The standard of evidence for calling it a lynching outside of a court of law has been met IMO.

Let’s call a spade a spade.

At least the people currently voting in primaries suck. The solution is for more people who don’t suck to start voting in primaries

Obama was an upset candidate. Hillary was the DNC choice in 08.

Yeah, the establishment has their thumb on the scale, and that sucks. It means that it will take more primary voters to overwhelm their influence. Like I said, I’m not optimistic.

But it is still the most viable path to change at this time. Unless you have a better suggestion? (Or do you just want to complain?)

If you mean that democratic primary voters in subsequent states voted for Biden after Sanders had the early lead, yes.

If people start voting in primaries that can change.

Am I optimistic that it will? No. But the problem is that people who want to see change aren’t voting in primaries and then they complain that their choices suck.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, because I don’t know enough details about their economy at that time, but people have been saying that about the US economy for decades and it hasn’t happened yet (not that I think it wouldn’t under Trump, because he’s really going nuts on it, but…).

Do you have anything you can point to that makes the case that the situation was so precarious that collapse was inevitable, or just that they were precarious (as the US has been since GWB at least)?

I’m not op, but I like speculative fiction. I was really into Ministry For The Future. I also liked Termination Shock.

What have you got?

I think it’s pretty rad that you offered to recommend books. You’re alright.

Primaries!

If more people voted in primaries we would have probably had president Sanders instead of Trump the first time around

“We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.”

-Al Franken

As long as there is substance to the reasons for pride, yes…

Some brave patriot needs to test it and demand a jury trial

Assuming the election wasn’t hacked, yeah…

I have my doubts about the election (and I’m a big data engineer with a cyber security cert)

Yes, but the point about minimizing plant deaths by eating plants instead of feeding more plants to animals and then eating the animals is a valid one…

The comment you link to does do a better job of explaining what you’re getting at, but I would still argue that those behaviors also require a partitioning of empathy, and that is a behavior most humans are susceptible to… Those who have empathy can often be made to shut it down or partition it so that it only applies to certain people.

I stand by my original comment modulo the part that asserts that it is empathy. It is not a lack of intelligence being the point.

I don’t think you understand what empathy is. Why are you bringing up irrational appeals to emotion?

Many of the Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were undeniably smart in the sense that they could perform abstract reasoning better than most people. Some of them had top 1% IQs and none of them had below average IQs (yes, IQ is an imperfect measure of intelligence, but at the same time, anyone who gets a 130 on an IQ test is smart… They just might not be smarter than someone with a 120 or a 110 from a different background).

I’ve had a long (25 years so far) and successful career in computational science/engineering. Everyone I have worked with in the last 25 year, with only 2 exceptions I can think of, was smarter than most people. I have heard some truly awful things come out of coworkers mouths. Particularly in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. People who could write software that accurately predicted airflow through jet engines who did not care that the people of Iraq were not the same people who attacked the WTC. They knew, but did not care! They simply wanted to lash out at brown people in the middle east.

No, empathy is the distinguishing characteristic.

We used to think that most animals lacked those things as well.

Plants very well may have some kind of consciousness or will, it’s just one that is so different from our own as to be unrecognizable with our current understanding.

Personally, I acknowledge that predation is a part of the ecosystem, and that it is not morally wrong to be a predator (Nobody thinks that falcons or bobcats are immoral for existing in the ecosystem the way that they do. I don’t think that should be different for humans). I do believe it is morally wrong to treat an animal poorly in advance of its demise though, so my policy on food is that I will eat animals and animal products if I believe that the animal that provided said food lived/is living a life that is as good as or better than it’s wild relatives, provided the practice is environmentally sustainable. So I eat a mostly vegan diet, but I also sometimes eat eggs from people’s well treated pet poultry or pasture raised chickens, and I eat seafood that the monterey bay aquarium says is sustainable. On rare occasions I will eat pasture raised poultry or hunted meat. I don’t do any dairy or farmed red meat because of the greenhouse gasses associated with their production.

I think it’s important for us to hunt deer in most of north america because we eliminated their primary natural predator from the ecosystem and they overpopulate to the point of being harmful to the environment without wolves in their ecosystem.

I heard it’s why dogs often stare at you while they poop. They’re like “You got my back, right?”

The original Nazis came for the trans folks before the Jews.

It’s fucking disgusting how similar it is and how few people see it

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/