You brought up the dogs comparison, and your allies in the IDF agree that they are as dogs, as they train dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners at sites like Sde Teiman

https://novaramedia.com/2025/1...

"Well, thank you for lying about me so thoroughly. Using Hamas' propaganda to do it too! "
"Oh, and just to be clear - I 100% voted to have every illegal immigrant rounded up and expelled."

Hamas clearly doesn't need to be in the room for you to reveal yourself for what you are.

Simplest isn't necessarily the best, and this is probably one of the best examples you could find. FPTP is used in UK too, and UK politics suck as a result, but I'd say that US politics suck so much worse, and to a very large extent it's thanks to FPTP.

All the problems stem from the fact that FPTP encourages people to not 'waste their vote' and vote for a candidate that's more likely to win, rather than the candidate they like the most. This is already a huge problem, this isn't how democracy is meant to work. But that naturally leads to the number of parties being reduced to the smallest viable number, which is two. And once you have a two-party system it brings an avalanche of problems.

In the UK, in spite of having FPTP we're slightly beginning to move away from the two party system largely thanks to how useless both 'main' parties have proven themselves, but in US for various reasons I'm not seeing any likelyhood of a move away from the two-party system, and it's a massive problem.

First, with a two-party system you get the same problem as having a choice between only two competing options when buying a car, or a computer, or anything else. As one of the two main parties you don't have to be actually popular, you just have to be less unpopular than the other main party. I believe you're seeing it abundantly clear now. As I see it several most recent US elections were to a large extent won not by people voting for a candidate but against the other candidate. It's accepted that the winning candidate will suck, but the hope is they won't suck as much as the other guy/woman. Obviously this doesn't lead to great quality of leadership.

But I believe the two-party system in US has lead to a even bigger problem. After so many years of a two-party system a lot of people think about politics in a fundamentally binary way and seem completely incapable of thinking in any other way. These people don't see good and bad policies, they see Democrat and Republican policies. This leads to a whole lot of rationalization and blinkered thinking and people voting for laws and candidates in spite of being obviously bad so long as it's coming from their team.

US desperately needs other parties in the mix. Even if they won't immediately start winning (it will probably take time) the threat of them becoming serious players may force the main parties to push their policies in a more popular direction. As it stands thanks to the fptp system the main parties can safely ignore independents/third parties as irrelevant weirdos and continue to push lobbyist-dictated policies.

To some extent yes, but smartphones are much worse than TV in this respect. All mediums are trying to maximise the time the user spends on them - engagement time as they call it now, eventually to the detriment to the user, but smartphones are much better at it. It's really a combination of smartphones and social media.

When you turn off the TV, it won't turn itself back on, especially important when you go to sleep. You know the TV program, you know when the stuff you want to watch is on, all other times you can ignore the TV and do something else. Otoh the smartphones you're expected to carry with you at all times and I'm betting many never switch them off. More important, social media notifications can arrive at any time. Ding! xXxDumbNamexXx has posted a reply to your comment, you want to see it right now, don't you? Ding! Omg_DragenThingy_lol just posted a negative comment on your profile, what're gonna do about that? You're not just going to let it slide are you? This is especially bad with teens because at that age they're hardcoded to be more invested in what their peers are doing and their opinions and beliefs. Even aside from the social media, the Internet can produce content at a rate orders of magnitude faster than TV ever could, and content creator subscriptions and notifications are designed to constantly keep yanking your attention back to that content.

Smartphones and social media combination has become so good at keeping teens glued to them at all times that it's eating into the time spent on everything else, like outdoor recreation, irl relationships and friendships, study, even sleep. Obviously that is having a significant negative impact on health. And certainly it's made worse by the fact that parents who could otherwise provide some alternatives are not there because they're working three jobs and a smartphone is the cheapest babysitter you can have.

Great new marketing slogan! MS, take note

"Hamas likes to put artillery"

There it is, the neverending pathetic excuse for mass-slaughter. Israel has destroyed every hospital and killed every person it can find that could allow a society to support life. It has mass-murdered whole families with its well-documented Daddy's Home automated killing software, and destroyed all water sanitation.

