Signtist

People are scared that if you acknowledge the fact that Biden is concerning as a presidential candidate in any way, people will be less likely to vote for him; the sad state of the matter is that Biden is the only candidate who has a chance to beat Trump at this late of a stage in the game. The reasoning that we need to avoid criticizing him as a result of that is bullshit though, since if you're closing your eyes and voting for your default color, then such discussion won't affect to your vote, and if you're actually paying attention to the state of our upcoming election, then you'll already be well aware that being against Trump forces you to vote Biden, so your vote is locked in, regardless of how depressing it is. Nobody's still hemming and hawing at this point, and even if some are, some random meme on Lemmy isn't going to be the thing that finally gets them to make up their mind.

There's no reason we can't acknowledge the fact that, while being better than Donald Trump should win Biden the presidential election, it's not an accomplishment, and in a vacuum he's a terrible candidate. In fact, we specifically need to point out that we knew this scenario was coming for the past 4 years, and have organized no major uprisings, or even major educational movements to try to get people to force out a different Democratic candidate in the primaries; we've sat on our asses ever since the last election, and there's no reason to think we won't do the same going into the next election unless we start forcing a change in the DNC right now.

These "both sides" discussions aren't about whether or not to choose to vote for Biden, they're about getting people to notice the fact that we vote for the "lesser evil" every 4 years, saying that the time to make a change is after we're solidified our candidate's victory, but then once we've done that we do nothing until we're in the same "lesser evil" situation again 4 years later. If we want to ever have a situation where we're voting for a president we'd actually like, we need to start planning out how to force that to happen now, because even 4 whole years isn't a very long time frame to for us to push such a large change.

I can understand some people are scared that Trump is going to win because too many people chose to vote 3rd party, or choose not to vote, but everyone who's paying attention enough to be swayed by political discussion is already aware that we specifically need to vote for Biden in order for Trump to lose, so at this point the fanatical drive to quash any criticism of him as a presidential candidate seems nearly tailor-made to sow even more apathy among the voting population, making them feel not only forced into voting for Biden, but forced into liking it as well. In the end I think the efforts to prevent discussion about how neither candidate is an objectively good candidate is going to ultimately cause fewer people to vote at all, since they'll feel as though they can't even air out their grievances with the candidate they'd already begrudgingly chosen to vote for.

Does Look Mum No Computer count?

That's exactly it. Determinism is the idea that all the various forces of the universe impact things in such a way that, however things play out, it's how they were always going to.

Imagine a time in your life when you made an impactful decision, and imagine you can go back in time to that moment. However, when you do everything is the same - you're thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings. You've had all the same experiences, and are in the same frame of mind. Every single atom in the entire universe is exactly the same as it was in that moment. Would you ever actually make a different decision from what you had in that moment?

Determinism says no - if you had the capability to know the exact state of the universe in a single moment, you'd be able to tell what the next moment's state would be, and on and on to the end of the universe, since it's all nothing more than a single incredibly complicated chain reaction.

And he's got 38 degrees in fucking.

Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don't bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.

Why the long face?

That's the thing. We think 2 steps forward 1 step back is making progress, but the steps forward are tiny, and the steps back are huge.

Huh, that's interesting. Though, how do you pick MLK specifically out of a recording of an orgy, let alone definitively enough for it to be damning to his reputation?

But they were writing the letter under the guise of just being some guy. I'd believe the government could make the public think I'm some sexual deviant, but not a random person writing a letter to me.

Is there something I'm missing, or is this letter nothing more than an old-timey version of modern internet comments and conservative "LGBTQ+ people are somehow pedophiles!" claims that are as outlandish as they are unfounded? Like, how is claiming a reverend has secret massive orgies he's clearly not having going to get him to kill himself? He probably just read this, said "Well that's a load of nonsense." and threw it away without another thought.

Toxicity isn't as simple as "toxic = toxic + toxic." While some byproducts of plastic breakdown are toxic, the bacteria are further dissolving those as well, going until they get glucose, as they wouldn't be able to eat it if that wasn't the end product. There are probably still some toxic byproducts that get excreted rather than broken down, but plastic breakdown already releases toxins under normal conditions, so that's already a problem we're going to have to tackle. If these bacteria can get past the first issue of breaking it down in the first place, then that's a net positive.

I tried so hard as a kid to sing the entire list in one breath, but never made it...