Well yeah. The mainstream media is so bad that of course relatively young people are not going to want to watch it. Of course everyone has their own reasons, but I would say that the 24-hour news cycle especially in the months leading up to the election has in the past many years been a great reason to stop watching network TV news.

I don’t think what you said is clear, but to the extent that it is, I feel like it doesn’t make sense.

The Democrats don’t need to lie in order to point out that Trump was being a lying piece of s*** when he talked about bringing down prices. That’s true, they can quote him time and again, and media that is sympathetic to the Democrats could do the same if it chose to, but it won’t.

Also, many Democratic politicians and centrist media are not people or companies that I would particularly describe as highly truthful. They say true things a lot more than Donald Trump does, but that’s a rather low bar.

Finally, there are so many obvious things that Democratic politicians could do if they were serious about addressing the problem with expensive groceries. What if they push to raise the minimum wage and key it to the cost of living? What if they bust up the corporations that dominate the grocery store and food distribution industries? I feel like both of those could greatly impact the price of food.

Right. Bullying someone and making their school life painful is exactly the same as denying someone healthcare and killing them. Therefore getting revenge on a bully is equivalent to getting revenge on the healthcare company. Did I get that right? /s

Maybe because the software is designed to make that very practical and smooth. You also might point to hardware limitations, should you have a machine that doesn’t have a lot of RAM, or perhaps you might point to simplicity, and that you don’t want to have a cluttered taskbar.

But it’s kind of ironic that you would ask why not leave software open on a post where the problem was specifically mentioned as one that is solved by closing the software.

Old news. And it is nonsense anyway.

Of course I care. The fragmentation of the Republican party is something that many of us have been hoping to see for a long time.

The good thing about the situation now, for those of us who think Trump is an evil piece of s***, is that he doesn’t have too much power. He can kind of pressure people who are up for re-election in 2 years, but his voice will mean nothing at all in 4 years. Also, many politicians want to wield their power so that they can either feel powerful or get richer, and if all they do is rubber stamp the word from the White House, nobody’s going to give them the time of day.

Your theory about companies raising prices to offset UBI is actually undercut by historical and present evidence.

There was a time when the United States had welfare. The United States still has food stamps. But nobody is seriously pretending that these things did or do drive up grocery prices.

Similarly, over time various states have raised minimum wage, and if your argument were accurate, then the prices in those states would have immediately risen to match minimum wage, but they didn’t.

In other words, you’re repeating a conservative talking point that has been repeatedly debunked by reality. I think you could try to improve your argument by arguing that inflation happens across the board, to everything, and therefore it would also happen to UBI. But what we’ve actually seen is that’s not true.

Well there’s certainly doubt right now. We’ve heard about what was written on the bullets, and the details of how that came to be written on the bullets are incredibly relevant. At some point that story is going to be spelled out, and it’s easy to imagine that the prosecution can do so in a reasonable fashion, but they haven’t yet. So I think we should stick with our innocent until proven guilty viewpoint, especially knowing the temptation for cops and prosecutors to lie to the public.

We already saw a multiple high profile cases this year that involved cops lying on the stand and erasing or planting evidence, and I’m not saying this is the same, but we certainly shouldn’t rush to assume that anything the pigs tell us is true, especially not NYPD.

It’s important to recognize that the system in the US is more convoluted than you believe. It’s not like we have totally separate drug manufacturers versus distributors versus hospitals versus insurers. There’s a fair amount of overlap, and a lot of it is relatively secretive, so you don’t know where the kickbacks are. You don’t know who’s jacking up prices in general knowing that they’re going to lower prices for the company that they are partners with. All of which is to say, this is not a fair market, this is not a market where you can reasonably compete if you play by the rules, but even if they actually bothered to follow the rules, you’re already screwed because they have market dominance.

The only path forward is through government run single payer healthcare. You can call it NHS, you can call it whatever you want, but it has to be run by the government. You need the government to set price ranges for drugs and treatments so that the drug companies and the hospitals don’t f*** over everyone.

