Yes, I understand that. But on social media you aren’t necessarily getting right-wing propaganda, as there’s plenty of left-wing propaganda and misinformation as well. That’s why I’m saying that they’re low- or no-information voters that are working solely on feels.
Even if you’re a relatively disconnected right winger
I’m not talking about relatively disconnected right wingers; I’m talking about people that are largely centrist, and not paying attention to Fox, NBC, CNN, or any newspapers, and gets all of their ‘news’ from social media. I guess you’d call them the hoi poloi; they’re low-information voters (or no information voters), and mostly apathetic as long as they feel like they’re getting by. Policy won’t matter to them very much; they’re voting on feels.
any right winger that obsessively follows the news is literally ben shapiro or alex jones.
That depends. There are a number of people that are extremely fiscally conservative that have zero interest in culture wars issues. Most of them have defected from the Republican party entirely though, because they see that the current iteration of the Republican party is deeply harmful to the kind of conservatism that they stand for. But that kind of conservative hasn’t really been popular since about the time that Newt Gingritch was trying to stir up the country against a president that didn’t keep his dick in his pants.
We can probably tolerate a little more disinflation, as a treat.
No, not really, because deflation (not disinflation) tends to be self-sustaining, much like hyperinflation does. If the dollar I have today will buy two dollars worth of goods next week, then I’m going to hold onto my dollar to make any sort of discretionary purchase until next week. When everyone does that, all at the same time, it’s like building a dam; the flow of money just grinds to a halt. Companies don’t have money coming in, so they can’t pay workers, which leads to layoffs, and the people laid off have no income to buy anything now, which feeds right back into that cycle.
I agree with you that corporations need to be reined in, that executive salaries are out of control, and that things like stock-buybacks are the bane of a functional economy. But that’s literally going to take legislation in this country to fix, in the same way that it did when the economy crashed in the 1920’s, and I guarantee you that there’s going to be zero political interest in that for at least two years.
Paul is 9-1, the one loss being a split decision, and 6 of the wins being knockouts. He’s inexperienced, but that doesn’t mean he’s not good.
I want to see Tyson knock him out in under ten seconds. But I don’t think I’ll get my wish.
Eh. I dunno. Tyson is in his 50s, and has a much shorter reach than Jake Paul. As much as I’d prefer to see him win, I don’t think that Tyson is gonna pull this off.
It’s not even a propaganda problem, per se, because most people aren’t obsessively following the news and economic reports.
It’s how they feel about money.
That was the biggest single issue.
People looked at grocery store prices and said, this is nuts, I was paying half this just four years ago.
It doesn’t matter to them that global inflation skyrocketed along with inflation in the US, or that we’re doing better than the rest of the world right now. They want to see prices go down, even though that would be deflation, which is incredibly bad for an economy.
Yeah, but does he like his step dad? Maybe he’s planning on ratting his dad out, ever think about that?
It’s out of their hands.
Uh, yeah, it literally was. Unless you’re saying that you want the president to be able to do whatever they want, even when a majority of congress and courts say no.
It’s not lying under any conventional definition of lying though. Saying something is a lie usually indicates deceptive intent, along with a knowledge–or a reasonable belief–that something you’re saying isn’t accurate. If I believe that the earth is flat, and I say so, am I lying? Or am I just wrong?
Biden said that he would cancel student loans; he’s done everything in his legal authority, and a few things that weren’t, to try an cancel them out. Do you think that the fact that SCOTUS prevented him from doing so makes it a lie? Or was he unable to follow through due to factors that he couldn’t directly control?
Obama was prevented from closing Gitmo by congress. IIRC, a big part of the problem was how to handle the criminal cases; all of the prisoners (“detainees”) in Gitmo have been tortured, the chain of evidence has multiple breaks in it, and it’s highly debatable that they can be tried in any kind of court. Yet intelligence agencies remain convinced that the remaining prisoners are guilty of terrorism. Congress didn’t want to move any of them to the US, because they didn’t want purported terrorists being held on US soil because ???
The president isn’t supposed to be able to act unilaterally, but we’ve allowed that Overton window to shift towards heavily authoritarian.
To paraphrase Nietzsche, that which doesn’t kill you psychologically scars you and leaves you with a lifetime of therapy bills.
According to Mormons, god is literally male, with (perfect) male genitalia. There is also a god–the-mother, who is female, and is both secret and sacred (they really don’t like talking about her), and also utterly subservient to god the father, because of course she is. According to Mormon theology, both gods were once mortal, and were raised up to godhood by their godly parents; Mormons–if they’re good enough–can go to Mormon super-heaven, where they will also become gods in their own right. Before everyone was born physically, they were born spiritually, in… More or less the same way babies are born now, except in heaven, to a heavenly mom. And there were hundreds of billions of spirit babies, so I guess that god the dad and god the mom really like sex or something? The implications start getting really, really weird, very fast. Which is part of the reason why Mormons don’t usually want to talk about stuff like this with people that aren’t Mormon.
I believe that the quote is, “As man is, so once was god. As god is, so man can become,” or something like that.
Source: was Mormon for >25 years.
It is, honestly, not nearly as bad as you’d think. The weight should be pretty well distributed, armor doesn’t have to be all that heavy to stop a sword, and the gambeson is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for piercing weapons. Blunt weapons, well, those are going to be unpleasant pretty much no matter what. You get really hot though; there’s a reason that the Saracens did such a number on the crusaders when they were able to get them outside of cities.
