Makes sense. If we can trust 87 year olds to govern the country, why can’t we trust them to drive? /s

The math contributes some to this. Let’s say the correct answer is 1%, and out of ten people, 9 of them guess 1% and the other guesses 51% - that one guess shifts the average from 1% to 6%. And if it’s 1%, then there’s no room for people to underestimate and bring the number back down, and the same is true of numbers close to 100%. The numbers closer to the middle don’t necessarily mean that people were more correct on an individual level, but that some people overestimated and others underestimated and it came out closer to the right number. The graph ought to give information about the spread of errors and not just the raw average.

Just over half of U.S. adults (52%) say they favor allowing public school teachers to lead their classes in prayers that refer to Jesus

Nationwide, a slightly larger share of Americans say they favor allowing teacher-led prayers referencing God (57%)

It’s right there in OP.

I grew up in one of those states and it’s part of why I’m a certified America Hater today. I genuinely don’t think people who haven’t been exposed to it, even within the country, but especially outside of it, really have a grasp on how prominent and powerful religion is in the US. Hell, I didn’t fully understand it myself until I lived outside of the country for a time and saw what normal is like. This country is a madhouse.

The problem I’ve always had with the term is that you can’t really define a term by pointing to a comic and going like, “It’s like when someone does this sort of thing.” Like there’s a bunch of things the sea lion is doing, one is:

pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence

Like if you get a grudge against a user and constantly hound them in every thread about a topic they don’t want to discuss, that’s pretty rude (and if you do this offline like in the comic, it’s straight-up harassment). That’s bad regardless of what form it takes. On the other hand, if it’s just a regular conversation and not following from thread to thread, you have every right to expect people to provide evidence for their claims. Another is:

maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity (“I’m just trying to have a debate”), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter

“Feigning ignorance of the subject matter,” is also part of the Socratic Method, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s inherently bad to be like, “What specifically does this term mean, and why do you think this specific case meets the criteria?” If you believe something, you ought to be able to state things in clear terms, and that’s an important part of a healthy debate, it helps the other side to identify the point of disagreement where they break with your line of reasoning. Otherwise, how do you even go about having a productive conversation with someone you disagree with at all?

In my opinion, these sorts of internet neologisms are dangerous even if they are addressing a legitimate thing, because once it’s out there, you can’t control who’s going to use it. For example, “mansplaining” was intended to refer to a specific type of thing where a man assumes he’s an expert on a subject and explains in a paternalistic way, while often being ignorant of the subject matter, like random guys on Twitter trying to lecture a female astronaut about how space works. But there are also people who use it/interpret it to mean, “Whenever a man explains something” - even if he is actually qualified to speak on the subject, which provokes a backlash (and obviously the problem is made worse by people trying to exacerbate the backlash, including through sockpuppets).

The ambiguity of the term “sealioning” allows it to be used to shut down good faith questions and discussion, while leaving the accused without a lot of options to defend themself. “What do you mean by ‘sealioning?’ What specifically did I do or say that meets that definition, and why should that be grounds to dismiss what I’m saying, or to conclude I’m acting in bad faith?” is generally going to be met with, “That’s more sealioning.” If critically examining the concept of sealioining is sealioning, then I’m just inclined to dismiss the term entirely.

"What we need to do to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power, that is one of my highest priorities,” she added.

Whitaker followed up, asking, “If Iran is building a nuclear weapon, would you take military action?”

“I’m not going to talk about hypotheticals at this moment,” said the vice president.

I can understand that perspective, but I’m looking at things from more of a class based and realpolitik perspective. The international order, I would say even now, but especially at that time of peak colonialism, was pretty much like this.

The Allied powers dominated the world, and they achieved that through force, brazen, unapologetic aggression. Germany didn’t have a problem with that, except for the part where they weren’t the ones on top, that they didn’t have colonies to exploit like everyone else.

