He has a long history of retweeting Nazis and agreeing with them. It’s an indictment on our society that this is so little known even in the USA.

I’ve been trying e-books, usually when I find something I want to read it will say something like you are 38th in line. Minnesota.

Every book I try to check out has a 3 month to 3 year wait-list. Not exactly a convenient way to read.

I’ve just been calling self defense, because that’s what it was.

I’ll never buy a Samsung again absolutely irritating phones. I’ve had 2 nearly flawless pixel phones. Even if this doesn’t last 5 years, I’m not going back to endless bloatware programs that enshitify the Samsung. If I leave pixel it would be for something like fairphone.

I got mine around release, which means it’s 3 years 2 months, no issues so far.

Every year I grow more food than the previous year. Someday I’m hoping to grow most of my non-meat items and then fork over the money for local organic meat and freeze it.

My guess is that these people were simply absent from the vote. If they scheduled the vote for an impractical time that would explain most of this.

Most places had some type of shelter in place orders for a period of time that was difficult for people to handle. I never thought your comment was anti-vax.

Here’s the thing, it was a global pandemic, any decision a government made was only going to mitigate disaster, not prevent it entirely. Either a lot of people died or a lot of people had a really difficult time. I tend to think preventing deaths comes first. If your argument is NZ wasn’t flawless in their handling of the pandemic response, sure, no one was. But they did a better job than almost any other country. Zero countries had a satisfied populous after the pandemic. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. You’ll learn from it and hopefully do even better next time.

Here’s some perspective, in the US we had more people die in the pandemic than any other single event in American history. More than WWII, more than the Spanish flu, more than the civil war, etc. The damage to our psyche from all that death, far exceeds 4 months in lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Over 1 million dead here, be grateful your country at least sought to keep you alive.

I don’t disagree with a single word you said. But having perspective and leaving time to be human is not burying your head in the sand.

The last things I tried to say was that taking action is one thing you can do to mitigate your sense of helplessness. People who help others or try to make the world a better place often end up in a better mental space. It has the added benefit of working against all of the bad shit that is happening. Pick something, anything you care about, and try to make a difference. Even if you only make a tiny difference, if a thousand other people go out there and make the same tiny difference, suddenly you’ve moved the needle. In my experience, despair is nearly always coupled with paralyzed inaction.

While on one hand I completely agree. On the other hand most generations in human history saw difficult times. One thing we have now is easy access to extra layers of constant despair by always being able to see any bad thing that is happening every minute of every day, on the news, on social media, from our politicians, etc. Then it even creeps into discussions with friends. The general dispare has crept into the discussion and taken over. But at the end of the day, most people have food, shelter, water, family, friends, and some level of healthcare (all be it problematic in the US).

For those of us lucky enough to not be destitute, or a current or future target of a repressive regime, it is important to remember to take some time to actually enjoy life instead of always feeling helpless about a profoundly imperfect world. Depression caused by the status of the world can also be avoided by taking action. Those that help, rarely let the status of the world get them down. Because, they know they did their part to move it in the right direction.

a lot of harm to society

You mean one of the lowest per capita death rates of any country with transparent reporting? Explain to me how saving tens of thousands of lives in New Zealand was bad without sounding like a dickhead…

Sadly as I get older I game less hours, so most of my games on this list are older. LoL, wow, Dota 2, modern warfare 2 (2009), Wingspan(online boardgame), PubG battlegrounds, counter strike 2, terraria. I haven’t played fps, wow, or dota for years, but they still dominate this list. It’s funny because if I made a list of my favorite games, it would include almost none of these, except terraria.

I said I was a gun owner because it directly contradicted your moronic binary thinking were people can only fit in one of 2 boxes.

instead they could open the NICS to people who sell guns for free

Okay go ahead…

And how do gun safety courses ban private sales?

Common criminals are not the only gun deaths. For crimes of passion, requiring a short term barrier to ownership usually leaves time for that passion to subside. For suicide, requiring a short term barrier is often insurmountable for someone that is depressed. But most importantly, for gun safety, a lot of dip shits with guns have zero idea what they are doing and are a danger to everyone even if they don’t intend to be. The same people that will argue up and down that mandatory gun safety is too far, will also argue that gun safety courses make guns safer and we should allow all guns because good people with guns train themselves and take it seriously. It’s usually just the mandatory part that bothers them.

I agree with the entire second half of your comment, from “pay teachers” to “end qualified immunity”. They aren’t mutually exclusive though.

I think simple minded people can only differentiate pro or anti when most issues are nuanced. Stop being simple minded. I’ve owned a gun for most of my life, I also think some of the gun laws need to change. That doesn’t make me anti gun, it just means I understand some regulation could save lives.

Things like universal background checks, and mandatory gun safety courses (resulting in a gun license), could both reduce gun violence while still allowing most citizens to own guns. That doesn’t make me anti gun, it just means I think we can do things to reduce violence by gun.

I think they meant it doesn’t solve any problems because they never were the problem.

No, perpendicular. We were on a path out of the way. I’m not sure why it came our direction, but I remember more than one pulley and the tree was propped against a building sort of in our direction.

I was watching some amature tree removal people rig a pulley system to a tree that partially fell over from about 50 yards away with a few other people. They hooked it up to a pickup truck and drove forward at full power. The pulley snapped and landed behind me on an incline a fraction of a second later. I felt the wind from it go over my head and sort of visually noticed it go by in the same way someone would notice a cannonball go clear across a field in an instant. It was most certainly going fast enough and weighed enough to completely demolish my skull and everything inside. Very surreal, we opted to leave them to their work after that.

Sorry you’re getting down votes. I think you’re giving your honest perspective and that doesn’t deserve the dismissiveness. I do think you undersell how much Trump specifically had to do with misinformation though. I do really believe the culture around Trump really follows his lead, so when he was selling misinformation, you saw his followers parroting his misinformation which I do think was likely responsible for a lot of death.

We had the most severe rate of COVID deaths in the world outside of Eastern Europe. That shouldn’t happen in the most powerful country in the world. We failed to do the things we needed to early on and created a culture of misinformation because our president decided to play politics in a crisis.

Had we reacted as well as New Zealand, largely considered to have one of the better responses, we theoretically could have had 280k deaths instead of 1.2 million. (If we matched their death rate) Obviously population density and our countries complex system account for some of the difference in death rate, but it doesn’t account for the enormous gulf between us and other wealthy countries. We are the only wealthy country in the world that had a death rate as high as ours. He bungled the response and likely got an extra half a million people killed. It’s amazing that this fact alone didn’t end his political career, but Americans suck at interpreting data.