Physically, most of us are way weaker and in worse physical shape. (Look at old time photos for far people, or sideshow people labelled as “world’s fattest man” who would not raise an eyebrow lumbering through walmart these days.) I wonder how the balance of more manual work vs our sedentary and fatty lifestyles would play out.

I also think folks were more ready to die or get hurt as that’s just how things happened, so probably more willing to be beaten as part of a strike etc.

I have no idea what point you’re trying to make other than, I dunno, some crazy shit like everyone who disagrees with you is a Zionist or something?

But I stand by that post, if you voted for a third party, you helped trump. If you’re trying to wrap your stupidity around the plight of the Palestineans you either aren’t following the news or never really cared about them in the first place.

I get that this is probably the first humanitarian crisis you’ve seen on social media and pretended to care about but as you grow up, hopefully you’ll realize there are sometimes unfortunate restrictions around your choices. While I would have loved a better option than the Dems, the choice was them or trump. If you voted third party, you helped put an administration that is absolutely hostile to them and worse than what would’ve been the case otherwise.

Sorry if reality sucks but whining about it like a petulant child isn’t going to change it or rally others to your cause.

Ahahaha, “As long as you’re respectful one can disagree.” And a paragraph later “hey, this guy pointed out trump would be worse for Palestineans that means he is down with genoicde!!!”

Could you prove my point much harder?

I think on the Left we have a “virtuous” cycle/feedback loop that results in increasingly outlandish positions.

Essentially, for most people there’s a serotonin feedback when people upvote, applaud, reteeet etc. People, responding to incentives like anyone else shift their online discourse to match.

Similarly, even beyond the positive feedback, on thr Left no one wants to be a white cis male contradicting the feelings, emotions or arguments of a POC or LGBTQ+ person.

The Right doesn’t really have this problem as the Far right opinions are generally understood to be reprehensible to most people so those movements have evolved to work on dog whistles etc.

It’s a structural issue but one that puts us out of touch with the mainstream (consider defund the police, transgender athletes or immigration until we were getting murdered in the polls and it was too late to do anything.)

Thank fuck social media wasn’t around when I was a weird 10 year old.

Fucking Smith looks so goddamn spineless. Everyone else is standing proud while Smith “please no more? What can I do for you?”

Ahaha, my thoughts exactly. One of the best parts about Biden winning, for me at least, was ending my embargo of bourbon.

Probably not the right answer on Lemmy but Ford to Marx is pretty damned brutal:

“f you’d saved a penny for each daughter you named Jenny You might not have needed to bury quite so many”

(Among Marx’s retorts, I love “you were worse for Michigan than Flint’s water pipes”

I really love this answer.

Awesome brother!

Generally agree though I suppose it depends on how the parents feel about swearing and how likely the youngins are to repeat the approximately 700 fucks in the movie.

“Do you have to use so many cuss words?” “The fuck you talking about?”

The Big Lebowski. I wasn’t a teenager yet, barely understood why anything was happening but damned if it wasn’t the hardest I’d seen my dad laugh.

I’m fairly confident few people would choose this scheme because otherwise you would’ve already sold your homes and kept the difference…

How does your scheme protect from devaluation? If my home drops say, 200k but you’re going to offset some of that in pensions, okay, let’s put aside the lost equity, how does this stop me losing say, half the equity in my home from some random devaluation?

Providing a living pension doesn’t mean I’m no longer interested in the investment I’ve spent 20 years paying off…

or we could free them from it and have wages rise proportionally or increase corporate taxes.

This is not a napkin calculation, this is handwaving!

We have to pay for the speculation otherwise from the homeowner’s perspective, they have again just lost all that value, regardless of how it was acquired. That’s literally the whole issue.

And it’s kind d of odd to say that if you have defined benefits, you won’t mind losing however many hundreds of thousands of dollars you lose when your home value drops. People are doing their financial planning including both their defined benefits AND the values of their assets.

You can’t just hand wave and say there’s infinite money if we just raise wages or tax corporations more. We probably could tax corps more but there’s all sorts of secondary consequences to that.

If you use pensions to pay the complete difference, that gets insanely expensive. Just some rough calculations:

Let’s just look at 10 million homes. (There’s somewhere between 14 and 16 million but let’s knock a lot out just to not quibble.)

Again, we’ll take a very modest price decrease, 200k that doesn’t make housing affordable per se but would be an impressive market correction.

That totals to 2 trillion dollars, significantly more than all the federal taxes received in the last decade (Total fed tax revenue was about 180 billion for 2023)

So, we clearly can’t afford to just offset the loss in equity with a publicly funded pension, or even half that.

People might be able to survive on a much lower amount but even giving back a mere 10% of the lost equity would be more than literally the entire Federal budget and still leave most people pretty upset about the lost 90% difference.

These ideas usually sound good until you poke around at the numbers.

I have trouble imagining any politician will do anything substantial about housing. If housing becomes affordable, everyone who owns loses some huge percentage of their life’s equity. (Imagine being stuck paying a mortage for a 700k condo that is now worth 400k.)

Not saying we shouldn’t fix housing but any politician who does fix it knows they will have a substantial proportion of the populace furious at how much they’ve lost. To make it worse, the losses would be concentrated among the elderly who outvote those who would most benefit, younger voters, by a depressingly large margin.

If this suit somehow won, Rassmussen would be out of business the next day as dozens if not hundreds of members of Congress filed similar lawsuits.

API issue made me leave, AI scraping posts and forcing ads made me stay away.

Edit: Holy shit, was curious about why Alred was getting singled out. Because he said he didn’t support trans women playing sports with the other women? If that’s the most anti trans Democrat candidate ever and your next move is “What else could she do, outlaw trans people?!?” you need to give your head a shake. No wonder we lose to a man who has more orange makeup than brains.

are you going to engage with these responses or what?

I mean, your comic made the same basic point that Oliver did. Which I already responded to. In depth.

Above all, I don’t think that trans issues are edgy and unpopular at all. Until a couple years ago it was a strictly medical thing

You could, uhhh, look back at the Pew research I already shared.

At this point people who take anti-trans propaganda seriously are lost causes to me

I love your argument is simultaneously “we can win them over with enough messaging! The DNC didn’t put enough into trans messaging to overcome propaganda! Also, those people we can win over are lost causes!” Pick a lane!

and I don’t care about Democrats ratings. I rather see that the extreme left everywhere dials up the pro-trans issues and organize defense and survival programs.

I guess that’s the difference. I’ve met some of the people who will be affected by climate change and seen the communities that will be destroyed. They aren’t abstract. It’s very easy to figure winning these elections doesn’t matter when you know damn well it really doesn’t affect you. I just find that view reprehensible as I think it’s throwing the most vulnerable people under the bus so you can feel good about being on the right side.

Life in large, pluralistic society is full of uncomfortable compromises. Most moral progress is made because enough people with old Conservative views have died and the median voter is ready to move forward, not because we screamed at people. (Though, frustratingly, the Left seems to have either lost the messaging game or taken such silly positions that we are no longer dominating the youth vote so we may have, through our evangelizing, set progress back much farther than needs be. How fucking annoying are we such that people would prefer trump to us?)

borders too closely to sealioning and concern trolling

Are you sure you know what those terms mean? This seems like when you had no idea what Utilitarianism was.

Sea lioning doesn’t just refer to disagreeing with someone, here’s the original sea lion comic:

https://wondermark.com/c/1062/

I’m hard pressed to see how, relatively politely, responding to the comments you keep leaving on my original response to someone else’s question fits that at all.

As I hope you’re true to your word and done with this, have a good weekend.