u/Valid_Argument

In Ohio specifically you had Jerry Springer hold some local offices and make a pretty good run for state office so not sure it's exactly the hallmark of decorum you claim.

Kasich had his controversy over that speeding ticket which was pretty spicy.

That is something Ramaswamy CANNOT know.

Nobody can KNOW except Acton, but he can THINK.

he's giving a platform for a pedo protector to attack a rape victim.

Decency went out the window a while ago if you haven't noticed. At least in national elections people are happy to accuse you of being a Russian spy or part of a pedo ring. On broadcast television you can call the president's mouth a certain kind of holster.

Yes it's a terrible thing for Ramaswamy to do, but I wouldn't say it's out of place these days.

And if you're only thinking about victims, it's been this way much longer. Remember how they treated Lewinski before she found the dress? What about Clinton's other victims?

why do you think she is stupid

Any arbitrary ten minutes of her speaking off script will confirm this as a known fact. It's not a dig: she is genuinely dim. There are plenty of left-leaning politicians who are very smart, let's say (at least younger) Pelosi or Warren. Acton is not among them, she is a literal moron.

Initially I thought it was a terrible idea but now I'm not sure entirely sure. Acton's story about her childhood is odd, and it is now the central focus of the election. Vivek is basically alleging via her mother she was a psychopath at age 12 and made up sexual assault allegations against her stepdad, which is a wild claim, but also does happen.

Acton has done essentially zero actual campaigning because she is essentially actually retarded (similar to Kamala), so she has simply avoided any debate or open interview. Vivek was losing to what is essentially a cardboard cutout, this ad at least gets people looking at the cutout in a critical way. The best argument against Acton is ten arbitrary minutes of her speaking about any topic off script, but you can't get that in front of the eyes of the voters if she simply doesn't give it to them, so what's left but attacking the cutout?

Anyways this was probably his hail-mary move since he's on the verge of losing. Orange man bad is 40%+ of the vote (people voting D just to spite Trump), I don't think this gets him over that edge.

With a known fugitive from a sex crime who you bailed out, yeah probably!

lived with the step-dad until he died a fugitive

Didn't know this part, what a wrinkle to this story. How is this not a crime, you can just hang out with a known fugitive and it's not your problem apparently? Is this what the 80s was like, you could just flee the state after a rape and chill for 20 years? Wild how shitty law enforcement is.

Wasn't he a fugitive at this point? Weird point to say she stayed married on paper to a fugitive.

Edit: she moved to PA with him as a fugitive, pretty impressive that (apparently) isn't itself a crime.

Wait, in your experience the union position payed LESS?

The entire unionized field paid less for high performers, but ime average/mediocre workers were vastly overpaid. It was a weird inversion where young guys who did good work got paid relatively little, old guys who were too dumb to do anything made good money. Hazing was mostly just the difficultly in joining/becoming a permanent member. The guys who I know who are still in unions endured years of shit pay + pointless "training" rituals for 3-4 years before hitting "journeyman" or "member" equivalent. They make close to your estimate now and would take a similar cut going private, though for years private pay was higher.

For most people, I think it was a good job honestly. And for the "consumer", when you hire union you get a fairly predictable and expected performance, which is nice, even if it's largely over-priced. I just wouldn't recommend it to the whole economy.

I was a "low" income worker many years ago ($17/h), and am now a very high income worker because my field isn't unionized.

In my middle career I was in a union-heavy role where the median salary was ~$65k and the upper limit at late career was ~$120k. I doubled my salary by leaving for a field with zero union presence.

I haven't seen any difference in workplace safety, benefits, etc. The only difference between union and non-union jobs in my experience is the former pays less but lets you phone it in more - after you get past the initial hazing, which is also part of all union roles.

Public unions are another story, being in those is very lucrative, usually the top pay band of that field. High school teachers for example, make way more money in union roles than private roles, but the private roles are actually the more chill ones.

did you know that undocumented immigrants commit less crime per capita than citizens?

Not really true.

First, organizations like Cato dispute the raw numbers. But let's just say they're wrong and use the commonly cited stat that illegal immigrants have fewer arrests/convictions that native-born people.

Second, when tracking "arrests", which is usually where this stat comes from, it excludes the obvious: when illegals are "arrested" they are often just deported, prosecuting them is a waste of time/money. Often they are not even guilty, but that's how it is: if you are illegal and accused of a crime, you're probably being deported, not prosecuted (though sometimes both).

