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@IwantRooseveltagain
So you’re saying that a personal choice by a woman or a girl to not carry a pregnancy to term is the same as enslaving other human beings for profit.
I'd dare say it's morally worse. At least the slaves, for the most part, were able to have long-ish lives. And they were born into a time when the drudgery of working the soil without the benefit of powered machinery was unavoidable, so their masters definitely made their lives worse but weren't the sole cause of that misery.
Abortion deprives a 21st century American of 70, 80 years of life in 21st century America. The utility robbed of them is much higher than for 18th or 19th century black slaves.
That’s beautiful.
There is nothing beautiful about slavery or abortion. These are among the most heinous crimes committed in the long history of the world. Since 1973 we've holocausted more of our fellow American citizens than the cumulative death toll of WW2. In countries like China, we're talking as many abortions in the last 40 years as there are Americans currently.
So you stand on the same firm ground of righteousness as abolitionists.
It costs me nothing to adhere to my position. It would be vain and vacuous to compare myself to those who risked their lives or took direct action against these evils. I'm typing this on a keyboard from the comfort of my air conditioned home, and after this post is completed I'll go about my pampered everyday life. 74 million Americans have been so utterly desensitized about the topic through decades of forced normalization as to do nothing when there's a Planned Parenthood clinic within driving distance, and I'm one of them. On a sheer emotional level, abortion is to me but one of many hot button issues. I can easily stop thinking about it and have my thoughts dwell on something else.
But rationally speaking yes. Abortion is a crime against humanity becoming of the Ancient Romans, who abandoned their newborns in trash heaps to die of sickness or to be eaten by predators.
Because a fetus is just as much a human being as a black person. Perhaps even more so, if the fetus is white..
I reject the distinction between a fetus and a person. By definition, a fetus is human and by definition a fetus is a person.
It's also telling that you said fetus and not embryo or zygote. A baby 30 minutes from being born is still a fetus. But because it hasn't yet passed through the birthing canal, I suppose that makes it not human in your eyes. Civilized "progressive" logic there.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Every southern plantation owner in the 1800s would've said the same.
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@Best.Korea
Abortion reduces crime rates
So does killing anyone from a poor socioeconomic background who's statistically more likely to commit crimes. Oh wait, it's almost like the act of killing them is murder, so you didn't actually reduce crime. Hmm...
improves quality of life
So...kill anyone who happened to have been born into American poverty, which is comfy by the standards of much of the world?
increases equality
I guess if you killed all the poor people, there would be less inequality. No need to make even the tiniest personal sacrifice to help tackle this tough problem, such as giving a few dollars to charity every now and then, when you can just blow out the brains of anyone less fortunate than you. Is this what you're saying?
increases liberty
Not sure how this one flies, when it's a crime punishable by death to have been born poor.
Migrants have lower crime rate than general population
This may be true of legal immigrants, since these tend to be vetted and ambitious people who want to actually better their own lives instead of squandering their potential by pointing a gun at someone and going to prison for 10 years. Illegal immigrants are unvetted and we don't know what their criminal histories are. They lack the patience and basic life skills to fill out a form and wait their turn in line. If they're from Mexico, all they have to do is hop into a car and drive 50 miles north, and this is easy enough for any random Jose to do.
The average person of Mexico is the product of a less civilized culture than the United States. In fact, this is true for all of Latin America. If the average person from any one of these countries wants to come here, they must first agree to assimilate into the culture of the land they're arriving in. But the mere act of entering a space does not imply you've made this commitment. The illegal immigrant's behavior is largely unmonitored, they signed no pledge of allegiance before crossing, and so on. For all intents and purposes, they live as though their new home is but an incidentally richer Mexico or Guatemala, unaware that the kind of behavior which is normative in Mexico and Guatemala is the main reason why these places are still poor.
Reducing debt is crucial to save economy and reduce inflation, and to reduce poverty, and solve trade deficit.
True, but VP Harris wants to hike entitlement spending. This is the opposite of lowering the debt.
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@Double_R
For all of my ire with Trump and MAGA specifically and the republican party broadly, it takes a palpable level of brainwashing to believe it's all about being evil.
Really? You believe Trump would make himself a Mussolini-style dictator and value judgments like evil have never popped up in your mind? Excuse me if I don't buy it.
There are always going to be people out there saying nasty things.
It's not about some vague "people out there saying nasty things". It's about a systemic bias in one direction against the other by the most influential voices in society. The average person, since he's not all-knowing, looks to voices of authority to tell him what to think. Not about everything, sure, but "being informed" entails consulting public resources and the individuals and entities behind such. This is unavoidable; I myself have little choice but to daily consult the same news sources that I distrust. And those individuals/entities are broadcasting 24/7 negative propaganda about Trump, much of it blatantly hateful.
If Trump were to say "Biden is senile", or "Kamala Harris slept her way up the early part of her career", who would believe him? His hardcore supporters, sure, but not moderate voters. He's one man known to have a big mouth and exaggerate constantly.
Of course, the same is true for Biden. Whatever his preexisting reputation, people know politicians say bad stuff about their opponents. That's par for the course. If it was simply Biden and his campaign slinging mud back at Trump, plus MSNBC and far-left outlets of similar reputation to counter the far-right Fox, we'd reach a situation of parity. I wouldn't be inclined to complain about that.
On the other hand, if the headline "Trump threatens a 'bloodbath' if he loses reelection" were to appear on CNN (even though, of course, Trump was talking about the US auto industry and anyone who bothered to watch the original clip should've known this), people believe that kind of stuff. It's much more effective propaganda than anything Trump or Biden is capable of. They have an outsized power to shape public opinion and they're using it solely against Trump and his campaign.
