It wasn’t the vaccine, that was just a cursed year. Everybody born in 1798 has died, too.

I believe the MAGA crowd says that the appropriate punishment for kicking things is to be shot in the back while being pinned down and beaten.

I was briefly tempted by a winterover job there. It’d be a pay cut, plus a year and a half of continuous winter, and I’m not totally convinced that the U.S. would still exist by the time they’re supposed to pick us up.

Three words: Pit toilet splashback.

Hahaha, that’s what I love the most! The downvotes come flying fast 'n furious on driving-related posts. It’s so consistent, across any social media or forum site. I can only speculate, but I think it’s the cognitive dissonance, because know from extensive real-life observation that driving makes people miserable and angry, even while they claim to enjoy it. Thus, it’s really easy to make observations that puncture the illusion.

Our criminal “justice” system sucks, period. It’s about vengeance, and racism, not about rehabilitation. We should reform it from top to bottom for every crime, not simply exempt one in particular because folks wanna zoom-zoom.

John could just follow the law. I love these discussions, because drivers get so angry when I call out their criminal behavior.

Oh, my heavens, a THIRD PARTY! /s

Yes, these devices cost money to produce, install, and operate. Don’t want to pay for one? Stop breaking the law.

Food is even more fundamental to survival than our four-wheeled toys, but if you habitually go to the grocery store and eat without paying, you’ll end up in jail. Shelter is more important, too, but that doesn’t mean that I can just take up residence in any house or apartment that I please. I’d go to jail for trying.

So, I really have no sympathy for the claim, “we can’t take away cars!” Take them away from people who can’t be bothered to follow the laws that let us live together in society, even though they knew the consequences. Maybe sell them off and use the funds to provide food and shelter to the homeless.

Agreed. The best solution, as always, is to design streets and roads so that driving unsafely feels unsafe, so that everybody naturally slows down. Until that happens, this is a good program.

They’re obsessed with each other. I wish they’d finally just bang, so all the hate-flirting wouldn’t show up in my New feed so much.

What happened to “don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time,” or, “shoulda thought of that before breaking the law”?

This scheme would reduce ticket revenue, though. And if criminal scofflaws have to pay, good, fuck 'em. The New York taxpayers shouldn’t take on the burden. The scumbags could avoid the cost trivially.

The frustration here is that the common refrain whenever somebody proposes a bike lane anywhere is, “It’s bad for business! Where will their customers park?!”

It’s completely bogus, which a snowstorm makes manifest: Without the snow, we can pretend that these cars belong to the drivers allegedly stopping to patronize local businesses. With the snow, we see the truth that space is here used by three people to store their private property for a week. This example illustrates why experience shows, over and over, people walking and biking are better for business than people in cars. Hundreds, or even thousands, of potential customers who can easily stop in, versus drivers (non-customers) who are so close, but so far away.

In short, it’s not that people did what the city intended, it’s that the city is kneecapping itself.

Leave aside the issue of blame. Other nations have no leverage to change the U.S. government. It’s arguably even beyond our influence, but Americans have the best shot at changing it. All that others can do is to try to tear down the whole empire, and it’s in their existential self-interest to try. If that leaves us Americans caught in the middle, that’s just harsh reality. Denial is human, but if we want to escape it, we have to get organized.

But that is exactly what happened, and it’s what the article is about. “Hunt down” is an idiomatic phrase in English, and it would be not at all unusual for me to, say, hunt down a USB adapter in my office. Leaving that detail out of the headline would be burying the lede.

It’s not normal or proper for the DHS to subpoena information about citizens who express an opinion to government officials. This is transparently an action undertaken to intimidate. The language used in the headline conveys the meaning much more clearly than a “neutral” (read: complicit) phrasing would.

Apparently not. ¯\(ツ)/¯

If you have the privilege to ignore “politics” while people are gravely suffering in real life, is it so hard to just ignore it in your Lemmy feed?

Majel Barrett also appeared in an episode of Babylon 5 as a show of good will because of the intense fueding between the B5 and DS9 fandoms. (IDK, this beef was a thing back then. 🤷‍♂️)

Yes. Very much so. Calling it a “virus” is an analogy to simplify the concept to a sound bite, and an author like Neal Stephenson made a “mind virus” central to the plot of his book, Snow Crash. But strip away the literary liberties, and it’s based on real neuroscience. See, for example, this article from a few years ago.

Quote:

It is well-documented that for example words like “reptiles” and “parasites” were used by the Nazi regime to compare outsiders and minorities to animals. Strongmen throughout history have referred to targeted social groups as “rats” or “pests” or “a plague.” And it’s effective regardless of whether the people who hear this language are predisposed to jump to extreme conclusions. Once someone is tuned into these metaphors, their brain actually changes in ways that make them more likely to believe bigger lies, even conspiracy theories.

I have this pet theory that the fact that some of the first TV broadcasts were Hitler’s speeches is more than just a historical curiosity. Broadcast media (i.e. radio) had come along just a few years before. Right after it provided a way for authoritarian leaders like Hitler to reach great numbers of people with their spoken words., the world saw an explosion of right-wing populism at a scale never seen before. I suspect it’s not just a coincidence. (The Nazis certainly understood the propaganda opportunity.)

It certainly resembled a viral outbreak.