If this is all you have to do, then EVERY MEDIA OUTLET should do this. Not even hardball, just “ok can you show me some numbers?”
If that’s all it takes to get this chicken shit weirdo to curl up in a ball, then fucking do it. He gets no airtime then other than his stupid rallies commemorating when he was pitted against an octogenarian.
Sounds like bullshit to me. Not that it’s impossible or anything, but it seems pretty late for this information to come out if it is true, especially after all the admissions of failings from the USSS, etc. You’d think that’s the kind of information that should have been mentioned right away. A month later, it sounds like they’re just making excuses and trying to make themselves sound good.
You wouldn't ever intentionally aim for the gun, you'd aim for the body in every single version of this scenario. If somebody's got a rifle pointed at an ex-president, you're not going for a warning/disarming shot.
If it's true, then all it means is that the USSS sniper also missed his first shot.
You wouldn’t ever intentionally aim for the gun, you’d aim for the body in every single version of this scenario.
In any scenario using firearms. They’re lethal weapons. there’s no way to make them not lethal. (well. Ignoring things like rubber bullets.).
Missing is too easy, and in any case, the only snipers not trained to shoot center mass are pretty much cops; where the ranges are much shorter, and you’re far more likely to have bystanders being held hostage or at risk if a torso-shot doesn’t immediately drop the subject.
Even then, cops are going to go for center mass if they can. For example, Trump would be dead if the shooter had shot for center mass- assuming he wasn’t shooting for center mass.
yep. there’s a reason they very quickly switched to describing them as “less lethal” rather than “non-lethal” Along with basically everything else.
Turns out if it has enough stopping power to actually be useful, it can probably kill you if it’s used improperly and possibly kill you even if it is… funny how that works. sad that they still use them.
The tendency of modern mass shooters to aim for the head seems to be the result of video game culture. So it’s quite likely that video games saved Trump’s life!
The article says it was a police sniper, ie. a local cop who probably doesn’t have the same amount of training. He also wasn’t actually positioned at a place where he could get a shot, so he ran to somewhere where he could actually hit the guy.
A secret service sniper eventually killed him after the first shots were fired. Makes the secret service look even worse IMHO.
It’s kinda funny (in a sad way) that all the things the founding fathers explicitly warned against (two party system, fractional reserve banking, partisan courts) have ALL come to pass and with the exact consequences originally predicted. I guess people just refuse to learn from history.
Living and dying are the same process. You can’t be born without dying. You could say biology condemns us all - very loosely - to a cult of death, as we must all participate.
Capitalism is worse than that. Capitalism is an ideology of exploitation. I’m fine with dying, it’s my fault for being born. I don’t see why I must submit to exploitation while I do, temporarily, exist.
Just because you can’t recall it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. As a spermatozoon, you eagerly swam towards that egg, then that egg could have chosen to abort at any time. Yet here you are alive. You chose to be here. Deal with it, accept it and move on with your life.
Just because you can’t recall it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. As a spermatozoon, you eagerly swam towards that egg, then that egg could have chosen to abort at any time. Yet here you are alive. You chose to be here. Deal with it, accept it and move on with your life.
does a delusional person choose to have delusions?
Things that are outside of our psychological realm, and physical control are quite literally something we have no control over.
Yeah, there are plenty of things we have little to no control over.
Having delusions is one of them for sure, but can we say for certain we don’t at least influence what those delusions are or which direction they take?
i mean you probably influence them, but much like dreams, are they really representative of anything other than your mind left to its own devices?
Human conception may start at the sperm race, but human consciousness doesn’t begin until a few years into childhood, so at the end of the day, who knows.
Can thought be considered a process that begins after being affected by an external stimulus? And without prior experience on which to base our response, we can only react according to the conditions set by that stimulus?
So is it truly we who control our thoughts or are we just acting in a predetermined set of reactionary impulses based on the accumulation of our personal experiences and gained knowledge over our lifetime so far?
We who are so easily influenced into outrage by trigger phrases specific to our fears or spurred into action by resonating soundbites promising our desires, are those our thoughts or are they just the mind left to its own devices?
I really don’t know. But it’s probably some food for thought in a way.
Can thought be considered a process that begins after being affected by an external stimulus? And without prior experience on which to base our response, we can only react according to the conditions set by that stimulus?
thought must be influenced by some level of internal stimulation, as you can deprive your senses and still think. Likewise, before you have the capability of memory, you are not conscious, it is simply impossible. Consciousness is directly tied to the ability to remember. Thusly it must be some mix of the two, life experiences, and remembered experiences.
Just one or the other is incapable of providing anything interesting.
