think its bad but still know its happening". It really does cloud youth shows and movies here in the US whereas European ones are much more upfront and honest.
At best, you're describing an America-Europe divide...forgetting that the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Finland are all historically Protestant countries.
But that isn't the point. The point is to create a psychological barrier between the winners and losers and create immense stress among the losers.
What stress are you talking about? The social stigma of being a virgin or otherwise sexually inactive? That's pagan culture, not Catholicism or Protestantism. Is it frustration from having no sexual outlet? Porn, or spanking off without porn if one's capable of it, is that outlet. For many people, choking the rubber chicken doesn't have the long-term effect of intensifying their desire to experience the real thing. Just the opposite, in fact. It makes them not that concerned with the women around them. But for those who feel otherwise, Protestantism obviously didn't invent porn.
The only reason why incel ideology exists is because there are systems in place to create immense barriers between the winners and losers
...Do you mean to say that, in general, Protestantism instills a general mindset of viewing everything in terms of winners and losers? Couldn't you just substitute "American-style capitalism" and leave Protestantism out of the discussion?
That's not really the point, but Robert Putnam misdiagnoses the reason which is that male organizations went on a relentless decline.
Yes, that's what I meant by "collapse in social engagement", and it's what Robert Putnam discusses in his book Bowling Alone.
Yes it did decline because normal people were denied access to it and it became scandalized and into the hands of criminals and bootleggers. That was my entire point.
Prohibition happened because alcohol was already scandalous, and it'd become scandalous because Americans saw firsthand the lives that it ruined. Booze was the same chemical, had the same effect on the human brain, and caused the same behavioral ills pre-1919 as after 1919.
The only reason why those rapes are associated with alcohol is because its part of the party/nightclub experience.
There's nothing about going to a party or nightclub that makes you want to rape someone. It is simply a gathering of people for the mutual aim of having fun, with each person free to decide the extent to which they want to participate. It's alcohol that puts people in a state of mind where they don't respect boundaries they otherwise would.
Drunk driving is massively overstated and a bit of a nothing-burger.
13,500+ deaths a year is a nothing burger?
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@Dr.Franklin
The more I explore sociology and politics it has now become abundantly clear that Calvinism has won against the old Catholic order.
Calvinism is relatively fringe even within Protestantism. The idea that some people were literally created to go to hell was never going to be popular, and it never will be. On top of that, Reformed churches are predominantly old and white; fast growing churches that successfully reach a young audience tend to be non-denominational, which tends to de-emphasize adherence to elaborate theologies, the very thing Reformed Churches define themselves by. I'd speculate also that from a psychological standpoint, the idea that only a small elect is heaven-bound would leave the impression that missions and evangelization aren't important and can be neglected, letting their opponents decide the makeup of the next generation of Christians.
Extend this exclusionary nature out to other ideas in life-wealth, sex, self-esteem, etc and the idea is that in Calvinist world, only the "elected" are allowed to actually live whereas the rest are perpetually unsatisfied and told that that a regular life us actually bad for you while being brazenly hypocritical.
You do realize that for the overwhelming bulk of Catholicism's existence, the surrounding cultural milieu was feudalism, right? The firstborn son inherited the land, married the princess, and probably had a few mistresses over the years, while the secondborn son was sent to live in a monastery and ordered to be celibate for life. The RCC had extremely large holdings in land, and untold millions of serfs paid rent to an abbot or bishop as opposed to a secular lord. Those who didn't still paid tithes to the church, whose bishops lived in opulence and whose monks often had beer bellies because they collected so much grain from the common people that they made it into beer as a means of storing it.
Protestantism reflects a capitalist society? That's still a massive improvement.
Take sex for example, The Scarlet Letter is a perfect example in showing the Calvinist idea that sex is something inherently scandalous but the "elected" are still allowed to do so.
In Protestantism, anyone is allowed to marry, and then have sex after marrying. And marriage is strictly monogamous, so you don't get a Middle East style situation. The Puritans in The Scarlet Letter (a fictional story by a man who was critical of religion, and who might've been inclined to strawman it at times) were having sex with their spouses all the time, and Dimmesdale was clearly written as having been in the wrong for having premarital sex one time in his life.
Making porn is about being sexually repressive. What we do is not entertainment, it is sexual control-and-repression politics.
Porn doesn't exist to placate people who are legally or culturally barred from having sex, since no such restrictions exist in the West and insofar as premarital sex is still taboo in some circles so is porn. Lack of sexual prospects does spur demand for porn, but in a free sexual marketplace there's always going to be winners, losers, and demand for some alternative product for those who can't win. Protestantism isn't the cause of this. It's a general human thing.
