You do realize how close we were to elected officials hanging from the gallows on the front steps of the capitol, right? 1 locked door and a half dozen cops.
But regardless, the point is that the ringleader was never punished, and he was reelected and is sitting in the Oval Office right now talking about committing more election fraud after Elon “fixed those machines right up” in 2024.
IMO, they have a similar thing going on as the US does where one of their largest exports is culture.
The veneer is peeling on the American Empire, but Hollywood and American media giants (and credit card companies) still hold massive sway over much of the world’s cultures, and Japan holds similar power with the export of anime and manga, as they are often one of the few things people know Japan through (that, and stuff about feudal era Japan and samurai as the Japanese counterpart to the American cowboy).
PR is one of their biggest products, whether it’s through their media or the reputation of the quality of their consumer goods, etc.
I see, so you understand that an economy exists, but not that it has many different interlocking pieces that can be examined in different ways. Let me see if I can break it down for you:
When you spend money at the store, when the store pays its employees, or when it buys goods from other vendors, are all examples of what is often referred to as “economic activity”. This can take many different forms at many different scales, in much the same way that a walk around the block is not considered an international flight.
For example, you go to the store and purchase a head of lettuce to make a salad. The store buys that lettuce from a local vendor who gets it from a local farm. That entire chain of transactions would be considered part of the “local economy”.
The fact that the US buys more than half of its aluminum from Canada would be considered “international economics” as the transactions involved take place between two different countries. In this way, you can examine different economics from as small a scale as you buying eggs from your neighbor who has chickens to the macro-economics of multinational corporations dictating the stupid price of RAM by effectively buying goods that don’t exist with money that doesn’t exist while handing the same 20 dollars back and forth to inflate their stock value to a disgusting degree. Hell, you can even pick out specific sectors, like with the aluminum example: when Trump started his pissing contest with Canada with tariffs, the American car manufacturing industry said that tariffs on aluminum would cause them to shut down plants within 6 weeks.
So when we talk about the economy of California, people are talking about the farms, the restaurants, the businesses that exist in the state. The people who work and live there, and the money that flows between them all. If these companies were to pull out of California, they’d be leaving all of that behind. Even ignoring the idea of the loss of sales, they’d also be losing the experience and skill of the people that they employ in the state, and the “value” of the property that they have there - whether that’s real estate or more logistics based like renting storage for goods or the cost of transportation from a manufacturing facility in a new location.
What economy is exclusive to the United States?
That’s what they said about Massachusetts’ “millionaire’s tax” - a 4% additional income tax on household income above 1 million dollars. And despite what finance rags claim, the data says that between when the tax was voted into law in 2022 and 2024, the number of Mass residents with at least $50 million in total wealth grew 35.2% from 1,954 people to 2,642 people. And the tax brought in an extra $2.46 billion in tax revenue during its first year.
So despite all the crying, the data says that they won’t leave. We’ve seen it happen multiple times across the country over the years. A state or a city enacts a new tax on the wealthy, the wealthy threaten to leave and cry bloody murder, and nothing happens except an increase in tax revenue to be invested back into the area.
People and businesses located in California buy goods and services, and produce goods and services that are sold both in the local region and abroad. This exchange of goods and services is frequently called an “economy”.
The economic activity within the state of California would make it the 4th largest economy in the world if it were an independent country, and it is the largest subregional economy in the world.
I don’t engage at this level anymore, where people show no respect.
False. Your first few sentences are insults, and the rest of your post is literally just this:
One of the most controversial uses of this discovery was as a means for sex verification at the Olympic Games, under a system implemented by the International Olympic Committee in 1992. Athletes with an SRY gene were not permitted to participate as females, although all athletes in whom this was “detected” at the 1996 Summer Olympics were ruled false positives and were not disqualified. Specifically, eight female participants (out of a total of 3387) at these games were found to have the SRY gene. However, after further investigation of their genetic conditions, all these athletes were verified as female and allowed to compete. These athletes were found to have either partial or full androgen insensitivity, despite having an SRY gene, making them externally phenotypically female. In the late 1990s, a number of relevant professional societies in United States called for elimination of gender verification, including the American Medical Association, stating that the method used was uncertain and ineffective.
They already tried that 30 years ago and it proved ineffective and only led to false positives.