You have to have some level over the control of your thoughts, otherwise you wouldn’t be capable of typing, or speaking, or most things in life really. If everything is predetermined it has to be predetermined at a higher level, quantum mechanics and multiverse theory for example. In some capacity, the vast majority of judgements we make in our lifetimes is based on the cumulative life experience we have gained, as well as a ability to engage in critical thinking allowing us to process said experience and to formulate an action to follow.
We who are so easily influenced into outrage by trigger phrases specific to our fears or spurred into action by resonating soundbites promising our desires, are those our thoughts or are they just the mind left to its own devices?
both, kind of. The mind left to it’s own devices will formulate thoughts for you to hold, it doesn’t like the lack of thought and understanding, it’s probably the reasoning behind religion, and it’s certainly the driver behind science. We’re also social animals, and as a result we like to conform to the pack, it’s what keeps us alive, so if other people are saying something, we have some fundamental level of bias against the alternative. Racism is a good example of this.
thought must be influenced by some level of internal stimulation, as you can deprive your senses and still think. Likewise, before you have the capability of memory, you are not conscious, it is simply impossible. Consciousness is directly tied to the ability to remember. Thusly it must be some mix of the two, life experiences, and remembered experiences.
Isn’t the internal stimulation just the nervous system zapping things to get a response? And doesn’t that need a trigger to get it going?
Anyway, I feel like I’m heading into contested territory here, but I gotta ask. At which point can we consider babies as conscious?
Most people will claim their earliest memory is at the age of 4 or 5 years old. So that time is probably considered as the general start of conscious identity. Yet some have reported that simulating the conditions in a womb such as sleeping in a fetal position or floating aimlessly within a larger body of water will grant them an instinctual sense of serenity. So it can be argued that at some level, we remember our time in the womb, even though we are not able to recall it directly.
And I’ve seen babies aged around 1-2 years old trying (unsuccessfully) to hide from their parents in order to attempt an action that had been forbidden several times before.
How early does our capability to store memory actually start? And at which point will the amount of stored and remembered experience be enough to count as consciousness?
Isn’t the internal stimulation just the nervous system zapping things to get a response? And doesn’t that need a trigger to get it going?
yes but between external stimuli, vision for example, and internal stimulation, memories, you generally need both in order to be able to conceptualize it and make practical use of it.
Anyway, I feel like I’m heading into contested territory here, but I gotta ask. At which point can we consider babies as conscious?
personally, by the time memory is formulated and they can start to remember things. Otherwise it’s debatable whether or not something can experience in a conscious literal sense, the effects of pain and suffering. We know that most animals must experience some level of consciousness, but between birth and the capability of general consciousness, the specific level of consciousness available is not very clear to anybody.
We know that newborns have a lot of fundamental primal responses, holding their breath, hanging onto things, facial recognition. ETC. we know that young animals also experience similar things, though it’s contested how much of this is just a primal built in, or a learned behavior.
And if we’re talking about learned behavior in the context of consciousness it’s even weirder because the matchbox tic tac toe (MENACE) experiment proves that a collection of matchboxes playing tic tac toe can clearly demonstrate the ability to learn and reflectively act upon it’s learned experience, however, it is in no way a conscious entity, it is merely a statistical representation of a conscious entity.
if we’re talking about consciousness in the form of abortion, generally i follow up to about the first trimester, with the usual “if deemed necessary” post first trimester. As most abortions happen very early on. Although realistically, i’m never going to have children, so it’s not really my problem to deal with, so my ultimate opinion doesn’t exist past “non infringement of rights”
Most people will claim their earliest memory is at the age of 4 or 5 years old. So that time is probably considered as the general start of conscious identity. Yet some have reported that simulating the conditions in a womb such as sleeping in a fetal position or floating aimlessly within a larger body of water will grant them an instinctual sense of serenity. So it can be argued that at some level, we remember our time in the womb, even though we are not able to recall it directly.
i believe it’s about 2-5 years old that memory starts to develop in general, though don’t quote me on that. I don’t think it’s “remembering being in the womb” so much as it is post-hoc rationalization and creation of those memories, and also primal programming that influences us to be receptive to those things more generally. It could also be in the case of fetal position, that a subtle psychological reasoning is present. Having your extremities nearer to the rest of your body means you have less to worry about, and puts you in a more defensible position for example.
And I’ve seen babies aged around 1-2 years old trying (unsuccessfully) to hide from their parents in order to attempt an action that had been forbidden several times before.
we see similar things with animals as well, birds, dogs, cats etc. They all do similar things, and they almost definitely have a lesser level of consciousness. In fact we ascribe them a higher level of consciousness than they likely have. It’s attributable to a simple level of relations between objects. Doing X is bad because Y doesn’t like it. Therefore if i do X outside of the existence of Y it is no longer bad. Which is probably a reason that we see this behaviorism. Though it is obviously later learned that regardless of what happens and where, it is bad. And we do still see that behavior with a guilt response upon being caught. Though presumably this is due to some level of independent thought.
