admiralteal @ admiralteal @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

And for anyone who doesn't put the dots together: a doctor cannot intentionally kill someone. It is the most profound ethics violation everywhere I am aware.

Even in places where there is medical euthanasia, the person must do it to themselves by e.g., pushing a button and someone who is incompetent to do so is ineligible for that euthanasia.

I'm sure there are shady places where this isn't the rule. But those same places, I suspect, are a lot more practical about execution than all this pseudo-humane "medical execution" crapola.

Considered too cruel to be used by vets because of the clear signs of distress shown in animals to which it was administered. But this guy says it's good enough for humans!

It's important that a prisoner not just be killed, but can feel themselves dying, apparently.

I understand why you would think this seems peaceful. But we have no idea whether it is, anyone claiming otherwise is bullshitting or lying, and the entire idea of "humane" execution is an oxymoron to begin with.

They should be called conservative because the image of conservatism should not be washed free of his touch.

Conservative means appealing to traditional values, power structures, and hierarchies. It means resisting change even if doing so rejects progress, reduces liberties, or is bad for a just and equitable society. There are different words for the people who prioritize all those things over maintaining the status quo: progressive, liberal, and socialist. The conservatives assure us they are none of these things.

In some way, be glad for Trump. He's showing conservatism in its truest form. Social progress comes knocking and he's here to donkey kick it back into the street. Campaigners for justice ask for aid and he slaps away their hands. Victims cry out that their rights are being violated and he laughs, scoffs, and admits it's him doing it. That's always been what conservatism is about.

But you should also call them evil fascist tinpot monsters.

What was Bernie's Israel stance again? Uh-oh.

It really isn't that, though.

Your vote is a commodity. It's influence to be spent, and you should spend it wisely.

People who think their vote is some deep moral choice need to get over themselves. Try to affect the greatest positive outcome you can. A vote is not a formal, sworn endorsement of everything every checkbox on the ballot stands for. If it were, only the Trump cultists would ever be voting.

Why is the blood on your hands? For voting for the guy who was less keen on killing Palestinians?

Do you forget that Trump intentionally and actively stirred the pot in the region? That he aligned himself with Bibi, not just Israel, because he likes tinpot dictators? Moved the embassy to Jerusalem just to stir shit up and make it messy? Appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of peace negotiations because getting his special boy a cushy job mattered more than protecting life?

What could you have possibly done differently to protect life over there? Any other choice you would've made would've been a worse outcome for the region. THEN you would be culpable.

A vote is not some deep sign of moral commitment to the candidate. Get over yourself if you think it is. Votes are a commodity. You spend it to affect change. You don't always get great value on your money, but you have to min max.

If we start a major world conflict right now I'm sure it will create sufficient distraction from climate change that your kids won't have anything to fight over.

Which is kind of back to my thesis -- respect and acknowledge the IRA. It's good shit that anyone who voted for Biden, even if it was just as a vote for "not Trump", should be proud of it. Demanding more like it.

I'm inclined to agree, but I also don't know that a lack of munitions would definitely lead to less killing -- Israel is a nuclear state, after all, and they seem very inclined to murder Palestinians. A worse-armed Israel might conceivably be even more indiscriminate (as hard to imagine as that is), and I've not sat in those JCS or whatever meetings to know what the rational is.

Maybe Biden is just genuinely prescribing his pro-Israel political opinions on the entire foreign policy. That doesn't seem too likely, given that he's Mr. Compromise.
Maybe the foreign policy really is just that entrenched in orthodoxy. That always seemed most probable to me, that the idea of in any way blinking in the support is just unimaginable to the top State and actual brass.
Maybe the situation has more complex concerns than any of us know. That's pretty much certain.

As it is, I think Biden deserves heavy criticism for this foreign policy. It's more than just a bad look. Aiding and abetting a genocide is not acceptable, full stop. But the idea that he's not just failing to adequately stand up to it, but is indeed the cause of it is absurd, and either way one bad policy move shouldn't completely wash away all the other progress -- even though it does for so many people.

Personally, I like that he's being protested like this. I just wish the conversation would stop ink-washing his entire term, obviating everything good that has happened. He's not JUST the alternative to Trump. The IRA alone gives plenty of reason to earn a vote.

I hear you, and maybe I am too critical. It never had the love for me post Stewart though, and I watched it pretty much every day for many years. Including the entire Oliver stretch. I dropped it pretty early during Noah because it just didn't catch me at all, and in spite of several tries I never was into it again. Even Al Fraken's stint didn't capture me. Bee was great though.

