It was a typo. I meant to say that the Democratic leadership seems to have put their and their parties interests above those of the people but I wanted to avoid editing my post too much.

I’ve been called many names, including “tankie”, so I’ll take a stab at responding.

I’m not mad about the debate at all. I expected something fairly similar. I’m mad that Biden and the Democratic leadership seems to have put their own interests above the interest of the party people (edit: Ugh. Terrible typo).

If Biden had gracefully stepped aside and given just about any other Democrat his full support, we’d be in a much better position now. Instead we have a candidate with a ton of baggage and who presents an easy target for Trump’s style of argument. Many mainstream Democrats, including the NYT, are finally starting to realize this. Unfortunately it’s probably a year too late. At this point it would just make it look like Demoratic kingmakers forced him out.

If I went by the modern definition of “tankie” as, an anti-american authoritarian communist. I probably wouldn’t be mad at any of this. I’d be cackling with glee because either of the current nominees will be terrible for the US. Neither of them has a serious long term plan. Neither of them can articulate a policy position. Both of them will continue to erode the power and moral authority of the United States.

Like it or not. Trump is likely to be the next president https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/. At this point it’s probably wise to start thinking about how to limit his impact and how to start cleaning up the mess afterwards.

Biden seems to misunderstand why he won.

He seems to think that people were really impressed with him as a candidate and that since he’s so much more impressive than all the other potential Democratic nominees, he’s the only logical choice to try to beat Trump.

He certainly enjoyed the support of many people who believe that but he relied heavily on the support of several other cohorts to push him over the edge. Those cohorts didn’t like him. They didn’t like him at all. They just hated Trump more, held their noses, and voted for Not Trump.

Biden has been telling several of those cohorts that their priorities don’t matter. He had tenuous support from those groups and he took that support for granted. Many of those groups are now thinking, “You failed to deliver on the one thing we wanted from you. I no longer see you as a significant improvement over Trump.”

Claiming that they’re just throwing a tantrum over a raspy voice further trivializes their concerns and pushes them farther away.

A clever MAGA troll would make exactly this kind of post. All it does alienate critical voters from Democrats.

The question is typically described as “the historicity of Jesus”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

There are similar debates for other famous ancient figures.

The general academic consensus on Jesus (and many similar figures) is that they did exist and many of the details have been fictionalized.

“Worse than expected,” depends largely on the individual and what they were expecting. It comes down to expecting one thing and being disappointed in the outcome.

People who expected him to be an ally of immigrants are disappointed in his border policies.
People who expected him to fix Trumps “easy” trade wars are disappointed in his trade policies.
People who expected him to support labor are disappointed in his ban of the railroad workers strike.
People who expected him to champion human rights are disappointed in his support of the IDF.

He may have met your expectations and the expectations of the majority of Democrats. Biden’s 2020 victory depended on several groups who only showed up because they hoped that he would address their specific concerns.

FOIA requests generally don’t involve hackers or leaks. The act exists because citizens insisted that government provides visibility into its inner workings.

What is the equivalent for Google, or any other private company?

It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions form a single 4 year period. There have been several instances of corruption (and significant externalized costs) in private firms that went on for much longer than 4 years.

I agree that there is a lot of corruption in government but there’s a long gap between that and no accountability. We see various forms of government accountability on a regular basis; politicians lose elections, they get recalled, and they sometimes even get incarcerated. We also have multiple systems designed to allow any citizen to influence government.

None of these systems and safeguards are anywhere close to perfect but it must be better than organizations that don’t even have these systems in the first place.

If we’re going by current usage rather than historical precedent, it doesn’t matter that “antisemitc” was originally coined to refer to hatred of Jews.

In that case we would look to the very common usage that includes hatred of all the other speakers of Semitic languages.

Or we could use the extremist definition of, “Any criticism of Israel.” If we go by that definition a whole lot of people (including many Jews) would also qualify.

What makes governments any more susceptible to corruption than a private organization?

I’m not actually talking about governments having absolute control. That’s a pretty extreme scenario to jump to from from the question of if it’s better for a private company or a government to control search.

Right now we think Google is misusing that data. We can’t even get information on it without a leak. The government has a flawed FOIA system but Google has nothing of the sort. The only way we’re protected from corruption at Google (and historically speaking several other large private organization) is when the government steps in and stops them.

Governments often handle corruption poorly but I can rattle of many cases where governments managed to reduce corruption on their own (ie without requiring a revolution). In many cases the source of that corruption was large private organizations.

That’s fine. If we don’t want to use the word we don’t need to. If we’re going to use it then let’s use it in a non-racist way.

It’s kind of bizzare to say claim that we shouldn’t use the term “Semite” because it’s outdated but then continue to use “antisemite” and claim it’s only about a tiny subsection of the people that “Semite” used to refer to.

There are approximately 330 million Semitic people in the world. Around 15.7 milllion (around 4.8%) of them are Jewish.

If the common usage of “anti-semitic” excludes the vast majority of Semitic people, it’s an outdated, racist term.

We should either drop it from our vocabulary or use it in an inclusive way.

It would depend on how well we can control it.

Ideally the material would be completely nonreactive for as long as you’re using it and then instantly degrade into component elements.

The faster things degrade, the higher the chance that they’ll degrade when you don’t want it to.

Why is that better? It may not be ideal but governments have at least some accountability.

They could have left out, “for LGBTQ+ people” and it would have been just as accurate.

Hidden? That’s literally the main argument when anyone surfaces a complaint about Biden. It’s always some variation of, “If we let Trump into the White House again our democracy is over.”

The hangup isn’t awareness, it’s acceptance. People aren’t questioning that he’d try to be dictator for life, they doubt his ability to succeed. Once you’ve seen someone try something and fail it’s reasonable to think they’re just too incompetent to succeed.

Whenever I see people ask for support for the claim they’re typically met with a hail of downvotes and name calling. That may feel righteous but it does absolutely nothing to recruit that person. Instead they’ll walk away with even stronger convictions.

It’s true. Hamas is posting rookie numbers. They’ve got to up their death count by around 10x before they can be in Israel’s league.

That’s the sister. Anon sounds like he has limited means. No need to make fun of them for being poor.

There is no single reason. It’s the sum of many reasons. They’re too many to list exhaustively but when we see a concrete example the vast majority of people come to the same conclusion on creepy vs appropriate.

When there isn’t a clear line, trying to define one is misleading. You can always find some couple somewhere on earth with an arbitrarily large age gap where people will agree that it’s the result of informed consent. People then try to make the argument that this justifies all relationships with that age gap even though most relationships don’t have whatever extenuating circumstances made the one example palatable.

Large age gaps are creepy. Whenever someone has to ask if a particular age gap is also creepy the answer is almost always, “Yes.”

There’s not much to discuss. The vast majority of the time it’s creepy grooming and we all know it. It’s technically legal and there may be cases when it’s genuinely a case of consent and mutual attraction but those are the exceptions.

Attempts to find the exact line are futile. “Half your age plus seven” is a rule of thumb, not a clear border.

Lindt is pretty good as packaged chocolate goes. You can always find some fancy artisanal chocolatier if you can afford to spend a few bucks per chocolate but for a HS student Lindt is pretty high tier.