For the intelligent, critical thinking ones sure. Of course the rest of their education is designed to prevent that whenever possible.
I like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent and self-aware, but it took me about 15 years after moving out of my childhood home to fully break free of the indoctrination I'd received.
I don't know if I'd say it's "obvious" he was murdered without more details. Yes, it's incredibly likely - probably the most likely cause. That being said, people that appear healthy can and do die suddenly quite regularly - heart attack, stroke, aneurysm, etc. can occur at any age and even with healthy people, often with very little visible advance warning. He'd been poisoned in the past - who knows what damage that may have left. Though I would argue that would still count as murder, even if as a delayed effect.
Still, yeah, he was probably murdered.
As someone raised in a white evangelical household, an ex-evangelical myself, and someone who lived in a number of very conservative communities and as someone who regularly works with police and military, I feel I have a very solid understanding of (and have been thoroughly traumatized by) the conservative/evangelical/christian nationalist mindset - and I think the Christianity part is way more central that you are giving it credit.
Similarly, while there is most certainly racism present, I have encountered few overtly, stereotypically racist people in those communities. They will enthusiastically accept any minority that shares their beliefs. I think it's far more about ideology than race. Where the racism comes in is they automatically distrust people of other races unless they discover there is a shared ideology.
They hate white Democrats/liberals/progressives just as much, maybe even more, than those of other races, because those are people who have "rejected the word of God" rather than being those who have simply not heard it yet and potential converts.
You're talking about income tax rates, and I agree that the top tax rates should be higher, but this won't fix the problem because billionaires don't make their money from salaries. Most of their money is theoretical and tied up in ownership of shares of a company.
They can sell shares or earn dividends to make money, so capital gains should also be taxed at a much higher rate. But billionaires often choose not to sell shares either because they have a better option...
They take out low interest rates loans using their shares as collateral. The interest rates they are charged are generally going to be far lower than the interest on their stocks that stay invested,. This is where most of their liquidity comes from, because loans aren't taxed, and in some regard is almost an infinite money glitch for billionaires.
I think we need to make it illegal to use financial holdings as collateral for loans, at least for starters.
It's a sequence of quotes from Fight Club
Neglected, reviled, emotionally abused, poorly educated children (which many of these children will be due to the situations they are being born into) will make great little conservative voters.
Vizio is kindof like Costco's Kirkland brand. They don't actually manufacture anything, they just select high-margin products that they can have contract manufactured cheaply, have some reasonable QC standards applied, and slap their name on the product.
So they're already kindof like Great Value TVs, though clearly held to a higher standard than most Great Value trash usually is.
I know what you're getting at here, but the way you phrased it is 100% wrong. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an expressly anti-slavery party.
Tapped out tenderloin?
He was operating a significant number of his weapons on bump stocks. Bump stocks allow firing at a much higher rate than the weapons were designed for. Operating at a higher rate causes the weapons to overheat. Overheating causes misfires and jams (and inaccuracy and can permanently damage weapons, but I doubt he was particularly concerned about those things). He did have them all set up in a row and many on mounts. He broke out the overlooking windows of his hotel room before he started shooting. It seems he was shooting with one until it jammed and then moving on to the next rather than trying to clear misfires.
Maybe not if it were an American company on the brink of collapse, but Maersk is a Danish company - and an exceptionally wealthy/profitable one at that. The cities, governments, and companies that are all affected by this will be eager to collect their pound of flesh from Maersk.
Uh, the normal way. Fines, lawsuits and potentially sanctions, if needed.
He sure as hell was at my (very close to national average demographics district's) caucus in 2020. Damn near the whole room lined up for Biden nearly instantly. It was the same for Hillary in 2016, btw. These lies people like to repeat on the internet about how one progressive or another has overwhelming support and only loses out due to manipulation by the democratic party are not borne or by reality, and I think are often spread by those trying to either disenfranchise left voters, or are the voters that fell for it and are now doing the dirty work of repeating the lies.
This happened in port, not international waters. Normal rules will apply. Seizing assets from a foreign company may be a little more difficult if it comes to that, but it'd probably be in Maersk's best interest to pay up rather than lose the ability to do business in the U.S.
Because a LOT of people have fallen for the fearmongering.
Do it. I made the switch a few months ago, and it's gone better than I'd expected. Now running Linux Mint on my desktop and laptop. I set my laptop up with dual boot, just so I can easily and natively run Windows apps if needed.
