He was less invested in those causes at that point than he was in progressive labor policies. As far as evolution and prohibition go, he had some understandable motivations. Alcohol causes terrible harm and he also worked to improve the conditions that drive people to addiction. Evolution was promoted by social darwinists to justify capitalist exploitation. He was less of a YEC by today’s standards, even if he was wrong.

He didn’t know how much prohibition would fail beforehand, and his opposition to evolution touches on an important assumption people make about nature. Most people assume that something being natural makes it good, but evolution shows how misguided that assumption is.

Evolution is a process fuelled by death, where no individual matters and we are only servants to a soulless machine. We only grow old and die to help evolution work faster. Most suffering serves our genes rather than us as people. Capitalism sucks because of the ways it resembles evolution, turning every element of our existence into a mechanical processes. Evolution dangles happiness in front of us to get us to serve it.

WJB just couldn’t accept that nature is so cruel, that we’re machines produced by a process that only advances through death. Most religious people still need to square this reality with their understanding of a creator deity worthy of worship. I respect the concept of God more as our creation of than as our creator. If it were to represent our common personhood instead of our evolved species, it would actually be worth serving.

It’s even worse with Ukraine. If Ukraine gets conquered, WWIII likely starts. Poland and others will probably put boots on the ground to prevent Ukraine from losing, triggering attacks from Russia, triggering NATO involvement, and pushing us to potential omnicide instead of genocide.

Israel is pushing towards nuclear war as well, only with Israel as the only nuclear player. Things are bad on a serious level right now that people haven’t comprehended

If he wasn’t worried, Biden would be much worse than he’s been(aka, the average for POTUS). He’s the best we’ve had since Carter, which is a condemnation of the office rather than praise of Biden.

If we got the President lemmy wants, a civil war would be the best scenario, but a coup would be more likely. The better the president, the harder their job. The more left wing candidate is always held to a higher standard.

They haven’t weaponized shit. He’s still being handled with kid gloves. TPTB are still protecting him for the most part. The reason he wasn’t investigated in the past is because TPTB are mostly rich assholes like him that protect each other from being treated like us peasants.

Most of the opposition still isn’t willing to hold Trump to the same standards as most people because even they’re rich, corrupt, conservative shitheads. The prosecutions are politically motivated to be weaker than they should be for his crimes because all prosecutions against elites are weak. Most of them would spend life in prison if justice was blind.

The most foundational concept to America is economic exploitation and cut throat entrepreneurship. Selfishness is more foundational to American conservatives than the church or the state. Trump was openly a selfish asshole. One would think that open disregard for others would disqualify someone from the highest elected office, but the right thought otherwise. Being a bully meant that Trump was strong. A lack of empathy isn’t a vice, but a virtue.

Honestly, steam reviews are far more useful than most review systems. Ign or metacritic are nearly useless in comparison.

That’s honestly kind of insulting to say that, and it shows a lack of awareness on your own part. You’re making one hell of an assumption that people aren’t informed and that they’re making a diagnosis without putting any thought behind it.

I’m not out of line in thinking that people can’t diagnose Joe Biden of being mentally unfit. People couldn’t definitively diagnose Trump with narcissistic personality disorder, and he didn’t have a known disorder that could interfere in a diagnosis. Biden has a well documented stutter, making it hard for any observer to parse his communication disorder from cognitive impairment.

People who are informed would recognize this, and even those willing to diagnose politicians from TV appearances would need solid examples of abnormal behavior that could only be explained by cognitive impairment. I don’t take armchair diagnosis seriously because I have some expertise in psychology. People want a reason to have someone other than Biden, so they assume mental disability can be determined by the public. I don’t think we can with the info available. Gut feelings will just reinforce your biases.

I get the physical part of Biden being unfit, but not the mental part. I’ve not seen any evidence of his age making him less intelligent or mentally. He’s not physically well, but whenever someone says he’s senile, I automatically assume they don’t know what they’re talking about. “Senile” is not synonymous with “out of touch.”

With the recall, concern wasn’t just coming from some rando or only Democratic partisans. I heard it from respected political scientists. They thought Newsom was likely to win, but there was still great risk of a Republican governor getting elected without popular support. It’s how Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, managed to get elected. The Governator never could have won a Republican primary, and didn’t even win the popular vote. If it weren’t for serious campaigning in the last few months, the recall could have been close.

Newsom always had majority approval, but the concern about the recall came because people were only lukewarm on him. He isn’t an exciting candidate, which is what the left claims to want. Like I said before, Biden seems more genuine about his morals and principles than Newsom. Newsom is more of what the left hates than Biden.

Newsom hate isn’t new. There was genuine worry he was going to lose his recall election, replaced by a radical Republican with a plurality of support from only those that voted for his removal. Left wing Democrats who were critical of Newsom united and organized to prevent a fascist rising to power. We put aside our gripes with corpocrats to prevent someone even worse from winning.

California is guaranteed for the Democrats in the modern era, so we usually sit on the sidelines of the fight for the presidency and hope other states make the right call. However, the recall race showed that we were also willing to hold our nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.

That’s part of why I get so frustrated by the anti voting shit. Biden is more of a genuine human being than Newsom, yet people fall for accelerationist propaganda. They delude themselves into thinking that not voting will strengthen the left when the opposite is true. The unreliability of young, left wing voters reinforces the establishment bias of not appealing to them. If they won’t even turn out for Bernie in the 2020 primary, why rely on them?

