Harris stating that nothing would change

Are you referring to that one “The View” interview where she flubbed the question about what she would have done differently than Biden before returning to it later in the same interview to add in a bit about reaching across the aisle, or is she on record elsewhere saying that nothing would change during her presidency?

Because when I search for it all I see is tens of right-biased news outlets talking about that “The View” interview.

WRT the first panel, I feel that way too.

That said, is this ragebait?

Too bad more people didn’t have their minds changed by Paine’s “Agrarian Justice”. What a banger.

I’m not as certain that it would be obviously less, as there are surely myriad factors about which I have no information. But I respect and understand where you’re coming from.

I’m not sure that the regimes propping up Iran wouldn’t take the opportunity to capitalize on a serious draw-down of Israeli munitions, for various reasons, logistical (supply-chain) reasons among them.

I pretty much agree with your positions 100%, in broad strokes, and will continue to send letters to that effect to elected officials.

I also believe that there are likely a slew of very complicated and interconnected factors within geopolitics that I’m unable to consider or include when formulating my opinion due to the classified nature of much of the world’s foreign policy. For that reason I also try to rein in the part of my mind that tells me I know best what should be done.

The world is so intensely complicated and I struggle to not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good, as I did in my 20s and 30s. It’s very difficult to do when we’re talking about death and destruction no matter what path is chosen.

The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know.

Okay, I can work with that. Do you think ceasing all weapons shipments to Israel tomorrow would create a situation in which more or fewer people would die in the middle east in the next 10 years, and what is your reasoning behind that belief?

Yes. I do mean that one, and I agree that is was not enough. What additional stoppages do you think should occur?

Okay, so let’s discuss the level of armament withdraw you think would be appropriate, and the affects varying levels might have.

Is there any middle ground between “not receiving 20 billion a year in weapons” and “disarmed”

Of course there is. The US has already stopped sending certain weapons aid to Israel over the situation in Gaza.

I’ll mostly ignore the childish insult, but you can do better at discussing the world like a mature adult, I’m sure.

What makes you so certain of that outcome?

Let’s imagine a world where we stop sending weapons to Israel. What does a disarmed Israel look like, in your imagination? How will it affect the geopolitical situation in the middle east?

Very nice work. You beat me to the punch, but I’ma ride your coat-tails and post my version here anyway!

I wiped my ass with a wadded up ball of 25 toilet paper squares for years because no one wanted to tell me about more efficient and effective ways to do it. Bathroom knowledge is like your paycheck. They say you shouldn’t talk about it with your peers, but it needs to be talked about.

These days I can clean my whole ass, even on the most explosive days, with less than 10 squares, and I’m saving so much money.

It takes a big person to cop to things like that, instead of doubling down. Whatever his reasons, we should all strive to be as open to admitting when we were wrong as Coolio was.

I know, right? It really sucks. They’re honestly one of the tastier bars I’d had. I’ve taken a bit of a step back from chocolate in general, these days. I probably got enough lead exposure as a kid… no need to add any more than is absolutely unavoidable.

Too bad about all the lead in them. They’re not as bad as some brands, though.

Saying immigrants bring ‘bad genes’ echoes Trump’s history — and the and the world’s

With a mishmash of false claims about crime and ridiculous race science, Trump makes explicit the racism at the heart of his politics.

Former president Donald Trump has long espoused a worldview in which genes are the determinative factor in someone’s life. In 1988, for example, he told Oprah Winfrey that success requires luck — and that “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”

In a 1990 interview, he said that he would not have followed in his father’s footsteps had he been born into a coal-mining family rather than a rent-mining one.

“The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son,” he said. “If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines.” This, he said, was because he, unlike those poor coal miners, had the “ability to become an entrepreneur, a great athlete, a great writer. You’re either born with it or you’re not.”

Trump has previously raised this theory of genetics on the campaign trail. In 2020, for example, he praised the “good genes” of people in Minnesota. He then offered a warning to those robust-gened Minnesotans: his opponent in his bid for reelection, Joe Biden, planned to “flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia.” The transition did not escape the notice of observers.

In an interview with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, Trump’s suggestion that non-White immigrants are genetically inferior was made explicit.

The comment came as Trump was disparaging his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“How about allowing people to come through an open border,” he said, “13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person and they’re now happily living in the United States?”

This is a false claim — “outrageously false,” in the wording of The Washington Post Fact Checker — based on a misrepresentation of numbers released by the government. That data indicated that there were about 13,000 immigrants who had committed murder but were not in custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many, though, are in custody elsewhere, including at the state level. Nor were they all immigrants who arrived during the Biden administration; many were here under Trump, too.

Unchallenged by Hewitt, Trump continued on the subject.

“You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” he said. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Reinforcing that he was talking about the “bad genes” of immigrants, Trump offered up more false claims based on the ICE data.

