In the US, there are still a lot from McCarthy-era sentiment and “Communist” is a pejorative within the general population. For instance, The Communist Control Act of 1954 is still on the books. Though it has issues as a law for being really vague, and hasn’t been used seriously against leftist organizing on account of that, it nonetheless remains and has never been outright challenged to the Supreme Court of the United States. Either way, it had a chilling effect, and was pretty successful as part of the US’s broader campaign to demonize communism and communist organizing.

Because of the way “Communism” and “Marxism” are used within US press and mainstream politics (especially by the Republican party), the average voter is conditioned to view them as bad words accordingly. The Democratic party, trying to court “moderate” voters within the political landscape here, all but refuses to touch those words with a 10-foot pole. It’s not part of their brand (and not part of their policy either, not by any stretch of the imagination).

Progressivism in my view is an umbrella term, but still pretty linked with liberalism as a movement in the sense that it’s mostly reformist, and acts a subgroup within the Democratic party. Most “Progressive” candidates for US political office are SocDems at most.

You can call it newspeak, but political movements arise under new/different names as the situation dictates, and often refer to different things. I’d argue that the point of newspeak within 1984 was actually to limit the evolution of language and restrict the development of new words/ideas, but I do get where you’re coming from on account of “progressive” being considered more politically correct.

Y’know, now that you mention it, the sealioning behaviour I’d been conditioned to expect is a big reason for why I spend so much time writing my comments and adding qualifying statements.

Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of “view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video”. If you want a specific video, you must search for it.

Cheaper to design one seat and use it for both spots

How about: Popularizing the idea of the wall in the first place, going mask-off calling illegal immigrants “murderers and rapists”, the “Muslim Ban” on air travel, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, employing white nationalists as staffers, packing the supreme court with extreme conservative justices, giving permanent tax cuts to the rich, expanding the presence of immigrant concentration camps, cozying up to foreign dictators, stating he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler’s behind closed doors when his own generals refused to nuke North Korea and blame it on someone else, egging on a far-right insurrection attempt, directly pursuing strikes and assassination attempts against middle-Eastern military generals and diplomats, ending the Iran nuclear deal, calling climate change a Chinese hoax, calling Covid the “China virus”, spreading vaccine disinformation until one was developed before the end of his term, trying to start a trade war with China, discrediting his chief medical advisor on factual statements about Covid, saying Black Lives Matter protestors were “burning down cities”, wanting to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, declaring “far left radical lunatics” part of his “enemy from within”, being an avowed friend of Epstein, sexually assaulting over a dozen women and underage girls, being a generally abusive sleazebag, also funding a genocide (Israel has always been ethnically displacing Palestinians), also building the wall, also not implementing healthcare reform (and being against what we have), also not protecting abortion rights (+ setting up the conditions that led to their erosion; see supreme court point above), and also denigrating anti-genocide protestors (but not as harshly since he wasn’t the one in charge when it happened).

I guess he’s not a cop though, so there’s that.

(minor edits made for grammar/spelling)

Wow, it’s almost as if someone being bad can be for multiple reasons!

Ideally, I agree wholeheartedly. American gun culture multiplies the damage of every other issue we have by a lot

One or more parents in denial that there’s anything wrong with their kids and/or the idea they need to take gun storage seriously? That’s the first thing that comes to mind, and it’s not uncommon in the US. Especially when you consider that a lot of gun rhetoric revolves around self defense in an emergency/home invasion, not having at least one gun readily available defeats the main purpose in their minds.

edit: meant to respond to django@discuss.tchncs.de

Days of the week in Spanish follow almost the exact same pattern as they do in English, with the exception of the weekend.

Specifically, Friday in Japanese translates to Gold Day, which also has a lot of cultural connotations with it being the lucky day of the week

In dry climates, the water actually will dry itself relatively quickly as long as there’s not an overwhelming amount. In more humid areas though, yup.

I’ve heard there are hyper-reflective stickers you can put on/near the plate that basically blind a traffic camera’s view when trying to read it

I believe the wording is “drinks which burn the throat” which naturally means:

• ❌ Coffee
• ❌ Alcoholic drinks
• ❌ Coca Cola
• ❌ Hot tea
• ❌ Chai lattes
• ✅ Sprite, other non-caffeinated soft drinks
• ✅ Hot Chocolate
• ✅ Kombucha
• ✅ Energy drinks???
• ✅ Herbal Tea (even while hot, but mostly if you’re sick as a home remedy)

Most of the focus is interpreted as “contains caffeine and/or alcohol” but the wording is vague enough that it leaves for a lot of weird wiggle room people try to argue (based on convenience usually). It’s quite silly

If they were conscripted tho?

Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.

The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.

Here’s an article with a graph. Given that the figures are measured per 100,000 live births, one would need to find how many births occurred in the state of Texas in the years graphed. I was able to find that exact figure for 2022 in a document from the CDC (on page 8) which comes out to 389,533. Since the overall Texas maternal mortality rate was about 28.5 per 100k births for that year (per the news article), the total number of mortalities would have been about 110.

If you want I could go find the figure for earlier years as well, but this should serve as a general ballpark the numbers are in. Keep in mind that the maternal mortality rate only factors in live births, so does not include any pregnancy complications involving an unviable fetus.

~Babe, wake up! New feminization technique just dropped~

I believe a lot of the problem with 4chan is that they publicly declare everything, when a lot of it should really be contained to a private scope

Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn’t, so the password didn’t work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.

Radical unschooling?