Valid questions. Do we have firm answers to any of them? And absent firm answers, what kind of risks to the safety of the general public are we willing to accept in service of ideological values?

Yeah… I’m all for compassion and understanding, but if someone is missing the voice in their head that says “Hey, we shouldn’t be killing people” then their circuitry is broken, no matter what age they are or what their circumstances are. And that broken circuitry poses a real and present danger to everyone in that person’s orbit.

I don’t support punitive incarceration, but the general public has the right to exist with a reasonable degree of certainty that they’re not likely to encounter a cold blooded murderer on any given day, and part of ensuring that is to incarcerate people who are known to kill others, at least until such a time that we can have a high degree of confidence that they won’t be doing that again.

The person being a child doesn’t really change that part of the social contract. I promise you won’t be any less upset if someone you love is murdered by a child than by an adult.

One thing I’ve noticed among friends and family, who lean quite left compared to the general public and would be generally supportive of progressive policies, is that there’s a belief that progressive policies are unpopular outside of our circle and therefore in the primary they must vote for a candidate who triangulates in order appeal to the majority in the general election. Because a centrist from the Democratic Party is better than anything we can hope for from the Republican Party.

I try to show them statistics that progressive policies are broadly popular across both parties as long as they are not presented with labels of “socialism” or “progressivism” but the reality that we all need to contend with is that we cannot easily escape the unfair baggage that these labels carry in our society where the big media cartel controls the narrative.

I think if we got rid of FPTP and got rid of primaries we’d see an enormous swing in favor progressive candidates. In my mind that electoral reform is the key thing to pursue. Well that and literally anything related to mitigating the climate crisis because that one really can’t wait.

I assume he thinks this will win over more Gen Z than it will lose him Boomers, and no one will ever hold him to this promise anyway.

Countries ranked in descending order by number of school shootings from 2009-2018:

• United States: 288
• Mexico: 8
• South Africa: 6
• Afghanistan: 3
• Brazil, Canada, France: 2
• Azerbaijan, China, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Kenya, Russia, Turkey: 1

One of these is not like the others. This isn’t exactly a fact of life in other parts of the world.

Source

People just don’t want to believe that China can win at capitalism because it undermines all their internal narratives around the innovation power of liberalism. I say this as someone who does not personally like China and its authoritarianism.

The fact of the matter is with a population of nearly 1.5 billion people, you’re statistically guaranteed to have enormous pools of talent to draw on. Even a relatively modest per capita investment in education, focused on key objectives and funneled into the portion of the talent pool that they’ve managed to identify, will be able to yield massive innovation.

A lot of people will suffer under this authoritarianism. The people from these talent pools will be exploited and burnt out at a young age. This is already happening in China. But as a nation, it will be able to position itself extremely well technologically and economically, and this is a reality the rest of the world needs to be prepared to deal with.

Same energy

This is very insulting, Dr. Doom is an intelligent and effective ruler, please do not draw such an unfair comparison between him and Musk. Fictional character feelings matter.

It sure worked out positively for her Walz pick.

I actually remember her being a standout at the debates until Tulsi Gabbard managed to latch onto a line of attack that hurt her credibility as the progressive candidate that she was presenting herself as. Shortly after that traction was lost I think she saw the writing on the wall and exited gracefully, which obviously worked in her favor because it made it easy for Biden to tap her for VP.

PG&E was literally the villain in the real life Erin Brockovich story.

I really can’t feel bad for these women that get involved with jackass conservative men. There were plenty of signals that they either ignored or saw as green flags. For her to be in her position is either extreme negligence or sheer karma, probably the latter.

But I feel very bad for any children that land in that position. They did nothing to deserve what they’re going through.

It worked for Trump, why not for others? 🤷‍♂️

I find it hard to believe that anyone who votes Republican will care enough about Taylor Swift’s influence to change their vote, but I can absolutely believe that her endorsement would swing the numbers in a big way if she just motivates politically apathetic Swifties to go to the polls.

Originally, a qipao was supposed to be a loose-fitting gown

Source for this? From living in Asia (not in China, but in a predominantly Chinese community), I’ve only seen qipao be form fitting, never loose. Even seeing older pictures of women in qipao, they’re always form fitting. And more often than not, women seem to use them to intentionally highlight their figure.

Chinese communities tend to have a strong conservative bend, but that doesn’t mean they’re puritanical when it comes to sexuality, especially the sexually suggestive.

People keep saying he’s getting worse, but to me he just seems like the same old narcissistic racist asshole that he’s always been 🤷‍♂️

Maybe his “charisma”, if you can call it that, is faltering a bit, but he may just be off balance from the sudden storm of twists over the past month.

Not quite, even when Trump won in 2016, he insisted there was election fraud and that he should’ve won by a larger margin.

I think Trump is accustomed to thinking his spouses are lesser beings that exist only to bolster his image and serve at his pleasure, and he probably harbors deep feelings of disdain for all of them that he can’t express publicly.

So for him it totally tracks to be married to a type of person that you hate.

If she loves Jewish people so much then why doesn’t she marry 'em?? 🤪

Oh wait…

Nothing is ever better in every conceivable way than the current state of the art.

Probabilistically, sure, but it’s not impossible that there has been some piece of knowledge or understanding that’s been missing, and that massive breakthroughs are possible once the process is figured out.

I think a fair modern example is LED light bulbs. They are better in every conceivable way than incandescent or fluorescent lightbulbs: they last longer, use less energy, shine brighter, use less toxic materials, and are easy to mass produce. But there were several decades where much of the industry believed that LEDs would never be very useful as a light source because we could only produce red and green, and it was generally believed that a blue LED would be impossible to produce.

Then one guy decided it would be his life mission to invent the blue LED, and the sonuvabitch did it. Now LEDs are the only sensible thing to use to produce light.

It’s always possible for this kind of breakthrough to happen, especially in material science where the complexity of how molecules interplay is nearly incomprehensible.