Third, illegals typically would commit crimes against other illegals, who cannot report them because of their own status. For example it's not like all the girls who are assaulted during border transits show up here and report those guys, they cannot for obvious reasons. Crime between communities is much rarer than ingroup, but here the ingroup literally is not policed.

Silly question.

"Now that we've incarcerated N sexual assaulters since X time, has this tangibly improved our standard of living?"

No, incarcerating them is expensive and time consuming, it distracts from the process of creating things. None of their crimes affect the GDP, so why are we spending so much money on this? We could save so much money getting rid of those pesky courts and prisons that don't even contribute a single penny to the GDP or improve our standard of living!

We enforce laws to avoid negative externalities, not to generate benefits.

It is a serious problem that politicians are entering Congress with nothing and leaving as millionaires. Omar is one of the most visible of such cases. Letting this obvious corruption become normalized is a real problem for society. That said, it's not that they actually care about corruption, only when Blue people do it, but you can nonetheless build a functioning society if two sides are just policing each other's corruption, so this is a step improved regardless. In the past, people pretended to actually care about these things, which was better. For me, it went south going back to failing to hit the Clintons over Whitewater and then subsequently the Bush admin over Haliburton. After that it was all partisan hackery for these kinds of soft corruption.

Some will counter that Orange Man Bad because he made money while in office too but (1) he lost a LOT of money in the first term, and (2) he already had a ton of money, and any fool with a ton of money could have made a ton of money in this market.

I am pro abortion so I agree with this stance and beyond, but I'm also not uncomfortable admitting it's essentially eugenics.

Down syndrome is another interesting one because it's equally eugenic: both the fatal defect and Downs are sterilizing mutations.

I will point out that doctors are abysmal at both false positives and true negatives when predicting birth defects in the womb, my advice to individuals personally is take your NIPT test (most are advertised with 1/infinity false negative, but they also have terrible false positive rates) and then take everything else with a huge grain of salt and get a second and third opinion if you have a positive result for anything. The first two ultrasound doctors I saw said my first kid would be likely critically disabled and I should abort, both were entirely 100% wrong. A friend of mine had two clear ultrasounds and gave full-term birth to a baby missing critical organs that died in seconds. In terms of diagnostic value ultrasound is closer to voodoo than medicine.

To OP's case though they can definitely stop anencephalic fetuses and that really does suck sorry OP's friend.

I love that Bush Jr. is so bad he's not even on the list. Hard agree with that one, I'd rather have Wilson than Bush Jr. back.

Wilson is an interesting guy because although he was absolutely a terrible leader and human being you can't argue he did a lot of stuff. Like is Ivan the Terrible great? Will yes. Not in a good way, but great in a historical sense.

Thousands of comments whining about "muh one gram of weed" not one person bothered to look it up:

delta-9 THC, the most commonly sold THC product in Texas, will remain legal

The ban applies to all synthetically created THC forms, including delta-8, delta-10, THCP and THCA flower.

Traditional cannabis remains illegal with no change to penalties. Same weights etc. Medical cards still available.

Dumb take on Coulter's position. She is not saying the problem is his race, she's saying the problem is his parents are from India, and he would be more likely to give preferential treatment to India. I disagree, but it's not racist.

His core argument has been (for literally years now, maybe before Trump 1) that if you don't have voter ID laws, it's likely to cheat. There is no other legitimate reason not to require voter ID.

And yeah, it's probably accurate. This is about the California election, where you don't need an ID to vote. No ID required to get a mail in ballot is wild.

Some people do give a shit, by the way, if you live in California and also give a shit, see here)

I was actually more bothered by Obama than by Trump, since Trump was already very wealthy before he took office. Obama has never earned an honest buck. Bush as well, honestly, though at least he can say he inherited it. Trump has a sprawling business and it was considerably down in many ways during his first term. He doesn't even run it day to day. That he is now up isn't really notable.

His business is actually pretty scummy in general tho, the people mad at him for selling crypto need to remember this is the guy who was selling mediocre steaks at Sharper Image. This is his thing, it's always been his thing. His whole business is putting his name on something gold-plated. He buys a rat-infested skyscraper, kills the rats and puts some fresh paint on it, calls it Trump tower. That's the brand. All the Trump hotels, casinos, and everything in his empire are overpriced faux luxury.

Certainly not the brightest bulbs for driving over it for no benefit though.

I mean generally you can drive over a paved painted surface it's nbd, but yeah not sure it's the best idea with incredibly heavy vehicles the SS uses.