Various international medical and sports professionals have, since 1986, advocated for the abolition of sex verification in sport, and specifically the Olympics. In 2000, following the 1999 IOC ratification of the 1996 decision to discontinue sex verification, the view was reiterated in the Journal of the American Medical Association; it included commentary that, while the purpose of such tests is to uphold a perceived fairness, the insufficiency of the tests can produce unfair results due to potential inaccuracies and the possibility of both false negatives and false positives. The authors also deemed the tests unfair and discriminatory towards female athletes with disorders of sex development (DSD), whom it felt should be considered as women for the purposes of sport, as “few if any plausible athletic advantages exist”. It also considered the implications for female athletes who “fail” a test (either as an error or through unknowingly having a DSD), in their personal lives and future career, as too severe to impose the tests.
In 2022, the World Medical Association (WMA) demanded the withdrawal of hormone-based regulations, arguing that they discriminate based on gender variation of female athletes. The Association also expressed concerns with physicians treating athletes with high levels of endogenous testosterone when the condition is not pathological.
Other criticisms are that there is no natural physiological limit imposed on male athletes, including those who have, for example, naturally high testosterone compared to their competitors, and that there are many biological factors that produce sporting advantages but “only those associated with gender are used to exclude or disqualify athletes.”
In a joint statement published several days before the official IOC announcement on genetic testing in March 2026, over 100 human rights and other groups criticized the proposed rule change as “a blunt and discriminatory response that is not supported by science and violates international human rights law”.
Over 100 human rights groups apparently disagree with you on this kind of testing being discriminatory. Also that it’s a violation of human rights.
Edit: I also like how you completely ignored the fact that all these black women were told that if they wanted to compete, they could take the same kinds of drugs that trans women take everyday. It’s almost like being trans was never an issue in the first place, since black women apparently have more testosterone than trans women. It’s always been about hate, and nothing more.
And Michael Phelps has a condition that causes him to build up lactic acid at half the normal rate, effectively doubling his endurance compared to his competitors. And yet he’s allowed to hold the world record for the most gold medals won. Sports have never been about “normal” people.
And Caster is far from the only black woman to face these kinds of punishments. In fact, not only does the Olympics have a history of racism and sexism against black women, but all three medalists were affected by the ban on Caster that year. Christine Mboma and Beatrice Basilingi were banned in 2021 for their “naturally high testosterone.” It’s a frequently occurring reason for banning black women from sports. All of them were told they could either take drugs to lower their testosterone, you know, the kind that trans women take, or undergo surgery to reduce their “naturally high testosterone” to “acceptable levels”. Understandably, none of them did. Especially not when men and white women don’t face the same kind of scrutiny. In fact, historically gender tests have often targeted female athletes of color who don’t conform to typically Western, white ideals of femininity. Serena Williams. Brittney Griner. Indian sprinter Dutee Chand. Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting. Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. The list never ends, and we haven’t even gotten to when the Olympics used to do chromosome testing in the 60s and gave up due to the extremely high number of woman athletes who came up as XY women.
Also, the European Court of Human Rights later ruled that Caster’s ban was discrimination.
“I was on a world scene, and what made the news was, another gymnast saying that if we painted our skin black maybe we would all win because I had beaten her out of beam medal, and she got upset,” she said on the TODAY show. “And that [was] really the news, rather than me winning worlds”
-Simone Biles, Olympic Gymnast
Sounds a lot like the criticism levied against trans athletes.
Not really, the differences just aren’t that large in general. The average black woman has a lower testosterone count than the average man, but a fairly large portion of the spread of black women is still higher than the average to lower end of the spread for men. And even the spread between white men and women has plenty of overlap where there are women with higher testosterone levels than men, and that’s just within one specific race.
Black women have testosterone counts high enough to get them frequently banned from the Olympics. Two time gold medal winner Caster Semenya has been banned since 2019 because her natural testosterone levels are considered too high and “give her an unfair advantage.”
Besides, trans women tend to have lower testosterone counts than cis women, because they take medication that reduces your body’s ability to intake testosterone as it takes up the same receptors as estrogen. This means that cis women build muscle more easily than trans women.
Which is why black women are famously segregated to the black-only events.
You know, since they have naturally higher testosterone levels than white women.
And why the Danes are segregated to the Nordic-only events. What with the average height of women in Finland being 6 feet and all.
It’s only fair.
“The Jewish problem is sufficiently important that Nazis bring it up.”
I am constantly reminded of a song from the early 2000s called Bastard by Ben Folds, especially the lyric that goes “spread the facts on the floor like a fan. Throw away the ones that make you feel bad.”
