I hate to say this, but you could go back 40 years and this would still be true. 6 years ago, TACO was still in office.

America’s number 1 export since the end of WW2 has been culture. From Hollywood and music to games, fashion, the English language, and Microsoft, American culture has been dominant for decades.

Considering that he and Epstein used to fly on Trump Airlines flights with a bunch of the contestants for Trump Beauty Pagents that Trump said he liked to surprise “by opening the door while they were in the changing room,” one doesn’t have to guess too hard on that one.

It can in the sense that many forms of generating power are just some form of water or steam turbine, but that’s neither here nor there.

IMO, the graph is misleading anyway because the criticism of AI from that perspective was the data centers and companies using water for cooling and energy, not individuals using water on an individual prompt. I mean, Microsoft has entered a deal with a power company to restart one of the nuclear reactors on Three Mile Island in order to compensate for the expected cost in energy of their AI. Using their service is bad because it incentivizes their use of so much energy/resources.

It’s like how during COVID the world massively reduced the individual usage of cars for a year and emissions barely budged. Because a single one of the largest freight ships puts out more emissions than every personal car combined annually.

We haven’t even seen any real effects of the tariffs yet. The last time a US administration did this, it caused 10 years of some of the worst economic downturn in world history - the Great Depression.

I think it’s also the speed and number of connections leading to the topic change. I think many neurotypicals would jump from the carnival to the rodeo, or to the bee story, but they wouldn’t jump all the way to wondering about wasps from talking about the carnival in one go.

From the outside, the topic change is so different that neurotypicals can’t follow the connections.

Hillary also had to contend with Bernie as her opponent in the primary, a much more beloved candidate who polled better than both her and Trump, and was also handicapped by the Dems running a crooked primary by saying that they didn’t have to and would never pick Bernie as the candidate, even if he won the primary. She also called herself a “Goldwater girl” during the campaign, a man who ran for President on segregation as a campaign promise. People also had a negative view of her because she’s a Clinton, and there was a bit of dissatisfaction with “political dynasties” after the Bush era.

And Harris ran a campaign that tried to appeal to conservative voters with promises such as building the wall on the Mexican border and campaigning with Cheney, which caused her to immediately begin losing percentages in the polls amongst independent voters. She also has a legacy of questionable actions against minorities of color during her time in California, which I saw a number of people criticizing.

Not to say that sexism and racism didn’t play a part because oh my God, even here in liberal Massachusetts I see that shit. But they also did the usual Democrat campaign strategy of not appealing to their base because they were courting a mythical moderate conservative voter that doesn’t exist, and that’s a losing strategy. Dems fall in love, Republicans fall in line. AOC is so popular because she speaks to the issues that people have, and she does so passionately.

Despite that, I unfortunately remain unconvinced that she could pull out a presidential victory because of the aforementioned racism and sexism that’s so prevalent in this country. As someone wiser than me once said, racism is so American that when you criticize it, people think that you’re criticizing America.

What the fuck are you on about? I never said that they started street brawls with the church. I agreed with you about them hating and attacking socialists, added that they only kept the name for the party because of the recognition factor/popularity of socialist policy at that time in Germany, and then said that if I remember correctly, Hitler made agreements with the church for funding and support despite his personal feelings on the matter. Nowhere did I say the Nazis beat up Christians or members of the Church.

Yep. Hitler also hated Christianity IIRC, but allied with the church for their financial aid and the support of religious voters. They definitely weren’t above using the name of something that they hated and actively attacked to allow them to grab more power, and it makes them neither socialist nor Christian to have done so.

Socialism was also popular at the time and they were using that to increase their appeal.

Also, resistance to air pollution isn’t as crucial as it once was due to better emissions technologies.

Tell that to the recently defunded EPA…

They have very long necks. The rest of it is still standing in the lobby, where a nice old lady with poor eyesight is telling one of its legs about her grandson.

I was going to say the same thing. They started this back in January. Both taking the passports of people with an X gender identification on their passports as well as confiscating the legal documents of trans people attempting to renew their passports (birth certificates, social security cards, driver’s licenses, etc.).

You’re largely spot on, but one thing I’d like to add is that Republicans in Walz’s state have actually pushed forward a “Trump Derangement Syndrome” bill, which would classify openly speaking negatively about Trump as a mental illness that is valid justification for incarceration in a mental health facility, which is exactly what Russia did.

Rule number one of OpSec is if you’re gonna do something, don’t tell anyone. If they’re planning something that the government can/would consider illegal, saying something online is the stupidest thing you can do. Even if it’s as innocuous as planning to protest.

They could’ve negotiated to try to prevent some of the damage for their vote for the bill. Would it have done anything? Doubtful, but it would have at least shown that the Dems are willing to try something before rolling over to take it in the ass.

As somebody with a bit of learning on the matter (it’s amazing the hats you have to wear to prove you deserve to live - from anthropologist to biologist to archeologist), it’s interesting to see how the language of the community has evolved as our scientific understanding of sex vs gender has.

The term started as transsexual, and there are older people who refer to themselves by that term, but by the 2000s the term had shifted in favor of transgender, noting the recognition that sex doesn’t equate to gender that happened around that time.

Then came the use of cis as well as AMAB and AFAB (assigned male/female at birth) in order to better describe the complexity involved around the fact that a doctor has to declare you one gender or another when you’re born, and the easiest way to do that with the highest likelihood of being correct is based on sexual characteristics - namely, what genitalia you have. So cis is used to describe people who have no reason to disagree with the doctor’s assessment, and there’s a lot of discussion around where intersex people fall in the community (do they fit in the trans umbrella term?).

People like Dunning-Kruger up there are basically arguing that isotopes don’t exist.

I don’t have a PhD, but my understanding of the basics is this:

All people start out developing as female in the womb before a certain point where a large dose of testosterone caused (usually) by the Y chromosome activating (basically the only time in life that it does apart from starting puberty AFAIK) causes the proto-labia and vagina to push outwards and form the ball sack and enlarging the clitoris and urethra into what we know of as the penis. This is why you can see that line down the middle of your ball sack; that’s where your labia fused together. It’s also why the tissue that makes up your ball sack is biologically identical to the tissue that makes up the inside of the vagina. It’s an outie vs. an innie.

There are many reasons why this wouldn’t happen “correctly” since biology is more a wonder of things somehow working at all after evolution is done with them rather than a perfectly designed, well-oiled machine. Sometimes the Y chromosome simply doesn’t activate, or it does, but the person has androgen insensitivity and so the testosterone doesn’t do anything, or they develop as female but have testicles where their ovaries should be, rendering them infertile but otherwise a perfectly normal woman. Sometimes a person is XX, but they experienced a higher than normal amount of testosterone during development and developed male instead of female.

And that’s before you get into the issue of intersex people, who are often surgically altered as babies when they’re born by the doctor to match with the genitalia that the doctor thinks should be the “correct” one. In a number of places, the doctors don’t have to ask permission or even tell the parents after.

Also, your definition of cis male is slightly off. “Cis” is the opposite Latin prefix of “trans,” meaning a non-changing/stable state of being, and in this case it’s used to mean that one’s gender identity matches up with the one that you were given at birth. It ultimately has nothing to do with what genitalia you have, and it’s simply an identification saying that your sense of gender matches up with the sex that the doctor declared and that you therefore aren’t trans. It’s an after the fact solution to the question of what to call people who aren’t trans and comes from the use of trans to identify somebody who transitions from one gender to another.

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