Do Americans really believe they’ll be able to get their pet monster under control once they genocide the entire Middle East?

I don’t think any Americans who truly support this think further than the next quarter of Raytheon profits.

Korra and Toph from Avatar, Tsunade and Sakura from Naruto

someone trained in protecting

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a cop protecting anything other than a storefront

A team of a nurse or social worker + cop is the alternative to (generally) 2 cops. Whatever the funding mechanism behind the doors, you’re switching out a cop for an alternative person, which is exactly what the defund movement has always been asking for. See some quotes below:

https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-police-services/

The police service is a dangerous option for people experiencing a mental health crisis—but for many, it’s the only option. By defunding the police, significant resources can be reallocated to create a new community emergency services to support the mental health needs of our vulnerable community members. Teams trained in de-escalation and who root their work in community-informed practices could provide crisis support and care.

…

One common refrain in opposition to defunding the police assumes that our society will not be able to effectively respond to violent crime. But we have to remember that police do not prevent violence. In most incidents of violent crime, police are responding to a crime that has already taken place. When this happens, what we need from police is a service that will investigate the crime, and perhaps prevent such crimes from occurring in future.

Policing is ill-equipped to suit these needs. When victims are not the right kinds of victims, police have utterly failed, and at times refused to take the threat seriously. Why would we rely on an institution that has consistently proven that it is rife with systemic anti-Blackness and other forms of discrimination that result in certain communities being deemed unworthy of support? Instead of relying on police, we could rely on investigators from other sectors to carry out investigations. Social workers, sociologists, forensic scientists, doctors, researchers, and other well-trained individuals to fulfill our needs when violent crimes take place.

…

If we were to defund the police, we could create new investigative services where diverse teams of researchers and investigators, with a mix of scientific, public health and sociological expertise are able to attend to our investigative needs without the inherent anti-Blackness with which the police services approach our unsolved cases. Additionally, we could put money into programs attending to the food security and housing security needs of people living in precarity, to reduce the likelihood that desperate people unable to have their basic needs met would resort to the extraordinary step of attempting to meet their needs through theft.

Yoo a lot of nostalgia for the Cybiko! My mom wouldn’t let me get a gameboy but my sister managed to find one of these somewhere. That was my only way to do handheld gaming for years! The games sucked but it was better than homework =)

https://tacticaltransition.com/product/ar-15-finishing-kit-rainbow-pvd-coated/

It likely won’t be done at scale, but let’s say you are wildly successful and are now in line for a high-value position, where vetting is common. Might look pretty bad if you fabricated your whole thesis. Recently, Bill Ackman basically bullied several schools into firing their head administrators on the pretense of not citing sources correctly in their thesis papers.

Yeah, it can be very exhausting to manage your manager.

Everyone loves cowboy bebop, and a lot of shounen anime has penetrated pretty far - DBZ, Naruto, One Piece, etc.

There’s a few separate threads of people responding to your comment regarding what marketing is, so it’s probably helpful to add what the guy actually said in the linked article (I know, who reads the article anymore🙄).

“Marketing is dead,” he said. “Marketing is dead. It truly is—I can back this shit up, man. There’s no channels anymore—it doesn’t work. You used to have marketing, communication, and PR. Marketing was essentially a retail theory—you were trying to get your box on the right point of the store shelf, and you have partnerships with retail stores. Those pipelines are gone. Now you’ve got the internet. Nobody is looking at ads anymore … all of the channels that we would usually market through are no longer really viable. So their function is also reduced by the fact that players just want to be spoken to. They don’t want to be bamboozled—they just want to know what you’re making and why you’re making it and who it’s for.”

You’d think if they really believed their own bs that democracy was at stake, they would do everything to court votes in swing states, such as, idk, the enormous Arab population in Michigan? Biden clearly prioritizes dead Gazan babies over “democracy.”

100%. Blue MAGA’s going to come out in force on this thread. If you’re in CA or similar “will go blue no matter what” state, there’s no reason for principled leftists to vote for Biden. Same with “will go red no matter what” states.

Yeah, but people also have blinders as to how the actual voting structure works. If you’re in CA/NY for dems or AL/MS for repubs, your vote basically doesn’t matter since those places will go blue/red no matter what, so you’re 100% free to vote for the person/platform you actually like! Any insinuation that you might vote for someone other than Biden is met with immediate scorn and ridicule.

Agree, depressing what gets upvoted - seems like any attempt to have a conversation other than 100% agreement is met with extreme hostility.

I’ve got one of those guitars too! Super light, really fun to play, looks awesome.

on the bright side, once it’s in a playable state after a few patches it will probably be on sale!

In my personal opinion, seems like a number of factors are at work. First, the second amendment has become more republican-coded, so republicans are probably more likely to purchase more guns than they would have. Second, the media’s sensationalism has constantly increased, so a lot of people consider a gun to be a prudent option - either viewing many cities to be hellholes, and the only way they would travel there is with a CCW, or seeing crazy people fighting over COVID supplies and thinking “maybe they’re coming for my toilet paper, better get a gun.” Third, a lot of firearm-curious people see the rise of the republicans arming up and feel like they have no choice but to also get a gun.

One concerning element in all of this is that even though there has been an increase in guns, it doesn’t seem like there has been a corresponding increase in gun ranges, so people are likely not achieving competence with their guns.

There are at least 2 other democrats in the running that could beat Trump that are polling >10%, but the DNC won’t allow debates. If the DNC believed in Biden, they should allow debates to show all of us that he’s competent.

Yeah, AMD GPUs work great across the board no matter the CPU.

Good to know, but… ick.