From my perspective, the real problem is that socialists at the time didn’t follow through on the Basel declaration of 1912 where socialists of every country promised to oppose the coming war. When the war actually broke out, everyone rallied around their respective flags, the British and French socialists talked about Germany invading neutral countries and not being as democratic, but the German socialists justified it by talking about serfdom in Russia and the colonialism of Britain and France, and at the end of the day, tons of regular people got drafted to go die in the trenches over these power games.

Admittedly, I’ve never really considered it from a Belgian perspective before, but I think the bigger nations were all more motivated by power than by a genuine commitment to upholding neutrality and national sovereignty.

Love Blackadder, especially that season ❤️

Pretty sure nobody was fighting before the Germans attacked Eben emael with gliders.

That’s the wrong war. Fort Eben Emael wasn’t even constructed yet, and there were no paratroopers on any side.

Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28th, 1914. On July 28th, Austria-Hungary began shelling Belgrade, in the first shots of the war. Germany occupied Luxembourg August 2nd and invaded Belgium August 4th.

But regardless, the European powers were always going to end up fighting each other after running out of places to colonize, building up enormous militaries, and forming a bunch of secret alliances. No nation was the “good guys” in WWI, they were a bunch of imperialist colonial states jockeying for power, and sending ordinary people into awful conditions to die for no good reason.

Eh, if Israel did not exist, the United States would just invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.

Germans were no more responsible for WWI than the British, French, etc.

Funny how extreme poverty starts racing down as soon as China adopted capitalist market reforms.

I wonder if there was any opposition to those reforms, like, maybe some kind of big protest right as they were being introduced 🤔

When Kent State happened, surveys showed an overwhelming majority of Americans blamed the students for getting shot more than they blamed the guard for shooting them. There were all sorts of fake news stories going around on TV about how the protests were filled with outside agitators doing things like putting LSD in the water supply. It was only once the opportunity for a reaction was safely past that they said, “Oopsie, we made a mistake.” There have been many other cases where the government and media lied until it determined it was safe enough to tell the truth, including the justifications for several major wars.

“Oh, well this gun costs less than your watch, and yet: hand it over.”

This also happened to me once too. I was working at Amazon as a picker, and they unveiled a new tool that lets you put in electronically if you’re planning to leave. One morning, I put in that I was planning to leave in a month. Before lunch that same day, I was suddenly fired.

Relevant sketch

When he was a serf, they said to him, “Let me find you in this field: I will hang you if I find you in anyone else’s field.” But now he is a tramp they say to him, “You shall be jailed if I find you in anyone else’s field: but I will not give you a field.” They say, “You shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside your shed: but there is no shed.” If you say that modern magistracies could never say such mad contradictions, I answer with entire certainty that they do say them. A little while ago two tramps were summoned before a magistrate, charged with sleeping in the open air when they had nowhere else to sleep. But this is not the full fun of the incident. The real fun is that each of them eagerly produced about twopence, to prove that they could have got a bed, but deliberately didn’t. To which the policeman replied that twopence would not have got them a bed: that they could not possibly have got a bed: and therefore (argued that thoughtful officer) they ought to be punished for not getting one. The intelligent magistrate was much struck with the argument: and proceeded to imprison these two men for not doing a thing they could not do. But he was careful to explain that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness, they would have left the court without a stain on their characters; but as they could not avoid it, they were very much to blame.

The desperate man to-day can do nothing. For you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws sticking out of his hair and says, “Procure threepence from nowhere and I will give you leave to do without it.”

(GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils)

I heard that some people drink so much of that crap that literally more than 50% of their body is made up of water. I don’t even know how it’s possible to still be alive at that point, I mean, JFC it’s like you’re not even a solid at that point, you’re just gonna dissolve into a puddle. Like, get help.

there is a perfectly good flag for England that people refuse to use

Well yeah, but these days, you say you’re English, you’ll get arrested and thrown in jail 😆

We can’t condemn the Nazis because if we condemn the Nazis people will think we’re Nazis. When people see that we won’t condemn the Nazis, that’s how they’ll know we aren’t Nazis.