Oh they know, they just also know that they won’t face consequences if their rhetoric is completely untethered from reality, no matter how dangerous - it’s their whole thing.

Okay, fine, maybe Trump doesn’t know the definitions, but his puppet masters certainly do.

Don’t blame hospital staff for not committing a HIPAA violation that could ruin their career and leave them liable for legal action. Sure, maybe you would like for them to disclose this kind of thing, but when you compromise patient privacy like that it leaves the door open for major problems.

Think of it in the context of underage drinking, as an example: if you bring someone to a hospital who has alcohol poisoning but is under 21, they won’t inform the police, despite having proof of legal wrongdoing, because doing so would only cause additional harm by discouraging people from seeking medical help when they need it in the future. It’s better for everyone if medical staff can just stay impartial and do their jobs.

100%, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive. The corresponding shock to oil prices certainly served Moscow’s purposes.

Pretty sure you’re correct. Seems like it’s just a miscommunication around the word ‘deep’, with one person meaning deeply hidden and the other meaning deeply ingrained.

Pretty much everyone I know (bar for those few still religiously devoted to doing their best impression of a boot polish sommelier) seems to be on the same page about how nearly everything Trump does is a distraction from the files, and that’s been the consensus for months now, even before the Iran War.

That said, I run in very different circles than those who make up the loyal core of MAGA, and I’ve learned to never doubt my countrymen’s ability to achieve new and rarified heights of stupidity and cognitive dissonance. I also never felt like most people even tolerated the idea of Donald Trump, and that led to an extremely unpleasant surprise in the wake of the 2024 election, so my social circle probably isn’t a particularly representative cross-section.

Oh trust me, he’s in the teens, I can promise you that.

Hit the nail on the head. I’m not proud to admit that I’m absolutely okay with execution purely for the reason of retribution in the face of truly unforgivable acts (I’m talking the Epsteins of the world; beyond any doubt guilty of years of atrocity). I acknowledge that this isn’t justice, it’s vengeance, but my ape brain admittedly doesn’t really view the two separately - a relic of our evolutionary past, I’m sure.

However, I absolutely don’t trust the state to be the one setting the requirements for what meets the definition of unforgivable, and I certainly don’t trust them to do their due diligence, so the whole thing has to go. As it stands, capital punishment isn’t about what you did, so much as it is the state proving to you and everyone else that only they have a monopoly on violence. That they can, if they so choose, end your life and nobody can do anything about it. It’s about proving that they, at the end of the day, own you.

Trigger warning: this is about to get fairly gruesome; I’ll be going in depth on botched hangings.

But short answer: 100%. Hanging can be botched in a variety of ways. More detailed explanation below.

I love this being framed as inhumane as if lethal injection isn’t the most consistently botched method of execution and as if firing squad isn’t by far the most effective and painless. People are shocked by it, and they want to abstract away from the barbarism inherent in the taking of a human life, but no matter the method, the end result is always the same.

Capital punishment shouldn’t exist in my opinion, not because I have any moral issues with it in principle, but because the burden of proof is simply too high to be met by the legal system as it exists now. Given that it does exist, however, I would personally choose firing squad as my way to go ten times out of ten. Better that than the paralytic working, the anesthetic not working, and feeling lava in your veins for the final minutes of your life as you can’t even scream.

Tbf, I’m a zoomer who knows a lot of people who vape, and the overwhelming sentiment among people I know isn’t the denial of “this won’t give me cancer”, but rather the nihilism of “I cannot be bothered to give a shit if this will give me cancer, because I probably won’t live long enough for it to matter.”

That’s not to say there isn’t a denial crowd, but the prevailing view in my experience seems to be that if, in the end, it’s the cancer that does us in, then we have already survived past all expectations, and in the present we’re just trying to get through the day.

Godspeed, soldier, and thank you for your service up to now. You’ve been a persistent voice of reason on Lemmy, and I’ll miss seeing your input, but taking care of yourself comes first.

Hoping all goes well for you, and I’m looking forward to hearing how you beat cancer’s ass!

