It is. It’s not like rat poison, but a single clove can be enough to poison them, so yes they should absolutely not eat garlic bread.

https://literarydevices.net/analogy/

Not only that, but FPTP mathematically will always pull the two parties to the center, a hair’s breadth apart from one another, because anyone who wanders off into “their” territory will start to lose elections because of it.

I mean… well, that’s how it works mathematically. It’s not even really applicable to modern US politics. What’s happening in modern US politics is that:

1. The voters are so addled by propaganda that they can’t even really tell what’s going on, and mostly make decisions based on pure engineered fantasy instead of based on anything that’s actually happening (“Immigration is a problem! Trump is going to fix that problem!” and similar beliefs)
2. Even through the fog of propaganda, there are some things that they’re able to figure out (health insurance companies are a massive problem and we shouldn’t let billionaires keep all of our work output while we’re struggling to pay rent and buy eggs). But, the people in Washington by and large don’t support fixing any of those things, because the people who pay their bills don’t agree with the obvious solutions that 85% of the people would support.
3. Party machinery and media monopolization (and now, social media propaganda) prevent anyone who’s invested in those popular things – the “center” that FPTP math would normally be pulling the politicians towards – from gaining any traction or being able to put anything better than a cruel caricature of it into practice (see also the ACA).

Basically, we fucked. But, if we someone managed to unfuck those massive problems, then we’d still be faced with FPTP pulling everyone to “the center.” But, on the other hand, “the center” would be way better than the current American system of one conservative party running against one openly fascist party and like 5-10 rabble-rousers on the left running around Washington and making noise about how really in a perfect world it shouldn’t be like that.

There are some fucking ridiculous people in these comments lol

Were you aware of this? I was not. Anyway, I edited the title; how’s that seem?

Hm… maybe I am wrong. It’s definitely not just a conservative talking point, it was how historians looked at early modern cities for a while, I thought. But it seems like modern historians aren’t sure that’s the case:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2598176

With just a quick look around, I couldn’t find anything that seemed definitive in the other direction, but also, the little preview that shows of that paper seems like it does a pretty good job of saying “Yo the reasons they said this is true are incredibly weak when you dig into them.” So maybe it was just premodern science from the leeches-and-ECT days.

There’s also this. Deaths are exceeding births in almost half the US, now:

https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/deaths-exceeded-births-nearly-half-us-counties-last-year

(And, of course, it’s mostly in the rural areas)

Wait until it’s all gone…

Not just whales, not just corals, but whole jungles, whole biomes, whole fields of the crops we depend on to eat, just crumbled and dead, unable to breathe in the heat.

Silent dead forests, sterile anoxic oceans or ones choked with algae and muck, starving people in desperate mobs a million strong, with no one to bury them when they fall. Hurricanes and dust storms over abandoned cities. Whole species, whole categories of life that can’t survive the pace of change and harsh conditions that are coming. It’s not a movie, it’s not a story. There are people already alive today who will see it unless something massive changes. Probably even if it does.

What did you do? I didn’t do anything today to stop it. We should be.

The justification is “What the fuck are you going to do about it?”

The normal process is born out of an awareness that people can bite back sometimes, and so “they” will take seriously trying to justify their actions. After a while, things get quiescent, and some of “they” start fooling themselves that it is impossible that the people not on top would ever bite back, and they stop bothering themselves with worrying about it.

For some reason (as with pretty much any other “what the fuck are you doing to do about it” situation), when people do do something about it, it’s all of a sudden an outrageous betrayal, an offense against decency that no one could have seen coming.

This is the way it used to be. Cities didn’t used to be able to sustain themselves through the birthrate alone; they were so toxic and dangerous that they would eat the populations within them, and needed a continuous flow of people from the countryside to sustain the population. Who would then, as the years went by, get fed into the maw and replaced in their turn.

Doing the whole country that way hasn’t been tried before to my knowledge, but what the hell, we might as well be the first to give it a shot.