The President doesn't have much direct control other than use of the strategic reserve and whatever political pressure they can exert with a "pretty please", but OPEC has significant influence over production and thus worldwide prices, and they have demonstrated a penchant for supporting the American politicians that keep us most tethered to fossil fuels rather than renewable energy sources.
Which would mean we could expect prices to go the opposite direction that GasBuddy is predicting here. I guess we'll see.
I mean, I'm pretty sure I couldn't organize an orgy even if I did offer to pay. I'm not a lame ass.
Disclaimer: I hate cruises and the entire industry, but ended up getting roped into a few before COVID by weird family dynamics.
I found a portable router to be pretty handy on cruise ships. The only Internet available is through the ship's WiFi, and the Internet package I had limited connectivity to a single connected device per cabin. The travel router would be the single MAC and allow all our devices to connect. I was also able to share with family in the next cabin over.
A few months ago I stayed in a hotel for about a week and I couldn't get my Nintendo Switch to connect through their Wi-Fi. My Switch also doesn't work on my phone's hotspot for some reason, even though other devices connect and work fine. Anyway, that scenario would've been nice for a travel router, but I didn't bring it with me on that trip.
Just think of the downvoters as cops giving you some street justice for your disrespectful use of an emoji!
There's also this weird discussion trap that damn near everybody falls into regarding the post office - why does it need to be profitable at all? It's a government service - nobody expects schools, police departments, fire departments, NASA, public works departments, health departments, departments of transportation, the military, or basically anything else to be profitable.
Well, Texas Republicans hate women, LGBTQ, immigrants, people that look like immigrants, the young (but already born), the old (they're too expensive to keep alive), the educated, leftists/liberals, people that are any religion but Christianity, the poor, and sometimes Jews.
Nazis hate women, LGBTQ, immigrants, people that look like immigrants, the young (but already born), the old (they're too expensive to keep alive), the educated, leftists/liberals, people that follow any religion but Christianity, the poor, and always Jews.
They truly are the thin brown line.
I don't know about the lack of mental health care being the "main issue." A healthy society wouldn't be in dire need of such extreme amounts of mental health care. These mass shootings are a single symptom (among many) of a very complicated and interwoven set of factors that have brought us to this place. There is no single solution that will fix the problem, and the only way out of this mess will take significant investment and likely generations to break the cycle. But humans are greedy, and particularly in the USA, we only look for simple simgle-issue solutions that can have a measurable outcome (and be economically viable) within the next couple or fiscal quarters or an election term, at most. The solutions we should be implementing don't work on that sort of time scale, and many will be very costly (in varying terms of both money and/or freedom)... So, we just don't do those things.
Yep, we didn't do that. And the US also didn't stamp out the Confederacy when they had the chance. And those may very well be one of the primary reasons that fascism is back once again. The world doesn't really seem to like truly holding people accountable when they can get away with it.
Fascism is perhaps the purest concentrated evil on this planet and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions. Everybody who supports and gives power to fascism has blood on their hands.
I have no idea on a metric of how frequently an "ordinary" gun jams, much less these modified ones, but I can apply some logic from my knowledge/experiences. The weapons you mention having experience with are designed with appropriate tolerances to not bind up under heavy use, so are a bit different from the 'consumer-grade' type we're talking about in this specific event.
The type of semiautomatic rifles we're talking about here use recoil to cycle the action. A bump stock allows the whole weapon to oscillate - and can have an effect similar to not securely shouldering the weapon. This prevents the needed energy from being transferred into the action for complete cycling, and that would make the weapon prone to jamming.
I don't know if I have much of value to add to or reply to your second paragraph, but yeah that fixation is weird.
I mean, he didn't really have much of a problem with accuracy - he fired a total of 1058 rounds, and those rounds or shrapnel from them injured 413 different people. Of course, many people received more than a single gunshot wound. He killed 58 (later 60) in ten minutes of shooting -- effectively one person every 10 seconds. I think it would be difficult for a single person to injure or kill more from where he was standing with any weapon short of an RPG.
Good point, but it's not that either. I guess most of the people here don't watch the ground crews at the airport before boarding - it seems these clamshell panels are opened between every flight (or at least very frequent intervals) for engine inspections and probably oil sampling. The far and away most likely cause is the ground crew forgot to latch the panel back up after performing their inspection.
