The extra fun part is that all post industrial revolution countries have flat or falling populations. This includes Europe, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, North America and parts of South America, and parts of the South Pacific. All of these regions need to import people if they want to keep using the same productivity and economic systems. The sheep lack of people is going to start causing major issues on all fronts.

This is going to put nations in a position to compete for immigrants with each other. It’s going to be a buyer’s market for young adults. Collectively, they need to make their labor more dear and nations need to treat people better to get and keep them in the future.

There’s plenty of material on the stages of population change in developing nations: https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk

The demographic transition model continues to be reasonable on track around the world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

Drug use was huge in the 1950s, 60’s, and 70’s. Strange that people reminisce about those times as a paragon of successful society.

It’s also an era with peak unionization, high marginal tax brackets, and active monopoly busting. It has some of the lowest wealth disparity the US has seen.

The racism and other issues were huge too, but at least you could work a job and feed a family in most places.

But no! It can’t be the current issues are the wealthiest 1% crushing the rest of us. Just because the average salary is quickly trending to a poverty state and home are unattainable to most people… Never. Can’t be that. It must be the drugs causing it. Instead of the damage causing people to seek escape from reality, which drugs offer a means to do… Nope, can’t be that.

Good. Gas prices are much too low in the US. This just continues the cycle of world damaging automobile centric infrastructure and carbon emissions.

I feel you misunderstood. North Korea has elections. Russia has elections. Syria under Assas had elections. Strangely, the dictators always won by huge margins. Many dictators have a farce of a democracy to both give the people they rule a veneer of hope of freedom and to muddy the waters on the international stage.

Stalin had elections in Soviet Russia but he made it clear he didn’t care who voted. He cared about who counted the votes. Once the democratic institutions are subverted and their independence destroyed by a leader that leader gets to choose who sits in the seats: judges, legislators, bureaucrats, officers, and especially elections officials.

You’re right about the citizens being responsible for defending the institutions. In the end, the ultimate responsibility for the health of the republic lies with the people, not the government. The US does not understand just how much we have failed to defend the republic and we are on the verge of losing it.

It’s the same reason dictators love elections: they appoint the people who run them to wrap the dictators actions in a veil of fake approval and oversight. It’s just rubber stamping fascism.

Conservatism consists of one core value: there should be laws that protect, but do not bind, the in group while the same laws bind, but do not protect, the out group.

Then immediately borrow real money against the paper value of your new merger company. Pocket a few billion and use some to bribe the feds to not audit you.

It’s crime all the way down.

The “Land of the Brave” but was completely belied by our response to the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks. We cried and lashes out at random thing until we hurt ourselves over and over.

Brave would have been standing strong and not trying to genocide the middle East writ large. Instead we did the PATRIOT act maneuver and removed our civil liberties before flushing our world leadership position down the toilet out of fear.

Here’s the especially fun part: the people deciding ‘norm’ will always find a way to slice the in group into ever smaller wedges.

The Right Wing is a death cult. It eats everything until they’re forced to eat themselves because without an out group to persecute they don’t have any real purpose. So, they just keep making more out group until they’re forced to shoot themselves too.

Land of the free! Small government!

Just small enough to fit into your pants…

Every vote for a Republican/Conservative is a vote against liberty.

When the various circuit courts allowed slower level judges like Canon to keep not enforcing good law on the people staging a coup, the judges allowed the Constitution to be destroyed. It’s just a piece of paper unless it’s upheld and defended.

The right wing has been undermining the federal courts for decades with unqualified ideologue appointments and this is the result. The rule of law is gone and the coup needs to remove any and all remaining opposition. It’s classic dictatorship 101 to remove judges who oppose you, both through legal and violent means. The courts failed to act as a body of law for decades and now they are in serious trouble.

Pride wasn’t a parade. Pride was a riot. The parades are the compromise to stop lighting things on fire until people were treated as people.

… so no contempt of court? Every person “just following orders” from the top on down needs to be arrested, charged, and detained until the courts decide on the punishment for refusing to follow the law. Unless that happens there’s no law and no Constitutional Republic in play.

Have fun paying your taxes, fellow peasants.

According to the US Supreme Court, a US president cannot be prosecuted for crimes (if they’re related to their official duties, but whatever goes, I guess). This means that Canada is faced with the fact that they’re being attacked by a foreign power with a ruler not beholden to the rule of law. If they give in, they’re going to be conquered by a king who is not bound by a national constitution, legislative body, nor courts. This is an existential threat to their freedom as individuals with rights.

I’m on board if she brings a whiteboard and schools people after putting forth actual legislation based on real data. She’ll be amazing in any political seat she is elected to.

He disbanded the US government agency that develops the annual GDP numbers. Guess how they’ll figure those out next year?

If you guessed “we’ll make some up that are higher than last year” then you’re spot on.

Requiring someone to provide evidence to back up a claim is not the same as taking a position that the claim isn’t true. This is the root component of the burden of proof and the stance many people have towards a god claim: they aren’t convinced the god exists due to a lack of evidence provided by the person claiming the god does exist. Until there’s actual evidence it’s rational and reasonable to withhold judgement.

The unicorn (or other mythological beings) are used as a similar case to illustrate to a theist that they have the same kind of attitude towards the idea of a unicorn existing as an atheist does to any gods. They’re both neat concepts, but without evidence showing they actually exist, they’re nothing more than an idea for stories and art.