There is no greater evil than those that deny the existence of the Seattle SuperSonics. The Sonics will rise again!

Enough time has passed that I can admit the early anti-SJW's of the pre-Trump tumblr era (ca. 2014) were absolutely correct in that academic social justice language was being co-opted and weaponized by malignantly toxic, hostile people who wanted to hide behind a veil of virtue.

> save $15M a year by cutting a screwworm monitoring program > screwworm outbreak almost immediately > $1B to combat it Government efficiency

If this dipshit said he didn’t want to work for a Black person every social justice warrior on this website would be tweeting about it … but a dipshit says he doesn’t want to work for a Jew and these same same social justice warriors are silent

JFK once invited to dinner 49 Nobel laureates, Robert Frost, William Styron, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Katherine Anne Porter, John Dos Passos, James Farrell and Lionel and Diana Trilling, and others. His line on the occasion became famous: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Some of you were alive when that happened.

Reminder that Doctors Without Borders spent two years at Nasser Hospital before admitting Hamas was using it as a terror base. During that stretch, the group refused to treat 20 Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid workers wounded by Hamas, leaving them to die in the courtyard

What's being defended isn't billionaires. What's being defended is the principle that rights belong to everyone, including successful people. The moment you decide someone's rights disappear because they're too wealthy, you've abandoned rights altogether and replaced them with political favoritism. Your position isn't that rights are universal. It's that rights are conditional on serving your demands. The billionaire is just today's unpopular exception. Tomorrow it'll be the millionaire. Then the small business owner. Then anyone with more than you.

Trillionaire discourse... Look, life is always unfair. I'm sorta ok with our current system because capitalism with reasonable guardrails seems best at creating prosperity for the most people. Other systems we've tried have killed millions (Yo Mao!). Yes, this system creates rich people. Sometimes super rich people! That's not new. Marxism had commissars, feudalism had kings and nobles, and Egypt had pharaohs telling the fallahin to pile big rocks on top of each other for three thousand years. So we have mega-rich folks. But we also have a prosperous middle class, life expectancy is up, education is up, and—according to Our World in Data—the poorest of the poor have dropped from 80% of the world's population to less than 10%. My problem with all the people who want to drastically 'fix' our system is that I think they dream of some 'good' bureaucrats who will decide where the wealth 'should' go, and that terrifies me. I don't want HR types micromanaging how the means of production should be run. The Great Leap Forward tried that, and 40 million people died. None of this means I believe in unfettered capitalism. We need rules, regulations, and taxes. We can tinker a bit. I'm down with maybe taxing the rich more than we have. I hope smarter people than me have some ideas about what would work there. And I pray to Buddha that other smarter people are making sure the market doesn't collapse because the frenzy around the SpaceX (and OpenAI and Anthropic) IPOs has led to massive overvaluation. Finally, it worries me that it's the corrupt Trump White House that's keeping an eye on everything! But what can we do? The alternatives are (probably) worse! And what do I know? I'm just a low-rent history professor trying to figure out the world and jabbering about it to his audience of 4,000 humans and 23,000 bots! Thanks to the 14 of you who read to the end of my maunderings! Good luck to us all!

For those whose objection to soccer is the lack of scoring, the USA beat Paraguay 28-7.

TLDR on the Ukrainian "biolabs": - Biological research laboratories exist in Ukraine, just as they do in virtually every developed country. They are used for medical research, disease surveillance, veterinary, public health monitoring, and vaccine development. - A biological research lab is not the same thing as a biological weapons program. It is also not necessarily the same thing as a biodefense facility. These terms are often incorrectly used interchangeably. - The existence of these facilities was not a secret. Many were publicly known and listed on the official websites by both Ukrainian and U.S. government agencies - After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and other partners funded programs to help secure dangerous pathogens, improve laboratory safety, and reduce the risk of accidental releases. It wasn’t about charity or weapons development - preventing outbreaks is far cheaper than dealing with the consequences of a leak. - The key claim made by Russians and some internet commentators is not that labs existed, but that they were evidence of a secret U.S.-run biological weapons program. The document released by the DNI has no evidence supporting that claim.

As much as I disliked it when “check your privilege” was a thing people would say, Western leftists scolding women in Iran for wanting the basic freedoms we all take for granted… really need to check their privilege and then check it again

By “stolen land,” they mean Herzeliya was founded on legally sold land in 1920. Palestinian means selling your barren land for a profit, having others actually make something of it, and then doing terrorism for a century claiming it’s still yours.

I remember when there was a teacher in Canada who posted on this app that no one believes “Free Palestine” means the destruction of Israel. He then got flooded with responses from antizionists saying “we actually do mean that.” This is even funnier:

Since Trump is unable to bring a receipt of Democrats rigging elections, here's one of Arizona Republicans caught in the act of trying to rig the 2020 election, by signing fake elector forms for Trump. It would be a shame to keep sharing this and other receipts...

At a Graham Platner rally in Portland. “Would an Israeli flag tattoo be a deal breaker?” “Honestly yeah, because I don’t support genocide.”

Sigh. Why won't anyone do research before posting? Responding to your six points. 1. Yes. It is legal. States have different laws. Still has to come from a registered voter, has to be returned in the return envelope assigned to that voter, there is no evidence of mass mail theft, and it has to have the voter's signature, which is checked (part of why it takes a long time). 2. California verifies identity through return envelope barcode and signature verification -- as is done for many financial and legal instruments. This is the same way it's done in Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, etc. 3. Unattended drop boxes. You do realize that every USPS box is an "unattended drop box," right? That's why it's nice that all Californians can track their mail ballots. And so too can the election officials. 4. Homeless regularly paid to vote. I'll settle for 5 proven examples in recent elections. Also, homeless are allowed to register and vote. 5. You're just pointing out that California is an "all mail" state and that almost everyone votes by mail as a result. Yes. And that's part of why it takes so long. California does voter list maintenance. Otherwise it would have a laundry list of lawsuits under the NVRA. And, for better or worse, you can't remove somebody from voter rolls just because he doesn't vote. So if you, e.g., move out of an apartment, but don't tell the registrar, and don't fill out change of address with USPS, then a mail ballot is still showing up to your address. And if the new resident simply throws it in the trash, then you're not taken off the voter rolls just because you didn't return a ballot. Now, if you're suggesting that states should share information with each other, such that they know when somebody registers in a different state, then I agree with you. That's why California should join ERIC. And it's why it's a shame that some states have left ERIC in recent years. That's bad for voter list maintenance. 6. This is just comparing apples to oranges. And you can easily Google the differences in the two systems. But first, as a factual predicate, you might want to be more careful. I'd suggest you start with this New York Times article: "Why Do Elections in India Take So Long?" nytimes.com/2024/04/17/world…

For real!! Oh, wait…👀

I agree with every word Sam Harris says here about Israel, and I'll go further. The preoccupation with this country is antisemitism. There is no other explanation for how that, of all the world's many brutal dictatorships and ongoing famines, all of Europe and the Middle East is obsessed with this tiny scrap of land and what the people that rule it defensively and democratically, in a sea of aggressive tyrants, are doing. Any country subjected to such unrelenting scrutiny by those already predisposed to be suspicious of it would come out looking evil, and that's before the lying and semantic games. If you believe that no criticism of Israel can be antisemitic, and that the antisemitic Arab world is not interested in destroying it, with the applause of most of antisemitic Europe, I'm sorry, but you live in an alternate reality and we have nothing to discuss.

I think that instead of giving millions of dollars to child molesters, the president should lead an army of patriots into the ocean to become lord of the sea

We did try and warn everyone....