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.

The US’s beginning levels of public education are probably some of the worst in the Western world, but its higher education at the high levels is some of the best in the Western world.

As is often true of the best things, the bestness is not because of the bestness of the thing, but because of what it connects with. The universities themselves honestly really aren’t great. But what happens in them is often extraordinary, because they’re able to attract the brightest people from across the world, and give them a place and let them shine.

Well, until now.

https://literarydevices.net/analogy/

Absolutely fucking not.

It doesn’t matter if the food court is usually pretty good, all things considered, but the mall is currently on fire. Do not visit.

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

It would be convenient to write them off as psyops

Fun, too.

, but the unfortunate truth is that there are people on our side of the political spectrum who have bad but sincerely-held beliefs too.

Completely agree. I actually think most people who say this are real people who believe it (whether or not they picked it up from Russia propaganda originally.) I’m just saying that I don’t think this blog in particular is some earnest person who just really feels strongly about NATO and BRICS, and also likes piping a very-sloppily-put-together script saying the same through an AI voice to create an overall vibe I would summarize as PREPARE TO RECEIVE MY POLITICAL VIEWS, FELLOW HUMAN.

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)

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.

OK, so Biden made things better across the board. he could have made some things even more better, but wasn’t able to. and he at least didn’t make anything worse.

is that an accurate summary of what you’re claiming?

Mostly. I wouldn’t agree with “he didn’t make anything worse,” because US immigration post-2001 is a terrifying hell run by horrible people, and it would be hard for anyone to lay hands on it in any way without making something worse in the process. But yes, aside from that, it’s accurate.

because if so, we need to get back to those details you claimed I don’t care about. the ones you’ve never actually responded to on their substance:

Because I’m not interested. I already laid out what I thought about this: Looking at the whole of his impact on immigration is a way better way to analyze his overall impact on immigration than extensive Lemmy bickering, and I think you’re focusing in on details as a way to distract from the idea of looking at the overall.

because if you actually read what I said, notice I phrased it as “you seem to be arguing”. that was intentional. I’m listening to what you’re saying, and trying to tell you “here’s what your argument is coming across as” because I do actually care whether I’m understanding you correctly or not.

Okay, fair enough. That previous paragraph is what I’m saying.

It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid
Now we stand outcast and starving 'midst the wonders we have made
But the union makes us strong

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?