681–690 of 816 posts
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I thought that already happened in the US and that's how we ended up with this current mess..?
I dislike Trump with a passion that is very hard to over emphasize. However, he did win the 2016 and 2024 elections. Maduro stole his seat.
He is small fish. Yes, he was wrong and need to be punished, but still, an small fish on the deep ocean of government inside trading. If you rob 100.000, you will have a problem with the police and will be arrested. If you rob 1 billion, the police will have a problem if they try to arrest you.
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Honest question: Would you feel similarly if the shoe were on the other foot? If we had a hostile presidential takeover and another country, for reasons completely unrelated to that , showed up at the WH and executed this kind of “mission”? Maduro was a piece of…let’s keep this polite and say “work.” Everyone agrees. Does that mean what the US did was acceptable? There’s a lot of nuance and context being glossed over…
In this scenario, is the person in the Oval Office a rapist, child molester, serial fraudster, corruptly manipulating stock markets, steering government money to his children’s own weapons companies, assassinating other world leaders, committing the war crime of declaring no quarter, committing the war crime of threatening to destroy all significant civilian infrastructure in another sovereign nation, committing the…
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I am not a fan of "well what can ya do?" That's not how we got the 40 hour work week or civil rights legislation. That's not how women got the right to vote. You have to fight and fight and fight for a better world. I mean that.
It's literally how you got those things. Without leverage to get them, they would have just been complaints. You ask what you can do, and then you do it.
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Only genocide has a 'duty to prevent and punish'; with UN Security Council approval of course. Restrictions on building nuclear bombs are defined in the voluntary Non-Proliferation Treaty, and is not applicaple to non-parties (India, Israel, Pakistan, South Sudan). Every foreign intervention done by US / NATO through-out has backfired, and worsened the problem it tried to solve. Case in point: CIA covertly arms Afgha…
Somehow they forgot to include when a member of the Security Council is commiting genocide - like what Russia is doing in Ukraine. The UN has a body that regulates nuclear energy, called IAEA, and they can definitely bring violations to the Security Council. > Every foreign intervention done by US / NATO through-out has backfired, and worsened the problem it tried to solve. That's quite a bold claim: - first by focus…
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> Just ban gambling. That solves good part of it. does that include the stock exchange?
I think a good compromise there is to get rid of shorting. And tax capital gains at a rate inversely proportional to how long the shares were held. E.g., 90% if held less than a second, 10% if held over 10 years.
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Medical schools require a lot of volunteering and things like 'slinging hot dogs to pay tuition' don't count unless you grew up without clothes surviving on rabid dogs in the holler of W Virginia working the coal mines from age 8. We all know who has time to volunteer or do minimum wage healthcare instead of work the best paying shitty side job they can get: the rich. It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich…
> Medical schools require a lot of volunteering But...why? Why not just let in the applicants that have the best grades?
Corruption means something legitimate is happening that can be corrupted. Maduro was president of a sovereign country. A bunch of kidnappers and murderers invaded the building he was in in Caracas, murdered everyone in the room, then kidnapped him and his wife. What's the "mission"? To pop up in some room and slaughter everyone in it, then kidnap his wife and him? In order to help steal the resources, billions of dol…
He was the illegitimate president, he stole the last elections. Plenty of evidence of it. Add to that all the human rights crimes they committed (national guard death squads who killed in the thousands on the poorest areas of the country just to name one). This was investigated by the UN, led by Michelle Bachelet (former president of Chile).
|not ok to kidnap - - - - - - - ok to kidnap|?
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Because there are so many applicants that have good grades. A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate".
No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades—unless there's a ceiling that the top m > n have all hit. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible. MCAT seems more relevant, though. According to Claude: "Roughly 0.1% or fewer of test-takers score a perfect 528 in any given year — typically only a few dozen individuals out of the ~120,000 or so who sit for the exam a…
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I didn't say they are incapable of wrong. I'm saying you can't hold a group that doesn't have law and order, and therefore control to the same standard as a group that does have control. If protesters throw rocks at police, would you hold the entire group responsible? Even though most were there to protest peacefully? Would you take the same view if it was the police throwing rocks?
It's a pretty low standard. But even worse it denies them autonomy and control of their own actions. They're victims, mere observers. You deny that group self determination, you do not view them as equals. It's like I get upset if my child bites someone, but not if my cat bites someone, because it's a cat. That's why that oppressor / oppressed mentality is so dehumanizing to the people it purports to empathize with
Plus I'm not even saying it's oppressor and oppressed, it's that one group has organisation and one doesn't.
I go back to my police and protestor example? Do you apply the same rules to each? Do you think the leader of the police is more or less culpable than the leader of the protestors?
It isn't dehumanising the protestors. If anything it's the opposite, it's dehumanising the police, they are supposed not to have agency. And that's the point.