the UK has 2 out of 3 of those

Change “shooting” to “knifing” and its 3 for 3. The UK has a huge hooliganism problem. The country is rife with domestic violence. But no (non-police) guns!

I was going to say… I don’t see the UK anywhere on this map

Republicans saying they hate Communism, then doing a Nicolae Ceaușescu speed run.

Given the glut of unwanted children from our abortion prohibition, we’ll be needing a lot of new adoptive parents in the near future.

It’s sociological. Traditions and taboos aren’t unique to religion. Communities form them as a means of building trust between members.

Religious belief informs ethical understanding. And ethics aren’t an individual concern. They’re social code of conduct.

We exported fascism into Europe initially. America has a long and horrible history of fascism, straight back to the colonial era. By the early 20th century, guys like Henry Ford were quite literally churning out the textbook definition of antisemitism (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and shipping it all across the Old World, to stock the furnace of racial animus and ramp the continent up into a second world war.

Then we harvested the remnants of fascism back into our own country after German Nazism failed. The open-borders policy extended to German military and science officers was a shocking reversal relative to our naked hostility towards Jewish refugees and other European dissidents in the run up to the wars.

We weren’t destroyed by fascism. We were its wellspring. We sent it out abroad, like the seeds of an evil dandelion, and then we reaped what we’d sown when those seeds blossomed.

In another thread, I was curious about the probability of reaching the age of 60 while living in the US.

Google gave me an assortment of links to people asking similar questions on Quora, and to some generic actuarial data, and to some totally unrelated bullshit.

ChatGPT gave me a multi-paragraph response referencing its data sources and providing both a general life expectancy and a specific answer broken out by gender. I asked ChatGPT how it reached this answer, and it proceeded to show its work. If I wanted to verify the work myself, ChatGPT gave me source material to cross-check and the calculations it used to find the answer. Google didn’t even come close to answering the question, much less producing the data it used to reach the answer.

I’m as big an AI skeptic as anyone, but it can’t be denied that generic search engines have degraded significantly. I feel like I’m using Alta Vista in the 90s whenever I query Google in the modern day. The AI systems do a marginally better job than old search engines were doing five years ago, before enshittification hit with full force.

It sucks that AI is better, but it IS better.

The political inclinations of monarchist Germany weren’t anything to brag about. The German Colonial Empire was just as racist, vulgar, and blood drenched as anything the rest of the continent produced.

Nazis brought the imperial tendencies home to Berlin. They didn’t invent them from whole cloth.

The European World Wars only produced losers. WW1 signaled the beginning of the end of the British Empire, the escalated decline of the French Empire, and the total collapse of the Russian Empire. WW2 obliterated a century of industrial development and squandered a generation of young people on a pointless pissing contest, only to hand the continent to a pair of foreign superpowers.

The US came out ahead in both wars primarily because they were the last to join and the only ones to escape virtually unscathed.

Both.

The Wilson/Coolidge Era was nightmarish for immigrants, with a host of laws targeting East Asian migrants and displacing uncountable numbers of industrial workers particularly along the West Coast.

Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback set off a wave of police terror along the Gulf Coast, crippled the agricultural economy, and killed hundreds of migrants forced into transit.

The current border policy funnels hundreds of thousands of migrants through an inhospitality Texas/Arizona desert region that’s killed around 10k-50k people in the last decade.

None of it actually curbs immigration. It all just becomes a black market affair, affording employers a tool to depress wages and cartels an opportunity to press-gang border residents into cattle slavery.

And yes you can live healthier to have better odds of getting higher on that chart.

Living healthier means keeping your stress low, saving time for exercise, and limiting your intake of fast food.

But these are luxuries primarily reserved for the already wealthy. Luxuries afforded through cheap service sector labor.

Like so much else in this country, good health is paid for with a labor tax on the poor.

$100B for generically engineered babies.

Not one penny on education or health care.

And you know none of these kids are getting vaccinated.

You don’t need AI to generate hack art. Corporate Memphis aesthetic has been around for ages precisely because its cheap, hacky clip-art you can apply to ad copy in order to give it a hint of life without spending much money.

These AI models make the new art comparatively dirt cheap (if you ignore all the negative external costs) without relying on the even more cheap and bland techniques of the past. It’s absolutely “better” relative to what’s come before.

But, it was a media event. It wasn’t “rigged”

You could gamble on it, which means there was money to be made courting suckers.

I’m sure the lion’s share of “rigged” proclamations were coming from folks who got baited into bad bets.

Earth’s surface is 2/3rds water and that’s not changing.

But intense heat means more storms with stronger winds and heavier rain. Imagine a Cat 5 hitting the coast every year.

But Russia also has enormous fossil fuel reserves. They just sold off a colony that was more expensive to guard than it was lucrative to exploit.

With the electoral college and FPTP, even opting in is of dubious benefit.

I’ve been hearing about the imminent crash for the last two years. New money keeps getting injected into the system. The bubble can’t deflate while both the public and private sector have an unlimited lung capacity to keep puffing into it. FFS, bitcoin is on a tear right now, just because Trump won the election.

This bullshit isn’t going away. Its only going to get forced down our throats harder and harder, until we swallow or choke on it.

Or drinking from the same well of propaganda.

The idea that men can be duped by a wall of Murdoch press but women can’t seems dubious.