The part that absolutely kills me about this is that there were anti-maskers during the 1918 “spanish flu” pandemic. This suggest that with two valid examples that this is a bad idea, people still chose to not do it. It also suggests that we’re still the same society that we were 100 years ago.

https://www.history.com/articles/1918-spanish-flu-mask-wearing-resistance

While it’s tragic that the mountain is going to add to its death toll on this, the idea of people queued up on the world’s tallest peak just for limited-time virtual merch, made me chuckle a bit.

After that Pokemon Go stampede in Central Park all those years ago, I’m feel like stunts like that are far more plausible than ever.

Edit: I also keep forgetting about the stuff RedBull does these days…

Exactly. Prompt the other party to exercise the smallest amount of critical thought and you can watch it all unravel. It’s fucking exhausting, but that’s what it takes.

I once heard someone drop some nonsense in a conversation about how “San Francisco is a dirty place.” Not only is “city = dirty” a common right-wing trope, but it had zero place in our conversation. It was just kinda parroted nonsense ham-fisted into our dialogue. I simply replied: “I’ve been to silicon valley and the touristy parts of downtown, and what I saw was a nice clean place; I can’t speak for the rest of it.” The guy stopped for a sec and said “well, I haven’t been there myself so I guess I can’t either.”

But it’s all saltwater. In the middle of a desert.

I know that’s sarcasm, but your comment made me think. I strongly disagree with those kinds of remarks. :)

This war isn’t like a game of Poker, where everyone is dealt from the same deck. It’s more like MTG, where the real game is about who can make better strategic use of their card-buying budget.

According to a Kyiv Independent SBU source, first-person-view (FPV) drones were covertly transported deep into Russian territory and hidden inside trucks before being launched against four major airfields.

Holy shit that’s embarrassing. I mean, those operatives are going to have to flee to Japan to in order to get home, but wow. That’s incredible.

Emphasis on “rich” here. History has shown that genocide is always followed by claiming and then divvying up the resources once held by the displaced/dead. That’s always a rich-man’s game.

This is the right answer. Life has already shown him that operating on a level playing field and being honest, really doesn’t get a guy like him very far. So the genius workaround is to lie your pants off instead, and build an alternative environment around yourself where you can’t lose.

No, he just looks horrifying. That’s it. Terrifyingly ugly man-spider thing. That’s his superpower.

Even an arrest record can be a problem. Which is itself, a problem.

By “traveling community” and “travelers”, does the article author actually mean Romani (“gypsies”)?

I ask since the article may have lost something in translation. It also puts the police’s actions in a different light if true.

I was gonna say: we didn’t vote for him! Approval rating should be at 0% on that point alone as zero voters approved of this.

WASHINGTON, Feb 4 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said the U.S. would take over the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and develop it economically

The scope of this statement is a shock, but the motivation that led to it, isn’t. That said, I hate everything about this.

I’m not the first to bring this up, but it bears repeating. This is colonialism, plain and simple. That, in turn, is an outcome of unchecked capitalism. Practiced ideologically (i.e. as the guiding light in one’s life), it holds up “exploitation at all costs” as a virtue. Second to that is “give your competition no quarter.” Combined, that explains the current state of affairs.

We all may be used to thinking of colonialism as some thing that ended on one more more independence days in the last 300 years or so. In reality, the engines of commerce and industry that made that happen kept right on running. Since nation-state-sized real-estate deals like this don’t come along very often anymore, these animals are quick to react and pounce before someone else figures out how to exploit the situation.

As an aside: the attitudes and values that enabled things like the US westward expansion, slavery, classism, eradication of indigenous peoples, environmental destruction in the pursuit of minerals, pollution and litter from energy extraction, etc., are still alive and well in the population. Being this kind of evil is insanely profitable under the right conditions, which confers an outsized advantage to reproduction and social influence. Which is to say that it’s not the ideology of capitalism that propels these values to stay with us, but rather the other way around. It’s as though those colonists with exploitation in their hearts are still very much with us, and that’s something to keep an eye on.

Honestly, I just want to know who fed him this Greenland nonsense in the first place. I don’t think it’s his idea, originally.

Force these shitters to make their products healthier for all age groups.

There’s a lot of nuance here, but in general I agree. Hank (of vlogbrothers and SciShow fame), summed this problem up brilliantly. To paraphrase: social media is engagement based, not quality based. Upvote/like content on all you want, but misinformation, propaganda, rage bait, and doom-scrolling fodder will dominate any platform where the only valued metric is eyeball time.

So, the top-down solution would be to somehow strictly define how for-profit ranked media feeds and news aggregators are allowed to operate. Unintended consequences of such a law aside, I think it’s possible to legally define a “well-behaved” social media site, but it won’t be easy.

Real question: how is anyone supposed to implement this without eliminating anonymity for those services?

I have been sexually harassed as a man in public transportation too and while i recognize it’s not as bad for me as it is for women, because it only happened a few times, it always happened by forcing me to be smushed against a ton of people.

Let me just say: I am sorry you went through that. This is awful and indeed unacceptable. Thank you for pointing out that assault is not an entirely gendered issue, and that segregation sends everyone down a slippery slope where we fail to stop it in the first place.

You say this, but have you ever tried to drive a car (sober) that is packed full of drunk people? It’s not easy, and they all might just get you pulled over anyway.

Outright prohibition never works. They have to get a lot more clever to work against addiction.

Reading the article, I see why this is a problem to be addressed. At the same time, I’m not sure how in the world you would directly “fix” this other than outright banning unruly customers after they cause problems.

The best course of action might be to quietly work with restaurant managers in major airports to start watering down mixed drinks, and serve lower-gravity beer and wine, on heavy travel days. I’m mostly sure this is how amusement parks operate; they just need to consult with Disney or SixFlags on this one. The threat of airlines (or the airport) banning heavy restaurant customers might be motivation enough. That way, restaurants make more money, airlines have (maybe) less nonsense to deal with, and there’s no documented limit on beverages.