Best President since Jimmy Carter is a low, low bar. We forget that Carter was a neo-liberal who threw labor under the bus. Because the Presidents since have been so right-wing, he looks like a leftist in the rear view. And throwing the working classes under the bus is one of the major reasons we’re here now.
Can we start delivering those 2,000lb. bombs that the U.S. gives to Israel one by one, to Netanyahu’s house, by airmail?
Fascinating how the subtext is always that we should feel comforted because a mass-casualty event that’s a normal part of the system that kills and injuries people every day isn’t terrorism.
“Oh, that’s just the machine crushing orphans. It’s supposed to be doing that.”
All logic breaks down at the grocery store.
One of life’s profound truths!
I used to think that as well. But what if it turned out that over-showering was actually the thing that makes you stinky?
I’m picturing testicles wearing a cowboy hat.
Simple: Visibility and speed. You look at a parking spot, and if it’s empty, it’s definitely empty. It’s virtually guaranteed to stay that way as you back in, so you don’t need to monitor what’s in it. No cars, cyclists, pedestrians, emergency vehicles, et cetera, are going to enter the parking stall as you back in. That’s not true of a street or lane when you back out into it. It’s often difficult to even see traffic coming, as backup cameras don’t have the wide-angle coverage, and there’s always the possibility that you didn’t see somebody.
As a result of both of those factors, with practice, backing in can be done in seconds, and pulling out is a breeze. Pulling in forward is a breeze, but for most people, backing out is a slower, more nerve-wracking maneuver. (At least that’s my assumption from watching how long it takes.) On the other hand, the people who just YOLO it back out into traffic are psychopaths.
You can use UTC, right now. Nothing’s stopping you.
I would go further. Most cars don’t belong in places where people live. They injure and kill people on the regular, the noise pollution causes mental and physical health problems, the light pollution disrupts sleep, the particulate pollution causes cardiovascular disease and dementia, as well as damaging ecosystems, driving adds to obesity and issues related to a sedentary lifestyle, the physical space they take leads to sprawl and ecosystem destruction, and the sprawl also bankrupts cities and towns. As well, driving in traffic just plain sucks as an activity, and makes people angry and miserable.
And you should back in.
That’s the leftist ideal. (Which, true, few people fully reach.)
It’s a good question, though people tend to treat it as a thought-terminating cliché rather than exploring the implications. Why should murderers be punished, actually? Enacting punishment is an external incentive, a stimulus, supposedly structured to make the cost to the potential murderer higher than the benefit they hope to get by killing. Belief in punishment, therefore, is consistent with the non-free will position. But if there’s no free will, then why not instead try to “solve” murder, and not have murderers anymore, by discovering the root causes that drive people to murder, and mitigating them? We’d all be better off!
On the other hand, free will implies that the mechanism of punishment may or may not be punishing to the murderer. We don’t know what they feel in response to stimulus; they have free will! Like in the story of Br’er Rabbit, trying to determine a foolproof method of punishment that’s hateful to the murderer is an exercise in futility, since we can’t know their mind.
Conservative spaces are not encumbered by pesky things like facts. Setting things their way doesn’t make one correct.
See, this mad-libs-style reversal of rhetoric doesn’t work because of pesky things like facts.
There are multiple meanings of “support.” There’s an endorsement meaning, which can be explicit or tacit, and there’s an aiding meaning. The Democrats may not explicitly endorse it, but the Biden administration certainly did tacitly endorse it by directly aiding it. And most of the party has been tacitly endorsing and aiding it for decades.
Huh, that’s really odd conclusion to draw from Democrats literally supporting genocide. Harris couldn’t even be bothered to come out against it during the campaign even when they knew their support was a losing issue.
It’s a simple moral calculus, don’t you see? You must always vote for Hitler and help him kill 5,000,000 people, if the alternative is somebody who’s going to kill 5,000,001 people.
This was obviously the outcome no matter who was elected. Israel has always been very clear about this.
More research is always good, as it can deepen our understanding, but the basic outline of what’s going on is already known. A lot of people just don’t want to believe it, because we’re all stuck on the metaphor that we’re all captains of the ship inside our own heads. You see it in this thread; people want to blame non-voters, as if millions of people all had perfect information and all made decisions based upon it through conscious reasoning. Because they’re just—I dunno—bad people? (Which is a completely bonkers belief when you start to dig into it.)
Actually, neuroscience tells us that consciousness doesn’t really exist, except as an emergent phenomenon of sensory experience. Brain scans show that thoughts, feelings, and decisions occur before we’re consciously aware of them; the conscious mind is basically a rationalization machine, inventing narratives about why we did a thing or felt a certain way, only after the fact. And, it’s notoriously bad at it. (The Misattribution of Arousal is one of the classic examples.) So, if you can affect the way that somebody’s brain works, you can in many ways control what the they think and feel.
And that’s exactly what authoritarian demagogues do.
Freaky! For the most part, name a movie, any movie, and I haven’t seen it. But I’m one of the few people who saw Space Truckers in a theater. Stuart Gordon went to school here, so he had screening of the film at the student union, followed by a Q&A session, back in '96.
Yes, it was a hoot! Gordon was a founder of an experimental theater company here which has the improv mentality of treating goofy ideas seriously and just going with them. That sensibility shows through in the movie, for sure.