If that’s something that regularly happens in the US, do you have any examples from the last decade, instead of three examples from 55-60 years ago?

If you’re rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/joe-biden/?ex_cid=abcpromo

Looks like he’s at ~38% approval, ~58% disapproval.

For what it’s worth, the ipsos poll here is a bit of an outlier compared to other recent polls.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/

There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.

According to the UN

In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and others of 7 October, the UN mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape in at least three locations in southern Israel.

The team also found a pattern of victims - mostly women - found fully or partially naked, bound and shot across multiple locations which “may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence”.

In some locations the mission said it could not verify reported incidents of rape.

Or is the UN an Israeli propaganda machine, now?

I assume his point is that calling Manchin or Sinema “liberal” isn’t super accurate.

Ok, I’ll bite.

How many people do you think shopped at your grocery store?

On average, how much food do you think they each wasted per week at home?

How much food per week did your store waste?

How typical do you think these numbers are nationwide?

Look at figure 2.

Consumption isn’t 50%, but it’s the largest single bar in that chart - significantly so.

You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you’re factually just plain wrong.

You’ve seen the centralized waste. But you haven’t picked through a neighborhood’s worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.

The government spends hundreds of billions on infrastructure every year.

Have we fixed potholes permanently?

Also, $8 billion is a bit less than $24 bucks per person in America. Do you really think $24 is enough to permanently solve hunger in a country? Do you think that another $5/person is reasonable, a few years later?

Almost half of food waste is people buying food that they let go bad before they eat it.

That’s substantially a price problem, in that people are more willing to let a cheap banana spoil than a prime rib or lobster. Food being cheap makes people more willing to let it expire.

But fixing residential food waste by making food more expensive would make hunger worse.

Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.

Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.

One important thing to realize is that different dialects of English have slightly different grammars.

One place where different dialects differ is around negation. Some dialects, like Appalachian English or West Texas English, exhibit ‘negative concord’, where parts of a sentence must agree in negation. For example, “Nobody ain’t doin’ nothing’ wrong”.

One of the most important thing to understanding a sentence is to figure out the dialect of its speaker. You’ll also notice that with sentences with ambiguous terminology like “he ate biscuits” - were they cookies, or something that looked like a scone? Rules are always contextual, based on the variety of the language being spoken.

Crosswords have clues going across and down.

The words just use common letters so they’re things puzzle creators wish were real words. They’re not currently words.

English definitely has rules.

It’s why you can’t say something like “girl the will boy the paid” to mean “the boy is paying the girl” and have people understand you.

Less vs fewer, though, isn’t really a rule. It’s more an 18th century style guideline some people took too seriously.

No.

There’s two types of grammar rules. There’s the real grammar rules, which you intuitively learn as a kid and don’t have to be explicitly taught.

For example, any native English speaker can tell you that there’s something off about “the iron great purple old big ball” and that it should really be “the great big old purple iron ball”, even though many aren’t even aware that English has an adjective precedence rule.

Then there’s the fake rules like “ain’t ain’t a real word”, ‘don’t split infinitives’ or “no double negatives”. Those ones are trumped up preferences, often with a classist or racist origin.

The beginning of the ‘Final Solution’ was in June of 1941, and began with the death squads of the Einsatzgruppen murduring Jews as part of Operation Barbarossa.

The commander of Einsatzkommando 3 submitted a fairly detailed report of his squad’s daily murder count by location. Through November 25th of that year, his squad alone murdered 57,338 Jewish men, 48,592 Jewish women, and 29,461 Jewish children.

Babi Yar happened on September 29th and 30th, 1941 - only about 4 months into the Final Solution. Germans put posters up in Kyiv, saying that any Jews who didn’t show up to be relocated would be shot. They took the crowd of 33k people to a ravine, herded them forwards and machine gunned them all down.

Is the Holocaust really the most apt historical comparison? Yes, the Holocaust is in the past, while this is ongoing. But the early days of the Holocaust were incredibly bloody; the massacres didn’t ramp up slowly once the killings commenced.

Two things can both be bad without being equally bad.

The war has been terrible. But do you really think it’s been as bad as Treblinka or Babi Yar?

Precisely three third party candidates have won any EC votes in the last century: George Wallace, Strom Thurmond and Robert La Follete. Follete won Wisconsin, and the other two unsurprising only won states in the deep south.

The likely “best case” scenario would be something like the 1912 election, which was essentially a three way race between former Republican president Teddy Roosevelt running third party against the incumbent Republican Taft, and the Democratic challenger, Willson.

Willson won 41.8% of the popular vote, and 81% of of EC vote. Taft got 23% of the vote, and managed to carry Vermont and Utah. Roosevelt got 27% of the vote, and carried 6 states. Eugene Debs didn’t win a single state with his 6% of the vote - and its worth noting that the last time a third party candidate did as well as Debs was Perot, back in 96.

A majority of the country voted for a current or former Republican president, yet the election was a land slide for the Democrat in the EC.

Because of the structure of the EC, third parties are either irrelevant protest votes (such as the south protest voting for segregationists) or they blow up in your face. Why would this time be different?

Edit:

One significant problem with a pro-Palestinian third party revolt against Biden is that Democratic support for Palestinians isn’t anywhere near high enough for a universal revolt against Biden on that issue. It’d just be begging for a repeat of 1912.

Netanyahu’s poll numbers are pretty rock bottom among Democrats, but a majority of older Democrats see Israel as a legitimate state with an unfortunately far right current government that’s going too far in their current war against a terrorist organization. They’re not looking for a free Palestine that stretches from the river to the sea.