When I talk about civility in politics I'm not talking about people on Twitter, I'm talking about prominent figures within the political left
And I say that when journalists decide elections, they are as powerful as politicians and ought to be held to the same standard of civility as prominent Democratic Party figures.
Taking the high road doesn't mean pretending that your political opponent isn't the threat that he is.
If you're gonna go with this, then anything and everything is justified, because everyone believes the other party to be a "threat".
I'm talking about the guy who suggested we drop a nuclear bomb in a hurricane, thought the solution to California wild fires is a rake
That's a lack of knowledge, not stupidity. You yourself are knowledgeable about whatever your career entails, but ignorant about a million random subjects. That's part and parcel of being human. Trump's mistake was to act like he knew what he didn't. But this is a separate vice from stupidity.
And let's face it: when Trump said "let's drop the nuclear bomb on the hurricane", you knew it was a dumb idea but you probably didn't know the science behind why it was a dumb idea. Maybe you looked it up and read an explanation after the fact, but that's beside the point. You just intuitively knew it was a dumb idea, same way that Trump intuitively "knew" it was a good idea.
And there is, I think, value to creative thinking in itself, even if lack of knowledge hampers its practical usefulness. The fact that Trump, a man in his 70s, was still capable of this kind of thinking is a good sign.
Take the rake thing; it's well known that California's wildfires were made worse by the state's reluctance to do controlled burns, allowing for flammable material to build up in forests. Assuming he came up with the idea of raking the forest himself, it does make for a sort of creative solution. You would remove that material without having to set anything on fire. Of course, it doesn't consider the logistics of combing such a vast area for leaves, or that more leaves would fall after the job is done, but so far as spur-of-the-moment shower thoughts go it's not so bad.
Should anyone have followed Trump's advice and raked the forest floor? No, but what it demonstrates is that Trump can think flexibly, a skillset that suits any President of the United States well as they go about doing what the job entails.
I accuse him of that because he is, as evidenced by the fact that he constantly fawns over dictators because of how tough and in control they are of their countries
For what it's worth, it's not an unpopular opinion that some countries are unsuited for democracy.
Many Democrats scoffed when Bush said he was going to bring democracy to Iraq, and worried that removing a strongman who kept the peace would make the local situation worse. I've heard a political science textbook raise the question "What good are lofty ideals like democracy to third world people whose main concern is putting food on the table?". I paraphrase because I don't remember what the exact wording was, but yeah.
In other words, it's not uncommon to use a different yardstick for what's good for other countries vs. what's good for America, where the system of government we have has served us well (our huge national debt notwithstanding).
Calling a lie hyperbole doesn't mean it's no longer a lie.
"Gee, I'm so swamped today. I've got a million things to do." Was this a lie or hyperbole?
You mean like loudly declaring that if a NATO ally doesn't "pay up" he would tell Russia to "do whatever the hell they want"?
You mean things he was saying back in 2015/2016, before he proceeded to become President and not touch NATO? This is the man who withdrew from NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Do you really think he wouldn't have exited one more treaty if he wanted to?
You left the dictators of Russia and North Korea off that lost. I wonder why.
Because for Russia, he was the same as other Presidents. Like Bush, who "looked into the soul" of Putin and saw a good man. Or Obama, who was quick to pursue a "restart" with Russia and then laughed at Mitt Romney at one of the 2012 debates when the Republican dared to suggest Russia might still be a threat 4 years after invading Georgia. Trump's Russia policy doesn't exactly stand out by post-Cold War standards.
With North Korea, he was harder on them at one point and then softer afterward. Both matter. You may or may not remember, but the mid-2010s was a period when North Korea's nuclear program was maturing and they were posturing more aggressively than they had done before. Fears of war escalated during this period, not just in Trump's first 2 years but before he took office.
Ever since then, the whole situation on that front has died down. Hardly anyone talks about North Korea anymore. Why? Because Trump first warned them "If you pick a fight with us, we won't blink", and then offered Kim Jong Un an off-ramp. We couldn't stop the North from getting nukes in any event, but we've also minimized the consequences of this fact.
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Biden has (or rather, had) the luxury of shutting up and letting the media lie for him, like when they continually dismissed concerns about his age as far-right misinformation, up until the point where they could no longer hide that he really does have a problem.
On that note, I myself bought into this. I didn't like Biden but I personally thought the talk about his cognitive decline was way overblown. The whole establishment was acting as though all was quiet on the Western front (or so to speak), and despite how I often talk about the media here there was definitely a part of me which couldn't believe they'd blatantly lie about something so huge as that.
I have no love for the media. I do not take the excrement that spews from the mouth of Keith Olbermann as gospel truth. But I believed them. Now imagine if you weren't already a Republican like me. Of course you would, right? The average person just assumes that whatever they say has to be correct, and in my opinion it's impossible to hold a fair election under these conditions when they're all stumping for one party against the other. The best remedy is to elect somebody whose career would ultimately discredit them.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Are 600-800 million people who live in different countries and on separate continents all led by Franklin Graham? Is he the Pope of all the world's Evangelical churches, most of which are non-denominational?
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@Double_R
You never explained what Trump pushed back on that made you loyal to him.