How early does our capability to store memory actually start? And at which point will the amount of stored and remembered experience be enough to count as consciousness?
I’m a bit of an absolutist in regards to this one, but i think that generally, the first thing you can remember, constitutes your first memory. However i don’t think it has to be something that you explicitly remembered as your brain can segregate things into different groups, and intentionally block out certain parts of it, while making others more explicitly important, but even that aspect, has an influence on your memory, the things you remember, and your general behaviorism so i would count that as “memory” also, even though it’s probably not.
How early does our capability to store memory actually start? And at which point will the amount of stored and remembered experience be enough to count as consciousness?
Consciousness as a concept is pretty tricky to nail properly in a sterilized environment, but personally i subscribe to the meta theory, where once you can personally conceptualize your own consciousness, the second you realize you are capable of being a conscious entity, is the second where you gain consciousness.
as for how it starts, it’s pretty clear through biology that it’s related to the structures of the brain, neurons inside of the brain and the paths built between them that are made more robust through continual usage are what constitute the ability to remember things, if you do not use them, you lose them, and it makes way for new paths and new memories to form, however there is generally some form of residual memory, similar to how data is written to disk and deleted.
apologies if this is somewhat schizo and badly formatted, i’m writing this while listening to a debate and playing factorio in the background, and i also spent some time talking in discord, so it’s probably a little bit disjointed lol.
np, i enjoy philosophy so this kind of thing is rather cathartic for me lol. Although that probably makes me mentally disturbed to some degree, such is life though. The most disturbed people are the most interesting/productive. The normal ones are boring.
I’m of the belief that we’re all a little disturbed in some way, only that most people prefer the comfort of boring over the satisfaction of disturbing. And the most boring of people are simply better at hiding their quirks.
yeah, i think similarly, though i think there is a spectrum of disturbedness, where at a certain point, your disturbedness outclasses your normalcy and you simply no longer fit in with normal people enough to daylight as a normal person.
Most normal people are a little disturbed, but not significantly enough to experience life outside of that range, whatever it is.
Whereas most disturbed people are somewhere outside of that range, and as a result, usually have some sort of “disturbance radar” which let’s them identify people who they should, and shouldn’t be following.
It’s certainly an interesting experience. It’s as if there’s a “socially normal” bubble, and then people who exist outside of that are kind of just, on their own. It’s like a latch circuit. It’s unlatched until it reaches the threshold where it latches, and once that threshold is reached, it’s pretty much stuck there until forcibly unlatched.
That’s because you’re a sinner and exploiting sinners isn’t to be punished, but praised. Exploit your fellow sinners, make them toil in suffering and you too shall redeem salvation in the form of stock options and tax evasion.
If you’re fine with dying, Tepco is still looking for guys to clean up under Fukushima. They ran out of old gambling addicts who had big debts with the Yakuza.
Capitalism has a historical tendency of imperializing all over the place and sabotaging other systems. It did not earn its spot as “best”, despite what capitalistic propaganda would have you believe.
I feel dirty saying good things about Sarah Palin, but she was brought on to fire up the base and did just that. Vance has managed to alienate the base. I don’t think the incels even like him at this point.
Of course the incels don’t like him. He argues that childless people should pay higher taxes. How did anyone think that would go over with the “never even had sex” constituency?
I think the incel crowd generally want to strip women of their rights because they see women’s liberty as a main reason they can’t get laid.
So, I’d imagine the childless cat women thing could hit with them because they’d be like “yeah, women should stop being so up-tight and have my babies!”
yeah, single women with no kids are childless cat ladies, but single men with no kids are just victims of the uncompromising selfishness of childless cat ladies. sounds about right.
Incels would agree to pay more money if it harms women. All incels hate each other, men who aren’t incels, themselves, and women. That’s in ascending order. They are full of hate.
Incels also hate the cruel world that made them and the politicians upholding it. The problem with women isn’t, according to incel ideology, that they refuse to pick a partner. It’s that they pick the wrong partners. That’s where the dreaded “nice guy” comes from.
So according to incels this doesn’t harm women enough but rather creates a tax on “normal men” for being “normal”. (And then they turn around and call themselves degenerates because their ideology isn’t the most consistent)
Also if you are in these communities for long enough, then it becomes part of your identity. That’s how we get stuff like wizardchan. (People who believe that still being an incel at 30 makes you a wizard). And this is an attack on that from the outside.
