• 119 Posts
  • 120 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’d like to note that in this situation where you’ve expressed you don’t like either major party, you only believe one of those parties should reform the situation (Democratic), which means that inherently you know one is acting more in good faith than the other. I doubt it even occurred to you that a Republican would want to reform the FPTP process because you know they won’t do it and have no incentive to.

    If you implictly know that there’s a lesser of two evils and yet choose to vote third party in the general, it’s just as much on you when the worse of the two evils wins.


  • Not really, that’s a minor part of the opinion. The more important part is they tell you how much food you’re going to get of what kind and then they give you that food. I don’t think anyone would be able to win a case on “my burger didn’t look like the burger in the ad” because every burger looks a little different. Lots of things that are the same don’t look the same and let’s not suddenly pretend we get McDonalds for the appearance. They’d win false advertising if, say, a quarter pounder was only 2 oz.



  • There is a legal, regulated, mostly safe method to buy cigarettes. It is inaccessible if you are under a certain age, but only the seller/provider is punished for violating regulations. It’s okay to have restrictions on what children can consume.

    While current laws on illegal drugs do not work, arguing against any regulation whatsoever is similarly silly, the laws obviously work. Smoking rates have dramatically declined since those laws and public education campaigns began.










  • Building up a new economy is not a crash. A crash is when the current system gets wrecked and it’s possible something better emerges from the ashes. The problem is that an economic crash primarily hurts the poor, even if they don’t own the stocks/property/means of production. They’re the ones whose jobs and homes are lost.

    Consider, for example, the Bengal famine. Entirely economic, there was literally enough food but it became prohibitively expensive due to market forces driven by the British. The rich British aristocrats didn’t suffer, Indians did. In Venezuela when the market crashed, rich people got out or are able to weather it. Poor people are either stuck having to attempt to make the best of a terrible situation, or flee and seek aid as migrants.


  • It’s a Catch-22. He’s a contender for the presidency and the former president who has a real shot of winning. He’s also under indictment in multiple jurisdictions. The things he says are news, regardless of how stupid they are, because he’s saying them to become president and avoid jail.

    The first time around they didn’t have to give him so much coverage early on in the primary race. This time, they don’t have a choice because it’s actually relevant news. That said, most networks have toned down coverage of Trump significantly. Actually most news orgs are more focused on the shutdown than the recent debate and Trump’s bullshit.









  • He’s got an amateur’s level of knowledge while presenting as an expert. The moment in the video about China’s plans to invade Taiwan where he said he used Google Translate as opposed to asking literally anyone in DC who knows Mandarin to help him with translations was when I realized he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about for many of the subjects he covers. I think there are policy and IR issues where he actually does have some knowledge, but I don’t think any of it goes to the level of expertise required to educate on the subject, which is what he purports to do.



  • OP said coworker, which I think most people missed. If you’re privileged enough to quit your job over a coworker’s political opinion, more power to you, I guess. I think that’s letting the fascists win, since you’ve literally ceded ground. But I believe OP is looking for constructive solutions to discuss politics with a coworker to preserve the relationship, likely both for their sanity at work and because there’s other things about the person they like.


  • Your response to someone noting that working for this office has inherent risks due to gun nuts existing and someone responding with “it’s just a job” is to compare gun regulations to the Holocaust. You just followed up a sentence where you said this isn’t about guns with two questions about guns. I think you either don’t understand what the Nazis did or you’re arguing in bad faith. My guess is both.

    Also, I don’t have to have a solution to gun violence to point out you’re making a stupid and dangerous argument. Calling people who work on gun safety Nazis in response to someone noting that gun nuts make their job dangerous proves the point.


  • I think you’re wrong about the car example. The reason people don’t know how their car works now is because so much of it involves proprietary software that you cannot fix it with physical labor. You have to understand and debug the code as well. Additionally, the manufacturers and dealerships have made accessing the parts (both on the car and replacements) so difficult that there isn’t really a universal approach to fixing the modern passenger vehicle anymore. Millenials didn’t stop fixing cars themselves out of laziness, it was because the knowledge needed to do so was greater than the cost of having a professional do it and have the repair guaranteed.

    Meanwhile, though I understand that touch screen and app-based OSes are pretty difficult to program for the average consumer, it’s not the only option for computing, just a popular one. This also has nothing to do with whether what you’re downloading is safe.