Field hospital director Marwan al-Hams was disappeared by the IDF, amd then they abducted his daughter to force a false confession from him.

https://euromedmonitor.org/en/...

The IDF tortured Dr. Adnan al Bursh of Shifa hospital to death.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2...

The IDF has killed prisoners by sexually assaulting them with electrical rods. Even a fire extinguisher has been used for torture. Every human rights outlet has condemned Israel for all those things. It is a pariah, and its remaining defenders find themselves alone. Even here it was cowardly hoe you hid your lies behind a "joke".

You will cheer on Trump abdictimg people for looking brown.amd speaking spanish kist as you cheer on the IDF abducting people (even little children)bwithout charge and holding them in prisons comparable to Anu Gharib.

You do see palestinians as dogs. Your racism allows all this, and it has led you to ally yourself with a satanic army. When you meet your maker, you only have yourself to blame. Maybe you'll find words then to defend the IDF as it bombs hospitals and torments doctors during surgeries. You have just as little regard for human life as any of them.

"I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

Show me someone using Bill Clinton as a source of truth in 2025, and I'll show you someone who can't read the room.

Delusional. Netanyahu's govt has made clear a state for Palestinians is off the table. They would never have toleratedone, only Palestinians' displacement and extermination is considered acceptable. Now hit me with a "but the hostages" for the millionth time even though they've been returned and the bombing continues. You all have destroyed your own credibility

It's not some circumstantial quibble, rather It'e part of a broader effort to root out all palestinian life.
The israelis, who want to present themselves as indigenous, are at war with the earth itself: they tear up native olive trees and replace them with european ones, they redirect water sources and poison aquifers. They are not compatible with civilized society

What are you trying to say here?

I believe that access to water is a concern, being something that human beings need a constant supply of in order to not die, but the title "Violent conflicts over water" is misleading.

In the above list, only the first type (disputes where water triggered violence) can be described as "conflict over water". The other two types are conflicts merely involving water in some very small way. The incidents from Israel-Gaza and Russia-Ukraine wars simply mean that civilian infrastructure, including water sources among others, has been deliberately targeted, something that unfortunately has been a regular feature of both wars. Neither war is a conflict over water.

The point of this is really to prevent adults from accessing news that their rulers don't approve of, so a "think of the children" with a "can't trust those foreigners" tacked on is extra nsauseating to see.

I find the guy's constant repetition of 'world-leading' and 'best in the world' strange. You've got some scientifically interesting results, great, go ahead and publish your findings, why put so much emphasis on what 'the rest of the world' has done in that area? This isn't some kind of 'our neutrino observatory is bigger than your neutrino observatory' contest. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, perhaps the dude is just really excited about his team's findings.

Or Gaddafi..

Lost somewhere among all the political talking points the OP has a very good point here. The usual fantasy/fear/sci-fi trope is turning a human being into a walking automaton, entirely taking away his free will and making him mindlessly obey all commands of the controller. This is what MKULTRA was trying to achieve, among others. But if you're willing to be more patient and subtle, techniques for controlling human behaviour existed for centuries and worked extremely well.

Brainwashing, propaganda, using mob mentality, pushing various psychological buttons, playing on fears and desires. Works better if you start from a young age. You don't have to subvert a person's free will with chemicals or tech or whatever, when you can brainwash them into believing that the thing you want them to do is what the person him/herself wants to do. People have an incredible capacity for rationalizing almost anything, no matter how insane. From a certain point you don't have to do anything anymore, people will self-brainwash from here on, and help you brainwash others. This is what we should be worried about, not some hypothetical sci-fi technology.

As for these 'researchers' and being able to directly alter human cognition, it's complete nonsense. We know next to nothing about how human thinking process works, so how can we change it directly? All we can do is super clumsy attempts like MKULTRA and similar research, and all those have achieved is messed with the heads of the test subjects without achieving any kind of control. Which, if you have no idea what you're doing, is the only possible outcome.