Everything that the Left has become. Their wanton hatred for various demographics to which I belong, and which escalated dramatically once Trump announced his candidacy back in 2015. Their ongoing campaign to overthrow our longstanding Republic and its constitutional order in a de facto slow coup by illegally importing future voters (either the migrants themselves or their children) who will vote for one party, and by creating an ideological monoculture from all traditional voices of authority that Americans look up to, so that everyone is convinced into thinking the party can do no wrong and its enemies can do no right.
Their support for efforts in Europe and elsewhere to make free speech non-existent, such as France throwing the founder of Telegram in jail and a willingness to do the same to Elon Musk if only he were to visit the UK, reports that the UK is about to throw J.K. Rowling in jail for comments she made about an Algerian Olympic gymnast, Brazil's attempts to shut down Twitter in the country because there's nothing more dangerous to "democracy" than platforms where people are allowed to speak freely without censorship, etc. Brazen comments by Tim Walz, soon to be Vice-President of the United States, that whatever the party dubs "hate speech" or "misinformation" is not constitutionally protected by the First Amendment.
The party which you support is pure unadulterated evil, and even if every single dubious claim the left has made about Trump over the last 9 years were all true, I'd still have reason to vote for him.
Since Trump came along we no longer expect our politicians to be:
- Civil
The civility you espouse is of no real substance. Biden and Harris are backed by a limitlessly cruel and sociopathic propaganda apparatus that, on a given Tuesday, matches or even exceeds the nastiness of Trump. Trump, in contrast, is his own sole advocate. Yeah there's Fox, but at this point everyone knows they're partisan hacks. WashPo, The Guardian, CNN, etc. are no less so but there's a systematic effort to gaslight us into thinking that they're somehow impartial.
If Biden wanted to "take the high road" in any way that mattered, he would've gotten together with the party bosses 4-5 years ago and convinced them to let up on the omnidirectional partisan attacks on Trump. Said attacks would've then ceased. Since this didn't happen, it's laughable to speak of a meaningful distinction in tone between Trump and Biden. Perhaps there technically is one, but why should anyone care?
Also, this weird cult of personality around the President of the United States which has sprung up since WW2 ought to end. He's not some benevolent, all-wise father of the nation. He's a mortal man who heads one branch of the federal government, which originally wasn't intended to be that much more powerful than a given state government. The White House is physically smaller than the Capitol building for both practical and symbolic reasons.
- Mature
I'll give you this one. Still better than senile, but just barely.
- Intelligent
You're talking about the guy who, without a day of political experience in his life, waltzed onto the scene and wrested control of the GOP nomination from the son and brother of two former Presidents (Jeb Bush) and two popular and fairly well known Senators from Texas and Florida respectively, and then strategically targeted the states few people assumed a Republican would win to carve out a victory over Hillary Clinton. Then he was sworn in as President of the United States.
Since you're accusing him of being an authoritarian dictator-wannabe anyway, I might as well compare his career to that of Alcibiades, of whom it was once said: "You should not rear a lion cub in the city, but if one is brought up, accommodate its ways."
- Truthful
Much of what the media calls "Trump lies" is Trump hyperbole. Some of what he says is indeed a lie, but again, he's his own sole advocate. Biden has (or rather, had) the luxury of shutting up and letting the media lie for him, like when they continually dismissed concerns about his age as far-right misinformation, up until the point where they could no longer hide that he really does have a problem.
- Respectful of democracy
And Dems are not respectful of our Republic. What's your point?
- An example to the world
The President of the United States is elected to serve the American people, not foreign peoples. Foreign heads of state are elected to do the same, and indeed most aren't nearly as tolerant of illegal immigration on their own soil as America is on its. Trump believed that his approach best accomplished this.
- To stand up for our allies
And in practice, Trump has done nothing to prove that he wouldn't.
- To stand up against dictators
Trump took a harder line against the dictators of China, Iran, Venezuela, and Syria than any Democrat has.
I'm curious what he did in your eyes to offset all of that .
I wanted him to serve two terms, and to keep Republican politics within the mainstream going forward since constant presence breeds a sense of normalcy. I wanted the mere fact of him serving to disprove doomsday predictions floated by the left, and for everyone to remember the wolf-crying with Trump the next time they weaponized this same rhetoric against another, preferably moderate Republican.
Sadly, he only got one term, which is why we're rehashing this election again in 2024.
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@Double_R
As a Trump supporter, I can give you an honest answer to this question.
In 2016, during the Republican primaries, my family for the most part wasn't crazy about Trump. Neither was I, which was why I made a spur of the moment choice to vote for Hillary, as Trump did have some off-putting isolationist talk that, without the benefit of hindsight (a full presidential term where he kept the foreign policy status quo intact), seemed scary, and back in 2016 I was veritably obsessed with topics like WW3 (see WW2, which the West would've lost if not for the United States getting involved, and said dependency has arguably grown since then). But I found myself weirdly elated on election night when it was announced that he won.
Three things happened: first, he became the GOP nominee, so a lot of people reluctantly voted for him. Second, he became a Republican president in a position to do Republican things (or at least keep the executive from skewing left), vindicating people's choice to vote for Trump. He was, up until late 2020, a "winning candidate", worth putting up with whatever gaffes or inflammatory comments he happened to make.
Third, he became not only the practical standard bearer but also the embodied symbol of the Republican Party. If attacks on that symbol were allowed to ultimately prevail, then it would do a massive blow to the party's reputation. But if attacks on that symbol ultimately didn't prevail, then the party would actually gain.
I'll explain what I mean by gain. Pre-Trump, the right was making no concerted effort to push the Overton Window. Maybe somewhat back in the '80s and '90s, but such efforts had since stalled. The left was, however, trying to make the politics of normie Republican guys seem unthinkable to the average person. They had the news media on their side, save of course for Fox, and were working overtime to realize this objective. But then Trump pushed back.
