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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • You can discuss the events of a story, and the relative morality and social etiquette of the characters in it, even if the whole thing is entirely fiction. Functionally, it makes no difference if it really happened or it didn’t. Sometimes that matters, but here is doesn’t. You don’t know these people, you’ll never meet these people, and there’s no real-world effect of discussing this story (except maybe someone learns not to touch somebody else’s food?).

    Fuck it, you could be a bot programmed to complain about people taking shitposts seriously. I could be an AI created to respond to your prompts to try to convince you not to complain about fabricated stories. This entire interaction could be four bots engaged in a learning exercise in a simulated online forum. Or maybe it was all a dream the whole time.


  • themeatbridge@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldsigh
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    16 hours ago

    No, but I didn’t say that either. You did say to just people die from living. Old people need young people to support them. If everyone just stops fucking, as you suggested, society would collapse under the weight of all the suffering of old people. Those will be your grandparents and then your parents and then you, and probably your kids, too, because that sort of disaster lasts a long time.


  • themeatbridge@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldsigh
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    17 hours ago

    You can’t just declare that there are too many people and then expect some other faceless masses to go do the dying somewhere else. If you actually want to lower birth rates, you need to invest in public education and healthcare, and you need to have a plan to care for the unbalanced number of elderly retirees.


  • I bet you are basing your concept of the “usual” Westerner on your own experience, and you might be surprised at how the actual average person lives even in the “West”.

    But to answer your question, the article defines decent living standards as:

    nutritious food, modern housing, healthcare, education, electricity, clean-cooking stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigeration, heating/cooling, computers, mobile phones, internet, transit, etc.

    Nutritious food is unavailable to an alarming number of Americans, transit is a mess and almost exclusively car-centered, healthcare and education are severely stratified along economic conditions, and almost everything on that list is a commodity. The USA has sanitation systems almost everywhere, but that’s just because rich poop and poor poop all smells like poop. Wherever the wealthy can isolate their own sanitation, they do.






  • The crazy part about Fetterman is that he wasn’t tied down by the Democratic leadership. They backed McCormick, a pro-business centrist, during the senate primary, and they didn’t want him as lieutenant governor before that. He was a progressive wildcard that touted his independence from the party. He was always pro-Israel, but he was also pro-healthcare for all, pro-marijuana legalization, supported human rights and a progressive tax code. His heel-turn has been shocking and baffling, and lost him most of his supporters. Fetterman could be primaried from the left or yhe right, and he will probably lose either way. He could switch parties, but there aren’t enough batshit Republicans in PA to make up for his flaws.






  • Sure, but again, he’s the mayor. He can’t set financial policy for the banks of the world. NYC has a huge administrative budget, but it ends at the five boroughs. He can’t be like “All UN delegates have to end all wars.” He has authority over city administrative issues, and it looks like Trump is going to go after him personally.

    Important things happen in his city, and that makes him the most powerful mayor in the country. But that’s like being the tallest elementary school student. And the job is a career killer. The last NYC mayor to be elected to higher office was in 1869.