The dip only lasted a few months. By August of 2020, VTI was back to where it had been before the dip in February.

Finally, a day when it is acceptable for me to lure children into my van!

societies have utilized shame in order to shun unwanted or undesirable opinions forever

Using shame isn’t new. Using shame in this particular way at this particular time appears to be a poor strategy. It’s deliberately divisive and conservative reactionaries aren’t the only ones who are motivated to vote against it. By now many people who call themselves liberal and have a history of reliably voting for Democrats oppose it too. I think Nate Silver does a good job of expressing why in the context of Israel, although he’s looking at a much bigger picture. Most of these people are still voting for Democrats, because Harris is a centrist and Trump is, well, Trump. It’s still not helping.

Lemmy is a place where it often seems like leftist views are almost universal among Democrats, but Lemmy is not representative of the large majority of Democratic voters. I don’t think most Harris voters (as opposed to just the vocal Democrats online) despise Republicans.

So, uh, is the spider hotter in person? Because the picture isn’t doing it for me.

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel.

I think the proposed approach would be perceived as defeatism. Voters would see one candidate saying “the problem is too big to solve” and the other candidate offering solutions. It doesn’t help that Democratic policy is what has been making the “problem” bigger recently.

I also think that restricting immigration (especially illegal immigration) is not inherently fascist.

You simply can’t make the full case against Trump—or a compelling illustration of his fascist tendencies—without talking about immigration.

The Democrats’ approach to immigration is genuinely unpopular, even with many people who are going to vote for Harris anyway. I think a strong case for Trump as an enemy of democracy can be made without talking about immigration, but if you (the general you) can’t do that then it’s probably better not to say anything at all unless you want to help him.

even many American Jewish people don’t like Netanyahu

The may not like Netanyahu but they’re quite alarmed by what they see on the left side of the Democratic party. If they’re concerned that Harris will be influenced by the left, either due to personal sympathy or political considerations, then Trump does have some appeal since he’s making it quite clear that he’s definitely not like that.

What I read was that it’s about 200mg per kg, so for a 70kg human that works out to 14 grams. That actually sounds remarkably high (14 grams is a lot). Did I mess up somewhere?

I don’t think that word means much beyond “bad guy who wants to oppress you” to the average American today, although using it to describe a political opponent would have been outrageous just a few presidential elections ago. Trump has been using it for a while without any backlash.

“Every time the radical left, Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I considered it a great badge of honor,” Mr. Trump said in February, and not for the last time.

Is there anyone whose mind isn’t already made up who will be swayed by the word “fascism”? That’s not a rhetorical question. So much of what I see from both parties sounds like preaching to the choir but I genuinely don’t know what they could say that wouldn’t sound like that.

One of the few Trump voters I know personally is really bothered by the fact that so many of Trump’s handpicked officials end up turning against him, because (according to this voter) it indicates that Trump is a poor judge of people.

That’s a good point. He does seem like he would probably write this sort of article as part of his political agenda regardless of what he sincerely believed. Thus the existence of the article provides almost no information about what conservative voters might actually be thinking.

That’s all correct, but wasn’t Harris’s goal to appeal to conservatives?

I didn’t find the article particularly convincing because there’s a clear answer to the question of why Harris defended Biden’s mental acuity, everyone knows it, but Harris can’t admit it explicitly. No one wanted to be the first person to say that the emperor had no clothes.

It seems like Harris is happy with how the interview went but I’m seeing negative coverage too. I wonder what viewers open to changing their minds actually thought.

What I had in mind is more like this 25kg bucket. That’s enough to kill about 2,000 people, which is actually a lot fewer people than I would have guessed before I looked up the LD50.

I’ve never actually seen caffeine in a bucket myself, but I worked in a lab once that had a big plastic jar of it.

Caffeine is poisonous to us too, so I think it’s more accurate to say that humans enjoy the side effects of that particular neurotoxin. It’s generally not possible for someone healthy to drink enough coffee to die, but they sell pure caffeine (for research) and even seemingly small amounts of that will kill a person.

No, this is a wolverine:

It’s about twice as big as an American badger.

American dinosaurs carried guns.

Station wagons should have stayed dead.

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