This is the type of subtle "bothsides"ism that I actually give kudos to. It’s not as blatant as saying “they’re both equally bad” or “they’re both old” or “they’re both [anything]”. It’s pretending to be dispassionate, just a neutral observation, just “oh wow, the times we live in”. Oh so subtle. “Presidential candidates”, not “a Presidential candidate”. “Challenge each other”, not “challenges the Democrat”.
And not a word about the central focus of the article, that Trump is clearly off his rocker.
It’s like textual judo. Deflect from the primary purpose: Trump is a fucking whacko --> we live in a time. Equivocate: Republicans are making shit up --> candidates challenge each other.
The former president and presumptive Republican nominee referred to Texas Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson, who was the White House physician for part of his presidency, as “Ronny Johnson.” The moment came as Trump was questioning Biden’s mental acuity, something he often does on the campaign trail and social media.
“He doesn’t even know what the word ‘inflation’ means. I think he should take a cognitive test like I did,” the former president said of Biden during a speech at a convention of Turning Point Action in Detroit.
I feel like we should make trump compete on “are you smarter than a 5th grader”. I mean, the whole accusation-is-projection thing. You know. Like how stupid people always think they’re the smartest in the room… he doesn’t know what inflation is… so of course Biden doesn’t know, either.
I found a sample test with 133 questions. I got 126 of them for 94.74%.
There were a few history questions that threw me, specifically related to the federalist papers of which I’ve got scant little memory.
I felt like the rest of it was pretty straightforward. I also think recent divisiveness has made a lot of the questions related to how the federal government is structured a lot easier.
As to your assertion that most natural Americans would fail, I’d flip a coin on that. Maybe? Probably?
Assuming most Americans couldn’t pass it, that explains a ton of politician rhetoric. They say things that are functionally impossible, but if the voter Is entirely unaware of how the government is structured and functions, then they’ll eat it up and cast their vote, frequently against their own well being.
if the voter Is entirely unaware of how the government is structured and functions
The vast, vast majority of voters have no idea how government works. And this is actually one of the few things that both sides are guilty of: incredibly uninformed voters.
The way our government works is actually pretty complicated and I'm confident in saying that most Americans have only a very basic understanding of it. That's also largely not their fault. Civics education in this country is a joke.
that Hillary lost to a piece of shit, rapist, plague on society, convicted felon – that Biden just barely squeaked by a piece of shit, rapist, plague on society, convicted felon – that Biden is only two points ahead of a piece of shit, rapist, plague on society, convicted felon – that the DNC refuses to give us anyone who won’t just pull even with a piece of shit, rapist, plague on society, convicted felon
Personally, I think reporting on the polls this far out of the election with the voodoo polling methodology that's in use is a pretty big waste of time whichever way they are pointing. But, clinging to some particular segment that lets you write bad news for Biden, when there's a story that's available that's actually more interesting that they could be writing as well as being more click-inducing, is a rare little fascinating window into what type of stories they're trying to write, and what ozma would like to post (i.e. not enlightening of reality). But what do I know. Why ozma's doing it, I feel like I have a pretty good idea about; why NPR is doing it is a little more of an open question.
“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” -Chuck Schumer, 2016
Republicans are banning RCV faster than Democrats are pushing for it (which is easy because almost no democrats and no on influential to the party is actively pushing RCV). Probably because RCV hurts Democrats too, but either way at this rate if the time ever comes for a national discourse on a national RCV the red states will already be propagandized to disregard facts and hate RCV. The Democrats are not your solution to RCV, once again they’re the party of ‘too little to late’ incarnate. Go vote for them sure, but stop acting like they’re pro RCV and will advocate for a solution that takes power away from them because they aren’t and they won’t.
This isn’t an Israeli or American problem anymore.
It’s a world problem.
We’re all complicit in allowing one country to destroy another.
We’re all complicit in allowing a genocide to occur.
When the Jewish holocaust occurred, the world said never again. It will never cease to amaze me that the latest genocide is being perpetuated by the same people who keep reminding the world of how terrible it is for one group of people to dehumanize, disregard, dismiss and destroy another people.
Entrepreneurs and influencers from across a spectrum of conspiracist and religious communities gathered in Las Vegas in March to discuss building an “uncancellable” future together.
Being “canceled” is a badge of honor for these fucks. It’s a marketing boon. No one uses this word in the real world. “Hey everybody, let’s cancel Trump, then he’ll go away!” Fucking idiots.
“If you violate the Geneva Convention, your people don’t get the protections of it” seems like a pretty reasonable way to justify the bombings tbh
In any case, there are some important considerations to be made here too:
After the horrors of Okinawa, US leadership expected a million casualties to take Japan itself, to the point where the Navy wanted to simply blockade Japan into submission. Given the Japanese civilians were already eating acorns and tree bark, and the military’s entire outward appearance was to never surrender, it isn’t unreasonable to assume Japan wouldn’t have given up.
Of course, the Japanese were refusing to surrender to the US in order to surrender through the USSR in hopes of getting a better deal (protect the emperor, no war crime trials, etc.). Of course, the Soviets invaded Manchuria and dashed all hopes of that, which, according to many people, was the real reason for Japan’s surrender.
It is a bit murky, but in response to the bombings and the invasion, there was a meeting on August 9th of the highest ranks of the Japanese government where it was determined that surrender was the only option and plans were drawn up to do so. However, on the 14th, there was an attempted coup by some army officers to continue the war, which failed after several high ranking officials refused to comply, among other things.
