https://youtu.be/-wCR65V6wxE?si=rRTJvER1ENQqoC83

“How do I help my uncle Jack off a horse?”

Yikes!

A problem with this question is that the US is such a big and diverse place, that you could have this same question posed to Americans only, asking about their experience visiting other parts of the US.

You think an American wouldn’t also regard that interaction as weird?

Do I just live in a weird bubble? I live in the US and I am rarely at someone’s house who doesn’t remove their shoes nowadays. I certainly grew up wearing shoes at home, but that’s changed significantly over the past 20 years or so.

Yeah, I always wonder how often there’s a need to refer to inhabitants of two continents together as a single entity. Like, if you say someone is South American or North American, that is never confused with being someone specifically from the US. When would those terms be insufficient?

Don’t you mean “from AND into”?

Bill Clinton never debated George W Bush

What kind of Dem candidate is pro fracking?

One who exists in a fucked up electoral system where the entire fate of our country rests upon a few thousand votes in western PA.

There was a time when it was the coolest snack to have at school in the US. Very popular. And it is still certainly a thing for kids nowadays.

Every single person who grew up in the US in the 80s, for starters.

I wonder if a big part of the reason is just the whole phone call about Biden and subsequent impeachment, and how Zelenskyy wouldn’t play ball and the whole thing damaged Trump’s ego in a big way. So even if it’s politically advantageous in every way to say you want Ukraine to win, Trump is incapable of doing so.

She skipped Netanyahu’s speech in protest and called for an end to the war afterwards.

“The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent,” Harris said.

The reports [from Israeli media] appear to reflect worries among Netanyahu’s inner circle that the emergence of Harris as the presumptive Democrat presidential candidate might herald a tougher US line on the conduct of Israel’s war with Hamas.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/politics/harris-netanyahu-israel-hamas-ceasefire/index.html?cid=ios_app

I’m not in any way arguing that she’s doing everything right on this issue. I think she should go more strongly, although I can also acknowledge that someone at this level is walking a tightrope.

However, if anything, her choice to skip the speech in protest associates her with the protest going on outside, and so she went out of her way to separate herself from the actions at the protest that went too far.

You can argue over whether or not some protesters did go too far, or what else she could say and do that would actually help and be effective, I’m just asking for people to strive for accuracy when making claims. This is an important election, in which I genuinely believe that Harris winning the election will lead to a better outcome for Palestinians than any other outcome. I want to be vigilant about what she says but I also don’t want to look for some excuse to paint her with the same brush as everyone else and write her off.

I wasn’t in anyway even trying to imply that these actions weren’t carried out by protesters. That wasn’t the point I was making. Can’t you see the difference between “I think it was wrong to do XYZ at the protest” and “I don’t think there should be a protest”?

I just watched the video and it didn’t say she denounced the protesters, it said she was one of the officials who strongly condemned the graffiti, flag burning, and raising the Palestinian flag. Specifically those actions. Not the protesters themselves or the fact that they were protesting at all.

If your statement was based on that segment alone, then I would say you mischaracterized the situation in a way that makes Harris come off worse.

Source?

I understand why he felt he needed to do this press conference, but at the same time I can’t believe he did it because he would have literally had to be perfect for it to not just generate new headlines and memes about his decline (which it clearly has).

It seems like the headlines will never stop and they are being perpetuated by people on both sides, and he’s completely flailing because the fact is, he’s no longer capable of giving a stellar live performance that can put this all to rest.

Right after the debate, I felt that if Democrats had brushed his performance off, it would have dropped into the background and been totally erased if Biden did reasonably in other appearances and the next debate.

However, each time there is a new headline about a Democrat’s observation that he is not in good shape, I become more certain that he must end his campaign. Not necessarily because I’m more convinced about his mental decline, but because you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

So I’ve stopped weighing whether switching out Biden at a late stage was the optimal strategy in a vacuum. He’s been damaged enough by Democrats in liberal spaces that it’s absolutely the optimal strategy now. I’m not judging these Democrats for what they’ve done, I’m just saying it’s a hell of a gamble. So in my view, we might as well accept it that he’s gotta go and hope to hell their gamble pays off. Because there’s no way the guy can stay after all of this.

While I agree that it would certainly be ideal if a speed limiter could account for the context that the car is in, you’ve missed a lot in drawing your conclusion that it would be useless without being able to do that.

Hitting a pedestrian is not the only type of accident. If you rear end a car going 25 mph at 70mph it is not a guaranteed death sentence for all. Especially if the driver brakes, which some do not, but some will. And this is ignoring cases where there isn’t a tremendous mismatch in speed. Like, even if it reduced residential deaths by 0% but it reduced overall deaths looking at all situations, it would be a net gain with literally nothing lost. We are looking at the aggregate here. So, it isn’t relevant if you think of one specific situation where you believe 70mph isn’t better than 90mph or whatever number.

Reaction time and braking distance are affected by speed. In some cases, the person going 70 might be able to slow down enough to have the collision be non-fatal. Reaction time goes down and braking distance goes up as speed increases. If a speed limiter gives just enough time to occasionally make an accident non-fatal, then in the aggregate you have fewer fatal accidents.

In fact, taking braking distance into account, I don’t think you can even say that over the millions of miles driven, that a speed maxed at 70mph isn’t going to, occasionally, lead to a situation in a residential area where someone was able to just get out of the way in time because the car covered 30% less distance between the time the pedestrian reacted and the time the car reached that spot (or an even larger difference if the driver noticed and braked at some point as well). But again, it doesn’t matter if it’s few to none in this specific scenario, because a speed limiter of 70 will certainly reduce fatalities overall.

You can certainly kill someone going the maximum legal speed in a place where the speed limit is much lower. But the likelihood of injury and death still does increase with the increase in speed. So if, say, 5% of accidents involving someone going 70 are fatal, but 10% if the person is going 90 (these are made-up numbers), then if cars are not even able to go above 70, you end up saving lives.