They are also gna drive over it (one day) with bulldozers and such to do maintenance on the monument, normally it's fine.

Already disproven in less than a day. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/reflecting-pool-tire-tracks/ (I don't like Snopes, just using it because Snopes hates the orange guy and your article also cites it as a source)

This whole pool story is really incredible for demonstrating how insane and dishonest the media has become. It has essentially zero stakes but is just this confluence of conspiracy theory and random accusations. The reporting almost everywhere is so transparently unhinged.

The reporting turned the pool into an attraction and (probably) actually triggered people to vandalize it, which is also very telling in answering the question of why people keep trying to shoot the orange guy.

I probably dislike the police, especially federal police, more than almost anybody.

That said, if the police give you an order, you comply, and fail to do so at your extreme peril. Driving into a federal officer is tantamount to suicide. Most Americans know this, so maybe he should have done a bit more research before coming over here.

by trying to build nukes.

Well this misunderstands what they were doing, because they never tried to build nukes. What they did was spend a bunch of effort to give the appearance they could build nukes if they wanted to.

For example, they enriched uranium to level that cannot make weapons, even though it would be very easy at that point to continue to enrich to weapons grade, they just didn't. They know that if they enrich to weapons grade, we are obligated to attack them, but if they get close-but-not-there, they hoped we would just give them things (money, sanctions relief, etc) in exchange for not reaching weapons grade. That of course backfired in their face, and the attack backfired in ours.

They also know that if they actually create a nuclear weapon in secret, that Israel will glass their cities with their own nuclear weapons before they can fire it. If they don't create one, Israel cannot glass them without pissing off the entire international community, and since Iran's conventional arsenal is sufficient to hold off Israel's conventional arsenal, they have no reason to attempt it.

they have a religious imperative to destroy America and Israel through nuclear war.

The prior ayatollah had issued a fatwah against nuclear arms. But, Pakistan has them, so religiously it depends on the sect and when you're talking about. Historically, Iran doesn't like them.

Despite all the bad press they get about being insane, the government of Iran is pretty rational and level headed when it comes to war. In this conflict, they could have tried to glass Tel Aviv/the gas wells in Haifa with saturation strikes and they likely would have succeeded in causing big damage, they chose not to because it didn't serve their interests to do so. You can see how they were able to destroy the six fleet base in Bahrain, so it's hard to say such a strike is beyond their capability.

The strategy of making a bunch of low damage strikes against everyone just to flex was obviously really effective for them. All they would get if they tried to build a nuke is more bombs on their heads, they are aware of that.

Depends on how you look at it. If you asked them to give us X but kill their leader they probably would have declined. Not exactly a big win to kill their leader, but we got that one already. Israel took half of Lebanon which is nice for them and likely the whole point of the exercise.

Personally I don't see the value in sanctions against Iran, Russia, Cuba, etc. I can barely see the case for real pariah states like NK. Sanctions cost us money too via reduced access to the global market, and it's been pretty well proven at this point that they simply do not work.

At this point, having won the nearly worst-case war with only conventional weapons, they have no strategic incentive to build a nuke, so that point is basically moot.

Even if they charge a fee on Hormuz, that's largely irrelevant to us: on a global scale if the oil exported through the straight costs more, that just makes our oil cost more, and as exporter that broadly helps us. To simplify, even if the toll is 10%, a 10% bump on 20% of the world's oil is only a 2% increase in the global price, so to us it's largely irrelevant.

Wouldn't that undermine the entire reason for the conflict in the first place?

Well at some point it was conceivable we could blow up all their nukes and just leave and they would just have to deal with it as they lack the ability to rebuild. Some argued we should have done this to NK earlier. But once you try and fail to do so, it's another ballgame.

Now Iran is getting sanctions lifted, etc. The only way they could fuck this up is to make nukes and become a pariah state like NK. So now, on the basis of our loss, they have no real reason to seek a nuclear weapon, they are already a regional power in excess of most of their neighbors and doing so would just put them on at best equal footing with e.g. the Sauds, who could beat them to a nuke if they wanted on a purely financial/technological/political basis.

Now it's possible their government is dumb enough to think they can pull off doing it in secret like Israel has done, and hopefully they don't attempt that. Really only Israel can pull off that particularly trick.

Do you think Trump's supporters knew six months ago that he didn't really care that much about Iran having nukes?

Probably not, just like how most Americans didn't know Bush lied about WMDs. Also see the gulf of tonkin, the rms lusitania, etc. Never once has America been led honestly into a war, nothing new here.