Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how ‘nice’ they may seem.

I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of…I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.

And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening’s entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.

That’s the people we’re dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.

Consider this question: how is it that anyone under the age of 40 today has ever smoked?

By the time they were born, the bad effects of smoking were well understood. By the time they were teenagers, not smoking should have been as obvious as not jumping in front of a train. People already addicted find it difficult to quit, but it in no way explains anyone starting.

The question is different and yet very similar, because the things you mention wind up in a similar way. Somehow people start in that route even though it should be obvious not to. And these things you mention are much easier to fall into than smoking because parents, family, etc are all pushing it on people. Smokers generally aren’t pushing their kids, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, etc to smoke, and somehow smoking still proliferates to some degree, just consider how much more difficult to avoid it is for those whose families are actively encouraging them to fall into these methods of belief and hate.

Because so-called second amendment advocates are really just gun nuts, and so over the years they have worked hard to maintain the right to keep and bear guns, rather than arms.

Thus knives, swords, halberds, maces, and all other ‘arms’ have had restrictions go unchallenged, or at least, not challenged by an extensive and well funded network of advocacy.

Well I think it can be fixed with technology because fixing it doesn’t violate any laws of physics.

A more pressing question however is whether we humans will obtain or develop the necessary technology and put enough resources into using it, soon enough to make a difference to us. And on that question my magic 8-ball says “Outlook not so good.”

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Not ‘to grant them greater control’ or even ownership. To secure exclusive right for a limited time. And this only because it was meant to promote science and art.

Using copyright to prevent a work from spreading is a direct perversion of the intent, it is using it in a manner diametrically opposed to what it is supposed to do.

These changes could be applied retroactively; this isn’t like creating an ex post facto law and then jailing people for breaking a law that didn’t exist at the time of the event.

How about reword it slightly: it must be available for purchase if you want to use IP law to prevent others from distributing it.

Too fucking bad? The purpose of IP was to give the public access to novel ideas and art, not to increase the control creators had over it.

And yet, instead of answering a simple question, you’ve launched into a ‘if only we could change the past’ screed.

If there was a good answer to the question, people like you would just answer.

I don’t think ‘going’ anywhere would be an option. If you’re in basically, most of the civilized world, and not in a very secure structure, you’re immediately fucked. I said more than 50% but I guessed that as a very conservative estimate. We don’t normally realize just how many living things are around us, mostly bugs, but also small rodents and the like. If every one of those within a significant radius of every human suddenly went berserk and wanted the humans dead, most people are not in areas where the number of attackers would permit much survival.

Those who currently live in certain desert environments, in certain cold environments, and so forth, would probably survive the first day, and then might have a hope of making it longer. But most environments in which there isn’t enough animal/bug life around to immediately kill you present serious other problems such as food supply. If you live at McMurdo Sound Antarctica, you’re probably not going to immediately be killed. But you will soon have issues feeding yourself and keeping warm.

People in Iceland or northern Norway and other similar places might have the best chances. Probably not quite enough things around to kill everyone immediately, but the environment is one in which they might be able to become self-sufficient, but in the long term I have my doubts even for them. If the bugs and animals and such are so focused on killing humans that they no longer perform their normal functions, then you’re looking at immediate and total ecological collapse. If they’re not, then the population of bugs and animals will increase in all areas other than the most extreme environments, and sooner or later what few humans survived in those extreme environments are going to have to attempt to emerge.

If humans had prep time, maybe. Assuming we could get over our normal difficulties cooperating and actually prepare for the event. There’d at least be a lot of survivors. But if it came as a surprise, suddenly someone flips a switch and the entire animal kingdom is trying to make every single one of us dead? We’re pretty much fucked.

If this means that every animal immediately goes berserk and tries to kill all humans, and ‘animal’ includes bugs, then the animals probably win.

Those people in relatively secure places without enough animals when it starts could survive, but there’s probably be 50% or higher casualties among the general human population in less than a day.

This started to become noticeable years ago when Google decided to start censoring searches even with SafeSearch off.

I switched to Bing at that time, which was good for a while, but eventually they have started doing the same thing.

I can now no longer find a search engine that actually works to find me all the relevant results. I’ve tried all that I’ve heard of, and none will provide complete results.

The easiest canary in the coal mine for this is NSFW stuff. If I search for a popular character of which I know there’s lots of porn/hentai, with SafeSearch off, and do not get a heavy mix of SFW and NSFW results, I know that search engine is messing with those results, and is also definitely doing it with searches that are not so obvious.

I mean, that’s a fair criticism in a way. If Bill lets you taste the chicken at that point, it’s reasonable to comment on what he let you taste. If he didn’t think it was ready enough to get your opinion on, he shouldn’t have let you taste it at all.

There are very few humans who would not be depressed if they were the last person on earth. Even the most introverted among us are still, well, human.

Sort of. Except all the shelves have weird lips on them to keep you from grabbing the product easily, you kinda have to wrangle each item. Also it’s layout and design is archaic and super hard to navigate. And on every aisle there’s these little 3 inch steps that you have to go up and down and constantly trip on, or your cart gets stuck on them and you have to lift it up or drop it down. And then if you do manage to buy things, their support is terrible; at the other store if you need help cooking they have a 24 hour recipe hotline to help you out, but this one promises the same, but you actually wind up on hold for hours half the times you call.

So they got tons of free samples, but all their products are kinda a nightmare.

The juxtaposition of these posts just below the gif of the bison KOing the other, smaller one, and leaving it to the wolves just above is, I think, even funnier than the comic.

Now I suddenly want to resurrect the Baghdad Bob meme template, but…effort.

Yeah, that’s an excellent example. Those protests posed a credible threat to that specific business - indeed, to some degree they even already carried out some of the threat, just to show it was credible - which made changes to what they had the power to affect - their own actions.

I think the best way to put it is that protests can be effective only when they present a credible threat of some sort against the people who have the power to make changes to whatever the protest is about. That threat may be direct violence, it may be electoral change, or it may be something else, but a credible threat of some sort is absolutely required.

Protesting against Israel, therefore, is of little use in most situations. The protesters pose no credible threat to Israel, so their decisions aren’t going to change. And the protesters generally are not representing much of a credible threat against their own governments either, so their own governments are also not moved to change.

I’m not sure if they’re more likely to become corrupt, but if they do they can be worse than other organizations. Religions have all sorts of special legal protection, and adherents to them usually find coming to the conclusion that they and their representatives have done wrong to be a much higher bar to clear.

So even if not more likely to become corrupt, they present a particularly large hazard if and when they do.

If I understand correctly they have some kind of explanation where the sun works like a spotlight or something. But it also requires light to curve in weird ways to make any damn sense, soooo…