All of this taken together is not to say “the bombings were necessary,” but rather to show the situation as it developed, and how many different things could have gone wrong and dragged the war on for longer (side note: Japan still held a lot of territory and there were plans to liquidate POWs and the like in the event of surrender)
Was it right to vaporize thousands? In a vacuum, no, certainly not. But in the complex context of a war in which millions had already died and millions more still very well could have, its tough to say.
I mean, sure it’s horrible, but again, understanding the context behind decisions is important to getting a full idea of why something was done.
Take something like strategic bombing, which killed more people by a country mile than the atomic bombings. Does anyone bitch on the same level about how many people were killed by regular bombing? Hell, Operation Meetinghouse (the firebombing of Toyko in March 1945) killed something like 150k people in a single raid, and nobody says a goddamned word about it outside of historical circles.
At the end of the day, the idea behind strategic bombing (in the case of the Allies) was that it was a good way to damage the enemy’s war effort. The killing of civilians wasn’t the objective (unlike the Germans, who explicitly employed terror bombing of civilians as a tactic). Its the cold calculus of fighting a modern war - the enemy’s capacity to fight is the ability for them to make more things to fight with, so eliminating that capacity by demolishing factories and houses is a good strategy. The killing of civilians wasn’t the objective necessarily - breaking the apparatus they participated in was.
In some ways it’s actually better to simply leave millions homeless instead of killing them, as the enemy must house and feed these people instead of using those resources for fighting…
Either way, would you have rather the US blockaded Japan to death to force a surrender? Killing untold numbers of civilians from starvation and disease than a relatively small number of civilians in 2 places? Maybe we wouldn’t have needed to if the Russian invasion was enough to scare them into surrender, but we’ll never know that for sure…
What would you have done against an enemy that gave every indication they were planning to fight to the death?
Does anyone bitch on the same level about how many people were killed by regular bombing?
Yes?
The killing of civilians wasn’t the objective
It literally was? They could’ve chosen an isolated place to bomb but they strategically made decisions to highlight the impact of the bomb. To clearly depict the before and after.
Wow. A lot of this is just made up bs.
What would you have done against an enemy that gave every indication they were planning to fight to the death?
Idk personally. I’m not that educated in this topic.
I’d like to see the amount of discourse surrounding strategic bombing compared to the atomic bombings for average people. There aren’t any movies today talking about how horrific the normal bombing campaigns were, whereas this entire thread is dedicated to a recently released film about the Manhattan project…
As for an isolated place, well, they thought about that:
It was evident that everyone would suspect trickery. If a bomb were exploded in Japan with previous notice, the Japanese air power was still adequate to give serious interference. An atomic bomb was an intricate device, still in the developmental stage. Its operation would be far from routine. If during the final adjustments of the bomb the Japanese defenders should attack, a faulty move might easily result in some kind of failure. Such an end to an advertised demonstration of power would be much worse than if the attempt had not been made. It was now evident that when the time came for the bombs to be used we should have only one of them available, followed afterwards by others at all-too-long intervals. We could not afford the chance that one of them might be a dud. If the test were made on some neutral territory, it was hard to believe that Japan’s determined and fanatical military men would be impressed. If such an open test were made first and failed to bring surrender, the chance would be gone to give the shock of surprise that proved so effective. On the contrary, it would make the Japanese ready to interfere with an atomic attack if they could. Though the possibility of a demonstration that would not destroy human lives was attractive, no one could suggest a way in which it could be made so convincing that it would be likely to stop the war.
The key takeaway here is that they were unconvinced the Japanese military would react to anything else.
If the Allies wanted to kill more civilians with bombings, why did they drop millions of leaflets into cities urging people to evacuate? And no, they did not do so in any special sense for the atomic bombings out of fears the bomb wouldn’t work.
Again, it is quite easy to simply handwave this with “they could’ve done X” without being in the shoes of the people who made the choices. The project barely worked and cost billions of dollars, the enemy was assumed to be utterly fanatical in their devotion to continue the war, and there was no guarantee the bomb would have worked at all.
As for your claims of made-up BS…my statements are true to the best of my knowledge around allied war planning and bombing doctrine. There were plenty of ways to maximize civilian deaths using area bombing, and the Allies generally refused to do them, instead focusing on targets of military value.
Idk personally. I’m not that educated in this topic.
Ah, so then you are stating you lack sufficient data to make the right decision? Congratulations! You are experiencing, in part, what it was like to be living at that time! Nobody was educated in atomic warfare, as it hadn’t happened yet and we’d had basically 1 test a few weeks before it began for real. Pair that with not knowing what the Japanese were thinking and only having data based on their actions and official communications (which pointed to essentially national suicide in defense of the Emperor), and now you get a glimpse of the calculus being made about the bombings. Don’t fall into the classic “20/20 hindsight” trap many people fall into: think about the problem as though you were there.
I’m sure Garland is classier than me. I would just send back a piece of paper with the date Gym Jordan was issued the subpoena he ignored written on it, and nothing else.
“Life begins at conception” but embryos outside a woman’s body have no personhood rights, while embryos within a woman’s body (even those outside her uterus, in the case of ectopic pregnancy) have personhood rights that exceed those of the woman. It’s not about the embryos, it’s about controlling women’s bodies.
And it’s really a viability argument, because if you do nothing, the IVF ones will eventually thaw out and die, and the ones in utero will live. Yet they’re unwilling to follow that argument to its logical extension of a 24-week leeway for abortion.
Misuse the word “groomer” until it means “anyone that isn’t strictly heterosexual” (while also taking away useful vocabulary to describe a real abuse tactic).
Make cruel and unusual punishment legal for “groomers”.
Make no mistake: they want you dead. It’s that simple.
To save a click: It is a federal disability program that doesn’t literally keep them from getting married, but the loss on benefits that would come from being married is keeping people from getting married.
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