The mere fact that somebody like Trump was elected, "got away" with holding the positions and saying the things that he did, and had a term in office that nobody was able to stop him from living out would basically kill efforts to render anathema in the popular imagination or at the ballot box the regular conservative wing of the Republican Party. The farther Trump pushed, the more assured this outcome would be. And so, to this day, I still support Trump and will see this through to the end.
Admittedly, there was one thing we overlooked or didn't give enough consideration to: that the act of supporting Trump changed the party itself. Edgelords and firebrands serve a purpose, but people with functioning brains mustn't unironically buy into everything they say. It seems too many of us have since drunk the Kool-Aid, and this knot could prove a challenge to untangle going forward.
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@Best.Korea
The story was decent by the standards of a children's movie, and very few people would complain that it sucked unless they were comparing it to a film made for adults.
But again, the soundtrack was everything. I don't know how old you are, but I remember what it was like in 2013 and 2014. "Let It Go" was a huge cultural phenomenon at the time. Not just Frozen; this one song by itself was an omnipresent force in our society. It was sung by every little girl in America, and probably some little boys too. Heck, one of the most well-known users in the history of debate.org, a user named imabench, had Elsa as his profile pic for like 5 years straight, to the point where, when he posted, his identity was instantly recognizable before you even read his name. And he was a grown man.
When you combine this with everything else in the movie that people liked (the gorgeous visuals, Elsa's sparkly dress, Olaf the snowman, the other songs in the soundtrack, etc.), we're pretty much talking a movie as big in 2013 as Star Wars in 1977. If you're truly watching this for the first time in 2024, then you may think I'm exaggerating. But I'm not.
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@Best.Korea
Frozen was a musical tailoring to children. This fact by itself carried at least 60% of its sales. And it was the overwhelming factor in DVD sales, since every 6 year old girl begged her mom to buy it so she could replay the "Let It Go" scene and sing along fifteen times a day. If it were a normal film, it'd be remembered today as just another expensive flop.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
I can promise you, there has never been a microsecond in the last nine years when Democrats were "polite" to Trump or his supporters. It's been an endless torrent of verbal aggression, with occasional threats to throw them in prison on phony charges.
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@Best.Korea
I figured people would hate me for saying this
Trust me, so far as sh!t takes you've given over the past year go, this one is on the mild end, so don't worry about it.
Star Wars episode 9 is good.
Hey, it's a free country.
Episode 9 adds a nice old disney emotions to movie. There is lots of compassion displayed in whole movie.
Okay, but the movie is an incoherent mess. Scavenger hunt story arcs, like the one in the last season of Star Trek: Discovery, don't tend to be any good, but at least with television it's not crammed into an hour or so, which makes for a confusing whiplash. The whole middle chunk of Episode IX was this.
Carrie Fisher's performance as Princess Leia felt flat because, well, she was literally dead and they had to awkwardly squeeze random pre-recorded footage and lines in there, and as a result it felt like there was no real substance to her character in this movie. They could've just retired the character and acknowledged her death but nooooooo. Then they'd lose ticket sales, and they couldn't have that.
On that note, having to prop up a movie with stars from 42 years ago, even going so far as to necromance dead actors, is a sign that the writers lack confidence in the characters they've written in the present. There's a reason people still talk about The Mandalorian and Grogu, whose show came out the same year as Episode IX, but not Rey and Finn: because they're forgettable. Kylo Ren was the closest thing they had to memorable, and everyone hated him. Granted, I suppose that, in show business, hated is better than forgettable, but still.
The movie retconned much of Episode VIII because they'd written themselves into a corner. I guess doing a trilogy and having a different person write/direct each episode is a bad idea, huh. Who would've ever thought? It's not like Hollywood had a cumulative 80+ years of industry experience to caution against trying stupid crap like this.
Finally, they brought back Palpatine from nowhere, because they spent the last two movies setting up Kylo Ren as the big bad only to realize he wasn't up for the task, so they dug up grandpappy's grave and put him in a movie again. In the process they made Anakin's six-movie character arc, which George Lucas made the prequel trilogy in large part to set up, pointless because his sacrifice was meaningless and he wasn't the one to fulfill the prophecy about destroying the Dark Side. He saved Luke's life, only for Luke to not train any Jedi who either survived or weren't already Jedi. He killed the empire, only for it to revive itself out of nowhere 20 or 30 years later.
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@FLRW
I honestly don't know how to reconcile this comment with your claim to be as old as Donald Trump. Which I'm assuming is the truth, making this all the more baffling.
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@Best.Korea
So let me get this straight. This anime literally has "ero" in the name. Seeing this, you didn't take 30 seconds to look it up to see what it's about. You went into it blind, and now you're complaining about what you found?
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@FLRW
Fair enough. What this suggests is that the President doesn't tend to negotiate specific terms with Congress. He/She just tries to limit what the other party does.
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@Double_R
Since Clinton left office in January 2001 no US President has vetoed more than 12 bills. For Trump and Biden, that's less than one bill every 4 months. For Bush and Obama, that's less than one bill every 6 months. Given how little the option is actually used, I doubt that it's something the President often leverages to negotiate with Congress. And the President really doesn't have any other leverage to speak of, so.
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@Greyparrot
Actually not a strawman.
While of course the GOP is very hard on the sort of crimes that would result in a 12 year old being impregnated by her stepfather, once said baby has come to exist, it deserves the same protections of life as anybody else.
