You have the right approach. If you have neither the time nor the ability to judge for yourself, you should 100% outsource it to the proper channels. I just mean for the people who have the energy and ability to responsibly do the digging, there is no reason to be so limited in your resources.

38 with a masters degree. No house in sight. Good luck. Remember, there is always [redacted].

I have no skin in the game but I have worked professionally as both an academic scientist and a data scientist in the private sector and I can tell you that peer review is great but a lot of legitimate research is done outside the bounds of academic journals. It is entirely possible for amateurs to do real science.

If the effect size is large enough, you dont actually need to be that rigorous about it. No one needed to do a study on whether there was a direct correlation between adverse medical outcomes and gunshot wounds to the head.

Schumer is part of an old american politics where there was a cordial relationship between both sides and the cost of sacrificing the interests of the constituents was largely negligible - no one knew what was going on so no one could complain (pre-24hr news cycle and pre infinite news outlets online or in public). Times changed. People notice everything. Schumer is not built for this time where everything he does is under a microscope and where consequences are seen and felt. He is acting as if he can just pretend that things are like they were in the 90s where he can show up, gladhand with donors and his colleagues across the isle, cash a check, work 4 months out of the year, and insider trade. He cant. The problem is that he is also intrinsically part of the democratic party machinery so no one can force him out. He needs to be primaried at a minimum.

I was late to the party, but it turns out that the NYT has always been an agent of manufacturing consent for the US govt dating back at least as far as the vietnam war but almost assuredly since the beginning of the Cold War.

The overton window is constructed by our media and it was built in such a way that anyone to the left of the democrats was definitionally too radical while anyone to the right of the GOP was just misunderstood and needed to be accommodated.

Most americans dont engage with politics on this level if they engage at all.

Well yeah. Sam Altman just came out and basically said he needs a few trillion dollars and government backed loans. This shit is going to be BAD.

There is a long list of people complicit in the current spiral towards dictatorship. Mueller, Comey, Roberts, Biden, Obama, Cheney (rest in piss)… Our current situation is the consequence of a rotten society. Trump is just a symptom.

Their plan is the same as it ever was. Rich people can afford the best care. Everyone else can die. This plan is not super marketable so that is why they wont make this more transparent.

This is arguably the biggest threat to his administration if he wins. The establishment dems DO NOT want someone to their left succeeding because it is a threat to their donation pipeline. The GOP dont need to do anything because the dems will eat him alive before anyone else.

I cannot now remember who said it, but it perfectly captured the problem with Trump:

“With Donald Trump, there are many questions, but no mysteries.”

We dont need the epstein files, and we certainly are not going to get them; not unaltered at least. Regardless, we know what is in there. Not everything, but everything we need to know with respect to Trump. At this point, his supporters do not care about the facts as far as Trump is concerned. We have to stop hoping that something is going to rescue us from Trump’s grip on our reality. Nothing will. All that is left is for us to act.

I’m surprisingly easy to please. You just need to semi-consistently represent the interests of your constituents. Easy peasy. Jeffries has been called to endorse Mamdani since July. He waited until the last few days before the election, instead of actively dissuading Cuomo from running by endorsing the clear primary winner. As a result, Mamdani spent the entire summer having to deal with attacks from someone in his own party rather than expounding on his (extremely popular) platform.

It is generally a bad sign for a party that wants to call itself ‘Democrat’ to reject the clear democratic will of the people in your own primary. Call me unreasonable for noticing.

What a cowardly bitch. Waited for the last possible moment once it was clear he had no other choice. God I hate Hakeem Jeffries.

Strong disagree with your characterization. I went to a crunchy liberal arts college in upstate NY. I came in as a republican and left as a libertarian. I went hard left years later after entering the workforce and learning about how the world really works. K-12 did way more damage to my understanding of the world and college didnt really do a lot to change that. The idea that college is some kind of propaganda machine is itself propaganda. Of those who come out liberalized it mostly just has to do with exposure to people from different backgrounds and classes. Said another way, people get disabused of their parochial upbringing which can look like indoctrination from the perspective of small-minded yokels back home.

No, I do not regret my college education. It gave me the tools to understand the world around me, and to be a successful and more complete person. The cost is too high, but what else is true in the US?

Seconding kuhl. They sell cargo pants that look and fit like regular pants should.

Libs dont have a coherent moral or political worldview. They are preoccupied with aesthetics and decorum. It is why the libs will not be involved in material change for the better. They simply lack the imagination or will.

EDIT: I worry that people are taking that I am on the side of the Trump admin. I am to the left of the democrats and that is the basis for my disappointment and criticism.

No chance anything that actually attacks inequality ever gets implemented through existing legislative channels.

Protests that are legal, time-limited, and non-disruptive while also having no specific demands are just angry parades. And while it can be personally cathartic to be around like minded people, this does literally nothing to affect material change. Instead, millions of people who were motivated to engage in political action have now spent a couple of hours walking around, chanting, reading signs made by others, have let off some of the built up pressure that might have otherwise motivated them to do something real. Imagine if 1% of the protestors who turned out yesterday blocked access to ICE facilities instead? Or donated time and money to feeding homeless people. Or donated time and money to helping immigrants (documented and otherwise) increase access to legal services. Imagine if instead everyone of those people decided to strike from their jobs until the shutdown was ended and healthcare funded indefinitely? My ideas are not the best ones out there, but they are all probably more impactful to real people than anything that happened yesterday.

Conversely, how many more brown people were disappeared off the streets by ICE while everyone was distracted with the no kings protest? What new, corrupt, immoral, expenditure of our tax dollars was allocated to some horrible imperialist cause or Trump ally? How many people who depend on govt services had to go without because the shutdown was in place? You get the idea.

Effective protest is disruptive, time-unbounded, and usually illegal. They always have specific demands like ending a war, passing a bill, or freeing the unjustly imprisoned, etc. I am glad that people were motivated to turn out. I am sad that they turned out for an angry parade.

Sure, but cells of disruptive activists are not the foundations of a nationally effective movement. You need a way for normies to show up and help. And placating their activist impulses with a demonstration of discontent while not also offering real channels for affecting change is a way of castrating collective action. That’s my two cents, at least.

Right, and private mockery contains the verisimilitude of their intent. They may not be ready to spin up a gas chamber but their chats are fully representative of their attitudes about millions of americans and fully serves as a legitimate basis of criticism and derision.