DreamerofDays

This implies their voters are speaking in a unified voice. They’re not. Subsets are, closer to it, but overall, politics is about compromise and consensus.

If you want the power of dominion, go for a monarchy, and if you don’t want to compromise at all, go to war. When it comes time for peace again, it’ll be some manner of compromise.

To use the old words: “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”

And him dying from a stab wound is going to change any of that?

If the model realized at scale repeatedly results in the same or similar effects, maybe there is something wrong with the model.

(Be those inherent mechanical flaws, flaws of ignoring parts of human nature, flaws of a model designed to work in a vacuum, or flaws of intricate and fragile necessary rules)

The absurdity and relative obscurity of this sends me

Believing this account outright is just as foolish as dismissing it outright.

There’s a reason “the first casualty of war is the truth” is a cliche— it’s because it’s very hard to know exactly what’s going on when there’s so much chaos and impetus for people to push agendas.

I have some assumptions I’m confident about, but those are fairly broad, and based on the nature of what happens in any war. Specifics I’m trying hard to slow-roll my reactions to and full acceptance of— I’ve seen way too many news stories about active situations be proven in part or in whole false, and most of those aren’t in war zones.

Username checks out.

That link suggests differently:

Following Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza-strip in 2005, the Philadelphi Accord with Egypt was concluded, which authorized Egypt to deploy 750 border guards along the route to patrol the border on Egypt’s side. The Palestinian side of the border was controlled by the Palestinian Authority, until the 2007 takeover by Hamas.[3] The joint authority for the Rafah Border Crossing was transferred to the Palestinian Authority and Egypt for restricted passage by Palestinian ID card holders, and by others by exception.

It was the Democratic Party, but it also kinda wasn’t. Particularly around the Civil War politics were, not surprisingly, rather fractious.

In the 1860 election, the last before the outbreak of the war, four candidates won electoral votes. The Democratic Party splintered a bit, with two of the candidates coming from it(one who sought a form of compromise over slavery, and one who was a pro-slavery hardliner).

I’m not sure how useful in practice “left” or “right” leanings are for discussing the parties back then in relation to now… that’s something I’ll leave to people who study this stuff more intently.

But there have been other parties in the mix in the US, and there was one that scored electoral votes in that election. This was also just after the dissolution of the Whig Party(which had been the party of four or so presidents).

That depends upon how you mean those terms, and would be aided by capitalisation.

Do you mean lower-case “d” “democratic” (likened to the concept of “democracy”) or upper-case “D” “Democratic” (of or related to the party that goes by that name? If the former, more or less yes, if the latter, no. The parties kinda swapped alignment middle of last century on a lot of issues though.

I think this is ignoring the seas of dross that have fallen away in the past. There have always been bad movies, and unoriginal movies, some of them doing quite well at the box office(used as a metric to show that people were showing up to see them). We don’t hold a lot of them in popular memory because we don’t watch them anymore, and what’s left from those eras are the movies of sufficient quality or resonance that we continue to watch them.

The system has a number of issues that are well trod, and certain pitfalls which are inherent, but hanging a lack of quality or unoriginality entirely on capitalism is overselling it.

I would posit that a lack of moderation, or a form of monomania is a bigger culprit here. Too much focus on the business side can stifle creativity, but too much focus on the creative side can result in sprawling, unfinished messes. With too much focus on safety we can be stigmatised from action, but with too much focus on action we can lose our humanity in favor of feeding the gears of progress.

This accounts for the bean counters, but doesn’t grant them the power of being the one true reason for everything being bad.

Implication being that if Republicans are losing in states they think they should win, they’re not going to change their positions, candidates, or arguments, but instead try to rig the system so they still win.

It feels like everyone is so goddamned angry right now, and the anger just begets more of itself. Anger and fear, fear and anger.

To the best of our knowledge, they still won’t care about the other creatures in the web going extinct. We don’t have any evidence of animals global or species-wide conceptualisation. This doesn’t make it right, just that anthropomorphising animals and animal thought isn’t a good argument.

But you’re right— no creature exists in a vacuum. The decisions we make matter, and having this abstract conception of the world gives us a moral obligation to be stewards of it. Some of that stewardship is about restoring and preserving what exists in the wild. Some of that stewardship means honoring the bonds we have made and the responsibilities we have taken on to animals we have domesticated. And some of that stewardship means acknowledging that our constructed environments have also become the homes and habitats of wild critters.

This is all to say— we need to do better, but no good answer will be simple, and nothing comes without consequences.

It’s an Alabama focused news site. The we can apply to either Alabamans, media outlets, or both. So that’s the we, and likely one you’re not a part of.

If you are in that we, it sucks, but if you’re going to be part of a whole with your neighbors, you’re going to have to own the consequences of their ideas sometimes. Maintaining a separation from them might make you feel morally superior, but it’s not going to do anything to negate those consequences or prevent future ones.

Separating is a powerful act, but it should be a rare one.

Forced migration, which this would be, is a bad idea, as has been born out repeatedly through history.

• if it’s to many countries, it splinters communities.
• if it’s to just one country, few are open to taking even small numbers of people in, let alone five and a half million.
• if one was open to it, none have the infrastructure in place to receive so many people.
• people get attached to land, and the idea of it.

To that last point, that land is not interchangeable, and any assumption that it is is remaining ignorant of some of the desires of the parties involved.

I could go on, but I don’t think that would add to discourse. This is a hard problem, renewed with every moment of violence. I don’t believe we should expect any of the grievances each side has stacked up to be let go of without honouring their non-violent desires.

I think the answer lies in between our statements, as absolutes have an absolutely thin margin for accuracy.

Intrusive thoughts are a thing, and they introduce thoughts of violence in pacifists, and racism in the tolerant. We don’t get these ideas because we want them or believe in them, and, from my perspective, giving them voice grants them power or legitimacy they never would have had otherwise.

But this could be an exception to your position sitting in a cutout you assumed in the expression of it.

Eh… I think I might care about somebody suggesting nuking the entire area. Not all ideas are created equal, and not all ideas are worth expressing.

No, he didn’t. But people get to want things. Sometimes they want things for themselves, sometimes they want things for their communities.

Criticism, constructively made, helps avoid bad ideas, and makes good ones better. But you don’t always know the better way when you see a bad one— I don’t need to know how to build a boat to know a screen door won’t float.

Part of the problem is one side having a desire for autonomy, and limited, at best sense of self-determination. Robbing them and the state they have grievance with of both their autonomies and capacities for self-determination doesn’t seem like a good answer to the problems they both have.