Our opponents have taken to revive practices so barbaric that even 1,600 years ago high civilization knew to recoil in horror and outlaw them. We aren't the ones who have anything to be ashamed of.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Right genius, and the Congress could never have gotten it passed without the President. See how that works?
You act like signing a piece of paper is equivalent to the work Congress put in to draft, negotiate, re-draft, and re-negotiate a several thousand page bill. Newsflash: it isn't.
While the engine of legislative ideas and action is Congress itself, the President has influence in the legislative process, as well
Which is, again, limited to asking for stuff and hoping that they listen.
The President recommends an annual budget for federal agencies and often suggests legislation.
A recommendation which Congress doesn't have to follow.
At best, they might make a few concessions to the President because there's the possibility that he'll veto the budget Congress actually writes and passes (which would then take a larger majority to re-pass and override such). But in practice, the last time an appropriations bill was successfully vetoed was back in 2015, and it's only happened 3 times since 2008; two of these cases were for specific governmental sectors (defense and intelligence agencies) as opposed to comprehensive spending packages. This is an option that the President, whoever he may be, is reluctant to exercise, because it makes trouble for the government if Congress is forced back to the drawing board and delays passing a budget.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
People can call it whatever they want. Doesn't change the fact that the PPACA was a bill passed by Congress, and that Obama couldn't have done a thing to make it law had Congress decided otherwise.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
A ceremonial role, I guess. In practice he simply writes his name on a piece of paper, indicating "I'm not going to block this".
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@IwantRooseveltagain
The President signs bills into law
Signing a bill into law isn't an accomplishment. Literally an 8 year old who knew how to write their name and was shown where to do it could do this job.
and often plays an important roll in deciding which bills the Congress will prioritize
The President can, at best, make suggestions about what bills Congress should pass. He has zero power to make Congress act on such.
You should have learned that in the fifth grade
Says the guy who thinks that the executive branch legislates.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
The Trump and Biden Administrations have the same number of legislative accomplishments, which is zero. An Administration as commonly referred to is of the executive branch. It has no legislative power. At best, agencies under its purview have rulemaking powers within the scope of the laws Congress has passed.
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@Best.Korea
If you want a "cute" slice of life with some action thrown in, you could try Love, Chuunibyo, and Other Delusions. It's two seasons long and a movie, and has some mech-themed OVA with sick special effects.
If you want serious, hard sci-fi with a few attractive chicks in it and a fair bit of humor, try Steins;Gate. Arguably two seasons as well, though Zero is neither a prequel nor sequel to S1. Also has a movie, which I haven't seen.
If you want "cute" but also dark and effed up, with great music to boot, try Madoka Magica. One season and an epic movie (Rebellion). And a weird sequel that probably isn't worth your time.
If you want "cute" but also literal nightmares when you go to sleep at night, play Doki Doki Literature Club or watch a YouTube playthrough of it.
I've never watched it, but the Monogatari series is hyped in many online spaces. It sounds a little degenerate to me but also straight up your alley.
If you want serious dark and edgy without the cute factor or attractive women, try Psycho;Pass.
If you want a Shounen battler, try HunterxHunter or Demon Slayer.
If you want a good isekai-style power fantasy minus any chicks, try Solo Leveling.
If you want a personal recommendation, play the Danganronpa game trilogy. All you need is to have a Nintendo Switch and visit your local GameStop. There's a three games in one bundle. Skip S1 of the anime, but you might enjoy S2 after playing the first two games. Heads up: in case you haven't heard of it, Dangaronpa is extremely violent and revolves around murder mysteries.
Danganronpa is more of a visual novel than a proper game, so you don't have to work too hard to enjoy the experience. Just go on the internet and look up a walkthrough for the Class Trials, because otherwise it's a pain in the butt.
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I got "committed conservative". Sad to hear I'm among only 7% of the population. Not all of the questions were satisfactory in how they were worded, but hey. That's how these quizzes usually go.
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@WyIted
Alright, I've got my own political decision-making heuristic I've been giving some thought to as well. At first I came up with it on my own, but then I came across a Wikipedia article and apparently it had already been articulated by someone (re: Agonistic Pluralism). So here goes.
In Medieval thought there was the idea of the wheel of fortune (rota fortuna). A man, such as a king or politician, has a time when he's upwardly mobile and gaining in power and influence. But one day he loses that. One day the wheel spins down on him instead of up. Metaphorically speaking, the shape of a wheel makes this inevitable, just as everything has its time in the sun before change inevitably happens and something else takes its place.
This idea was popularized by a 6th century book written by a Roman Senator in prison on phony charges awaiting his execution. But it has broader applications than individual careers. One could say the wheel spins up and down on countries. It spins up and down on ideologies, religions, cultures, political parties, corporations, business practices, technologies, etc. Change is inevitable, so a thing is destroyed because it refuses to change, which might have prolonged its lifespan.
But this process cannot be centrally controlled. Only a competitive environment will bring the ideal changes to the forefront and relegate the less ideal ones. Thus, a system must not be insulated from said competition even though it's painful. Competition with the outside world should happen at the earliest possible stage. But better yet is that a system is competing with itself before that stage is ever reached. Within a country, regions should be allowed to compete with each other, and even with the central government, to achieve the best local outcomes. Each local government should have different approaches to tackling different problems. In the US there should be 51 different "laboratories" of government, and they should learn from each other to find out what does and doesn't work.
