Neither. I’m actually pretty well aware of the harms caused by places I’ve worked, including in the US military. I’ve even left places when I couldn’t square that circle. I figured the comment would get some heavy down voting because I know how most of the world is looking at the scenario. I felt some schadenfreude watching the guy get gunned down, too. My perspective is that I see the left committing a lot of the same logical fallacies typically committed by the right in this scenario. It feels a little too close to “well, the cops wouldn’t have shot him in the back if he just complied” or “Palestinians elected terrorists so they’re all terrorists and gldeserve whatever they get” arguments to me. I try to practice the Principal of Charity, and I don’t have any good evidence that this man was cackling with glee while personally slamming a big red “DENIED” stamp on grannies chemo medicine claims. If he’d approved every claim, he would be fired, and they’d bring someone else in to deny the claims. I’m not defending the insurance industry or capitalism for-profit healthcare, but I worry more generally about society normalizing or celebrating violence.l and where that’s moght take us.

False dichotomy is a common tactic used to radicalize people and instigate violence.

Brian Thompson was the head executive of a corporation. He likely spent his days looking at spreadsheets and BI reports, going to meetings where he was held accountable for making a profit for the shareholders and playing golf. If he is responsible for deaths related to the 30-something percent of claims that the company he ran denied, then he is equally responsible for any lives saved by the 60-something percent of claims they approved.

I’m not mourning the guy, but I know his friends and family are. If his murder was justified, is mine justified for not feeling bad he died? Is my daughter’s murder by a Palestinian justified because I pay taxes that buy bombs my government sells to Israel?

There are lots of alternatives to murder (or whatever euphemism for murder you choose to use). Murder certainly feels easier in the short term, especially when you have no connection to the guy who pulled the trigger. His life is likely ruined now as well.

At this time year? In this part of the country?

I would have sworn it was an article from this election cycle, but hey, that’s the brain for you…not nearly as reliable as we’d like to believe.

I wish I remembered where I read it so I could attribute it, but I saw someone describe Trump not as a liar but as a bullshitter. It’s not that he lies. It’s that he has no regard, one way or another, for whether what he is saying is a lie or not. He simply has a thought and recites it. It’s so effortless for him to lie because, from his perspective, it’s the same as telling the truth. If this is true, the pattern you’ve identified could be merely chance based on the probability that any random thought a person has is more likely to be wrong than right when they are incapable of learning new information.

I didn’t feel like I was doing it justice, so I found the sauce…from fucking 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar

So I’ve heard this lots of places but never done the math, so I sat down this afternoon to try and work it out and…it’s super complicated. The generator in the picture might not charge the car at all…if it is, it’s probably a trickle charge like plugging into a 120v outlet…which means running the generator for a very long time for a very small charge which means it’s super inefficient…depending on your starting assumptions you get anywhere from 11 - 20 miles of charge out of a gallon of fuel for the generator, which is less efficient than tha average of 31 mpg for a 2022 sedan…so in that case, it’s less efficient. The more normal use case would be a whole-home generator powering a level 2 or 3 charger in your garage… which can be more efficient than an ICE engine assuming a high-efficiency generator and EV. Additionally, generators don’t typically have emissions controls, so from a carbon standpoint, it’s WAY worse than an ICE with a catalytic converter.

Also of note, this is still more fuel efficient than using an ICE vehicle.

Once they’re teens, all parents become “bruh…”

That was a wild fitness class…

Bullshit. Conservatives don’t want people living in tents. I’m tired of all this propaganda. They clearly want anyone who can’t afford a house in a prison, not a tent.

I’d rather have a 100km particle collider than an aircraft carrier.

63502931.8 mega grams

I wish we were exploring space more!

The monkey paw curls. We get entitled pricks, destroying labor protections to build so much wealth they’ve bought everything worth owning on the planet and still yearn for more.

I wish we had robots to do our work!

Another finger curls. Wealth inequality cripples the working class. Corporations consolidate to the point that everything is profit driven… locked behind paywalls or subscriptions. The only publicly available art and literature are made by robots.

I wish we could all communicate with each other!

The last finger curls, and paw crumbles to dust. Democracies around the world flounder as their populations are brainwashed by greedy CEOs in the news and media…taught to fear their neighbors and mistrust those politicians who haven’t been bought and paid for. Online, they’re bombarded by misinformation campaigns on every topic until they live in different realities. Diseases and pestilence once vanquished through science and cooperation return when science isn’t trusted and cooperation with your fellow citizens is viewed as betrayal to your tribe. The world now burns, and it, too, crumbles to dust.

This timeline sucks, yo.

Then the cop shot him for resisting arrest. The end.

What’s childish is not acknowledging the 2 facts that

1. Trump will make the genocide worse. Abstaining from a UN security council vote is a pretty flaccid response, but it’s the most any US President has done since since Israel’s inception.

2. The US President has responsibilities and influence beyond whatever Israel is doing. Biden losing increases the chance of a 2nd genocide in Ukraine and potentially an expanding war in Europe. That’s not even mentioning how much worse things are gonna get here for anyone who isn’t a cishet white man.

Your thinking is no different than all the women who kept voting on the single issue of overturning Roe and are now shocked they have to carry dead fetuses to term or be charged with a crime.

Worked for the average German in the 1930s-40s

Maybe…but we did less during the financial crisis of 2008 and had a worse outcome. When we analyzed that data from 2008, we decided that it would probably work better if we spent more next time, which is what we did this time…and the result matched the prediction, which is pretty much how you prove something works scientifically. Make a prediction, test the prediction, and if the test results match your prediction, that is evidence for your hypothesis. So, the evidence we have says it’s probably better to increase deficit spending to avoid economic collapses. This isn’t a lab, so we can’t control for every variable to really prove it, and we probably never could…we can just keep evaluating our results after a problem and see if the changes we made resulted in a better or worse outcome than we predicted.

That’s what the Ukrainian and Indian conscripts are for.

Why, indeed. Almost like it’s a deliberate attempt to distract us from real problems…or, in the particular case of Elon, an attempt to make something that isn’t about him be about him because he’s the specialist little boy.

This is actually very useful framing…I’m gonna chew on this for a bit and try to untangle some of my own implicit premises.