Also, Catholicism doesn't allow premarital sex either.
We do not offer or facilitate sexual contact, we do not help or will help anyone have real sex with anyone, but we incite cravings that have no chance of ever being consummated.
Doesn't this contradict your position, since to "incite cravings" is the polar opposite of placation?
Another aspect of this is alcohol. Alcohol was long scandalized/suppressed by Calvinism and its offshoots in America. Prohibition comes, and now normal people do not have access to alcohol and social cornerstones of the Western world such as pubs are destroyed.
There are other "social cornerstones" besides bars, such as coffee shops, libraries, church, and home gatherings, and in reality a lot of people go to pubs to drink alone. Per Robert Putnam's research, the primary cause of the 20th century's collapse in social engagement was the rise of television, which let people enjoy the effortless semblance of a social life by following along with their favorite characters on a show. Which, of course, had nothing to do with Protestantism.
Prohibition comes, and now normal people do not have access to alcohol and social cornerstones of the Western world such as pubs are destroyed. However all Prohibition ACTUALLY did was put the hands of alcohol production, selling, and usage into the hands of an "elected" who ran underground bars and criminal syndicates.
The rate of alcohol consumption per capita actually did decline during Prohibition, contrary to popular myth. And we might've kicked the habit for good if it'd proven longer than a 10-year experiment.
One of the most treasured and liked commodity in Western Civilization was completely scandalized and shocked by Calvinists, rendering consumption of it into the hands of the "elected".
Between 1/3rd and 3/4th of all rapes involve a drunken perpetrator. Same with at least half of all violent crimes. In 2022, 13,500+ Americans died from drunk driving. In an age of limitless outlets for self-amusement, it's really not a big sacrifice to dump alcohol. People are more than capable of living happy lives without it.
Also, it's blatantly not a taboo in Western countries when you consider how many beer commercials play on TV. Maybe it was a century ago.
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@WyIted
IMO he just wasn't as careful as he thought he was, though still light years above the average killer. He left a breadcrumb trail of traffic cam footage leading back to him, and then needlessly stopped at a restaurant.
If it were me, I would've spent like a year or two getting jacked and buy the lightest motorcycle I could find that could still go fast enough to not pose hazards on the interstate. I'd ride at night, preferably in early winter/late fall when the night is long, and preferably on a night where forecasted temperatures don't dip too low. Every time I spotted traffic lights ahead, I'd get off-road and go around them, lugging or carrying the motorcycle with me. If you can bench press 200 lbs then you ought to be good. Preferably wear some kind of padding on my feet (while dismounted) to avoid leaving shoeprints. Take no phone with me. Pack a basic utility kit like food, water, a map of the route, calculator, pen and notepad, etc. As much as I could reasonably take with me on a motorcycle without it blowing away or whatnot. I wouldn't stop anywhere unless I absolutely had to.
Ahead of entering, I'd hide the motorcycle somewhere and use taxis to get around, paying in cash (my wallet, and every bill and plastic card in my wallet, would be treated ahead of time to remove fingerprints the best I could). My fingerprints are in the system, and as for DNA I'm fairly confident that some relatives of mine have taken ancestry tests. While using any taxi, I'd place some kind of pad under my butt to avoid leaving my sweat in the cabin, and I'd avoid resting my back or head against any part of the car. Instead, I'd use my gloved hands to hold onto the front seat and keep my balance.
I'd be wearing gloves, a beanie cap, flu mask, thick clothes, and colored contacts. All this save for the flu mask and colored contacts would be purchased from a garage sale or whatnot ahead of time, preferably from two or more different ones, where I paid with cash, at least one month in advance. In the winter I wouldn't look out of place wearing this getup. My outward layer of clothing would be of some visibly different color when worn inside out. I'd bring both my real ID and a fake one; if stopped and questioned before the act, I'd use my real ID and give a prepared story for why I was in New York. Then I'd give up the attempt and go home. If stopped and questioned after the act, I would risk a fake ID and just hope I didn't get arrested.
In winter, I probably couldn't stay outdoors overnight. Preferably the act would be done on the same night that I arrived but if I was staying multiple days in NYC then I'd have rented an Airbnb with a burner phone (or using a burner app on my normal phone) and paid with cash. All in advance, of course. If I had to withdraw a lot of money from my bank account to prepare for this, then I'd do it incrementally as opposed to all at once. All travel in NYC would be done by taxi as opposed to on-foot, and traffic cams would be avoided simply by ducking the best I could while in the back seat. The exception would be the act itself, during which I'd have to do some walking outdoors. I'd schedule one of the taxi cabs that I rode in to meet me again at a certain time and place, and that's how I'd either make my getaway from the city or return to the Airbnb (if daytime and I needed to wait until it was night again).