But I don’t think Americans are ready for that yet. Obviously Trump winning the election makes it incredibly unlikely, but I think even large numbers of Democrat voters are still trapped in American exceptionalism. They know they’re getting fleeced, but they aren’t yet willing to say that they should probably copy what’s happening north of the border or across either ocean. They have good stories, things about super long wait times or lack of doctor choice, pretending that those things don’t happen in the US, and then pretending that those things do happen in every other country that has universal health care, which is laughable. But it’s hard, because so many people are desperate to believe that the US is the greatest country in the world, and they are desperate to avoid recognizing that they’ve been getting f***** right in the ear for the last few decades.

Right. Bill Gates is horribly evil and rich, and like many people in his shoes, he decided to be a philanthropist to fix his image. What if millions of other people had gotten that money instead of him? What if Windows hadn’t been monopolistic? What kind of world would we be in today? A better one, most likely.

Don’t waste our time, please. Just use the standard American definitions when chatting about domestic American politics. It’s not so hard.

Of course rich folk will look for allies among poor folk. Play off the people against each other. This strategy is centuries old … no wait, millennia old.

You don’t mend a divide. That’s pointing to the divide as the problem, when the real problem is discrimination.

Biden gave it a shot, got stymied, and walked away. Hey, a weak attempt is better than nothing, but we sure would have liked to see him try harder. I don’t blame him for failing, but he certainly didn’t give it his all.

Oh my friend, you’re here trying to lecture the internet and ignoring the lulz. IMO life is too stressful for that approach, but you do you. … by the way, 1A protects nearly all speech. There are limits, but general advice and tips are nowhere near the edge of acceptability.

I agree with you that Republicans have been big on obstructionism. And Democrats have never taken serious steps to deal with it, because corporate Democrats like the obstructionism. They want to pretend to be left wing, but if they actually had to pass left-wing policies, that would piss off their corporate funders. Obviously this is a vast simplification, but I think the best example was Obama pushing for the ACA instead of NHS. You can argue that it would have been hard to get NHS through, but it would have solved the problems that are even bigger now than they were 10 years ago. No way big pharma was going to allow that. There’s too much money to be made when you sell insurance and then allow your customers to die anyway.

When you say something like, violence should be avoided, I have no idea what you mean. Avoided by who? Avoided when? Certainly law enforcement has done a lot of horrible things, but if you think they ought to exist, then you are explicitly endorsing the use of violence.

Oh I think many of the jokes are about him. Of course they’re about him. He got rich by killing people, he did it intentionally, all of his family and friends knew exactly what he was doing, and almost nobody respects him for it.

It’s kind of comical if you think how pathetically small the reward for information was. $10,000 and then now it’s up to $60,000. That’s how little his family wanted to track down his killer? That’s how little the government cares about who killed him? Jesus.

What an interesting thing to observe. The United States health insurance system is such a complete f****** disaster, and a great many Americans know that, but many of those Americans also feel that the US is the best country in the world. So there is this cognitive dissonance where people are angry but some still won’t admit that maybe Canada and the UK and Japan and dozens of other countries are all doing it better.

And if you’re unwilling to recognize a systemic failure, then maybe the best you can do is hope for a hero or at least some kind of vigilante warrior to come along and dispense justice or karma or whatever you want to call it.

Why would we ignore facts on the ground? Do you have any better facts?

Your hypothetical makes no sense because murder is not ordinary or basic. But even if it were… “Couldn’t have happened to a worse person.” Right? “Karma’s a motherfucker.” Right?

Many Americans are so blindly patriotic that they don’t realize their health insurance system is much worse than dozens of other countries. At the same time, many of these Americans also know that they’re being scammed. It is interesting to look at that cognitive dissonance. And it is interesting to look at mainstream media, so afraid to point out how screwed everyone in the country is, because of some evil rich assholes.