I think this may speak more to the state of talk series than anything else -- most of them are just so bad these days. ...how on god's green earth is Bill Maher still consistently one of the top-streamed shows on HBO I will never understand.

God, that has to be depressing for him. He did so much to set that show up for success, but he's now coming back in to put out fires and try to get it working again.

He thought he was retiring and moving to doing good work. AppleTV fucked him on editorial control and his baby TDS couldn't hold itself up on its own.

Meanwhile his protegee is winning Emmy after Emmy with one of the best programs out there.

And worse, coming back in for the 2024 election. The joke people were telling when he left is that leaving right as Trump was coming into power was 'such a waste' of comedy potential. And his response was, pretty frankly, that it was an awful thing he didn't want to see. Now he's coming right back into it.

I really hope he's able to come back, get it back in shape, and then find a strong successor and go back to doing the projects he really wants to be doing. If anyone can, it's Stewart, I suppose. I'll give it a watch with him back in the helm, which is more than I can say of most of the rest of it since he left.

I mean, this IS the popular message. It isn't true, but it is the popular message, regularly amplified by the far left and the GOP alike.

The reality of Biden is that he's repeatedly pushed and campaigned for student loan debt forgiveness and has accomplished a great deal on that front even against a corrupt and entrenched conservative judicial apparatus preventing it. He's put a largely-young, massively diverse set of people in charge of the levers of the administrative state. He somehow got passed through a hostile congress the biggest piece of climate legislation ever, in the entire world. He got a huge consensus infrastructure bill passed, too, which in spite of its vast scope has someone gone COMPLETELY under the radar politically -- an accomplishment in its own right. He's had, frankly, a very successful term, all things considered. Better-liked presidents have done far less.

I'm not at all happy with the administration's words as far as the war on Palestine goes, but the oversimplifications aren't saving any lives over there either. And in terms of actual actions being taken... I've yet to hear someone make a convincing practical argument for what we could do to end the conflict and protect lives, setting aside all the discussions of pure ethics that these conversations usually are.

Similarly, I think it is damn time we get serious about supreme court reform. The institution is corrupt and has been for a very long time -- mostly always. But I am not going to say he's a total failure when he doesn't do it. It's morally right to do it. It should be done. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool or a bastard. And I know Biden won't because it would end him, politically, and the other progress is good and worthy of maintaining.

I mean, give it a try. Easiest way is to just open a new mpv window and drag from the url bar into it. There's also a lua script that allows mpv to still make use of sponsorblock, but I haven't ever tried it. Youtube-DL is part of a standard mpv install unless you disabled it.

You can also just mpv 'youtubeurl' from terminal.

Yeah the Google News app too. It's fucking useless -- any time you click something on it you get served up a page of nothing but ads, modals, autoplays, and other unusable crap. Bouncing around as it loads. I had to finally uninstall it and switch to just a bookmark on the homescreen instead.

Way faster when you consider time spent loading and navigating around all the fucking ads. The mobile web without adblock is a dumpster fire of the highest order.

A super lightweight option for viewing videos that I don't see mentioned often is drag and dropping the link into MPV.

By that same line of argument, there are myriad ways to be progressive but only a single way to be conservative. Which is really only true theoretically. In practice, most people who identify as conservative actually have very specific policy preferences for how they want their society to evolve. But at least the way the word is used it has an intended meaning like this.

I mean heck, with the right parameters and conditions doing things like rolling back regulations and appealing to traditional values is progressive. For example look at the advocacy of Strong Towns, who in (very) broad strokes are pushing for a return to more traditional urban development patterns in order to help cities return to safer and more financially sustainable models. If you had a mind to do so you might define this as conservative progressivism, which isn't really a contradiction at all.

Traditionally left and right were not "economic" terms. They were the revolutionaries and the monarchists. And the idea that economic politics as separate from other kinds of politics I kind of reject too.

Well, just know that as bad as it is, you can always look south for a worse solution.

"Left" isn't really much of an identity definition anyway.

Right is clearly aligned with the greater political body of the small-c conservative movement. Preserve existing power structures, resist social progress, prop up 'traditional' values (i.e., the values that match the preferences of your tribe justified by whatever histrionic nonsense you can think of).

The left is really only defined in opposition to the right these days. Liberals, socialists, progressives, Marxists, anarchists, you name it and all the shades in between. The common identity of "the left" is just... not conservative.

Which means I agree with you. Leaning left just means leaning away from right. It doesn't really tell you what specific policies the person wants, just what policies they reject. And center/middle/"moderate" has no particular meaning in this day and age.

God it must be so nice not having a two-party system.