Hewitt, rather than contesting Trump’s genetic argument, shifted the conversation with no apparent irony to the federal criminal charges Trump himself faces. These, of course, are not a function of criminal genes, in Trump’s estimation, but instead of the political whims of Biden. (In reality, they are a function of Trump’s actions.)

Trump has a track record of dehumanizing immigrants, repeatedly referring to immigrants who commit crimes as “animals,” for example. He also has a record of disparaging immigrants in sweeping terms, aggregating them by nationality as a rationale for declaring them unwanted.

He does this with other nonimmigrant groups as well. Speaking to Hewitt, for example, Trump appeared to conflate “Jewish Americans” with “Israel” — as he has in the past.

“I think Israel has to do one thing: They have to get smart about Trump,” he said in the interview. “Because they don’t back me. I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. And it’s not a reciprocal, as they say. Not reciprocal.”

Here Hewitt did push back: His numbers, in Hewitt’s estimation, were improving among Jewish voters. But Trump replied that they “should be 100 percent.”

This inability to see nuance in cultural and national groups of which he isn’t a member is one thing. His claim that America was being flooded with “bad genes” thanks to new arrivals to the country is another thing entirely. It’s also one that might evoke unsettling historic parallels for some Jewish observers.

Beyond the racism of such claims, it’s also striking how self-serving Trump’s deployment of genetics is. Immigrants to the United States — like the Haitian immigrants now living legally in Ohio who were the target of lies by Trump and his running mate last month — are the ones who escaped the cycle of suffering that Trump referenced with his coal miner example. They are the ones who, in the face of natural disaster and political unrest, pulled up stakes and sought a new, better life. They are, according to Trump’s 1990 calculus, the winners of the same genetic lottery as him. Except that, unlike him, they haven’t been convicted of crimes.

But such inconsistencies aren’t important to Trump because the “genetics” thing isn’t based on evidence or science. It’s just a way for him (and by extension, some of his supporters) to view themselves as superior to the immigrants he’s scapegoating. This has always been the subtext to Trump’s politics. He’s just making it more explicit.

Cities: Skylines II Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords

For months, players have been complaining about the high rents in the city-building sim. This week, developer Colossal Order fixed the problem by doing something real cities can’t: removing landlords.

The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb.

“First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters,” the developer posted in a blog on the game’s Steam page. “Second, we changed the way rent is calculated.” Now, Colossal Order says, it will be based on a household’s income: “Even if they currently don’t have enough money in their balance to pay rent, they won’t complain and will instead spend less money on resource consumption.”

The rent problem in the city sim is almost a little too on the nose. Over the last few years real-world rents have skyrocketed—in some cases, rising faster than wages. In cities like New York, advocates and tenants alike are fighting against the fees making housing less and less affordable; in the UK, rent is almost 10 percent higher than it was a year ago. From Hawaii to Berlin the cost of living is exorbitant. Landlords aren’t always to blame, but for renters they’re often the easiest targets.

From this perspective, perhaps Cities’ simulator is too good. Prior to this week’s fix, players found themselves getting tripped up on some of the same problems government officials and city planners are facing. “For the love of god I can not fix high rent,” wrote one player in April. “Anything I do re-zone, de-zone, more jobs, less jobs, taxes high or low, wait time in game. Increased education, decreased education. City services does nothing. It seems anything I try does nothing.”

On the game’s subreddit, players have also criticised “how the game’s logic around ‘high rent’ contrasts reality,” with one player conceding that centralized locations with amenities will inevitably have higher land values. “But this game makes the assumption of a hyper-capitalist hellscape where all land is owned by speculative rent-seeking landlord classes who automatically make every effort to make people homeless over provisioning housing as it is needed,” the player continued. “In the real world, socialised housing can exist centrally.”

This is true. It exists in Vienna, which the New York Times last year dubbed “a renters’ utopia.” Except, in Vienna the landlord is the city itself (it owns about 220,000 apartments). In Cities: Skylines II, the devs just got rid of landlords completely.

The change in-game will have “a transition period as the simulation adapts to the changes,” and the developer “can’t make any guarantees” with how it will impact games with mods. Although the update aims to fix most of the problems at hand, that doesn’t mean players should never expect to see rent complaints again. When household incomes are too low to pay, tenants will be loud about it. “Only when their income is too low to be able to pay rent will they complain about ‘High Rent’ and look for cheaper housing or move out of the city.” Maybe it’s time players had a few in-game tenant groups of their own.

What would you have me do?

What do you suggest we Americans do? I can vouch for the fact that spending my entire life feeling ashamed of my country has not helped to make it better, despite doing my best to be an outspoken critic of American policy… so I’m hoping you can provide a suggestion for a viable path to redemption.