Maybe that the government reactions don’t engage with the anger, is what makes those reactions worthy of inclusion? Actually, scratch that, whether or not those reactions do or don’t acknowledge the anger is irrelevant to whether or not they should be included. Those reactions are relevant to the article because they inform us of what the other involved parties are doing.

In this article those reactions at the end do not fit in with the main story of the angry people, because they don’t acknowledge that anger. I’d call them tone-deaf reactions, but a journalist isn’t allowed to write that (except in opinion pieces), so the journalist can only give those tone-deaf reactions as they were (+ provide some context about them, which I appreciated). That the anger of those people was so far only responded to with tone-deaf reactions, makes those tone-deaf reactions very relevant to the anger of the people.

Not unfocused at all imo. The article says that Hong Kong would traditionally hold an open inquiry in cases like this and then goes on to explain why that is probably not going to happen for this disaster (hint: authoritarians don’t like open enquiries). And then at the end of the article there are some reactions from other more remotely involved parties + some context about those remarks. The end of an article is where those reactions are traditionally put and reactions from various parties are always going to be more varied in nature, but that doesn’t make them non topical or “unfocused”.

As a child I read Groosham Grange from Anthony Horowitz, and when I first heard a description of Harry Potter, I thought that they were describing that book from Horowitz. I can’t believe no one else noticed. But I also think that most people active in children’s literature will have an attitude of “anything that gets a child reading, is a good thing”, so they’re not that upset about poor quality being popular and they’d rather keep the positive vibe going.

I believe that in the past some of them had morals, but that now none of them do.

So Ben Shapiro knows that Trump is a crook, a pedophile, … But he’s more concerned with keeping those scandals covered up than with seeking justice. Keeping their guy in power is more important than any morality, which demonstrates how amoral the entire usa right wing has become.

Brilliant. This also needs a night time photo.

It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don’t need more info than that summary, they don’t click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn’t be able to exist without the source material that it’s now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.

Usa republicans are such a weird alliance of values. It seems that on one side there’s a bunch of xenophobes who don’t care if someone is a lying corrupt grifter, as long as their skin has the right color and they profess the right racist + misogynist values. And on the other side there’s a bunch of lying corrupt grifters, who don’t care what skin color or sexuality someone has, as long as they’re also lying corrupt grifters.

As I understand it, the public perception of Trump was distorted by how he was portrayed on The Apprentice: https://www.psypost.org/new-research-sheds-light-on-the-influence-of-the-apprentice-on-donald-trumps-political-rise/

The producers at NBC had to jump through a lot of hoops to make Trump appear competent. Their chief marketing officer from that time is very sorry for what he did: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-16/we-created-a-tv-illusion-for-the-apprentice-but-the-real-trump-threatens-america

Once Trump became the republican candidate, the right-wing media took up the responsibility of filtering and distorting what their audience got to see and hear about Trump.

It is theft though: they are taking something that would otherwise belong to someone else (the wealth difference that would have been accumulated), and they’re keeping it for themselves. That fits the definition of theft. The method may be more indirect, but the end result is the same. Inventing euphemistic terms to describe something that can be described with a simple existing word, will only end up muddying the waters in my experience.

Republicans really have something against the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, it seems to get targeted at every opportunity.

Edit: as it turns out, republicans really do have a grudge against the agency, they’ve been targeting it since before Trump got reelected: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/22/conservatives-cyber-cisa-politics-00122794 Countering misinformation campaigns was a bridge too far for republicans.

It’s not going away any time soon. There’s currently 2 to 3 times as many humans as what would be long term sustainable with the way that we live. That means that it’s going to be a problem for at least many decades, but more likely a few centuries. It’s definitely not yesteryears problem. And sustainability should always remain a concern, in everything that we do. Many countries (not the USA obviously) are already taking steps to be more sustainable, but it’s baby steps compared to what is needed.

To sustain the current amount of humans, we are using unsustainable methods. That makes us unsustainable as well.

Some estimates from Wikipedia: “Climate change, excess nutrient loading (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus), increased ocean acidity, rapid biodiversity loss, and other global trends suggest humanity is causing global ecological degradation and threatening ecosystem services that human societies depend on.[9][10][11] Because these environmental impacts are all directly related to human numbers, recent estimates of a sustainable human population often suggest substantially lower figures, between 2 and 4 billion.[12][13][14] Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion.[15] Geographer Chris Tucker estimates that 3 billion is a sustainable number, provided human societies rapidly deploy less harmful technologies and best management practices.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population

Would the outcome have been the same without people in the media repeatedly bringing this to everyone’s attention? Probably not, because there would have been no public pressure against it, while the shadow groups that want this would have still been lobbying the politicians.

Something bad is going to happen.
Some people advocate to stop that bad thing.
Even more people are holding their clutches that the bad thing might happen.
Because of public pressure, action is undertaken to prevent the bad thing from happening.
Thanks to those efforts, the bad thing is successfully averted.

Some random person: that bad thing was never going to happen, look at all those gullible people who were panicking over nothing, we could have just done nothing and the outcome would have been the same.

Also known as the “preparedness paradox”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

This is going to depend on the country that you’re in. Germany for example is pretty notorious for also going after the small fries.

That’s an older old theory I think: the big bang birthing time and space. Some newer old theories say that there was already something before the big bang.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-beginning-of-time-2006-02/ “String theory suggests that the BIG BANG was not the origin of the universe but simply the outcome of a preexisting state”.

It’s the same old fallacy that people have been making since time immemorial: Our tribe is the chosen tribe and the world is as big as what we know of it.

Or much later, once smart people figured out that we were living on a planet, the assumption was made that our planet was the center of everything, with the sun rotating around the earth: Geocentrism.

And then when they figured out that that probably wasn’t the case, there came a theory that everything in space evolved the sun: Heliocentrism.

So now that we know that both geocentrism and heliocentrism were incorrect hypothesises, we’re just going to make the same mistake and assume that the milky way is the center of everything? Our horizon may have moved, but we’re no smarter than those Greek philosophers who thought that the earth was the center of everything.

The old theory was that all matter was concentrated into a single singularity, and then the big bang happened.

These newer measurements show that there is stuff outside of the area affected by the expanding big bang, indicating that there was already stuff floating around before the big bang happened, and that the big bang happened more gradual.

To make a stupid analogy: the old theory is a cracker exploding in vacuum, while the newer theory says it’s more likely that the cracker exploded when someone was holding it in their fist, with the fist surrounded by a room filled with air. And now our powers of observation have become so good, that we can observe the air where it hasn’t been disturbed yet by the expanding explosion.

Personally I believe that everything has a beginning and an end, except time and space, which are going to be infinite. For that reason, I think it’s more likely that our universe just goes on to infinity, and that we can only watch back X billions of years because of event horizon phenomena.

But even if our universe was born with a big bang and thus finite, that doesn’t mean that it was the only big bang ever. If big bangs are a thing, then there’s going to be a infinite amount of them happening in the infinity of time and space, each one filling their humongous little corner of space with uncountable galaxies. We might not be able to see/detect stuff further away than what we call the universe, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing outside of our universe.

It’s real. From the yahoo news article that someone else linked: The defense secretary wrote “Cool story, General” in response to a tweet from retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges about Adolf Hitler gathering Nazi generals in 1935 and them being “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer.”