Key to said competition is that: (1). Outcompeting everyone else should be tangibly rewarded; but (2). It should not result in the competition being wiped out, because then it's extremely hard to reestablish a rival contender. At that point whoever's in first place will inevitably stagnate and get by on the sheer mass it accrued back when it was managed competently. Hence, the rules should be written with this balancing act in mind.
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Also, isn't this pretty much a truism? Who would positively assert that long term thinking is bad? Doesn't everyone pay lip service to this ideal?
If your point is that you've abandoned partisan politics in favor of making "longtermism" the core criterion you use to directly make political decisions, then what does this look like exactly?
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@WyIted
Wait, was that one guy on DDO like 7 years ago just your alt?
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@Double_R
Inflation is the result of the aftermath of COVID, which didn't begin till 2021 when vaccines became readily available and people went back to work. It didn't happen under Trump because he was already booted out of office by then.
I fail to see what "people going back to work" has to do with inflation. They were spending money either way, thanks to stimulus checks passed by Congress (which, I guess to be fair, Trump signed off on). Which could've been avoided if they just didn't lock down in the first place. Since let's face it: everyone caught Covid anyway. Everyone continued to shop at Wal-Mart and routinely risk exposure to the virus and then bring it home to their loved ones. It's questionable how many lives the lockdowns saved in the first place, so people might as well have kept working.
But anyway, a butt ton of money was spent in 2020. Biden couldn't control that fact, fair enough. But then came January 3, then January 20th, and Dems had an effective trifecta, as VP Harris cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate. And what did they do? Knowledgeable that the economy was already overheating, they passed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. It didn't even take Biden two months in office.
But okay, fine. Biden is only partly responsible for the inflation we've seen. It's still in poor taste for his supporters to brag about how great the economy supposedly is doing right now.
Inflation and wages have been moving in different directions in recent years:
- April 2024: Inflation was 3.4%, while wages grew by 4.7%
- June 2024: Nominal wages rose 4.2% while inflation was up 3.3%, resulting in real wage gains of 0.9%
- July 2024: Real pay grew across all pay and inflation measures, with Total Compensation generally showing the biggest increases
I've heard numbers to this vague effect before. First, I think they tell a misleading story. Inequality grew rapidly during Covid, and in the years following. I remember hearing that the rich added trillions to their net worth while the global economy contracted, and I'm sure that's also played itself out on a less dramatic level comparing, say, people who make $200K a year and people who make $25K a year. Which is to say I don't believe the above gains were distributed evenly, and millions of lower skilled, lower earning workers ended up in the red.
But let's look at some specific data:
The above link only gives results up until the end of 2022. Since whites are by far the largest demographic in the US, for them to have gained suggests that its data on wealth/income gained or lost doesn't account for inflation, since per your data the average citizen would've taken an inflation-adjusted loss in 2021 and 2022. This suggests that even not adjusting for inflation, blacks and Hispanics saw their income fall in 2021 and 2022, even if in the short term this was compensated for by stimulus checks and big boosts in welfare spending (which added to the national debt). Adjusting for inflation they got bum-effed hard. For 2023 and 2024 they likely saw no substantive gains but simply didn't get more worse off, with the lion's share of actual net growth going to whites, Asians, etc.
What this paints a picture of is a Biden economy where income rose faster than inflation for some, but not for marginalized groups.
Second, putting aside statistics, there are American workers who've genuinely gotten no raise at all between Jan. 2021 and now. I don't know what the size of this group is, but they exist and they were mega bum-effed because their inflation-adjusted income is only like 80-85% what it was before Biden took office.
No one on the left is saying this. Harris repeatedly talks about raising the minimum wage to large cheering crowds at her rallies
Fair enough, but my point was that, when it came to discussions about the minimum wage 5 or so years ago, the left recognized how disastrous inflation has been for working class people. Now they're downplaying it since this discussion is inconvenient for their man in the White House.
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Libs in 2019: "Adjusted for inflation, the (Federal) minimum wage is lower today than it's been in a very long time. Once the price of living goes up, it stays permanently higher while the (Federal) minimum wage stays the same, meaning the income of minimum wage workers is less than it was before. This is wage theft! We don't believe this problem can be solved by people moving up to higher paying jobs or getting raises. Likewise, arguments that the Federal minimum wage isn't a problem because few people make that little are nothing more than late stage capitalist propaganda. Rather, the system is fundamentally broken and we need drastic reforms to the government."
Libs in 2024: LMAO, what do you MAGA conservative fascists mean by "inflation"? Sure, the price of everything has gone way up since Biden took office, whereas inflation wasn't that bad in the year 2020, but it doesn't matter because every worker in America got a kajillion dollar raise sometime in the last three years. Proof? Uh, uh, well we say it happened, and you must believe us! The Federal minimum wage is still at $7.25 like it was in 2019, but it's no longer a problem just because we declare it isn't! Nobody is making minimum wage anymore whereas everybody and their mother was in 2019! Why not? Because we say so! Also, you ignorant peons should be grateful to the glorious leader President Biden that further inflation has slowed, because we willfully mistake this for high prices actually falling back to pre-Biden levels."
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@Moozer325
I know I'm a bit late, but sure.
The theory of evolution is that which is best supported by physical science. However, science as we know it is a closed system. We don't know to what extent the claims of science correspond to actual reality. Physical science cannot prove that said correspondence is 100% because it has no standard outside of itself. Which is no different in principle from religious revelation and theology, whose standard is also itself.
