Buelldozer

If they show up I hand out the candy and I’ve been doing it that way for decades. No telling some kid or teens situation in life and there’s no need in making it harder on them.

It is a law in my state that all students must stand and all teachers must recite.

That law has been unenforceable since 1943.

We have the electoral college, the senate, and gerrymandering.

The outsized effect of the EC and Gerrymandering have a very simple fix. I wonder why Democrats never talk about it?

It’s sad you have no third strong grassroots movement,

One of the few things that both Democrats and Republicans work together on is making sure that there are no viable third parties. They make it extraordinarily difficult to get ballot access at any level whenever possible and on the odd occasion that a 3rd party candidate does make it into office they pull out all the stops to make sure they lose the next election.

You never know, they could written something out without fully considering the ramifications. It happens.

Heroes don’t kill hundreds of people, they save them.

Ah, so the people killing Nazi’s in WWII aren’t Heroes anymore. They should have saved the Nazis instead!

Are you hearing yourself?

Serie A are a bunch of greedy cunt bags trying to re-arrange how the Internet works to try and protect their precious footy matches. Fuck 'em.

What are some of these connections men need out of a marriage?

Basically the same connections that women need out of a marriage. A peer group, a purpose, and friend groups to share interests with.

Unfortunately many, if not most, people simply don’t know how to go about it. They throw themselves into their work and whatever of their time is leftover gets dedicated to family. The interests and friends that they had prior to marriage and kids are left behind and those sacrifices leave them feeling alone and unfulfilled. They also don’t understand WHY they feel that way when to the best of their understanding they’re doing everything right!

Marriage isn’t, except in exceedingly rare instances, a “one stop shop” where your partner somehow magically fulfills your every need. That’s straight up Disney Movie bullshit.

People, regardless of gender identity, absolutely REQUIRE relationships outside of their marriage.

When I protested and gave them the handout of their own procedures, the guy said “you can give me the key, or you don’t get on your flight.”

They did that to me once and when the Agent showed up at my gate with that line I replied that I was happy to tag along back to the case and open it for them. The Agent took me the back way through the service halls to their area where I opened my case and they did their inspection, then they brought me back to the gate through the service halls.

The agent wasn’t happy about it but I stayed cool with 'em and they made it work.

Head to Vegas and bet all 100 Million that the Earth will be destroyed by an Asteroid in the next 25 days.

Earth not destroyed? 100 Million is gone and the Billion is yours. Earth IS destroyed? You aren’t alive to know that you won the bet but lost the Billion.

You literally cannot lose.

China are shifting away from fossil fuels,

China’s coal use has gone up every year since 2000 and is now 5 times what it was back then. They aren’t “shifting away”, they are steadily increasing its use.

It’s nowhere close to a full accounting. The IRS just plucked some extremely low hanging fruit by going after 1600 specific individuals that they already knew owed at least $250,000.

For TY 2024 the effort is being expanded and they are going to go after 25,000 high income earners who didn’t file taxes (at all) in TY 2017 and later. The IRS knows who they are and has already sent them letters warning them that their audits are coming soon.

It’s good stuff but its still more low hanging fruit. The hard work is going to start in TY 2025 when they start auditing the large companies.

For those who wonder how the IRS did this you should read the actual IRS Press Announcement but basically they went after 1,600 specific individuals that they already knew owed them at least 250,000 each.

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-tops-1-billion-in-past-due-taxes-collected-from-millionaires-compliance-efforts-continue-involving-high-wealth-groups-corporations-partnerships

There is more in the works for TY 2024 and beyond.

Russia may not have

Russia is NOT the only problem, they aren’t even the main problem. There’s quite a number of issues where the mainstream media discourse depends almost entirely on whose in office. As an example take a look at crime statistics since 1991 and then align the media coverage about crime with whose in charge at the time. Immigration is another one. 2,000 people or more crossing the border every day may or may not be a crisis depending on which political party is in charge.

Those and other issues aren’t being manipulated, at least not primarily, by Russia Propaganda. That work is being done by mainstream media sources and the only way to know you’re being manipulated into an opinion is by putting in the work to learn the context and history of an issue.

