The thing is in America we had people who will 'use their guns to defend rights' and we had 'the other'.
The propagandist currently in control of the government has the people who will use their guns to defend their rights (which are currently and successfully being swiftly taken away) under his thumb. And the other are patiently waiting their turn at the post to make as much money as possible under Gavin Newsom.
Its more realistic to look at the situation as a leadership team during layoffs, except the layoffs are the American electorate.
You don't have to be a redneck moron to enjoy the things you can do that require a gun. There's plenty of hunters and sports shooters that realize that the authoritarians will eventually restrict guns to keep themselves safe.
Seems like it’s easier to lose our rights than defend them. It shouldn’t be.
The way Trump has exercised power and ignored the law should be a real wake up for everyone. Imagine if we had a competent dictator? We’d be in real trouble.
> Imagine if we had a competent dictator? We’d be in real trouble.
We just might. After a Democrat comes into office, gets blamed when the really bad consequences of Trump's policies manifest and gets run out on a rail, Republicans will sweep with a "return to traditional, serious business Conservatism" candidate who will really just be the next phase of Trumpism. I don't believe for a second that these people haven't been laying the groundwork for keeping the movement going after Trump.
After all, half the country still believes in everything Trumpism represents, they just want a President to follow through.
You’re being ridiculous if you’re down to the level of saying you don’t have a right to life because there’s no guarantee.
In that case there’s no rights to anything, you just don’t believe in them, and you can stop being coy about by only calling out individual instances people refer to as a right
Correct, the idea of “natural rights” left any serious philosophical defense in the 1970s. I mean bentham’s rotten head amd straw body is the the only body still in philosophy taking “natural rights”
I’ve been debating on the internet under my real name for…30 years? It got boring 20 years ago now the fun part is figuring out what bait makes people make the argument, so I don’t have to.
The most effective way to get a correct answer on the Internet is to get people to disagree with you because they want to prove how smart they are
It’s also the one way left seemingly that people learn.
They’ll see something they disagree with run off to Google or Wikipedia or now one of the chat applications, do a bunch of research (in which case they learn a bunch of stuff) and then they come back and they “prove me wrong.”
If I actually get ppl to go out and learn something that’s a win. There’s probably somebody who read this thread who never heard of Jeremy Bentham and went and looked them up, that is an unambiguous success.
Your original comment technically isn’t even wrong, it’s just the definition of “right” written in a backwards ass way. Unfortunately for you this latest comment proves that this was just an accident!
Everyone knows that the law is what really matters when it comes to prevailing in court. That's why there's no correlation between money spent on legal representation and the outcome of a ruling.
I have been researching family genealogy, and this alleged "privacy" has never actually been a thing at all, much less a "human right". First, it is well-known for anyone who lived in a small town, that every small town had rumor mills, gossip grapevines, and everyone knew everyone else's business, to the extent that there was a daily soap opera drama about relationships, and hard times and good times as well.
So this small-town attitude was imported when people urbanized, and a lot of neighborhoods had this sort of grapevine as well. Furthermore, the urban centers established some distinct "brother's keepers" practices.
There were the City Directories. Before telephones, these were the White Pages and Yellow Pages. Your name, your occupation, your address. All your neighbors and the businesses on your street. All indexed and alphabetized handily. Everyone in the city would know what you did; they all got subscribed to these directories. These are invaluable resources for researchers today, so that we can find folks and know their professions, sometimes on a year-by-year basis.
Census reports were taken every 10 years. These can be highly unreliable resources! The census takers had no way of verifying information or investigating answers! They always took citizens at face-value, so it was the practice of new immigrants and criminals, and others in the shadows, to conceal the truth from the census takers. But nevertheless, some facts were obvious, and so there was good information gathered, and released by USGov, about household compositions.
Also, the newspapers have been a crazy treasure trove of information since their inception. I was literally able to track the movements of some of my relatives, because the newspapers in each town would report when a family member, or friend, visited someone. They would say if they came by car, and how long they planned to stay, and where they're from and all that. So anyone traveling in the 1930s and 1940s and so on, their movements were never "private" and you had journalists who acted as Human License Plate Reporters, ensuring that the whole town knew you were hanging out for the weekend!
Depends on where you are. Defending against getting punched in the face by shooting them will get you thrown in prison a good portion of the time. Sometimes being a piece of shit should result in an ass whupping.
What makes you think this is “evil and self-serving”? It affects a relatively small quantity of specific products from a specific supplier with specific use-by dates.
In any case, this is Argentinian beef, not Canadian or something. Isn’t the US administration pretty friendly with the right-wing populist Argentinian government?
Argentina's been paying Huawei for 5G gear and services with beef direct to China, who's been selling it via Huawei stores (see https://www.huaweimossel.com/).
Earlier in March a shipment of ~22 tons of beef was rejected by China for having antibiotics in it and was 'contaminated'.
This was back in 2024, when Argentina used to have severe restrictions on foreign exchange in an effort to (artificially) prop up the value of the Peso. This made it difficult for Argentine companies to purchase the foreign currency needed to import things like 5G equipment, hence this weird beef-for-telecoms equipment deal.
Argentina liberalised its Foreign exchange market in April 2025 so I'd imagine this sort of thing is no longer happening.
They are, leads me to wonder if something was found and the limited hangout is a paperwork snafu. Considering the administration is loudly trying to bring beef prices down via imports, it would look doubly bad if tainted beef came from Trump's bff.
Trump promoted the sale of the beef at a discount a week ago on Truth Social, and now the beef is recalled. Clearly it was bad beef, and he and his cronies made a mint fire-selling it, while American businesses take a loss. Pretty basic corruption.
Honestly more than half of this sort of mess is incompetence rather than malice. But... yeah, sigh. Our grandkids just aren't going to believe what it was like.
Usually I'm with you. In these instances, there's a ton of malice, however, with what DOGE did and the relentless drive from conservatism to shrink government and regulations (many of which aim to protect consumers).
If you look at the trajectory of things since the turn of the century, let alone prior, it's more likely that we'll be recounting stories of today as the 'good ole days.' We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning. No we didn't light it, and we tried to fight it.
Which interpretation of your comment do you think makes you look better: that you're pretending not to understand the point being made, or that you truly don't understand the point being made?
> Our grandkids just aren't going to believe what it was like
Is appropriate for recalling ~30 cows worth of beef? There is no secret point being made, it's just average things happening while certain people overreact.
Broadly though, the belief that "current X politician from Y party is the worst, most corrupt politician ever" is a childish belief. I've heard it said about every president and high-ranking politician in my lifetime and it is not remarkable. Frankly the Biden scandals where his son was cutting him into foreign payments seemed worse, and there's no reason to think this beef import had anything to do with corruption, and certainly not at the presidential level.
The us system of government and many of its agencies are under attack by an administration that elon helped secure a win for. Excuse me for getting a little emotional towards a Nazi who supports the concentration camps we have on US soil.
I'll make every effort to avoid his products and bad mouth him every single time his name comes up.
i remember when SGI boxes were $50k and then literally worthless just a couple bears later. i remember my university had a pile of them for free outside the deans office.
i think you bar is too high. i would argue dogs, cows, and pigs are conscious. it doesn't seem unreasonable to build an artificial system capable of reproducing and out competing a cow at doing cow things.
i don't think LLMs are the entire answer, but they might be part of the solution. To me, LLMs feel a lot like system 2. I don't see a lot of people trying to build system 1. i don't think you can have consciousness without a body to keep alive and reward.
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