https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Pretty damning to me. Never in my life have I seen a more obvious case of cause-and-effect.

Yeah, so what the Republicans and you really are saying is "the border isn't really that much of a crisis, it's not really 'open' and we can afford to push it off for 12-18 months so we can help our election.

No, they're saying it is a crisis, and given the choice of it being a crisis for the next 9 months or the next 4 years, they're gambling to pull off the former. Especially if it means a stricter policy.

I mean, that's what he did with the strict Trump immigration policies after he took office.

This isn't really true

Huh? It's absolutely true:
https://www.texastribune.org/2...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/p...
https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_...

Like we had that shit on lockdown coming out of the Trump era. Illegal immigration had slowed to a crawl. And then Biden dismantled all that policy. Only recently (like within the last 9 months) is he talking a different game (again, because it's really hurting him in the polls: https://www.axios.com/2024/01/...)

if it was why would be openly supporting and ready to support a law that would have been the most stringent and mostly Republican supported immigration reforms in like 30 years?

Because:
1) See above polls
2) It's really not that stringent. This is a compromise bill.
The Republicans had a much stronger border package (Secure the Border Act) they put forward in May that Democrats rejected: https://www.aljazeera.com/news...

They did want a border bill and one was all set to pass before the last minute it was killed due to politics.

That was politics. It's an election year, and Biden desperately needs a win on immigration to appeal to voters. The Republicans didn't want to give him that win after he effectively supporting open borders for the past 3 years. Not to mention there could be legitimate fear within the Republican party that if harsher immigration laws are passed this year (that help Biden win an election), he could go ahead and dismantle all those protections immediately after winning. I mean, that's what he did with the strict Trump immigration policies after he took office.

Take a wild guess how the current Supreme Court will rule once the case makes it there.

Likely 5-4 overturning this ruling, with Kavanaugh joining the 4 liberal justices (Roberts, Jackson, Sotomayor, Kagan). Possibility it could swing 5-4 the other way. But my money is on the overturn.

A case in point: I was horrified and outraged by the attack by Hamas on Israel. I was also horrified and outraged by Israel's response.

To this day I don't get the outrage. If Canada was publicly stating their ultimate goal is to exterminate every American, and they went and fired thousands of missiles into your neighborhood, I highly doubt you would find the collateral loss of innocents caused by a response invasion "horrific" or worthy of outrage. I think Americans are woefully naive in their comfortable bubbles and have never understood real fear in their entire lives.

The Jewish population to this day remains below its pre-Holocaust numbers, some 90 years later: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora.... That is what a genocide looks like. Gaza's population has doubled in the last decade while all the while Israel was allowing food and electricity to the country the whole time. And people claim this is a genocide? Like where's the fucking perspective?

By far the worst offender in this respect is the "conservative" mainstream media realized in pioneers like Limbaugh and the cast of Fox "News" who convinced people that opinions supersede facts and reality.

Fully disagree. Both sides engage in this nonsense. We saw it with Obamacare "if you want your doctor, you can keep your doctor". We saw it with the China COVID lab leak theory. We saw it with Hunter Biden's laptop. We saw it with the Trump Russia investigation. If the left have an axe to grind, they gladly will use their opinions to supersede facts. Anyone who doesn't believe so has a camp they've already settled in, but wants to be construed as a self-aware moderate.

Sex can be transactional. It can also be a fun activity, work to produce offspring (not the greatest kind of sex, BTW), or an emotional event that strengthens a relationship bond. Or all of the above.

All of those still sound like transactions -- i.e., "i give you sex, you give me a kid", or "i give you sex, you give me a long term emotional bond". It just comes down to framing. It's like that old altruism argument that claims selfless acts don't exist because you're always getting something out of it, even if that something is just "good feelings". When you really boil it all down, all people do the things they do to get something out of it. That includes relationships. Whether you see it as transactional or not is all perspective.

