tburkhol

Money doesn't win the election, it's more of an entrance fee, and campaign financing is more complicated than just 'the campaign.' You have to account for PACs, party, and all the free messaging from sympathetic media outlets. Bernie pinned his hopes on going viral on social media, and mostly demonstrated that it's not a viable strategy, at least at the Presidential level. Might work OK for smaller races, like AOC, in a geographically small, relatively young district, but not nationally. Most people actively avoid political messaging, which is a fundamental problem if you plan to rely on organic distribution of a political message through social media. Especially social media controlled by billionaires that might be hostile to messages like 'billionaires bad, unions good.'

The reality of American political process is that it takes at least a billion dollars to run a Presidential campaign. (Thanks, SCOTUS) That kind of money doesn't come from unions, social activists, or proletariat donors. It comes from corporations and billionaires, and those people don't like revolution.

Until someone can demonstrate that you can get more votes with progressive, worker-friendly policy proposals than with a well funded propaganda machine, the DNC is going to keep chasing the less conservative billionaires. And no third party will even be relevant.

Yeah, rereading your text, I may have confused all the negatives and inferred that you support the post's implication that they're targeting children, but I meant to comment on the data in the context of 'biggest bar,' not to criticize opinions. Seeing OP's chart, the first thing I wanted was a population chart, and I'm glad you'd already provided one.

The post title asks you to look at the "biggest bar," which seems to imply that the biggest bars - children - must be targeted. OccamsTeapot population graph is important context because, as war-crimey as indiscriminantly bombing civilian populations is, intentionally targeting children feels so much like comic-book villany that people dismiss it as propaganda.

They do look pretty similar to me, but can't say without numbers. Keeping in mind the population graph is a couple years old - half of a bar height - they both show a minor peak/inflection around age 30 that's maybe 2/3 of the major peak around 5. Babies seem to be spared from the bombing, but that could be fewer births or increased non-violent infant mortality.

IMO, it's not a great data set to claim Israelis are intentionally targeting children, but it is pretty good for saying they are not intentionally targeting military-age men.

There's a lot more than Fox out there echoing the narrative that times are hard, inflation is killing you, and there aren't enough homes to go around. Wapo and NYT would happily recount Trump's claims that it's because immigrants are taking all the houses and jobs while Biden policies are making everything expensive. Doesn't matter if they follow up with long-winded explanations that his claims aren't true, because most people stop listening when they hear there's someone to blame.

Fun fact: in the boiling frog experiment, the frogs were 'pithed.' Jam a stick in their skull and scramble their brain.

Frog spinal cords have a lot of reflexes. They'll use one leg to wipe a painful stimulus off the other. They'll jump. But they accommodate pretty quickly and won't get excited enough to jump out of slowly warming water. Gotta have a brain for that.

Recounted here: https://archive.org/details/studiesfrombiol00martgoog/page/398/mode/2up

Original ref: Goltz, F. 1869. Beiträge zur Lehre von den Functionen der Nervencentren des Frosches. Berlin, 1869, p. 127, etc Which is actually online: https://ia801200.us.archive.org/15/items/b22344937/b22344937.pdf

The filibuster is just a Senate rule, though, which they can rewrite any time they like (though usually only after an election).

The 2017 repeal effort used a budget reconciliation mechanism that is not subject to filibuster. In fact, a lot of the 2017 legislative awfulness used the budget reconciliation hack, where the Senate can change laws in order to 'balance the budget,' so long as (by convention) they don't change policy. 2017 repeal, of course, famously failed because John McCain thought they shouldn't use that process and voted against it.

Yeah, my niece, who is generally a worldly, progressive person, was talking about this guy whom she's not ready to call 'boyfriend' yet, and part of that description was, "he's, like, super into Hitler."

Doesn't that seem like kind of a red flag? ??

Autonomy is not "given."

Dems definitely lack a coherent, interesting economic message. Any new proposal - medicare for all, UBI - immediately gets sucked into a quagmire of details. Turning to Republicans for the votes they need to win in general elections has been such a consistently losing strategy that I have no idea why they keep doing it.

Meanwhile Republicans keep running on "You feel poor and it's Their fault," continues to resonate, for varying definitions of "Them," as long as GOP is out-of-power. It's simple. It feels good. It completely absolves them of needing any policy more complicated than "Get rid of Them." It's a winning strategy as much as the Dems have a losing strategy.

Look how tight the labor market got when COVID took a million people out of the workforce. Trump's talking about deporting 10 million workers and customers. You will absolutely see it, although it may be hard to connect the dots.