It’s a massive time suck that can require hours, days, or even weeks to get a deep enough understanding to know you’re being lied to and / or manipulated.

Fair point, I can only speak directly about my local experience.

That’s true but we, that includes me, can look around and see what’s happening beyond our State and National borders to see if a theory fits.

Realistically, the standard of living has been falling for a while.

IMO that’s the crux of the problem right there. The Standard of Living has been falling everywhere and it’s been falling faster as “Globalization” took hold. The real issue though isn’t trade between countries that have roughly similar economic systems and lifestyles, it’s the one sided importation of goods between countries that do not have roughly similar economic systems and lifestyles.

The problem with Globalization is that it tears the floor out from underneath the vulnerable. The under-educated and the poor struggle to make a living because their jobs have been shipped away to another country where someone can live for less and thus work for less. It’s a race to the bottom.

Those vulnerable people, and even the once privileged who’ve watched their livelihoods ripped away, are increasingly desperate to find a way out of their situation and so they’re increasingly turning to the only people who seem to care. To paraphrase a bit “It’s the (real) economy, stupid!”

This isn’t my idea either as this outcome was widely predicted by Union Bosses and Business Leaders during the Clinton Administrations runup to NAFTA and MFN Trading Status for China.

If they were correct, and it appears they were, then the only way to stop the madness is to re-onshore the jobs as much as possible with a special focus on geographic areas that have the highest imbalance. The U.S. started doing it under the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration has accelerated the trend. If everyone will just hang tight for another 12-18 months the effects will start to get really noticeable and the Right Wing rise will ebb away.

Having said all that, it should also be said that we do still currently have a very real Nazi problem.

Nearly every country in the world is experiencing a shift to the right and it’s accelerating.

In Europe we have all that

You had all of that but as it has trickled away your populations are also accelerating their move towards the Right Wing. I can’t believe how many people in here think that this is only a problem in the United States when it’s happening in nearly every country.

Imo, a big part of what I am seeing now stems from a lack of proper history and or civics education.

That doesn’t explain what’s going on in much of Europe. You bring up the Holocaust but Germany has about the strong laws imaginable against Nazism / Neo-Nazism and yet the far right is about two whiskers away from holding power. It’s much the same in France and they already have power in Italy. This accelerating trend towards the right is a Global phenomena.

I think what’s really happening is a populist uprising against globalization and the hardships its created for so many people. Those same people are trending right wing because the RW are actually talking about the problem and possible solutions.

Libertarian here. According to you I don’t want to help the poor so can you please explain to me why I’m spending hours every month doing volunteer work that has positive impacts for the disadvantaged?

It’s long been said Libertarians are just Republicans that want to smoke weed and distance themselves from the outwardly racist rhetoric.

Some are but not all. The people who repeat that line really don’t like to be confronted with the reality that there’s a lot more to a libertarian than weed. As an example the party platform started pushing LGBTQ rights clear back in the late '70s, long before anyone else was.

There certainly are selfish bastard libertarians but undesirables exist in every party and I maintain that we shouldn’t define a group by its worst members.

Why would I, a right wing libertarian, lend my time to developing a piece of software that I am unable to make a profit from?

You are making a reductionist argument that the only thing that motivates a libertarian is profit. It is certainly a motivator but it’s certainly not the only one. Libertarian’s have a long history of association with FOSS, for example my own stretches back to the mid-90s. I have no desire to make money from it but I have a strong desire to stay out of the clutches of BigTech as much as possible and so I contribute to FOSS as I can.

Something like bitcoin is the kind of tech project of that mould that i think attracts the right wing libertarian.

A lot of libertarians push on cryptocurrency not because of a profit motive but because of the freedom and privacy aspects. To use myself as an example I don’t hold crypto as an investment but rather as a way of holding a currency that isn’t subject to the US Federal Reserve system.

Are there some libertarians who fit your descriptions? Absolutely there are, and they are generally referred to as Anarcho-Capitalists, An-Caps for short, but just like every Democrat isn’t a Progressive not every libertarian is an An-Cap.