Wearing a plate carrier is, IMO, worse than wearing a gambeson and chain maille.
Unfortunately, this one goes both ways. Some women feel like they need to play hard to get, because otherwise they’re sluts, and also they want to know that a guy really likes her. It’s self defeating of course, on both sides.
What’s crazy is that, for all the poundage that a war bow requires to pull, it’s still less powerful than a small-caliber bullet. A breastplate will easily stop a clothyard arrow with a hardened bodkin point, and a .38 Spl will blow right through. I tried doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations a while back, and IIRC a .22LR has more energy at the muzzle of a 14" rifle barrel than a 160# bow could put into an arrow. (Someone needs to double check my math on that though.)
Blackhawk Down gets things very right.
Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords.
Just watch Olympic fencing; you get a very fast exchange that you can’t follow, and then someone has a point. In a real sword fight, without armor, that’s about what would happen. OTOH, when everyone is wearing armor, it gets a lot messier.
And of course, the classic gunfight where nobody hits anything.
That is surprisingly common. Most people are really bad shots when they’re stressed out. It’s physiological; when your body dumps adrenaline into your bloodstream, you lose fine motor control. So unless you’ve trained extensively under stressful conditions, you’re gonna have a hard time doing shit.
What exactly are the “material conditions leading to gun crime”?
Largely economic and educational, yeah, but also systemic racism and ingrained misogyny. While it’s facile–and accurate–to say that Republicans block efforts that would help these problems, the fact is that Democrats often do as well, opting to ban firearms and features rather than addressing root causes. I recall one particular violence intervention program that got cancelled in Chicago by–IIRC–Rahm Emmanuel. And unfortunately, many of the centrist Dems don’t really believe in programs that work, like enrolling inmates in college to reduce recidivism.
Why do other countries thar have lots of guns have less gun crime?
Other countries with a relatively high number of firearms also tend to have significantly better social welfare systems, more focus on rehabilitation than punishment in their criminal justice systems, and a lower rate of income inequality overall. If the US had, for instance, the social conditions of Finland, while still having the same number of firearms, I expect that you would see a sharply lower rate of firearm homicides. (Interestingly, Finland has very similar rates of suicide as we have in the US overall. I’m not sure what to make of that. But I also note that all of the Nordic countries seem to have fairly high suicide rates, and all of the Mediterranean countries tend to have quite low suicide rates. Climate and amount of sunlight, maybe?)
Aside from the, the right to keep and bear arms is an individual civil right. IMO, attempts to restrict that right should be subject to strict scrutiny. NYSPRA v. Bruen helped with that, but it hasn’t gone far enough. Think of it this way: voting is supposed to be a right. Republicans want to limit the ability to vote in ways that favor them. I would say that this is wrong, and that Republicans need to change the way that they govern or message so that they can attract more voters, rather than trying to make it harder to exercise a civil right.
or the gas station clerk to get a gun pointed at her and told to give up the cash.
…Which you aren’t very likely to do once economic conditions have been addressed. Not very many people go out and rob people for the sheer joy of it. Little Johnny shoots Susie because society has taught him that the only acceptable emotion is rage, and he can’t deal with his emotions in any other way. Again: address the messaging–about gender norms and expression in this case-- and fix the underlying problems, and then access to the tools of violence becomes immaterial because there’s no longer the impetus towards violence. Dems have made some inroads regarding gendered emotional expressions, but a lot of far-right influencers are actively working against those efforts.
parents of shooters bought them guns despite clear warnings
I think that this is probably appropriate in limited cases, such as with the Crumbleys in Detroit, MI, and with the Grays in Winder, GA. In both cases, the parents (father, in the case of Mr. Gray) had credible information from authorities that their child was at risk of harming other people, and both of them gave firearms to their child despite and after receiving the credible information about them being a risk. I would say that, if parents made a reasonable attempt to deny a child access to firearms, or did not have credible information about their child being a risk, then you should no longer be looking at a criminal or civil case. It seems to me that having your firearms locked inside your home or vehicle should be enough to say that you made a reasonable effort, because anyone that takes a firearm from those places knows that they’re breaking and entering already.
The desire to make locking firearms up is yet another way of making firearms prohibitively expensive, and functionally denies the right to keep and bear arms to people that can’t pony up the $1000+ for a locking firearms container that’s even slightly secure.
The entire Ultima series for sure. I think those were the first CRPGs I played. I loved Ultima: Underworld I & II, but I was never able to get Ultima VII: Pagan to run properly on my computer. (And, holy fuck, that was 30 years ago.)
But also The Elder Scrolls: Arena, TES: Daggerfall, TES: Battlespire, TES: Redguard, and TES: Morrowind. The first two TES games would be challenging to make, given that many of the areas were randomly generated, rather than being designed.
It is, yeah. When you look at accounts like Occupy Democrats and start fact checking them, there’s a lot of bullshit that they post. Like, pants on fire kind of bullshit. I knew a lot of people that followed them. In order to get engagement, accounts need to stir up emotions and get people to react and comment; it’s easier to do that with things that outrage rather than dense policy positions.
I want to believe that the political left is more intellectually honest than the right, but that’s because I’m mostly on the political left. (I’m an anarchist at heart, but with a cynical disbelief in the ability of people to work together in a country the size of the US without some degree of authoritarian control.) So I try to fact-check all of the sources that I use for both factual information, as well as ideological biases.