Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how ‘nice’ they may seem.

I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of…I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.

And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening’s entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.

That’s the people we’re dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.

Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?

By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.

The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren’t pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.

No, but they should be public to everyone, and not hidden unless you jump through hoops.

“AI”, especially art. I’ve spent years trying to learn to draw on and off and have never gotten good at it, but now I can use words to create illustrations I want in a level of quality and detail I could never dream of.

Now I just want the interface to be easier and more able to understand natural language and be capable of making directed changes better.

Because so-called second amendment advocates are really just gun nuts, and so over the years they have worked hard to maintain the right to keep and bear guns, rather than arms.

Thus knives, swords, halberds, maces, and all other ‘arms’ have had restrictions go unchallenged, or at least, not challenged by an extensive and well funded network of advocacy.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Not ‘to grant them greater control’ or even ownership. To secure exclusive right for a limited time. And this only because it was meant to promote science and art.

Using copyright to prevent a work from spreading is a direct perversion of the intent, it is using it in a manner diametrically opposed to what it is supposed to do.

These changes could be applied retroactively; this isn’t like creating an ex post facto law and then jailing people for breaking a law that didn’t exist at the time of the event.

How about reword it slightly: it must be available for purchase if you want to use IP law to prevent others from distributing it.

Too fucking bad? The purpose of IP was to give the public access to novel ideas and art, not to increase the control creators had over it.

And yet, instead of answering a simple question, you’ve launched into a ‘if only we could change the past’ screed.

If there was a good answer to the question, people like you would just answer.

Odd to me is Her Majesty’s instead of His, considering Charles is now King.

Do these places just retain the gender of the ruling monarch at the time of their construction?

I don’t think ‘going’ anywhere would be an option. If you’re in basically, most of the civilized world, and not in a very secure structure, you’re immediately fucked. I said more than 50% but I guessed that as a very conservative estimate. We don’t normally realize just how many living things are around us, mostly bugs, but also small rodents and the like. If every one of those within a significant radius of every human suddenly went berserk and wanted the humans dead, most people are not in areas where the number of attackers would permit much survival.

Those who currently live in certain desert environments, in certain cold environments, and so forth, would probably survive the first day, and then might have a hope of making it longer. But most environments in which there isn’t enough animal/bug life around to immediately kill you present serious other problems such as food supply. If you live at McMurdo Sound Antarctica, you’re probably not going to immediately be killed. But you will soon have issues feeding yourself and keeping warm.

People in Iceland or northern Norway and other similar places might have the best chances. Probably not quite enough things around to kill everyone immediately, but the environment is one in which they might be able to become self-sufficient, but in the long term I have my doubts even for them. If the bugs and animals and such are so focused on killing humans that they no longer perform their normal functions, then you’re looking at immediate and total ecological collapse. If they’re not, then the population of bugs and animals will increase in all areas other than the most extreme environments, and sooner or later what few humans survived in those extreme environments are going to have to attempt to emerge.

If humans had prep time, maybe. Assuming we could get over our normal difficulties cooperating and actually prepare for the event. There’d at least be a lot of survivors. But if it came as a surprise, suddenly someone flips a switch and the entire animal kingdom is trying to make every single one of us dead? We’re pretty much fucked.

If this means that every animal immediately goes berserk and tries to kill all humans, and ‘animal’ includes bugs, then the animals probably win.

Those people in relatively secure places without enough animals when it starts could survive, but there’s probably be 50% or higher casualties among the general human population in less than a day.

You probably had the same damn book I did, with an illustration of him eating an orange and seeing the wings of a butterfly coming up over it and supposedly realizing they look just like the sails of a ship and so, gasp, the world must be round like this orange!

I don’t usually recommend movies in situations where the solution space isn’t already limited significantly by the context, but 2001 is the one I thought of first upon reading the title, so I suppose there’s at least two of us!

There are very few humans who would not be depressed if they were the last person on earth. Even the most introverted among us are still, well, human.

More like 1997, or even 1983, when the UK handed them back to China, or the earlier date, when they decided to prevent them from having British citizenship.

If everyone in Hong Kong had the right to emigrate to any British territory, China would have to be a lot lighter touched there, or there might be a mass exodus.

This is what I said to someone who asked a very similar question about the same thing a while back:

‘Females’ is, effectively, a ‘technical term’ you might say, that isn’t used in normal conversation. It’s used specifically in situations where distance from the subject being discussed is intentional. It is the sort of language used in police reports, medical reports and the like…when it’s even being applied to humans at all. Its use is perhaps more common referring to animals; it’s the sort of terminology you’d expect to hear in a nature documentary.

The people trying to push its use are intending to make the subjects - women - sound ‘other’ and separate and alien by referring to them as ‘females’. Not everyone who is picking up this terminology intends it that way, but the connotations are unavoidable because of how language works in common use, and therefore if you don’t intend it that way, you badly need to be made aware of it so you can stop.

The combination of competence, the necessary skills, intelligence, and most importantly, the willingness to sacrifice oneself to effect change is…rare. It’s also uncertain whether results would be positive.

Consider what is needed to pull off ‘focused’ violence - that is to say, assassination of key targets. You need to be sufficiently skilled to manage at least one successful strike. You cannot communicate with people to do this - it’s far too easy to get caught in the modern day. You need supplies and equipment, and sure, guns are somewhat easy to get in the US, but they aren’t the only thing you need. You need access and information, some of which is public, but some of which can be hard to get, and can draw attention by being sought (keep in mind algorithms are pattern matching to find this stuff).

Then consider the potential outcome of these actions. As mentioned before, organizing is impractical since it would mean getting caught before doing anything with much higher probability. Regardless of your skills, the chance of getting caught approaches 100%. You may be able to take out two or three key senators, or if you’re very good and very lucky, a few supreme court justices, before being caught. At this point you will either be imprisoned, or you commit suicide to avoid this fate.

And what’s the result? Violence of this sort to effect change is hard to pull off, but even harder to predict the outcome of. If you’ve succeeded in all plausible goals, you might manage to change the makeup of the supreme court - that’s probably the best possible outcome you can hope for with this sort of violence, but right now on the gay front, the supreme court shockingly has yet to do anything too bad, so you may not want to provoke that shit. But there are a lot of possible bad outcomes. And as someone smart enough to pull this off, you’re smart enough to see that. It could lead to increasingly strict rules, to retaliation against the group you’re trying to help - it could even be the catalyst to strengthen your opponents position enough to make things worse elsewhere.

The idea of someone killing a bunch of the key bad guys is great, but it has so many impracticalities, and worst of all, such an uncertain and potentially worse outcome that it’s probably just a bad idea overall, even as much as I too sometimes wish someone would just kill some of these motherfuckers already.

Yeah, that’s an excellent example. Those protests posed a credible threat to that specific business - indeed, to some degree they even already carried out some of the threat, just to show it was credible - which made changes to what they had the power to affect - their own actions.