This painting/drawing is from artist Kichisuke Yoshimura, who said of it, “Their clothes ripped to shreds, their skin hanging down. On the riverbank I saw figures that seemed to be from another world. Ghost-like, their hair falling over their faces, their clothes ripped to shreds, their skin hanging. A cluster of these injured persons was moving wordlessly toward the outskirts.”
Not scary: some people were vaporized leaving only a shadow, others badly burned as the painting shows, people were maimed and amputated by the blast, and a big part of the city was blown and burned down. Plus the poor souls who would die horribly from acute radiation poisoning over the following days.
And let’s not forget those nuclear weapons were some of the very first ever made. Modern atomic weapons can range from Hiroshima-size to turning a mountain into a radioactive lake range. Thankfully no hydrogen bomb has even been used in anger because that would be a completely different level of horror (and likely the trigger to the end of human civilization).
Many nuclear powers have policies to fire nukes on warning. That means they would shoot back even before the enemy nuke hits them. Shoot when the nukes are confirmed to be incoming.
Republicans love to regularly talk down the World-ending horror that would be using atomic weapons in war. During Bush Jr.'s “war on terror” they were already talking about using bunker-buster nukes and tried to diminish the well-deserved stigma of nuclear weapons.
Renaming them atomic weapons “Musk bombs” sounds hilariously misguided.
John Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, which is a book of personal accounts he recorded just one year after the event from six people who were there, is one of the most haunting things you will ever read.
some children where at home after the bomb fell and they said a horrific burnt figure on fours came crawling in and died. It was so burnt black and horrifically melted they thought it was a dog. It was their mother.
absolutely sickening these “men” I wish i could just absolutely take it to these pieces of shit and beat them senseless.
I used to love Starbucks because it was a great place to get coffee and chill. Then the whole anti-unions thing, and local coffee shops did it better making me drop Starbucks.
I used to love Chipotle because of their quality and price. Then portions got weirder. Every week was a new food recall. The ones near me look filthy and sad, and that made me drop Chipotle.
I wish! We have a “TimeOut!” coffee shop down the road, and they’ve got the attitude and they price their thimbles-worth like it’s the airport, but I really didn’t go in for the show so much as a decent frothy cuppa; and I left feeling just as lacking and a little less valued.
I wish we could deport the MAGAs that hate our country. I’d rather have citizens who actually want to be here and improve the country instead of harming all their neighbors so they feel better about themselves.
Also voting is the one thing those bastard pig fascist bootlicking simp conservative chud SCUM don’t want us all to do. You can tell because of how much outrageous effort they dump into making voting more difficult. So: fuck ‘em. They can eat shit.
It’s not even that I like the democrat party at all.
I just want the republicans to lose. Fuck them in hell for eternity.
Bonus; If the GOP gets curbstomped into oblivion where it belongs (with the Federalist party) then the democrats won’t be able to say “well at least we’re not republicans!” anymore.
Imagine uncle sam standing before the behaded corpse of an fat frumpy anthropomorphic elephant, still holding a big bloody machete and smiling at an anthropomorphic donkey.
“Oh, you’re not like him? Why, Yes, You’d better ‘be like him’ as little as possible if you don’t want to end up like he did too!”
The democrats only get away with their fuckery because they always hide behind their favorite token excuse.
They still delusionally think the republicans are their pet controlled opposition.
That pet is not controlled. It is entirely OUT of control, a danger to everyone, both completely feral and RABID.
It’s time for America to take that violent, deranged, savage animal out to Kristi Noem’s gravel pit and end its life right before its democrat "owner"s’ eyes. If we make an example of the republicans, the cowardly shits in the centrist party will either see the light or flee.
Sometimes we forget that the roof over our heads and the walls that hold it up are temporary. The store at the mall is temporary. The mall is temporary. The ground that the mall is on is temporary. Nothing last forever. Except for the stupidity of Steve Huffman, which seems boundless.
I’m hoping this will be a Patreon/OnlyFans situation where you can make a subreddit for your followers, art or whatever and not a thing where the big subs become $0.99/Month.
The handful of mods that control all the giant subreddits are going to rake it in for the remaining week or two reddit survives after this. This is going to be worse than streaming TV, imagine a subscription per series instead of per service.
He was counting on the audience to yell over Kamala when she talked, and Faux to have mysterious technical issues when it came time for his mike to be muted.
Well, they still represent their party, so their actions could still affect an election. An embarrassing lame duck session would screw the next party nominee.