As a Cali native, Newsom would be worse than Biden. If he ran in a Democratic primary, he might lose California because Democrats here don’t like him that much. If the primary was between him and Biden, I would vote for Biden because he’s less elitist and has a better moral compass. Newsom honestly doesn’t seem to have serious principles beyond political success. He’s a distilled version of what people hate about Democrats.

America isn’t that free of a country. Democrats were always going to run their incumbent. The time to choose a left wing candidate was the 2020 primary, which is why I was devastated when Biden won. I knew we would be stuck with him for 8 fucking years. The left didn’t turn out enough in that primary, and the establishment went with one of the worst choices.

The fact that there isn’t some popular Democratic alternative at this point means it will not happen. Biden has been the most left wing president in over half a century, and none of his shitty decisions have been due to his age. Organize with the DSA or promote left wing Democrats if you’re fed up with the establishment. Recognize that becoming cynically apathetic makes you a pathetic asshole, not a person who’s better than those that try.

Zionism has always had multiple different meanings, so this isn’t a new phenomenon. Humans made up every word in existence. There is no single definition for any word and there is no universal dictionary handed down by some higher power. We make up everything and write the rules ourselves. Pretending that isn’t how language works on a fundamental level is simply wrong.

Appreciate how good you have it. In America, child sex abuse material is only illegal when children were abused in making it, or if it’s considered obscene by a community. If someone edits adult actors to look like children as they perform sex acts, it’s not illegal under federal law. If someone generates child nudity using ai models trained on nude adults and only clothed kids, it’s not illegal at the national level.

Fake porn of real people could be banned for being obscene, usually at a local level, but almost any porn could be banned by lawmakers this way. Harmless stuff like gay or trans porn could be banned by bigoted lawmakers, because obscenity is a fairly subjective mechanism. However, because of our near absolute freedom of speech, obscenity is basically all we have to regulate malicious porn.

See my other comment on ideas. The communication abilities and intelligence of humans would need to be crippled for us to die off. We’d never truely go back to the iron age, because we have non physical technology that’s difficult to destroy. We’re unlikely to forget how to make steel because it’s too useful, even if all steel is destroyed.

I don’t get this under estimation of humanity. If 99% of humans died, the planet became 3-5 degrees warmer, and all computers literally popped out of existence, we’d recover a ton of technology within a few centuries. We’d use a strange mish-mash of old and new tech, but people would write down a ton of information from the generations that remember the before times, and using previously learned principles, new generations would reverse engineer a ton of useful things.

Radio communications would be relatively easy to remake and will almost always exist in some form. A ton of useful developments like agricultural technologies and energy technologies would be too valuable to be lost for long. Gunpowder and firearms aren’t going anywhere. All of these bedrock technologies would never totally disappear as they’re too useful.

Even in a world constantly at war, these technologies would be essential to winning those fights. If you forget how to make guns, a group that didn’t will conquer you. If you rediscover an old technology, it could give you an upper hand. If there isn’t perpetual war, the risk of it and the benefits of trade will allow even more development and rediscovery.

The biggest reason for you underestimating humans is that you forget that most of our technology isn’t physical. A boat may decay and become inoperable within a few decades, but the engineering principles that allow for the boat to function are unlikely to decay and fall out of disuse. Engines are useful. Boats are useful. Construction of high quality versions of these things won’t happen overnight, but low quality and functional versions will get built.

People, even without writing, are exceptional at remembering useful ideas. With writing, we can store information outside of our minds and write out more complicated ideas than our working memory can handle. You think everyone is going to forget how to write mathematics? Hell no. We’ll never lose written language, and that will allow us to find knowledge that no one alive remembers. The necessity of learning unknown concepts alone will ensure people would remember how modern languages are written.

The most impressive technology humans have is language, ideas, forms. Without forms, we’d never have built the most impressive physical structures and technology we have. Every advanced building began as a blueprint, and even Stonehenge required planning and communication. If every physical technology we’ve ever made disappeared at once, we’d rebuild many of those things by writing down what we remember and sharing knowledge with eachother.

TLDR: Ideas can outlive physical technology, and we’ll never stop using useful tech in any apocalyptic situation. Only the Planet of the Apes neurological disease would stop humans permanently.

It’s a problem for everyone because the societal changes that would adjust for a population decline and inverted population pyramid aren’t favored by the upper class.

We’d need to invest in doctors and nursing staff properly, something a ton of places are struggling with. We’d need to make the job more appealing by both increasing pay substantially and improving conditions. We need to get rid of student debt overall, but definitely for medical professionals that care for the elderly.

We also need to decrease inequality and use redistributed wealth to fund the retirements of younger generations, but that’s more complicated and the more uphill battle.

No. It’d be very difficult to actually have humans go extinct. Bad things will happen, but extinction would require a Children of Men level situation.

I don’t care what God will do to him; I just want to get these awful people out of power so they’ll stop killing children. God making things right in the afterlife isn’t a universally agreed upon truth, so we must do the right thing regardless of its existence. If God is good, surely he’d want us to make our mortal existence less miserable and more meaningful, right?

Hundreds of micro votes a year? I think people should be ABLE to directly vote for things, but most legislation is better handled by representatives. I’m interested in politics and even I wouldn’t be happy voting directly on every policy. That’s way too much stuff to be informed on.

As a person Republicans literally plan to persecute for existing, fuck you. You’re either a person who’s safe from the consequences of fascism, or an idiot who thinks they can avoid them. I can only hope you’re in a solid blue state.