I don’t know who is right, but this is the greatest nerd fight I’ve seen in years! 😁

This is just the gender fraction among the working age casualties of the bombing campaign. Men are more likely to be outside the home. Israel has been targeting all the infrastructure they can, including hospitals, schools, emergency services, etc.

Think about how societies would act when under constant bombardment. You still need to find a way to support yourself. The proverbial rent doesn’t stop just because of the war. Especially in more traditional societies, you would likely see men doing most of the work outside the home, while women stay in whatever place is safest with the children. The wife stays back in the half collapsed building, while the husband goes to risk the crowds, riots, and potential machine gun fire at the aid trucks.

What war in history hasn’t seen the male population, even the civilian population, be placed at a higher risk of direct violence than the female population? Especially in more traditional societies, men will be highly likely to place their wives and children in the safest places they can find, while they go and take on a disproportionate share of the risk of leaving relative safety.

And for their sacrifice and bravery, the men of Gaza are rewarded by being slandered. Are you a male of working age killed by an Israeli bomb? You are assumed to be a member of Hamas.

Such a stupid move. The whole point of having a formal union agreement is that it prevents the TSA workers from using their real power. Their real power is if they go on strike, the entire air transportation system shuts down. In exchange for agreeing not to strike, the government agrees to negotiate with the union. We’ve never had to deal with a TSA strike shutting down air travel. Without the recognized union? This is no longer the case.

Drop that fucker til it’s in the ground.

That’s the attitude that lost Democrats 2016, 2020, and 2024. (They only managed to win in 2020 because of covid.)

People consistently underestimated Trump. It’s the same thing that caused people to underestimate Bush. Both sound like morons when they talk, so people thought they were harmless morons. And then look what happened.

Just because someone is evil, does not mean they are stupid. Trump managed to read the electorate and determine how to appeal to voters better than hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Democratic consultants. He has far better political instincts than anyone currently leading the Democratic party.

Do not underestimate your opponent. That is what got us into this mess in the first place. People kept telling themselves, “there’s no way this blubbering idiot could possibly win.” And then he did.

Hitler was a drug-addicted fool who failed at everything he tried to accomplish in life.

You don’t have to be competent to be a dictator. In fact, incompetence is usually a prerequisite for being a dictator. Actually intelligent people realize they don’t personally have all the answers.

When people say things like hair plugs are gender-affirming care, they’re really showing they don’t get the concept. Gender-affirming care is just that - something that affirms your gender. Male-pattern baldness is a male secondary sex characteristic. Reversing it is anti-gender-affirming care, if anything. Nothing wrong with getting hair plugs if you want, but hair plugs are not gender-affirming care. They’re just cosmetic surgery.

Breast reduction for cis men? That would be gender affirming. Breast enlargement for cis women? Also gender affirming.

If a cis person gets a treatment that reinforces the secondary sex characteristics of their natal sex, then that treatment is gender-affirming care. Not every cosmetic treatment is gender-affirming care.

Yeah, I don’t spend a lot of time trolling. That’s not really my style.

I haven’t seen them around. Any examples?

They’re using a bullshit slight-of-hand to claim they’re not spending government money on it.

They’re planning on using coins seized from criminals. But normally those coins would be sold, and the proceeds from that sale would go to the US Treasury. Instead, they’re going to seize them and just hold onto them.

It’s the same thing. Whether you spend government money to purchase coins and hold them, or you simply hold seize coins, both of these options result in the same increase in the US national debt.

And ultimately it is simply a method of propping up the crypto bubble. They want the US government to be the ultimate “diamond hands” hoarder of crypto. Every time some dark web drug site gets shut down, any coins they hold will be thrown into a government vault, never to be seen again. This effectively removes them from circulation, decreasing the supply, and forcing crypto prices higher. This is taking billions from the Treasury to prop up the crypto market.

I mean, 4x the market cap of Meta, 80x, it makes little difference. The key is the book publishers should end up owning Meta. Again, I wouldn’t expect them to necessarily turn Facebook into some revitalized utopia. But I think at least a bunch of stodgy old book publishers wouldn’t be so overtly cartoonishly fascist at the very least.

Exactly. Of course, I need to make sure the files are appropriate for AI training, so it’s imperative that I review the media in its entirety first.

That’s one of those things that fridge logic really hits hard. Because there are no fixed prices under Earth’s laws. So in exchange for quintillions of dollars of Earth’s music, the aliens could just sell us technology at the same or similar price.

Let’s do some math. Some searching suggests the average size of an e-book is about 3 MB. 82 TB means they pirated about 27 million e-books. At the rate of Russet’s fine, that would come to damages of $2.2 trillion. So not more money than has ever is about 4x Meta’s entire market cap.

I hope the book publishers sue Meta and end up owning Facebook and Instagram. Not that I expect one evil megacorp to inevitably fix all the ills of another. But it would be hard to make Facebook any worse than it currently is.

I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t pirate media. I’m just slowly gathering a collection of AI training data.

