During the whole Olympic controversy on the Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif, questioning her actual gender, someone was making mental gymnastics that she still has testerone level higher than "vanilla females".

Lol, vanilla females. That alone says a lot.

Shittiest take on this community by far.

It's an myriad of reasons from what I can tell. Americans are conditioned to think along the status quo lines even if there is certain degree of freedom of thought. The American corporate media carves the political landscape to intentionally but subtly influence folks to pick either only Democrats or Republicans.

Another reason is that, I suppose rugged invidualism won out in the American society for better mobilisation. As you rightly pointed out, there just isn't grassroots activism among American people (not counting civil and lgbt rights which are undoubtedly grassroots activism and successful ones at that). But this isn't what it used to be. Before and in the early 20th century, there have been other third political parties still gaining respectable number of votes, the last one being the Socialist Party led by Eugene Debbs. He won a respectable 1 million votes as a presidential candidate while campaigning from prison during World War I.

Not sure what happened why political grassroots activism that could counter either Democratic and Republican parties died out, but my guess is that the proliferation of mass media in the 20th century may have had a hand to convince people to stick with two parties, as well as heavy emphasis on individualistic values.

The alpha/beta wolf notion doesn't even make much of a sense, considering wolves tend to be loners but only make packs when they need to hunt.

And the once PlayStation exclusive games have also been made available to Steam, thereby making them also accessible to Steam Deck. So the latter is infinitely a better choice!

Dan Schneider has not been convicted though.

The only conservatives which I give some healthy degree of respect are the European and maybe Japanese conservatives. I can't comment on conservatives from other places as I don't know much about them, but the American conservatives are bat shit insane. There are far and few sane American conservatives are drowned by loud crazy ones.

I had a friend who was never christened by her atheist parents and thus never had to be drilled to believe in any religion. Welp, it was rather refreshing to hear someone's perspective that all the proselytising just sounds nothing to a person who had never been indoctrinated since infancy. Someone from another religion might still consider the stories from other beliefs; but hearing religious story by someond who was never baptised into any religion? For that person they would just say "cool story bro". Even for myself who is no longer a believer, I still get some pangs in my consciousness brought by early exposure to Christianity. But I am lucky that I have never been extremely indoctrinated and therefore I don't feel any fear of an eternal damnation in hell for leaving Christianity. Some former Christians, though, essentially have PTSD by being made to feel guilty for leaving, and have existential angst of the possibility hell (the original Torah/Talmud never even mentioned hell so why should Christians believe in one?)

For me, the worst is either Batman and Robin, or the first 30 minutes of The Killing Joke where Batman fucked Batgirl (say what you will about their relationship, it is just plain weird of them to become romantically involved).

As for the Dark Knight Rises, I see where you're coming from. I think Nolan directed the last movie in such a way so that people would not crave for another sequel. It's not bad, but it is not titilating. A lot of directors "underperform" on their works so that the audience would not demand for another. Some movies just doesn't deserve more sequels than needed.

In Germany, where there is stricter gun control, there was an incident in which a bystander tackled the knife attacker. The police mistook the bystander as the perpetrator, and because the police were distracted, the attacker got up and stabbed two more people including one of the police officers. https://apnews.com/article/germany-mannheim-stabbing-police-officer-death-a66c14970a53464aff0c1c77a7196481

I agree with others. The idea of "good guy with a gun will stop the bad guy with a gun" is pretty much wishful thinking if the police arrives on the scene and mistakes who. It does not matter whether there is gun control or not, the good guy could be mistaken in the midst of chaos.

I'm glad to hear it. I guess that the incursion into Kursk made Biden reconsider as Russia's "red line" has crumbled.

This reminds me of the current French politics. After the previous legislative elections were won by the left, neoliberal president Macron nonetheless appointed a conservative as his prime minister.

At the end of the day, it's all about the bottomline.

Too many are accusing them already. Where there is smoke, there is fire.