The US is horrendously backwards on animal welfare.

There is an adjustment period, which is often uncomfortable.

Find me a philosophy or religious perspective that is unambiguous about brute force.

It’s effective as long as one doesn’t consider the consequences, but the reality of nearly every situation is such that there’s always a better way. Did the US need to nuke two Japanese cities and every inhabitant during WW2? Or were they just too tired, scared of a war of attrition and with the technological option available, they took the easier path?

Maybe. How are we going to responsibly fight one?

You are correct in your noticing Democrats have been the party of decorum - and that’s the penultimate refuge of the incompetent before violence. So, now we’ve established that the two-ply paper-thin veneer of legitimacy has unraveled, what should we do?

There are ways out of this. None of them are easy.

Vote with your wallet, vote in primaries. Go to community board meetings. Speak up, even if you’re afraid of what anyone might think. More people will respect you for trying than you’d think, but don’t waste the opportunity on something trivial.

Don’t do business with anyone with destructive politics to the point where it causes you personal/professional inconvenience and costs your money. Support local communities. Talk to the guy on the street corner you always see but never approached. Maybe they can tell you something. Talk to the guy that makes your sandwiches at the store, your bartender, your barista, your cleaning lady, your laundromat people. Hell talk to your drug dealer/street pharmacist. Talk to your coworkers and don’t be scared. If they snitch then you will know indicators better for next time, and trust me - you will survive the mistake. Maybe it’s BS, maybe you’ll realize there’s an angle to help yourself and everyone else. Never do anything unless it helps more people than yourself, and doesn’t have an obvious negative externality that you can account for.

Go to rallies, go to meetings. Show support in public for people you believe in, someone standing up next to you when you stick your neck out counts for more than you can possibly understand. Put yourself on the front line facing armed police. Make the point that you won’t break, and that they can’t scare you. Remain nonviolent until you have no other option, but be prepared when they invent reasons to hurt you withing reason - and remember that they may have thought they never had a choice (even if they did).

This is going to get ugly.

The next time someone annoys or inconveniences you, or says something provocative, ask yourself why, and ask yourself what personal hell they are living in made them do that?

If this sounds a lot like religious nonsense, that’s exactly what it is. That stuff was (arguably flawed and wantonly misinterpreted) attempts to give people a map going forwards. We’ve been putting in an abysmal effort to do better for not only ourselves, but everyone else, and now everyone’s hurting. Some people you can’t help, they’re so stuck into their monomaniacal vision of reality that they don’t care who they’re hurting, even if it’s ultimately themselves through consequence or some other metaphysical mechanism whether you believe in it or not.

Find a community, build a community. Be a leader and set a better example for everyone around you.

It may already be too late but your actions going forwards from here will determine what survives, and whether THAT is worth saving.

And remember - it’s not just humans. There are many other living beings on this planet that don’t have the technological capacity, legal status or physical ability to make themselves heard, and our status demands at very least the acknowledgement of some form of responsible stewardship.

Good Luck.

To all of us.

It sounds to me like the dying gasp of a cocaine-fueled homerotic roadtrip in California somewhere.

In spite of themselves. Despair is a useless emotion.

Thank you for the information. My (incorrect) assumption was the oft-paraded “gun show” loophole.

I think consistent effort is required to erase any misconception about the availability of firearms.

Really? I thought they’d deep throat them for data?

They’ve had to scale capacity faster than they thought, the flagship instance is getting some additional capacity and a fulltime DevOps team

What a foolish bill.

swap “www” with “old”
slightly less bad, but it’s still a worthless site at this point with half of the useful information either years out of date or actively deleted.

Road trip to Georgia and back, basically.

Well, I don’t like it, but you’re right.

NYC as an institution has many hard-working people at all levels dedicated to their communities.

The mayor, however, is a worthless self-serving piece of shit that sold out to foreign nationals, and a good chunk of the city elite are corrupt one way or another.

It’s a very, very mixed bag.

Because they are scared, and hiding behind the skirts of a paper-thin layer of incompetent fascists prior to facing the music from everybody they’ve hurt.

Well, minus an effective central bank…

US global influence is already well into decline. This is the USA’s Byzantine period as we shift from a unipolar into an increasingly multipolar world.

If someone could spit out some nice high-performance RISC-V CPU with an integrated open-source and most importantly mainlined GPU (which also includes a video encoder/decoder which could handle 4k 264, 265* and AV1) … I’d be SO happy…

• Yes, I know the intellectual property/digital restrictions management cesspit would do everything they could to prevent this from happening. One can dream, though.

And here I am stuck in an apartment in NYC with one option… spectrum cable. That’s it. I mean you COULD get Verizon DSL (lol) or some horrendously overpriced LTE thing, but realistically you’re at the mercy of whatever bloodsucking landlord thinks you deserve.