It’s almost like the government has already spent decades wringing every last penny of fraud prevention out of the only programs these type of goon wants to cut. Any kind of welfare that benefits regular people has deliberately onerous applications and continual verification. You can cancel these programs entirely, but there’s little actual fraud there to find in Medicaid, food stamps, etc. There’s actually millions of people who would qualify for these programs that aren’t on them due to the difficulties of the application process.

There is plenty of fraud to be found, but it’s all in the contraction, consulting, and acquisition sides of the budget. There’s plenty of fat to be wrung out of military contractors or contractors like SpaceX. Look at the debacle of the pandemic business-aid loans. But this is the type of waste and fraud that Musk and Trump love. It personally benefits them and everyone in the cabinet. They could find fraud here, but they’re not interested in that type of fraud.

You know, if only there were someone who could actually do something about it…

It’s not like tariffs are part of the president’s innate Constitutional powers. They’re part of Congress’s powers. Implementing a tariff is supposed to require an act of Congress.

However, Congress passed legislation long ago that allowed the president, in an emergency, to make limited targeted tariffs for national security reasons. If we’re suddenly at war with someone, we probably don’t want to be trading vital raw materials with them. In a Pearl Harbor scenario, it made sense for the president to be able to instantly cut someone like Japan off from US exports. That’s what this power the president is using is meant for. But Trump has been abusing the Hell out of this power, declaring everything a national security matter. He implemented blanket steel and aluminum tariffs, as if every nation on Earth is a national security threat to the US.

Congress could easily fix this. They could pass legislation that severely curtailed the president’s ability to raise tariffs, and reclaim the power that is rightfully theirs. And if Republicans cooperated, they could easily do so at a veto-proof margin.

So McConnell, don’t just bitch about it. If you really hate the tariffs, do something about it.

Enough doomposting. Fatalism is fatal. Even if you’re right, would you rather go down fighting or wait for the knock on the door to come to you? Here are some tangible things Dem reps can actually do right now, even as a minority party. These are the things voters should be demanding of them, other than just vague calls to “do something”:

1. Grind the Senate to a halt. Not one Dem vote for any confirmation. Filibuster everything. Put holds on everything.
2. Not one Democratic vote for a continuing resolution or debt ceiling increase without major concessions. The federal government is better shut down than run by Trump/Musk.
3. Participate directly in street protests. Sitting reps can participate in these with little risk for arrest or assault by cops, and they have the resources and clout to not be destroyed by being arrested.
4. Purge anyone who dares utter the word “bipartisanship” from the party. Anyone who votes on a single Republican bill should be ineligible for a penny of Dem campaign funds come the next cycle and should lose any committee seats they have.

These are the things we should be demanding of Democratic representatives right now. Give up on the doomerism. If you want to crawl into a hole and die, fine. Go do it and quit bitching.

Oh, and quit trying to relitigate the prior election. Yes, there were errors on both sides of the left. The centrists should have stopped the genocide, and the Palestine supporters should have voted for Kamala anyway. It’s a moot point now. We have bigger problems to worry about, and picking at these old wounds does nothing but divide the left further.

I don’t think many people actually thought Trump would be an improvement, aside from the Christian nationalists.

When your life is misery, a chance, any chance, no matter how small, can often be or at least seem worth it. Rents are through the roof, pay is stagnant, health insurance is complete scam, and people have lost any hope of improving their lives. For tens of millions of people, the probability of them ever actually improving their lot in life is next to zero.

Someone comes along and says, “I’ll smash the current order to pieces and reshuffle the entire deck.”

Imagine you’re a person in desperate straits. You think that overall, that potential leader will be a net negative society. But in the current system, the probability of anything improving in your life is zero. With a complete shuffling of the societal deck, well your odds aren’t great, but they are non-zero. You’re not going to end up an oligarch, but maybe you’ll be one of the minority that ends up slightly better off. After all, some ordinary German citizens did actually materially benefit from the Nazis. Most didn’t, but some got lucky.

This is why many people aside from Christian nationalists voted for Trump. The saw him as someone would would come along and knock over the Jenga tower of the existing sociopolitical order. They knew that the odds of their life being directly improved by this were slim. But they thought a slim chance was still there. And if nothing else, it would punish the bastards who have been keeping them down for years.

This is the fatal flaw with milquetoast Democratic centrism. It ignores that if you go long enough without actually helping millions of people who really need help, eventually those desperate people will vote to burn it all down out of sheer spite.

Is such a vote rational? No. But human beings are not rational. Human beings are not perfect utilitarian optimization engines. They vote with their hearts and souls, with both hope and rage. And that is what Democrats have repeatedly failed to realize.

Are you out there being the change in the Democratic party? Are you out there forcing change with your actions? Are you actually doing something to have a choice between something other than two parties?

We live in a world of specialization of labor. That is how civilizations are built. I don’t have to be a blacksmith to know that a crooked nail is a poorly made one. I don’t have to be a doctor to know that a witch doctor is not a real physician. I don’t have to be a politician to know when a politician is utterly failing at their job.