Schadrach

The fourth is catnip. Always the 'nip.

Once my mom asked me to clear out a planter box that had become overgrown because she wanted to plant tomatoes. I pulled up this 3ft tall stalk plant with little purplish flowers, and as soon as I shoved it in the trash bag, the cat came running from the other side of the house and dove face first in the bag. After a minute or so, it was backing out of the bag with the stalk between his teeth dragging it out of the bag and once it was out of the bag started nibbling on it and rolling around on the plant. Looked up what the plant was and apparently I had just pulled up his catnip grow operation. When he came down, he was mad at me for a few days.

You’re not wrong. There’s nothing that requires the two parties be Dems and GOP. But you’re not going to overturn one or the other in a single election, and that means losing to the farthest big party from you, likely a few in a row, while that gets resolved. Especially if you try to do it top down instead of building support from local/county offices up.

Basically, if you could get enough third party support, you could either supplant one of the existing parties or force them to shift to stay competitive. The argument is that trying to do so with the office of president when doing so promotes a fast track to outright fascism is a painfully bad tactic.

What exactly does “should” mean in this context?

I think the implication is that it’s essentially being prevented from collapse because it’s so ingrained in international trade that if it were to collapse it would hurt you and your allies too much, so you don’t allow it to collapse when it otherwise might.

Another reminder that blueMAGA don’t see Palestinians as human.

Every option with any real chance of being elected supported Israel. Unfortunately your choices are essentially Dem, GOP, or one of several people who is definitely going to lose unless you can round up another 60 million or so voters to back them.

Haha, Leviathan was certainly the “big bad” in Job.

To quote a work of fiction I particularly enjoyed, during a discussion between the characters on the Book of Job:

“You know,” said Bill Dodd, “what is Leviathan, anyway? Like a giant whale or something, right? So God is saying we need to be able to make whales submit to us and serve us and dance for us and stuff? Cause, I’ve been to Sea World. We have totally done that.”

“Leviathan is a giant sea dinosaur thing,” said Zoe Farr. “Like a plesiosaur. Look, it’s in the next chapter. It says he has scales and a strong neck.”

“And you don’t think if he really existed, we’d Jurassic Park the sucker?” asked Bill Dodd.

“It also says he breathes fire,” said Eli Foss.

“So,” proposed Erica, “if we can find a fire-breathing whale with scales and a neck, and we bring it to Sea World, then we win the Bible?”

https://unsongbook.com/

And if you have the opportunity to question Him directly, you’ll say the same thing Job said.

That would be what, “Why are you so weirdly obsessed with Leviathan?” after Job 41?

So like nearly every commemorative coin then. I have half a dozen tied to various years I went to PAX because I thought they were a cool piece of memorabilia.

And, since it’s a subliminal process, it’s extremely difficult to make a concious decision to not buy products you’ve seen or heard ads of.

Instead, I make a conscious decision to not buy products I remember seeing or hearing ads of. If you’re using subtle product placement to subliminally manipulate me in a way I don’t notice, good for you. If it’s obvious enough I remember you doing it then I will not buy your product unless it is already the best deal available (aka the cheapest per unit or best quality per price, excepting products I have had a bad experience with).

I know we have citizens united but corporations are not people lol

Citizens United didn’t make corporations people. Corporate personhood had been a thing for a very long time, largely about whether or not forming a business means you lose legal rights operating under it (Does a business entity have freedom of speech? What does freedom of the press even mean in an 18th century context if it doesn’t apply to a business [aka a newspaper]?) and whether or not regular old laws prohibiting a person from doing a thing can be applied to businesses.

Talking about being able to ride a bus in the US is comical.

Depends where you live. It’s much more doable in the densest urban areas than it is somewhere rural. I have a friend who lives in Boston for example and he doesn’t have a car, at all. Because Boston’s mass transit is good enough for his routine needs. I can’t do that here, however.

No, no, no. Just like a tax on unrealized gains is a bad idea because of how much it would royally fuck up the stock market, including every 401(k). What they need to do instead is tax the ways used by the extremely wealthy to utilize their gains without technically realizing them, even if that sometimes means taxing debt (aka treating it as income when they borrow against it and taxing accordingly).

Sounds like an obvious spot in the market for a bullshit-free smart TV. You’d just have to get the UX right.

The moment you give people a little finger wrt their requests, one of those people will take the whole hand. The same likely applies to modding.

I suppose that depends on which finger.

It’s almost like people ignore men’s issues and scapegoat them at every opportunity for the sake of women.

Men will never ever get the benefit of the doubt, but when we try to demand it we are just crybabies.

Welcome to society. Frankly, it’s malagency (mis-assignment of agency, specifically in a fashion that often makes men responsible for things that happen to them even when they really aren’t and often absolves women of that responsibility when they really should have it) all the way down.

Malagency as a lens predicts reality better than a lot of other gender focused lenses. “What would happen if women are believed to be less responsible for what happens than they really are and men are believed to be more responsible for what happens than they really are?” tends to map to reality better than “What would happen if everything in society were created by men to benefit men at the expense of women and to oppress women?” Especially once you stop looking narrowly at the top few percent of men, where the two lenses give similar results.

and the cops saw a man fighting a woman and shot the man by default.

Something like 95% of people shot by police are men. This of course is not discriminatory on the grounds that men are evil, violent savages unlike every other group that are disproportionately shot by police who are innocent victims of oppression.

“Gamers” are also a group one elects to be a member of, while one is categorized into a race, sex or gender from birth. One is elective, the other is descriptive. No one chooses to be black, or white, or born with male or female genitalia, etc, etc. And a lot of negative views are often along the lines of a rare bad thing being more likely performed by a certain demographic being extrapolated to accuse that demographic of being dangerous or harmful in general (usually an out-group, though under some ideologies it’s only acceptable to have this view with a target perceived to be the in-group - as regards blame they essentially reverse the perceived in- and out-group roles).

To turn it around on you though, imagine we picked some other elective group (a hobby, a political or ideological leaning, that sort of thing) that you are likely to look positively upon (and maybe even be a member of) and did the same kind of thing. Let’s say…feminists? Would it be acceptable to accuse feminism or feminists of anything negative I can point to any group thereof doing, and if you aren’t one of the ones who actually does that then you should not take offense, right? Not feel defensive at all, not question or challenge the assertion at all, right?

Are they? It literally points out “Who you voted for is secret” on the ad, right above where it says that people will know if you voted.

The idea is that Spain and Portugal are part of the “West”, but not Spanish or Portuguese colonial offshoots, which are mostly South American and haven’t dated as well as the colonial offshoots from other nations of western Europe.

David Berkowitz. He claimed that in court, and later retracted the statement. Sonny from the Venture Bros parody of the Scooby Gang is also a reference to him.

The most recent season has a surprising amount of sexually assaulting Huey though. The first time they even play it for laughs.

The Constitution didn’t establish a right to vote for men in general or any men in particular. It left the question of which citizens were allowed to vote fully up to the states.

Or to go deeper: The Declaration of Independence limited voting to landowners. The Constitution set no regulations whatsoever for which citizens could vote, leaving it wholly up to the states. There are various trends in state laws over time but nothing federal regarding who can vote (other than various immigration laws about who can be naturalized). Until the 15th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Technically, men did not have a federally protected right to vote until women did, the 19th amendment. Though state laws had expanded to give essentially all free white men the vote in every state shortly before the Civil War, but that’s not from that federal point of view you’re so worried about.