That is exactly what right wingers throughout the world are doing now. Funny how history repeats itself.

That is exactly what everybody throughout the world are doing now. Funny how history repeats itself.

Fixed that for you. I don't exactly see Democrats standing up for the Jews these days...

What is a "structure of tolerance"?

https://study.com/academy/less...

The legal limits per individual are (1) 3.6 g / day, (2) 7.5 g / 30 days via mail order, and (3) 9 g / 30 days via any method. A single 24-hour Claritan-D pill contains 240 mg of pseudoephedrine sulfate, and taking one pill per day over 30 days is 7.2 g, which is under the limit via mail order. These limits are more than enough for occasional short-term use.

You do realize most people just run to the store to get OTC meds? "Mail-order" is not the norm. So you literally gave an example where the limits are not enough for short-term use. I've run into similar issues with Nyquil usage during colds with not being able to get enough when needed.

I stopped watching a few years ago (around the last season of Matt Smith). Is it worth catching up again?

Not really. The writing has gotten alot weaker, and a bit preachy as well. The acting for the most part is fine, but I legit can't think of a memorable story since Moffat. His departure really was the death knell.

Are you saying its not possible for states to micromanage its citizens?

Oh, certainly. But that is typically referred to as "overregulation." "Overreach" implies they've gone beyond their legal authority or venture into the gray zone of legality to snatch some more power.

seriously. how does this system make sense, that allows someone to win who did not get the most votes?

It makes sense because spatial locality is more of a bellwether of policy than "total number of people". Each state contributes in some fashion to the country and has radically different needs. Water shortages and forest fires may be really fucking important to Californians, whereas they might not give two shits about flooding. Could you imagine a govt where they throw all the dollars into shit they care about and just let New Orleans drown because "*shrug* it's not an issue that's particularly relevant to me". Or say they let the farming industry go under. Or punt on the opiod issue, because "that's a new hampshire problem". Or shrug about fentanyl, because that ain't a problem in their state. There's wildly different issues of importance based on the "piece of land" you're living on. Whereas, locally in a given region, regardless of the number of people, you're largely going to have similar concerns. Governing a nation by definition doesn't mean ignoring ~99% of it, which is exactly what happens when population rules. 50% of the US population lives in 1% of the land area. That's an insane way to govern.

The electoral college gives people in shit states more voting power than people in states where people actually want to live.

By design. Or our farming industry would have died off decades ago and we'd be at the mercy of foreign powers for our food. You think a San Francisco avocado toast eater gives two shits about what matters to an Iowan corn farmer? They've probably never even seen a blade of grass in their lives.

Yes, we destroy their economies through colonialism and/or corporatism and then they need someplace to go, and they can see that their wealth has been transferred here. Then America declares that fleeing economic collapse is not a valid reason to be a refugee, and get the fuck out, even though we caused that collapse.

If you think the US is the sole reason for the sustained dysfunction in these countries, you're seriously deluded. There's rampant corruption across all layers of govt and often cartels literally in bed with govt as well. If anything, its the US demand for cheap labor that actually is lifting the countries up, which stands in stark contrast to the corruption holding it down. I don't know a single country with exposure to US labor demand that hasn't come out better on the other hand...it literally _built_ China.

The sad part when it comes to you is that all the information necessary for you to understand all of this is freely available, but you're too busy cheerleading for fascism to even go looking for it, let alone to read it.

Super ironic statement considering your Quora link is literally the only reference source I can find even remotely discussing your claims about "US destroying their economies". Every legit reference I can find chalks up the Latin American debt crisis to world recession and oil price shocks, factors well out of the control of the US.

"there is movement to try to push back on Federal overreach" The more recent issue is state overreach.

That by definition is not a thing. It's literally the 10th amendment. If it's not in the federal govt's purview and it's not inalienable, the states can literally do whatever they want. By constitutional design.

Federal overreach is a thing because the federal government was not meant to have grand sweeping overarching powers, authority, or control.