Finally, I would return home the exact same way I came. Depending on how long I was gone, my absence would be noticed. I'd have taken time off of work, not exactly matching the time window of the act but a little longer than that to deflect suspicion, and afterward claim that I was playing video games at home for several days. I'd keep all the lights on in my home to consume electricity, and the curtains drawn, for the duration of my absence. All web searches that I did ahead of this would be done browsing in Incognito Mode, VPN, and the most private search engine that I knew of.
...If this sounds like a huge hassle, that's because it is. It's extremely hard to pull off a perfect murder in this day and age, and even what I just described isn't without its vulnerabilities and potential points of failure. My guess is, Luigi Mangione wasn't anywhere near as thorough as I've described above.
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@WyIted
I'm of the disposition that "grifter" as a term is waaaaaaaay overused in politics. Yeah, somebody makes a living by being political. So do congressmen and presidents. Doesn't mean they're actual conmen.
The main problem with the right is that we lack friendly infrastructure above a certain threshold of competency. For example, if somebody somewhere in the halls of academia does research and finds that X Democratic policy had Y positive effects, the mainstream media will catch wind of it and widely report it so that the general public knows. But if an academic does research and finds something that Republicans could use as evidence for their positions? It's likely to stay buried. For example, I watched a few minutes of the SCOTUS hearing on United States v. Skrmetti, and mentioned was a governmental report from the UK which found that transitioning is the opposite of helpful for many minors who do it. Would I have ever stumbled across this report if I hadn't watched the judiciary's equivalent to C-SPAN? Probably not.
I'd argue this isn't even the mainstream media's fault, since at this point everyone knows they're partisan institutions. They're obviously not going to work to find research that undermines the message they exist solely to spread. Instead, it's right wing media's fault for not serving its constituents in the way that left-wing media does its own. The "intellectuals" of the right spend all of their time moaning about how woke a movie with a green-skinned main character is because she was played by a black woman, or screeching about like that one woman who was murdered several years ago by one of the 20+ million illegal immigrants in this country. There's little to no substance to their content, and this dearth of meaningful friendly information is what's turning the right anti-intellectual. Heck, it puts us at a disadvantage in online debates since it's often much harder for us to find evidence than it is for our opponents, hence the right has turned away from platforms like this and toward optics and meming instead.
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@RemyBrown It's rich that you, so full of blind hatred for 77 million+ ordinary citizens you've never met, accuse others of being in a cult. That's classic cultlike behavior right there, and I'll consider it a high honor to be blocked by you, since everything you say is wrong and if you call me a bad person then I must be a pretty good one.
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@RemyBrown
I do not respect the weird game you're playing in this thread, and by extension I do not respect you. Pre-emptively blocked. As for the users in this thread who were blocked by this guy, I encourage you all to block him back.
And for the record, I trust that the criminal justice system would work well enough that he'd go to jail (assuming he was actually guilty and assuming this isn't doublespeak for "he ordered a drone strike in Pakistan" or whatnot) and another Republican candidate would be fielded in Trump's place, sparing us the dilemma of either voting for a murderer or collective political disenfranchisement. Of course, in real life he'll never again be up for re-election anyway, making this a moot point.
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Also, "We need to redo the election because social media had a pro-Russian bias" rings hollow to the American ear. We held elections even when journalistic coverage outside of Fox News was blatantly rigged against Trump and for his opponent, dating all the way back to 2015. Whether the ones doing the "rigging" are foreigners or the other political tribe within your own country is inconsequential, since either way they're fundamentally hostile to you and your community.
Romanian democracy ought to be held to the same standard as American democracy. They're not helpless ignorant children.
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@Sidewalker
Putin knows better, your far-right candidate has to stack the high courts first, then you put the puppet into office.
"We must save democracy by nullifying the results of an election that didn't go our way."
Like, at that point what's even left to save? Isn't it merely a choice between Authoritarian Regime A versus Authoritarian Regime B, with most people being inclined to support whichever of the two regimes happens to be closer to them on social issues?
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If there's anything at all that the left and the right can agree on in these hyper-polarized times, it's good riddance. Brian Thompson was a mass murderer who the law refused to touch.
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Sure, which is why polytheism has basically gone extinct outside of India and East Asia. Winning ideology right there.
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You guys really want to defeat hate in America? Then congrats. It is happening right now. Almost 77,000,000 people showed up at the polls to vote down your hateful ideology and deny you another four years, and if it was any Republican but Trump he probably would've added another 5 million votes to that. Let this be a reminder that the extremism you see and propagate in your echo chambers does not reflect mainstream attitudes in real-life America.
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