By analogy, suppose you were a simulated person born into a simulated world. The builders of this world installed certain commands that would make your lives easier once discovered. For example, a "Farm" command would cause a digital seed to be planted on a tile, and with the elapsing of a certain amount of time it would turn into a fruit or seed bearing plant, usually at a small profit to the owner. At first the results are crude. But with time, your civilization figures out the intricacies of how these commands work and what the programming logic behind them is, and manages to use the game's engine to churn out more and more complicated results, so that your world prospers beyond measure.
So far as you the simulated person know, "the commands" are objective science. They explain how the universe works. They explain how reality works. Anyone who claims there is something beyond the commands is a pseudoscientist. And I wouldn't blame this hypothetical you for thinking so. But that could well be the situation we find ourselves in now. Perhaps science as we know it was a convenient framework put in place to help us make sense of the environment we currently live in, but not the final say on what indeed is.
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You quit the site for several months. Then when you pop back in, your first and final post is to weep and gnash your teeth, and announce that you have "internet forum addiction" and need to quit. You dredge up random drama that happened like ten years ago and flagellate yourself for it, apologizing to users who were never even on DART and will never see this.
What was the point of this?
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More good news: as many as 400 Russian troops may've been killed in a massive HIMARS strike on an ill-prepared convoy. The bodies are sitting in the open, and a Russian civilian passing through filmed it and uploaded it to the net (he was arrested by Russian authorities afterward).
Fatalities on Russian soil will be a lot harder to sweep under the rug, or for the government to dismiss as Ukrainian propaganda, than those which happened in Ukraine. If Ukraine can keep this up, it may well change popular Russian beliefs as to whether or not they're winning the war Putin started.
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@Best.Korea
1. Enemy must leave behind some units to guard previous territories, thus the amount of soldiers he has available to fight on your territory reduces.
True. But so is the reverse: Russia has so many people bogged down in Ukraine as to limit the effectiveness of its response in Kursk thus far.
2. Enemy has to suffer from guerrilla warfare done by local population.
For the sake of a war that their own government started and could easily put an end to with a peace treaty offering reasonable terms to Ukraine (like withdrawing from their national territory)? Nah. Who would die for this reason? One's own life is too precious except to the suicidal. Plus, Russia has gun control and Putin presumably has zero tolerance for anti-government militias like those which exist in the US, so it'd take a while for any such group to get on its feet.
3. Your army becomes more concentrated on your territory, while enemy's army is forced to strech from their territory to yours.
Russia cannot concentrate its army on its own territory because those troops are in Ukraine and Putin refuses to withdraw them. If Putin does withdraw them to defend Kursk, he'll have fewer with which to wage offensive war on Ukrainian soil.
4. Also, there is a winter coming soon, which has caused great casualties in the past to enemies fighting against Russia on its territory.
By "soon" you mean in 2-4 months. And since Ukraine and Russia are both countries with a lot of experience dealing with heavy winters, it seems to me both would be equally able to cope with it.
5. Russia will have Ukraine's army out of their anti-air protection and out of their artillery range and air ports range.
The offensive also gives Ukraine a chance to bomb or seize Russian equipment, such as radars, aircraft, and artillery on Russian soil, that would otherwise be outside of their reach. Equipment that could in the future be deployed to and against Ukraine.
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Alright, so I must correct one part of what I wrote. Lgov is 50 miles west of Kursk, which is a lot farther than what I described above. When I typed in "distance from Lgov to Kursk" it showed me a different place called Lgov which is much closer to the oblast capital than the Lgov which is about to fall into Ukrainian hands. We're still talking a city of 17,000 people.
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Putin has ordered Russian media to compare this to the Battle of Kursk during WWII, which I suppose is fitting because the Soviet Union helped Nazi Germany start WWII and destroy peace in Europe, and then it came back to bite them in the arse. Hard.
But in any case the optics of this are terrible, because Russia was in a very desperate situation during the historical Battle of Kursk, and this is tantamount to an admission from Putin that he's managed to destroy all sense of peacetime normalcy inside Russia by foolishly and needlessly invading Ukraine.
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Three days ago, Ukraine launched a surprise offensive into Russian territory, by far the largest of its kind since the start of the war in 2022 (previous incursions were by small militia groups who only stayed 2 or 3 days at most and captured maybe one border village). To date that they've managed to capture around 100-200 square kilometers of Russian territory.
Early into the attack, Russia falsely claimed to have repelled it. They've since repeated that claim several times as the area under Ukrainian control expands. Russian forces have retreated upon encountering the Ukrainians, and Ukraine's best mobile warfare unit is at the helm of this operation.
They've already captured the town of Sudzha, through which flows a Russian pipeline that supplies Europe (or at least it did before the war; I don't know if it still does today). If they can keep up their present momentum, they should be entering the city of Lgov by the end of today. Lgov has a population of about 17,000 and is a fairly major railway hub inside Russia. Furthermore Lgov is a 45 kilometer drive from Kursk, the capital of Kursk Oblast (population 415,000). Objects traveling in a straight line, such as artillery shells, would have to travel a much less than 45-km distance to strike Kursk from Lgov; for context, 45 kilometers is 28 miles.
It's 50/50, then, that by the end of today Ukraine will be able to bombard a Russian city about the size of New Orleans with at least a handful of artillery pieces. And depending on how incompetent the Russian response continues to be they might even capture said Russian city the size of New Orleans at some point in the near future. In this best case scenario, we are talking roughly half a million Russians living under Ukrainian occupation. Half a million Russian hostages whose lives and freedom Ukraine is able to use as a bargaining chip. The whole debacle would, if nothing else and even if short lived, be a catastrophic blow to Putin's image as a man able to protect ordinary Russians from foreign threats.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Hmm, do you believe women in general are capable of meeting the physical demands of combat?
