Poverty is a social construct caused by wealth hoarding
What?! As if non-human species don’t control access to resources… Keeping stuff for yourself (and your kin) rather than sharing with strangers is about as natural as a behavior can be. The social construct is actually the moral system that leads many humans to share.
The interesting thing is that anatomically modern Homo sapiens appeared about 300,000 years ago and did live exclusively as hunter-gatherers for about 280,000 of those years.
I do like how this Twitter account, in the rush to blame capitalism, overlooked the fact that the sun rises and sets every day.
I suspect that as Nate Silver says, Trump is doing this sort of thing because he wants to fight about immigration rather than his other, less popular policies - he thinks he has the public support to win on immigration.
That’s my whole point. Might things be a lot worse in a couple of years? Yes. Are things as bad as this article is all about saying they are right now? No, clearly not.
“The American democratic republic is in danger of dying” is true.
“The American democratic republic has died” is histrionics, and histrionics are particularly counterproductive at a time when what’s actually going on is so serious.
The U.S. is survived by a country of the same name, the United States of America, now a presidential dictatorship.
This gets an eye roll from me. The USA is certainly in a lot of danger but anyone who calls the current situation a dictatorship is ignorant of what a dictatorship is.
Here’s a hint for the author: you wouldn’t be getting an article like this one published in a dictatorship.
How are you guys getting all these wrong answers? Because I do use ChatGPT to look up information about software development, which is something I have a lot of experience with, and it’s almost always right. “Almost always” isn’t “always” but, if I’m being honest, it’s probably better than my own memory.
Trump destroyed with facts and logic at Pope’s funeral.
Any possible negotiated end to the war at this time would involve territorial concessions by Ukraine. Putin himself won’t agree to withdraw from most of the territory occupied since 2022, and even if he is replaced by a new, much less expansionist ruler willing to withdraw from all that territory, the new ruler still won’t give back Crimea.
The Uyghurs in Guantanamo didn’t want to go back to China.
Do you remember how prisoners were kept in Guantanamo Bay, even after they were no longer suspected of any wrongdoing, simply because there wasn’t a country that would both accept them and treat them in accordance with US law? Many of those prisoners ended up nowhere near where they came from.
Some countries refuse to accept deportees. Some countries are so likely to mistreat deportees that sending them to those countries is illegal. Some countries simply don’t exist anymore.
“Obligatory charity.” Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
No, not the bees. My eyes!
Or so I’ve heard…
Bezos looks pretty good for a man his age.
But this is trivially true, and not an argument for or against any policy. If you stopped trying to prevent people from murdering each other, the murder rate would also rise rapidly and then plateau. In general, if you stop punishing people for doing something, it will be done more often but not necessarily 100% of the time no matter what it is.
I presume that the author’s intention is to imply that being transgender is like being left handed in that it is an innate quality which cannot be changed even if it is suppressed, but there’s nothing in what he wrote here which is an argument for that implication.
Built to fail? The Constitution worked, more or less, for over 237 years and 44 different presidents. It hasn’t even failed yet now, although it is in a lot of danger.
It’s the job of Congress to stop the President from doing this, via impeachment. However, in a democracy the people get to choose their leaders and if the people elect not just a man like Trump to be President but also a majority in Congress to support him almost unconditionally, then the people get what they voted for.
Even now, Republicans in Congress fear that they will not be re-elected if they oppose Trump. Thus they’re still carrying out the will of the people.
That’s a good point, and I suppose that someone sympathetic to Trump might think that he was being unfairly prosecuted after other presidents hadn’t been.
I disagree with your implication that a former president should always be punished for having broken the law. The rules do need to be different for presidents than for ordinary people.
A prince, when by some urgent circumstance or some impetuous and unforeseen accident that very much concerns his state, compelled to forfeit his word and break his faith, or otherwise forced from his ordinary duty, ought to attribute this necessity to a lash of the divine rod: vice it is not, for he has given up his own reason to a more universal and more powerful reason; but certainly ’tis a misfortune: so that if any one should ask me what remedy? “None,” say I, “if he were really racked between these two extremes: ‘Let him see to it that it be not a loophole for perjury that he seeks.’ He must do it: but if he did it without regret, if it did not weigh on him to do it, ’tis a sign his conscience is in a sorry condition."
Montaigne’ Essays, book 3 chapter 1
It’s one thing to break a law with the belief (perhaps unjustified) that doing so is necessary for the good of the nation and quite another to do to because power protects you from deserved punishment, but how can the law itself make this distinction?
Even the Trump appointees seem like the sort of people who would want to defend the rule of law at least to preserve their own (and therefore the court’s) power, so I wonder how each of the six “conservative” judges was convinced to rule the way that he or she did. I don’t imagine all of them doing it for the same reason. Maybe some were rewarded for their votes and others wanted to see Trump wreck things (Alito and his flag come to mind) but did some actually think that it was a good idea or the correct legal decision?
Yeah but he also said to love each other, and people quickly realized that he was wrong.
The natural resource shortage or lack thereof is irrelevant. Look at those nature documentaries where a pack of healthy, well-fed animals drives away a starving loner.