While at-home testing kits are hard to come by now, and community testing is all but shut down, hospitals still have plenty of availability to run tests. If someone is admitted as an inpatient to a hospital for respiratory issues so severe they end in death, there is an overwhelming likelihood that patient is getting tested for COVID. Particularly due to their legal liability for allowing someone to die due to an undiagnosed infection.
So yeah, we don't have good numbers for a raw number of active community infections anymore, but the fatality numbers should still be around as accurate as they ever were.
Completely agree on your other points though!
They like instability. A steadily increasing market may yield reasonable results, but a chaotic market creates lots of buying opportunities on the cheap.
You're definitely right, and I kindof lumped those together - it's hard to write a complete response during a poop break at work.
I was not aware of 'athiest christian nationalists' being a thing. Fascinating.
I also didn't adequately explain that I feel 'modern' Christianity has very little to do with the teachings of Christ, much less the content of the Bible even as a whole. It seems it's much more a justification of their targeted hatred.
I get your point, but "most"? I've had 5 male dogs of my own over 40-ish years, and have known or met many, many others and I've never once had my leg humped.
DENNIS: Oh king, eh, very nice. An' how'd you get that, eh? By exploitin' the workers -- by 'angin' on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic an' social differences in our society! If there's ever going to be any progress--
WOMAN: Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here. Oh -- how d'you do?
ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady. I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that?
WOMAN: King of the who?
ARTHUR: The Britons.
WOMAN: Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR: Well, we all are. we're all Britons and I am your king.
WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.
DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--
WOMAN: Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.
DENNIS: That's what it's all about if only people would--
ARTHUR: Please, please good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?
WOMAN: No one live there.
ARTHUR: Then who is your lord?
WOMAN: We don't have a lord.
ARTHUR: What?
DENNIS: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
ARTHUR: Yes.
DENNIS: But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
ARTHUR: Yes, I see.
DENNIS: By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,--
ARTHUR: Be quiet! DENNIS: --but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--
ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
I think the right not to be shot is a weeee more important than the right to be the shooter.
I remember all this, and I fell for it. Due to years of propaganda against her, I just had this mild feeling of revulsion to Hillary. I primaried for Bernie in a district that's very close in demographics to the national average, and was stunned that Hillary had about a 4x as many supporters. But once she became the official Dem candidate, I started watching her campaign events, debates and researched her political history. Hillary was a fantastic candidate and after watching her in action I fully understood WHY there had been decades of propaganda from the right against her - she was incredibly dangerous to them - not only because of her likelihood to win, but even moreso due to how effective she would be as president.
Sadly, reading comprehension of Lemmy users leaves a lot to be desired.
I also think many that misunderstand something would rather entrench and make a ridiculous argument than admit any kind of fault.
But they didn't have HVAC, electricity, health care (even shitty health care is better than bloodletting), couldn't shit indoors, had no access to affordable transportation of any kind, had very little access to education beyond "this is a sieve, get to work. There weren't clothes washing machines and dryers and dish washers. There was no radio, tv, Internet, or much in the way of entertainment at all. There weren't medications that could cure you if you were sick or treat disease.
I say this as an exceedingly privileged Westerner, but I'll happily take living in this moment compared to pretty much any time in humanity's past.
As a response to the assertions you shared, particularly the second paragraph:
This is all true, but it doesn't mean that we can't have a good idea what's going on without testing individual potential cases - most cities are still monitoring sewage that gives incredibly accurate data on how prevalent COVID (among other diseases) is, which neighborhoods are having surges, which variants are infecting people, etc. Plus limited sampling and testing of individuals can still be pretty darn accurate at identifying what's going on with the rest of the population.
But yeah, a layperson looking at raw case numbers without any kind of error correction is going to come to the wrong conclusions on how things are going with COVID.
I don't necessarily blame governments for ending the major individual testing efforts - large chunks of the population were disregarding masking / isolation / quarantine protocols anyway and there was little of any means of enforcement. Sucks that it makes it much harder for an individual to protect themselves and their family, but the responsible people will continue to mask up and isolate when warranted, and doing all that testing for a bunch of assholes to disregard anyway is quite a waste of resources.
Anybody younger than me is a kid. One of the few remaining things I have to look forward to in life is calling the new residents of the retirement home 'kiddos' and 'youngsters'.
There's no karma to be had here, this is the end game. The Republicans have been working to dismantle the government for decades. Every piece that can be sold off to private enterprise will, regulation will be gutted, and consequences be damned.
The fall of the US is now inevitable. There is no future for anyone here that isn't already rich. Leave if you can.