Mexico is in a very different situation regarding the size and complexity of their administrative state. They’re also facing an entirely different type of corruption and political violence than we have up here…
Would be so much worse… Think about any type of project or policy that takes more than 4 years to complete (and longer to see tangible benefits from).
It’s already bad enough having a GOP president come in every 8 years to undo most of the good things their Democratic predecessor accomplished (with Reagan removing Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof being the archetype).
Imagine having that pendulum swing every 4 years. Literally nothing that takes longer than 4 years would ever get done.
I think the problem with that would be that every 4-12 years we’d have a lame duck supreme court playing tug of war with the last supreme court over a handful of issues.
What we really need is to be able to easily oust justices for ethics violations and conflicts of interest, like what the hell is Thomas still doing there??
Thomas is still there because taking Bribes and Gifts from Billionaires who have Cases before you is FINE! The REAL Corruption is Judge MERCHAN’S DAUGHTER who DONATED some Money once to DEMOCRATS!
Why would he do that before the election? It’s still the same party, and him doing that would do nothing but hurt Kamala at this point. The smart move is to walk the tightrope for a few more months.
Yeah I get it, it sucks that American politicians can’t just say certain things without tanking their career and destroying their political future. It’s fucked up and gross, but it’s real.
A lot of people are talking like this is a done deal, but I’ve seen enough elections at this point to know that a million impossible to predict things can (and likely will) happen between now and November.
As much as you might want the Democratic party to shout support for Palestinians from the rooftops, the current reality is that we need to continue to be very careful. If you actually care about Palestinian lives beyond using them as political pawns, then unfortunately we need to play the game until November.
Because the alternative is an unacceptable outcome for the Palestinian people.
I’ll probably get downvoted for saying it, but it doesn’t make it less true: Harris could behave exactly the same toward Israel as Biden, after being elected, and she would still be the only choice this election.
I know there are plenty of genuine people here, but so much of the “genocide Joe” rhetoric was such obvious astroturfing. Or at least began that way…
But we live in a world of cause and effect. Regardless of what happens between now and then there are a few possible outcomes for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. But objectively, by a long shot, the worst is if Donald Trump and the GOP (with the hands of the Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, John Birch Society, probably several lame clubs named after Ayn Rand bullshit, firmly up its keister like a goddam Muppet) take the presidency and immediately give Netanyahu carte blanche to “do what needs to be done” there. Which is what he/they will do.
If you think things are bad now, a Trump win would be signing the death warrant for the Palestinian people in the Levant. And every so-called “progressive” that stayed home because of Biden’s stances on Israel will have the blood of millions of dead Palestinians on their hands.
I consider myself to be a progressive, but the complete lack of pragmatism I’ve seen from other so-called progressives lately has been atrocious. So I hope it was mostly astroturf.
I really don’t think there’s that many people towards the middle or left of the political spectrum that are going to be upset about this if he gets the changes through.
Besides, any changes that might bother voters will still have an effect on Kamala’s campaign until the elections over in November.
Whenever I see a politician mention anything about a constitutional amendment, I immediately stop reading.
Shit ain’t happening… We wouldn’t be able to pass an amendment saying “Pizza is yummy” because Republicans would refuse to agree with Democrats. They would actually stop eating pizza altogether because of it. There would be a movement to outlaw pizza because it’s grooming our kids (stupid sexy pizza).
I was trying to think of something silly and outlandish, and as I was typing this, I realized… This isn’t even that far out of the realm of possibility at this point. It’s like legitimately difficult to think of something too far-fetched for this reality. It wouldn’t be the first pizza-related issue on the right (ahem, Pizzagate?). Or the second (I just remembered the stupid “pizza is a vegetable” bullshit).
The looking glass ain’t shit, we went through it years ago. We’re at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey” with Pink Floyd’s Echoes playing in sync with it. If we’re lucky, we’ll soon make it through the psychedelic spaghettification, and we will get to watch ourselves as a boring old man before becoming a giant space fetus…
Sorry, got kind of sidetracked there what were we talking about again?
Oh yeah, Jupiter and beyond the infinite…
(Spoiler alert? Lol I couldn’t spoil the end of that film if I tried).
The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now.
TBF that’s not even as bad as Reagan’s “ketchup is a vegetable”. Canning is a totally legitimate way of preserving tomatoes at their peak of ripeness with their nutritional qualities intact (many chefs even prefer canned tomatoes to fresh ones) and paste/sauce is just the ground-up version of that. Ketchup is that plus a shit ton of sugar and/or corn syrup.
The amount of tomato sauce on pizza is dubiously small, however.
It was more about the conservative reaction to the situation. Because it was during Obama tenure, and Michelle had the gall to get all uppity and try to make kids more healthy.
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