I think it’s often personal, as opposed to objective. A lot of people simply like it and do not want to lose access to something they like.

Lead researcher has a youtube channel linked at the bottom of that article, too.

Some plastics are more stable than others. That said, we are admittedly far too lackadaisical with them in general.

To answer your direct question, we do have an FDA that does a passable job with some things, salmonella outbreaks, emergency vaccine development, stuff like that. There is probably some regulatory capture at play, though, where business interests get their people appointed into oversight roles. When a full half of our government is so vocally and rabidly pro-business, this is difficult to prevent in the long run.

Certainly. But anti-elitist sentiment is broader than just this country, as is anti-capitalist sentiment. There’s a broad coalition of people that would celebrate something like this for a variety of reasons. I try to avoid taking people online purely at face value, since its so easy and commonplace to simply spin one’s opinions slightly into something that seems similar to solidarity with one specific position, but in reality is operating from a subtly different motive in an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of way.

That said, I do agree that a lot of it is from Americans. But it would be in the interest of a variety of different chaos-interested positions to amplify that in any way possible. To a communist, its class warfare. To a geopolitical rival, it’s a blow against stability. To the far right, it’s a blow against the liberal order. To social media companies its an enticing engagement. Etc etc etc.

edit for a typo and an extra example

War is very seldom inevitable. We tend not to focus much attention on wars that never started, because that does not make for very engaging history content. It happens far more frequently than a war actually starting though.

It’s useful to remember that Americans are a minority on the English-speaking internet. There’s only 330 million of us, while the world has an estimated 1.5 billion English speakers. Probably much more if we include people that just know some of the language.

English is the global trade language, it’s frequently taken in school as a second language all over the world. If you learn some English, the amount of activities available to you dramatically increases.

They don’t really think it that far through. Policy proposals aren’t considered, it’s more about vibe.

After the election, AOC reached out to her constituents to ask why some of them would vote for both Trump and her.

There’s a variety of answers, but the general sentiment is people want some way to “shake up Washington” without a real understanding of how exactly that would work or what would happen.

Obama made this a goal of his second term, and while he achieved some success, the relationship between the west and the other major nuclear powers has significantly worsened since then.

It’s an admirable goal, but I’m not sure it’s going to be feasible any time in the near future.

Some very cheerful protestors.

Study of history.

People have been prophesying the end times for millennia now, for this reason or that reason. I think that ultimately they just don’t like the basic fact that change of some sort or another is inevitable in the world, it will not remain static and no system or institution will last forever. This does not result in any concrete end, however.

To quote Morpheus, “I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me, but because of the path that lies behind me.”

There’s also a fair bit of profit-driven exaggeration in just how bad things really are in certain arenas. Bad news makes good clickbait, good/neutral news less so. So the ratio of bad to good news we receive is not actually representative of the full picture of what is happening in the world.

Yeah, pretty much. Collaborative storytelling is the most apt description I’ve heard. Could probably add “rng aided” and you’ve captured pretty much everything about it. It’s definitely one of those “all about the journey, not the destination” sort of things, sort of like a road trip. Also like a road trip, can be anywhere from meticulously planned to basically being railroaded on down to “uh, how about that way?” or anything in between.

Any significant injury that results in paralysis would be a potential candidate. These become possible as soon as you become old enough to climb things like trees.

Assuming he abides by constitutional law, this will be his final term.

That last line was the funniest thing I’ve read in the past few days, so thank you for that.

There’s around 2 million Gazans still alive. That’s a lot of ethnicity still to be cleansed if cleansing is the goal.

On the arms shipments, we may try lawsuits via the Leahy Law if the ethnic cleansing ramps up. The way the law is written, it actually looks at arms shipments all the way down to the granular level of individual military units. It does not say arms cannot be exported to countries engaging in war crimes, it specifically says individual military units that commit war crimes cannot receive arms. If they choose to engage in a broader campaign of organized displacement out of Gaza or starvation in places where combat has largely died down, a larger number of military units could potentially become implicated, which could maybe make a lawsuit more feasible. We’ll have to see.

Regarding AIPAC, since Citizen’s United determined that monetary donations are a form of speech, this requires either an amendment or recapture of the Supreme Court. Otherwise Americans are allowed to lobby the government for whatever they wish, even if they are doing so at the behest of a foreign government. They have to disclose that, but so long as they do, they are simply exercising their Constitutional rights as perceived by the current Supreme Court. This isn’t going away any time soon, the current law is very clear and pretty much ironclad, rooted in the Constitution itself via the Bill of Rights.

Some good answers already. To add, in the media sphere Pod Save America and their related branches is a liberal progressive media organization that tries to run counter to the conservative media ecosystem, trying to ride the line between policy wonkery and approachability.

I kind of understand Bush vs Kerry. Bush had a vision. It was a crazy neocon vision, but it was a vision and he used it to communicate effectively enough that we still occasionally meme about bombing people into freedom.

Obama had a clear vision, and communicated it well. Hope, prosperity for the middle class, international leadership. Biden had a vision, a less divisive America where we came together and worked on overdue problems. Hilary didn’t really, nor did Kerry or Gore. They were more policy administrator types who focused on specific policies and administration, and the idea of incremental improvement just didn’t resonate with people.

Trump, for all his failings, does have a vision he is capable of communicating to the American people. Harris did too, better than Hilary anyway, but it didn’t really come online until fairly late into the campaign and stayed a little too nebulous. I do think she was hurt in this regard by getting such a short campaign with no real prep time, she was evolving in the right direction.

I think we need a Bernie or AOC, someone with a powerful vision and ability to clearly communicate it, to the point of literally cudgeling people over the head with it. And we need to vote them in during the primary, over any competent administrator types, despite the fact that we are fully aware of how effective and necessary those policy administrators can be. Our valuing of them is a place where we’re out of touch with the broader American electorate though.

edit: MLK Jr was good at this. He had a dream, and it was a simple one that any person could visualize in their head. It didn’t require any policy expertise to understand it. We need that.

I think you were really lucky, a pocket knife is a lot riskier than a can of mace or taser or something. Easy to take away. But if it’s what you got, then it’s what you got. Also should’ve aimed a little lower.