Half the country is functionally illiterate.

By stupid people.

People who think Trump is qualified are stupid. Zero dispute.

Wonder what Putin has on him.

It goes through rounds of lawyers and actuaries long before an insurer changes coverage policies. It’s absolute fantasy to think they threw this change together practically overnight.

I remember reading that it was coming before Luigi, but like the person you’re replying to, I can’t find it after the enshitification of web sesrching. It’s buried behind a billion articles about Luigi.

You have to have a good education to realize how fucked we are.

I listened to a clip a minute ago on the radio of dumbass Trump and his dumbass supporters from the show he made on inauguration day, signing orders, and the one withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord stuck out to me. “Could you imagine Biden doing this?” Raucous applause. “This is going to save $1,000,000,000,000.” Raucous applause.

No, I could not imagine Biden doing it, because it’s fucking idiotic. The world is burning. The air is turning to poison. Only cutting greenhouse emissions in half will provide any hope of anything resembling social stability over the next several decades and the only way to do that is to reign in the dozens of corporate poluters who are responsible for such desolation. It will save a trillion dollars for corporations, which savings they will absolutely not pass on to Trump’s gullible, stupid supporters, but in fact they will use to live lifestyles marked by even more greenhouse emissions, yachts and air travel. Even the capitalists who are self aware enough to see what’s coming will use their savings to build lavish prepper bunkers and hoard medical technology. When shit hits the fan, and MAGA rubes are chanting “let us in” outside the bunker while wild fires close in, maybe as they suffocate and burn to death they will realize they should have done more.

One good looking kid with an education going into politics isn’t going to overcome the power structures that have these donkeys cheering wildly for the missteps towards their own demise. You have to have the education to know that we are past that. Their kids will be dying of small pox, and they’ll still be blaming their grief and anger on the woke left and diversity, equality, and inclusiveness, on immigrants and the unhoused. The oligarchs own the government and the media. Only the people at large can depose them, one by one. We have all these mass shooters looking for infamy, maybe after Luigi they will see they can get actual fame, adoration, if they choose a culpable target instead of rooms full of innocent kids.

I think that’s what Luigi’s supporters are saying.

Someone else asked for this too and I’m really having a hard time coming up with anything.

Same as it went for HDDVD, Laserdisc, and BetaMax.

The anti-porn conservatives have always been about controlling women.

That woman who founded OnlyFans driving around in 10 different Lamborghinis, that’s their worst fucking nightmare.

Before that, it was that one lady whose husband died and then she discovered massive oil reserves under her land.

That kind of stuff is an existential threat to the patriarchy, which conservative control freaks must preserve at any cost.

They cannot allow women to become self-sufficient and thereby self-determinative. Otherwise, who will take care of the men, and raise the men’s babies?

Yeah I said when we say it, nobody is trying to remove the metal detectors from around the Capitol building and stockpiling guns in nearby hotel rooms, placing pipe bombs in the streets. Nope, that’s just Republicans. And that’s why they have their motto “we are all domestic terrorists.”

They have always wanted to break the government. They are okay with what’s happening, they knew it was going to happen, and they wanted to continue.

Here’s some further reading in the problem I was describing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_displacement

I can almost picture the classroom I was sitting when I first learned about the study and having the exact same reaction you did.

Part of the study controlled for that, in the context of practical limitations. They divided the city into sectors and absolutely flooded certain sectors with cops while doing minimal patrols in the others, or in some cases none at all. The crime just moved in the opposite way. When the police presence increased in one sector, the crime rate went down there, but went up in the others. And then when they switch the sectors, the crime switched back. So practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants. I see towns get into it over a budget allocation to hire one additional officer, let alone the number they would need to sustain to keep up the sort of levels needed to push crime out everywhere. And maybe some places would be able to do it, but the crime would just push to other areas, foisting the problem onto other communities. Further, I think there’s very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.

I got a degree in criminology about 25 years ago and can confirm that there was no dispute in the science at that time that this was the way to reduce crime.

Everything else had been tried and tried again and proven not to work. It was around that time that my (then) field realized that the DARE program increased drug use.

It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it’s been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.

When I studied, it was almost a joke to read new research coming out, because every serious study was just confirming what everyone knew. Guest lecturers would come in to talk about their latest theories in criminology. and, it was basically everyone just sitting around saying oh yeah that’s obvious. The field has peaked, and it was up to society then to catch up.

We looked at three strike’s laws, truth and sentencing laws, asset forfeiture laws, mandatory minimums, and every time we found that these policies increase violent crime. They further fracture communities and destroy families at the generational level.

It may not be intuitive to think that, but would a little thought, a little reflection, it is hard to say that this would not be the obvious result.

The methods to reducing and ending recidivism have been well known to science. People who talk about harsh law enforcement and punitive corrections are either ignorant, emotional blowhards, or not serious about reducing crime.

We have in America a well-established cat and mouse model of policing. And indeed it does Trace its history to slave patrols, a reactionary force of violence, dispatched into the community to capture offenders. The entire model does absolutely nothing to prevent future crimes from occurring.

Maybe they catch some guy who’s a serial offender, and get him off the streets. And they call that a win. But until the root causes of crime are addressed, all they’re doing is playing serial offender whack-a-mole; the next one is just going to pop right up. And maybe they’ll say, oh sure, that’s because we have a “catch and release” system.

Well, if we literally did nothing at all to stop crime, and totally abolished the concept of a police force, the science is absolutely clear that most people are going to age out of crime by the time they turn 25, and the rest, save for a few people who are likely mentally disabled, will age out by the time they hit 35. But instead, we’re kicking down doors and locking people out in cage for decades on end, making sure that their families are broken and locked in a cycle of poverty and trauma, and we end up sometimes with three generations of men sharing a prison together.

And while we’re on the subject of prison, the science is also absolutely clear that the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment. When I got my degree, the field was shifting to a program evaluation approach, because we had figured out what programs we needed to have, and the only thing left to do was to fine-tune those programs to get the most out of them.

But then 4 years would go by, or 8 years would go by, and some new tough-on-crime politician would come and wonder why we’re spending so much money to hold people in a cage, and they’d start cutting the programs.

And despite that, and despite the emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime, virtually every type of crime is the lowest it’s ever been in my lifetime.

Child abuse.

Nazi truck.

He cannot partake in a ceremony meant only to bind his power, Trump will only touch glowing orbs because they enhance his power.

It was all macho nonsense that did nothing to improve my life. There’s no such thing as “manly.” Just be yourself, however you are, and you can feel perfectly adequate.

The best advice I’ve ever gotten had nothing to do with my genitals other than perhaps that an unplanned pregnancy being one of the top things that could change the course of my life, but even that is universal.

Wait I thought all illegal immigrants voted blue?

Bet $100 it’s because he hates himself because he is queer.