Hegar

These many reasons include his words, actions, policies, advisors, finances and friends.

Sometimes, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck, hangs around with ducks, waddles like a duck, lives in a pond, gets fed bread, and has been classified as a duck by experts the world over - it might just be a duck.

Reminds me of a line from The Maxx: “The Crapon-in-a-hat and Jean Paul Satre team up to fight nausea? Sounds like a losing battle to me.”

Eliminating the Senate might seem like a good way to reduce the outsized influence that voters in smaller states wield, but the Senate helps keep those states in the union.

Also, the death penalty should be eliminated, not expanded.

We obviously need to address the fact that our government doesn’t represent the country, but drastically increasing the ability of larger states to ride roughshod over the interests of smaller states is not a recipe for stability.

Ryan Air: No, it’s the airports that are wrong.

The fact that you posted that incredibly disingenuous jpost piece from foxman yesterday makes me very skeptical of your ability to identify what is and is not antisemitism.

You’re a troll though. It’s easy to tell because every single post in your comment history is trolling.

I’m gonna block you now but best of luck with your future trolling.

Threaded messages seems fine to me, as you said that usage is more well understood than threadiverse which risks conceptually-centering a billionaire controlled platform.

The existence of threads makes threadiverse an inappropriate name for fediverse content aggregators, is the point I was being overly sarcastic about.

Defederating from threads seems like the best way to make it nice. That way there’s less influence from psychopathic billionaires who happily stoke genocide for clicks.

Russia seemed to be planning to open another front on the Ukrainian side of the border here, so this has spiked that, seized the gas line, provided potentially ‘swappable’ territory, embarrassed the kremlin and diverted Russian reinforcements from other fronts.

No, that’s too shitpost.

If you’d zoomed out a little more you could’ve included Ibiza to the north, where the Mayans started out before expanding north towards disneyland, or the Azores to the west, the base used by the Polynesians to obtain sweet potatoes from the Ghanaians.

Right to disconnect laws were first introduced in France in 2017… One critic at the time said: " the French may quickly discover that their most productive workers are routine “lawbreakers” who stay connected during off-hours." … A 2023 Australia Institute study estimated Australian workers on average were doing an extra 5.4 hours of unpaid work per week. … equates to an extra 281 hours’ unpaid work per year. This is estimated to be costing workers an average of AU$11,055 annually.

For employers, productive is just a polite synonym for exploited.

Public protest and unrest is a symptom, your society telling you something is wrong

This is something that the Chinese government actually pays very close attention to. Specific issues - food safety and pollution for example - they allow some protest so they can gauge how strong public sentiment is on the matter. Even when they arrest protest leaders, they’ll often make policy changes in the relevant areas. I’ve heard china scholars talk about how interested the chinese government is in public opinion and the roundabout ways they assess it in a system where it can’t be regularly expressed in open elections.

the appearance of a peaceful society without conflict is not the same thing as a peaceful society without conflict

For sure. I feel like as far as an authoritarian government is concerned though, they are functionally the same. Until suddenly they are not, of course. But again, the resilience of the CCP is due in part to working out what is up for public comment and what is most definitely not.

public unrest is a feature

Again, super agree. But I don’t think of public unrest as political chaos, at least not in the US context. The inability of the government to perform it’s most basic functions without brutally pointless culture wars, the myriad ways to gum up the works and prevent action, the increasing politicization of the public service, the willingness of so many to act contrary to the government’s own interests - that’s the sort of stuff I think of as All American political chaos.

Oh, that’s it? Thank you! I never would’ve gotten this. I think it was the whole of sponge bob used as a metaphor for a single body part that was throwing me off.

I’ll wear whatever you like 😘

Last week for me.

I still do not get it.

Are his eyes and nose supposed to look like testicles and a penis? They’re upside down if so.

Is it his eyes and the line extending from his head? There’s the square of his head in the way so it just doesn’t look like a penis to me.

I gather it’s somehow penis related, yeah?

How does that relate to the image though?

I could definitely believe that some weibo users are very interested in Biden’s stepping down. Xi’s decision to stay on passed the original term limit was quite controversial even among some of his supporters. Stepping aside when the moment requires it is the hallmark of that paragon of Confucian virtue, the Duke of Zhou.

But no one in the world “envies” our political chaos. We’ve done real damage to the global reputation of democracy and given example after example for the world’s autocrats to point to when they argue that democracy is self defeating.