The Republican party is a cult through and through, and the way cults work is that they give the desperate and victimized an answer to their troubles. They tell them that it isn’t their fault, it’s someone else’s. Specifically, it’s the Outsider’s fault. They appeal to their emotions and create an insular bubble against anybody who says anything that goes against what they believe. Because if you aren’t with them, then you’re against them. And that makes you an Outsider, too. An enemy to be hated and vilified.
So they decide on their answers before they’ve even seen the facts, and any that don’t fit what they want can be safely discarded as the enemies’ lies poisoning their glorious truth.
And what makes this even harder to combat is that there’s a tipping point for most people beyond which it’s incredibly difficult to come back from. You have the real crazies who don’t care anymore, if the leader says babies are delicious, then they’ll start boiling cooking oil, but for most people in a cult, the thing that truly traps them even if they’ve realized that the cult is wrong, is that they’d have to admit that they’re wrong. And not just that they, themselves, are wrong, but that everything they’ve done, everything that they’ve believed, for years and years, is wrong. And it’s a rare kind of person who can look down from the summit of that mountain and accept that every step they’ve taken up it has been a step in the wrong direction.
I’m also reminded of Nazi Germany. The people turning in Jews weren’t the monsters at the top, like Heimlich Himmler, they were “good people” - the neighbor who always has a pocket full of dog treats when they go out for a walk, the owner of the local grocery store. The people you walk past every day at work or on the street. Your mother, father, aunt, or cousin. Your friends. “Bad people” are never “bad” people. They’re just people. There’s footage of Hitler that’s been floating around the web for decades at this point that people almost unanimously say is unnerving: it’s Hitler, sitting at a table outside, who turns to the person holding the camera and gets up, saying “What are you doing, filming an old man like me? I should be the one filming a beautiful girl like you!” People are unsettled by it because it’s simply Hitler being human, like anyone else. He’s not acting like the monster that we see in our heads. He’s just…a person. And that goes for all of the worst monstrosities to ever walk the planet - and the most gentle of saints. Each and every one of them is…just a person, who, like everyone else, believes that they’re the hero of their story.
Oh, so Kirk was the new college gargoyle, not just grotesque. Now I get it!
In the southern states, people were getting arrested for handing out water to voters standing in 8+ hour lines that stretched multiple city blocks in 90 to 100 degree F heat (that’s almost 38 Celsius) with no shade in states where Republicans shut down voting centers in and around traditionally leftist areas mere days before the election, forcing multiple voting districts to travel by car to the single open voting center miles away in a Republican district.
Voter suppression in this country is on a scale that most Europeans would think to put countries like Russia on.
All they know is that they lived through the Red Scare
Are living in the Red Scare. It never ended, even though the Cold War did. They’re still preaching the same anti-USSR propaganda to the kids today that they were in the 60s. You need look no further than the Republicans calling Obama a communist because he took a course on Communism in college. You know, the one that every college student was required to take during the Cold War and that every Republican politician also took.
I think we also experienced a few unusually high number of school shootings for a few years around 2016, and the media probably reports them less because Trump has taken up all of the media spotlight.
I seem to remember noting about a decade ago that we had a very high number of school shootings in the first 6 months of a year, and doing the math out it was something like 1.5 a month. I definitely remember talking to people about how crazy it was that we had one basically every few weeks.
Not necessarily owned by Amazon, but plenty of websites are running on Amazon systems on the back end for stuff like payment processing and web hosting, or the business uses Amazon to ship their products. There are plenty of Amazon affiliate companies out there as well, but sometimes buying from an independent business still gives money to Amazon through delivery or processing fees or something.
They are not refugees, they should immigrate the normal (expensive) way like everyone else and not get a free ride on the American tax payer’s dollar. Especially when we have, what, 30,000 refugees from south of the border living in warehouses awaiting a chance to legally immigrate. 50,000? 100,000? Probably even more than that.
They’re escaping South Africa with fortunes made by exploiting the people of South Africa and will suffer no consequences in the US. They stand at least some chance of being punished in their own country (even more so if they’re running like this, seems like they can feel the noose tightening), and their money would stay in South Africa to help the country in such a case instead of disappearing into the offshore haven of the US.
They’re friends of people like Musk and Trump, and allowing them to more easily use their money to affect American policy will be worse not just for the US, but the world at large. Letting people with experience running an apartheid regime into the politics of a belligerent war hungry government who has already threatened numerous friendly countries over resources cannot end well.
Jeez, who took a dump in your McFlurry?