Strength is, to a large degree, an immutable characteristic. Your right to live does not in any way, shape, or form hinge upon said characteristic. Even if you do engage in strength training, that also has no bearing on your rights.
It appears you don’t have anything between your legs
Ad hom. You're also talking to a guy who wouldn't mind becoming a eunuch, so.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Perhaps, but it's the truth. What's between your legs does not determine how expendable your life is, full stop. If the government wishes to compel men to fight and die, they must do the exact same to women. Not doing so is the same as giving men permission not to fight and die, unless said men enlisted of their own volition.
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@Best.Korea
Give the chickens to somebody else so you don't have to see or be involved in their slaughter.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
I believe this has been discussed many times before, and several Republican users including myself have given answers to this question; for example, other Democratic politicians who ran for President avoided serving in Vietnam. Harris's running mate, likewise, never saw combat IIRC, so he's not comparable to, say, WWII vets by pure virtue of enlisting, though he does deserve a fair measure of respect for serving in any capacity. But I'd like to add one more thing:
It says nothing about your character at all.
Women are exempt from the draft, so it logically and morally follows that men are entitled to the same protections of their right not to kill or be killed. Any law that suggests otherwise is an illegitimate law which not only can but should be ignored without hesitation. To serve is an honorable choice, but if it's not an obligation for all then it's an obligation for none.
And to be clear, this isn't just a defense of Trump; I have no qualms with the men of Ukraine who are fleeing to foreign countries in violation of Ukrainian government orders to stay put and submit to the draft, since Ukrainian women are permitted to leave without obstacle. They are doing nothing wrong whatsoever.
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@WyIted
I googled him to figure out who he was and sites keep saying he is a right winger against women's rights.
He made one ill-advised off-color joke about a woman a few years ago (which he apologized for recently), and the media wants that to be the only thing he's known for. Not that he interviewed Liz Truss, or that's he's a well known influencer for an internationally prominent political movement.
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I've watched several podcast videos featuring Carl Benjamin (AKA "Sargon of Akkad"), and he goes into what's happening right now. Here's a short breakdown for anyone who's out of the loop:
-Three young girls, ethnically British or at least European, were recently killed in a mass stabbing attack at a dance studio, while 8 children and 2 adults were injured.
-The attacker was an immigrant, though not Muslim nor of Muslim background. However, a rumor quickly spread that said terrorist was Muslim, and the Muslim community was blamed for this.
-In response, far right groups (and probably a lot of generic apolitical bottom feeders who took advantage of the riotous atmosphere) have thrown the UK into a state of civil unrest. Most of it's just standard property damage like you expect to see during riots, but in some cases the rioters have attacked Muslims.
-There's currently a sense of fear among British Muslims, and some have organized into street gangs for both defense and offense. Far right groups on one hand and Muslim/Antifa groups on the other are brawling with each other.
-The British government under the new Labour PM, Keir Starmer, has promised a heavy-handed crackdown and to punish anyone involved with the rioting, including those who in the government's view egged it on online.
-There were previously riots of this scale in 2011 and during the 20th century. In 2011, the cause was the death of a young black man at the hands of police.
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A few years ago I stumbled across an example online of how real sex offenders talk and think. They tend to be exhibitionists who can't stop themselves from prattling on excitedly about their perversions (not just kids, but adult women), because they're getting a kick out of describing such to strangers on the internet. Their brains are oversexed and they assume the real world works like porn. For example, they won't hesitate to tell a random woman that she would feel good wearing "sexy underwear", or they'll claim that any two women would strip off their clothes and screw each other in private. And of course, they wouldn't hesitate to tell a 12 year old girl this.
Best.Korea doesn't give off those vibes. Either he's trolling, like the "Catholic priest" gag I used to do on DDO, or those pills are working wonders.
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@ebuc
So she was motivated to whatever degree. 0 - 360 degree
Okay, but proposing a bill is not the same as passing a bill. Given the cloture vote and the other house of Congress held by the other party, it takes people skills to get your stuff passed. Senator Harris, instead of demonstrating those skills, was a party hardliner whose office spent 3 years compiling bills that would never see the light of day.
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The Roman historian Sallust understood the decline of the Republic to begin in 146 BC, when the city of Carthage was destroyed.
The line Carthago delenda est, a rallying cry of Cato the Elder against their North African city-state rival, is well known today. More obscure is an argument made at the time (at least per Sallust) against destroying Carthage: that the city provided a sense of metus hostilis (fear of the enemy) which kept Romans from turning on each other. Carthage was Rome's enemy for a total of 118 years, during most of which there was an uneasy peace. Sallust contrasted the civil wars and political usurpers of his own time with the relative sense of unity and patriotism which prevailed in that century.
So what do you think? Is this concept applicable to our time and place?
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Right, you’re voting for the guy who presided over the fastest economic recovery in US history, saw Republicans take back the Supreme Court for the first time in decades, and kept more wars from breaking out overseas
Fixed.
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You legitimately got me with Vance. I hadn't considered that.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Like Senator JD Vance did?
LMAO I didn't realize he'd been in the Senate for so little time. I thought he started in 2016, but it seems you're 100 percent right about him. The same criticism applies to both him and Harris. Though, he simply accepted the VP nomination for a candidate with a 50% chance of winning instead of running for President himself. Thankfully I'm not voting for Vance to be President but for the guy who actually was President for 4 years.
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