At this point it’s starting to feel like Biden’s holding the nation at gunpoint and making us have a second Trump term. He’s always been a terrible politician, running twice for the nomination and failing to get a single delegate, until Obama made him VP. Honestly I suspect part of the reason Obama chose him is because he didn’t wanna play kingmaker and figured Biden was too old to run again.

Then in 2020 I think the argument was Biden could benefit from Obama’s popularity. I certainly thought that was a terrible pick, but not totally lacking in logic. But in 2024 there was utterly no rational basis for Biden to be running in the first place. Now that he’s been a complete disaster, he’s just fucking us as a nation for his own narcissism.

Why the hell would anti-genocide protesters be protesting Bernie Sanders, the rare jewish voice that has condemned Israel’s war? It goes to show how the biggest unwitting enablers of Israel getting continued support from the US are these edgelord protesters. All they did was piss people off.

It’s time for everyone on the left to be clear-eyed. Just try to be convincing. That’s the only thing we gotta do differently if we wanna end poverty, war, and live in a literal utopia. Just try being convincing and picking the right hills to die on and not being willfully blind of weak spots, just once.

I love all the Bernie bros coming out and implying that the solution to the We Have No One But Octogenerians To Vote For Problem would be another octogenarian.

Surely there’s someone under the age of 80 who’s qualified to be president.

We should start a campaign to write him in to force the Dems’ hand.

Well this is an explicitly peaceful march so leave the rioting for another day

If you’re sick of this, in the DC area, and need a saturday activity, reminder that there’s a “Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington, D.C. and to the Polls” in Washington DC tomorrow morning 10 AM. Make it if you can. Yeah I know the title’s absurdly long and marching doesn’t do shit but what else are we gonna do.

How about we pick someone who vaguely approaches the average age of an American adult. There’s a ton - Buttigieg, AOC, I dunno even Kamala would be a million times better. Literally anybody under the age of 70. Why is that so hard to do?

The crazy thing is everything up to this point was so much better. They’d show biden waiving at “nobody” and then they’d zoom out and there’s someone standing there. Or he’d say “president of Mexico” when he meant to say “president of Egypt”. But then last night was like nonstop fail. It’s the perfect nightmare scenario because now everyone can say “You shoulda seen it sooner!” but really, we couldn’t.

I think you can do a lot better than he did, any of us could. Just look at the transcript here. ctrl+f for “golf”. You’re gonna tell me you don’t have a better response than Biden here?

I’m just gonna come up with 5 things right now Biden could’ve said:

• “I don’t think the American people care how good my opponent’s golf game is. They care if he can run the country, and as you can tell from his answer he doesn’t even remember what that involves.”
• “Again with the cognitive tests. No one asked whether you took a cognitive test Donald. But if you wanna brag about it, at least release them to the public so we can see if you actually passed.”
• “I think everyone’s seen enough from both of our 4 years in the white house - they can see I’m focused on the economy and foreign policy, while he was focused on golf as he still is.”
• “I’ll fully concede that he’s a better golfer than me. After all, he spent so much of his last administration practicing.”
• “This guy claims he won two club championships at the age of 82? Does anyone seriously believe that? This guy is delusional folks.”

Instead Biden talked about his height (which he didn’t mention) and challenged him to a driving contest. WTF. I recognize how bad this would’ve sounded before yesterday, but literally any random person we pick from this thread has better odds than Biden at this point.

Trump did absolutely horribly. His answers can be fairly described as completely and transparently delusional. But Biden managed to make him look good.

We would be, if not for Devo

Going the whole distance in QWOP

According to this wikipedia page - Median wealth per adult globally is estimated at $8,654 for a total population figure of 5.5 million, quite a bit less than the global population estimated at 8.1 billion. I’m guessing because this is “per adult” rather than per person. The children of the world are all on the low end of the wealth spectrum and probably would be a large share of the 3.6 billion.

Also questions can be asked about how they value wealth, do we consider debts, etc…in which case there’s a lot of people with zero wealth or less, as well as a lot of people who don’t have bank accounts and whose wealth is hard to measure is any ordinary sense. Point being, this particular comparison is kind of meaningless without more context. There’s probably ways you can do it to get an even larger number than 3.6 billion.

But a more useful and perhaps more surprising metric is that 8 people have as much wealth as 158 million median people. Which is still ridiculous, like those 8 people are worth a Russia’s entire population’s worth of people. And not just of poor people, but your average adult person who likely has a job and may even be considered on the well-to-do side within some poorer countries.

One party in particular is stifling attempts to change FPTP. So step one is to remove them from office.

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I don’t know if the type of matter matters, rather I’m basing in on the idea that measurement collapses the wave function, and consciousness does measure things

There’s a lot of possibilities.

My top contender would be a desire to explore, which probably requires consciousness. Given that we have pretty much no idea what leads to consciousness, it can be guessed (dubiously) that if it arose more easily then we’d have an explanation by now. It could be that it’s an extremely rare phenomenon, and there may even be other planets with “intelligent” but mechanistic beings that act entirely for their own survival and don’t build civilizations or explore much.

Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.

Third, and the one I most feel is right but it requires pretending I understand quantum physics (which I don’t) and probably offending many that do, is the notion that the concrete universe is not large but small and has no objective existence independent of our respective perceptions, and any part of the universe that’s invisible is a mere wave function that will only have concrete reality upon our perceiving it. I make the further dubious assumption that conscious beings can’t be part of the wave function. So there.

Now imagine this happens in a remote area with no cell coverage. In Arizona those are a thing too.

I think it makes sense to care more about problems that are solvable. If anyone out there has a realistic plan to reduce the suffering of the people of Gaza in any sort of lasting manner, I’ve yet to hear it.

But people spray painting the library? Yeah that can be solved. Report them to the police, take pictures. No tanks necessary.

I’d suspect it’s reaction to large cultural shifts in the last couple of decades - including gay and trans rights, George Floyd and increased racial integration in media, me too, etc. For whatever reason, perhaps loss aversion, many people tend to react angrily and violently to change and the threat of change. Perhaps it’s analogous to how communist movements in the early 20th century led to fascist movements a decade or two later.

I also don’t think it’s the US only, so you can’t put it all on Trump. I’d argue Trump and similar figures around the world are the result of the above counter-reaction.

The heat hasn’t killed me yet