Well, at least we’re getting good fuel efficiency in this dogshit economy?

I mean, it sort of does, particularly as far as retirement is concerned. I know some MAGA diehards that are, to a significant degree, judging by the metric of their 401k/Roth retirement savings accounts, and the value of those accounts are necessarily going to be tightly linked with the overall performance of the stock market by virtue of the fact that they are investment account.

Now, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the US stock market has been largely decoupled from reality since at least 2008. Consequently, the current state of the stock market no longer functions as any kind of meaningful metric for economic health. It is, in my view, just a system for speculation which exists to transfer wealth out of the pockets of the people attempting to beat the market and into the pockets of the people who already have enough money or influence to make the market. Even decoupled from reality as it is, however, I find it a dubious prospect that the line can ever keep going up indefinitely - they never do, and especially not when so many other (arguably more concrete) economic indicators are pointing the other way.

Looking at you, load-bearing (and suspiciously bubble-shaped) AI hype, looking at you.

Should such a crash happen, I’ll be very excited to hear what rationalization they pivot into this time. Who knows, maybe Trump will get control of the fed like he wants and then we can throw hyperinflation (and likely a subsequent de-dollarisation) into the mix to really take the already roaring garbage fire up a notch. I’m certain that this fascist will be just as cautious and responsible with the money cannon as his dictator peers have historically been.

When they go low, start hitting below the belt until they cry foul.

I don’t really know what I put there that qualifies as purity testing? If it’s the final paragraph, I should say that it was intended to be unserious; I just wanted an excuse to continue the ‘fetter’ bit.

As stated, I think the situation is very unlikely, to the point that it’s not worth seriously considering unless we have a demonstrable, compelling reason to believe that a flip is presently happening. My point was rather to say that Fetterman’s flip was less unexpected than it would initially seem given what information existed at the time, and if he’d gotten the kind of attention Mamdani did when he was running, it likely wouldn’t have been as surprising as it ended up being. Conversely, however, even after the intense scrutiny Mamdani has received from both the media and people on the left and right, it would be a genuine surprise to me if he was being anything other than truthful about his beliefs and intentions, and so the two aren’t really directly comparable. It is speculation, yes, but it’s not as if it’s entirely baseless, and it leads into the conclusion of ‘all we can do is wait and see. There’s not a reason to be worried at this time, but there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful.’

Plus (and to your point), even if Mamdani turned out to be less progressive or less effective than I’d hoped, so long as he’s this side of sane about the current fascist takeover, then I’d say we should count him as an ally, regardless of anything else mentioned.

I mean, Fetterman had some questionable views even before the point that most acknowledged that he’d flipped, he simply got less coverage than Mamdani and had the benefit of running against Dr. Oz so a lot of it was missed/overlooked. I think it’s significantly less likely that Mamdani flips because, to my understanding, he’s been very consistent in his views for quite a while now, even from the time before he was in office.

That said, if Mamdani flipped I could see it doing significant damage to the left on the basis of perception alone, so it could be that I’m just praying the left won’t be… fettered, by another pretender giving progressive policy a wrongfully bad name.

Yes, but if the minimum wage increases, everyone who makes above minimum wage has a better argument to get a raise as well. Employers have to make pay competitive, and a raised minimum wage sets a new floor that wages have to be based around.

Edit: Also, that ignores the fact that there are people who make above minimum wage but below whatever it might be raised to who would also be affected by a minimum wage increase. If the wage was raised to $15, for example, then anyone who currently makes between $7.26 to $14.99 an hour would receive a raise, despite not being represented in the data set you reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States

Very confused why this is getting downvoted so heavily. Sewer socialism is a pre-existing term and is not a negative descriptor. This opinion piece in particular is pointing out that Mamdani is seemingly aiming to be another in a long lineage of successful socialist mayors who made it their mission to focus on the day-to-day infrastructure of a city, even the dirty kind like sewers, as a way to measurably improve the lives of their constituents.

My assumption is that people are downvoting this without actually reading the article, as generally .world seems to heavily favor Mamdani, unless I’m missing something?