Sure

Like I say, other people might have other wordings or summaries. Honestly hair-splitting about it just pisses me off. A court proved that, by the normal-human definitions of these words, he’s guilty of rape. How’s that?

That’s not to mention the many, many allegations of rape, sexual assault, and child rape that other people have credibly raised. That’s just the time that it’s been proven in court with him having every opportunity to vigorously defend himself against the allegation, and failing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump

renewing her claim of defamation and adding a claim of battery under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law allowing sexual-assault victims to file civil suits beyond expired statutes of limitations

A jury verdict in May 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, and ordered him to pay US$5 million in damages.

Regarding the jury verdict, the judge asked the jury to find if the preponderance of the evidence suggested that Trump raped Carroll under New York’s narrow legal definition of rape at that time, denoting forcible penetration with the penis, as alleged by the plaintiff;[d] the jury did not find Trump liable for rape and instead found him liable for a lesser degree of sexual abuse. In July 2023, Judge Kaplan said that the verdict found that Trump had raped Carroll according to the common definition of the word, i.e. not necessarily implying penile penetration.[e] In August 2023, Kaplan dismissed a countersuit and wrote that Carroll’s accusation of rape is “substantially true”.

The official finding of the jury was that he was “liable” for sexual assault. The rest of it, I think pretty much speaks for itself. I would summarize that as him being proven in court to be guilty of rape, other people might have other wordings or summaries. Whatever.

The man don’tbe corporealanymore center

Sounds like someone needs a visit to the MDC

He was literally proven in court guilty of rape, in the defamation case.

1. There are definitely indications of fuckery in the election, the most compelling case I saw came from that one county in NY. According to some other people, it’s a Hasidic community that just always votes however their rabbi tells them to vote, but that doesn’t seem totally convincing to me.
2. I don’t think this story is evidence of that… it’s honestly just a bunch of random innuendos about international human trafficking and other voting scandals that have already been exposed as voting scandals. Aside from one change to how config.ini was handled, there is literally nothing that I saw that is even a hint of an indication that something was stolen about the 2024 election. Why not focus on the stuff that proves the case (at least to lay out the broad outlines of the argument)? At least mention what it is? Why demand hand recounts, which are a lot slower and less reliable than other types of more properly done recounts? Why this aggressive flopping around among other issues and arguments? Am I missing something?

the NTSB chair has been going after the FAA, saying that the FAA failed to adhere to 15,000 close call warnings at Reagan National Airport between planes and choppers, failed to act, failed to move the helicopter route so that there would not be a disaster. Failed to listen to controllers who warned of a possible disaster. And she says the FAA has been dragging its feet and not cooperating in this investigation.

This is precisely why the FAA and NTSB are two separate agencies: When you’re looking into why a crash happened, it often develops that the FAA wasn’t doing some things it should have been doing. And, of course, if the FAA was investigating itself, it would be tempted to downplay how that happened or how big a deal it was. Since it’s a totally separate organization that does investigations as the one that enforces airline safety day-to-day, though, they can just state the facts and if it hurts someone’s feelings or career prospects, oh well.

It’s a leftover from an earlier and more honorable time in American governance.

It is hard to get account-banned from Reddit. Like mad hard. I mean, I’m not up on current events over there, maybe things have changed and they brand you as “antisemitic” and ban your account sometimes, but I feel like much more likely is that this is a you issue.

No, everyone doesn’t deserve a second chance. Certainly not everyone deserves a fourth chance, on the same platform.

Surprisingly, when you drop not enough food basically at random on a whole population of starving people, they start “stealing” it from each other. And the ones who are best at violence tend to be the ones who wind up with it. Who knew.

(Not that I’m saying the NYT isn’t lying here. I haven’t even read the details really, but I’m sure they are making up some kind of bullshit. I’m just saying that, even if there is some kind of “theft” or hoarding of food going on, that is 100% what anyone with a brain would expect to happen from the way Israel is controlling humanitarian aid at this point.)