I don’t know what country you are from or how your voting system works. But I will guess that your country has many parties and after the election, a governing coalition is formed.

In the US voting system, similar parties get punished by stealing votes from each other. So, in effect, we have to form our coalitions before the election and choose the single candidate that will stand for all of us. So, you can think of the Democratic Party as the Democratic Coalition, made up of some truly left-wing factions, as well as some not very left-wing or even centrist factions, and so our candidate will be much more watered down than what you’d see in a different system.

This is probably a fool’s errand, because it’s all or nothing, making it inherently unstable. If we ever get within striking distance of having enough states to cross the threshold, the law will be fought tooth and nail to prevent passage, and this battle would continue in perpetuity in every remotely purple state that has the NPVIC law in place, trying to get enough overturned to stop it.

Maybe it accomplishes something useful simply by bringing the conversation about reform to the forefront? But as an actual solution I’m completely skeptical, as much as I like the idea.

It is genuinely amazing. I have watched it multiple times since I first saw it! It feels like something that would be funny but should get old after a few minutes, and yet it never does.

The whole talk appears to be done in one continuous take!

There was a time when it was the coolest snack to have at school in the US. Very popular. And it is still certainly a thing for kids nowadays.

Every single person who grew up in the US in the 80s, for starters.

I wonder if a big part of the reason is just the whole phone call about Biden and subsequent impeachment, and how Zelenskyy wouldn’t play ball and the whole thing damaged Trump’s ego in a big way. So even if it’s politically advantageous in every way to say you want Ukraine to win, Trump is incapable of doing so.

“You” and “thou” come from different roots. They are not simply different orthographies like “ye” and “the”.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/thou

https://www.etymonline.com/word/you

https://english.stackexchange.com/a/18629

If “literally” means “figuratively,” then we literally have no word for “literally.”

It’s worth pointing out that you just used the word for “literally” and we knew which sense of the word you meant through context. Just like the verb “dust” can mean to put a layer of small particles on something but can also mean to remove the small particles from something. Humans are able to sort these things out.

However, one of the best things about language is that if a need actually arises for more clarity about “literalness”, a solution will naturally emerge to address it.

Even the word “literal” started out as a word that pertained specifically to the written word, and scholarly things, and its sense evolved to refer to things not necessarily written down, to the present meaning of “the most straightforward interpretation of what I’m saying”. A need arose and a word filled the need.

I’ve always wondered why so many people have this reaction, rather than seeing it as a cool thing that languages can do. Namely, taking bits from other languages and making them into something new.

I don’t know if this is true everywhere, but I can say my elementary school kid and friends all say “search it up”, and although they have school-issued Chromebooks and use Google for search, I can’t actually recall ever hearing them say “google it”.

She skipped Netanyahu’s speech in protest and called for an end to the war afterwards.

“The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent,” Harris said.

The reports [from Israeli media] appear to reflect worries among Netanyahu’s inner circle that the emergence of Harris as the presumptive Democrat presidential candidate might herald a tougher US line on the conduct of Israel’s war with Hamas.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/politics/harris-netanyahu-israel-hamas-ceasefire/index.html?cid=ios_app

I’m not in any way arguing that she’s doing everything right on this issue. I think she should go more strongly, although I can also acknowledge that someone at this level is walking a tightrope.

However, if anything, her choice to skip the speech in protest associates her with the protest going on outside, and so she went out of her way to separate herself from the actions at the protest that went too far.

You can argue over whether or not some protesters did go too far, or what else she could say and do that would actually help and be effective, I’m just asking for people to strive for accuracy when making claims. This is an important election, in which I genuinely believe that Harris winning the election will lead to a better outcome for Palestinians than any other outcome. I want to be vigilant about what she says but I also don’t want to look for some excuse to paint her with the same brush as everyone else and write her off.

I wasn’t in anyway even trying to imply that these actions weren’t carried out by protesters. That wasn’t the point I was making. Can’t you see the difference between “I think it was wrong to do XYZ at the protest” and “I don’t think there should be a protest”?

I just watched the video and it didn’t say she denounced the protesters, it said she was one of the officials who strongly condemned the graffiti, flag burning, and raising the Palestinian flag. Specifically those actions. Not the protesters themselves or the fact that they were protesting at all.

If your statement was based on that segment alone, then I would say you mischaracterized the situation in a way that makes Harris come off worse.

Source?

I understand why he felt he needed to do this press conference, but at the same time I can’t believe he did it because he would have literally had to be perfect for it to not just generate new headlines and memes about his decline (which it clearly has).

It seems like the headlines will never stop and they are being perpetuated by people on both sides, and he’s completely flailing because the fact is, he’s no longer capable of giving a stellar live performance that can put this all to rest.

Right after the debate, I felt that if Democrats had brushed his performance off, it would have dropped into the background and been totally erased if Biden did reasonably in other appearances and the next debate.

However, each time there is a new headline about a Democrat’s observation that he is not in good shape, I become more certain that he must end his campaign. Not necessarily because I’m more convinced about his mental decline, but because you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

So I’ve stopped weighing whether switching out Biden at a late stage was the optimal strategy in a vacuum. He’s been damaged enough by Democrats in liberal spaces that it’s absolutely the optimal strategy now. I’m not judging these Democrats for what they’ve done, I’m just saying it’s a hell of a gamble. So in my view, we might as well accept it that he’s gotta go and hope to hell their gamble pays off. Because there’s no way the guy can stay after all of this.

While I agree that it would certainly be ideal if a speed limiter could account for the context that the car is in, you’ve missed a lot in drawing your conclusion that it would be useless without being able to do that.

Hitting a pedestrian is not the only type of accident. If you rear end a car going 25 mph at 70mph it is not a guaranteed death sentence for all. Especially if the driver brakes, which some do not, but some will. And this is ignoring cases where there isn’t a tremendous mismatch in speed. Like, even if it reduced residential deaths by 0% but it reduced overall deaths looking at all situations, it would be a net gain with literally nothing lost. We are looking at the aggregate here. So, it isn’t relevant if you think of one specific situation where you believe 70mph isn’t better than 90mph or whatever number.

Reaction time and braking distance are affected by speed. In some cases, the person going 70 might be able to slow down enough to have the collision be non-fatal. Reaction time goes down and braking distance goes up as speed increases. If a speed limiter gives just enough time to occasionally make an accident non-fatal, then in the aggregate you have fewer fatal accidents.

In fact, taking braking distance into account, I don’t think you can even say that over the millions of miles driven, that a speed maxed at 70mph isn’t going to, occasionally, lead to a situation in a residential area where someone was able to just get out of the way in time because the car covered 30% less distance between the time the pedestrian reacted and the time the car reached that spot (or an even larger difference if the driver noticed and braked at some point as well). But again, it doesn’t matter if it’s few to none in this specific scenario, because a speed limiter of 70 will certainly reduce fatalities overall.

You can certainly kill someone going the maximum legal speed in a place where the speed limit is much lower. But the likelihood of injury and death still does increase with the increase in speed. So if, say, 5% of accidents involving someone going 70 are fatal, but 10% if the person is going 90 (these are made-up numbers), then if cars are not even able to go above 70, you end up saving lives.

It seems to me that the question of free will is only truly meaningful (aside from being an interesting thought experiment) if we could then perfectly or near-perfectly predict what a person will do. But the system in which we exist is so complex that we will never be able to model that or come close.

So we might as well consider humans to have free will, just as we consider a roll of the dice to be random.

Forget telling you, they should just start playing the movie and bill you