Leadership positions of any kind are and have always been a magnet for arrogant sociopaths. From Fortune 500 C suite down to mud hut tribal strongman.

Question (evolutionarily) has always been, sociopath or not, is he more or less effective than the next most plausible alternative?

Fuck if I know if there's a pure-hearted diamond in the rough out there somewhere just waiting to lead us to greatness, but as to my question above, the answer usually seems to be, good enough.

What was the excuse for when Biden was in office?

The US doesn't control what happens in Moscow.

Short of getting into the fight ourselves (um...no) there is nothing to do other than watch.

Systematic moochers score quite high in the oppression olympics. Dumbasses too though admittedly they may have fallen behind the pack.

You punched down. And that's bad, especially if the dumb schmuck deserved it, I am led to understand.

1;

Just pay me before you hit enter.

The marginal cost of producing an additional kWh of electricity is the cost of paying for the labor, materials, and consumables of building and operating the generating capacity for that additional kilowatt hour.

These are determined by physics and the fact that people don't work for free. Communism doesn't "solve" this any more than capitalism "creates" it.

The Soviets tried to fix the "people don't work for free" part of it, and almost 40 years later I still remember the regular utility outages, bare shelves, and bread lines of my childhood.

Communism has been tried at scale for a century and a half. It has failed spectacularly when tried at scale for a century and a half.

We actually *don't* ban gambling or alcohol. In many parts of the US, state governments actually run (and advertise!) lotteries, and in a few states (New Hampshire and Pennsylvania come to mind), the state government has the monopoly on consumer alcohol sales.

In recent years, commercial gambling has become legal in more places, marijuana has been legalized in more than half the country, and other narcotics are becoming decriminalized if not legalized in more and more places.

To your point, these policies *are* in fact ensnaring precisely the fragile people you alude to, and I wasn't a fan of having to smell other people's weed wafting up through the vents when I lived in a large multiunit building a while back, but whether because of freedom, greed, or both, the legal vices aren't going anywhere.

So why treat the phones differently? As if they're more dangerous than putting literal poison in your body?

I don't have to believe in spherical libertarian cows to see this as the mindless moral panic and shakedown operation that it is.

It's nice when things are either blasphemous or superfluous. Much simpler that way.

Maybe I should move to some deep red pocket of somewhere where I could pretend that liberals are cardboard cutouts and not real people who came to their ideas for reasons other than pure malice.

Seems to work for the online all the time crowd of both stripes, so it can't fail irl!

When it's idiots rioting while shouting left-wing slogans, it's democracy in action. When the idiots shout right-wing slogans, it's hypocrisy, a coup attempt, and the end of civilization.

A pox on both your houses.

So if I don't like what you're doing, but it's legal, I just get to walk over and trash your shit.

Wearing a tracksuit is mandatory?

Self-sterilization. For the good of the planet.

A man can dream....

If I were an EU citizen, I could refrain from using tiktok. But I could not refrain from living under a government that thinks I'm a child.

Maybe got stuck in vi?

Basic human dignity entitles people to make their own life choices, rather than having those choices made for them by a king.

If you ascribe to me the responsibility for your actions, whether beneficial or self-destructive, you have made me your king. Are you sure you want to give up ownership of your own self that way? Because if you say I am responsible for your suicide, or another's, then that's exactly what you've done.

There were no kooks, nutters, or viral conspiracy theories before the internet. Everyone, everywhere, all the time, got all of their information from publications and broadcasters who stringently held themselves to the highest moral, ethical, and professional standards of truth, integrity, and duty to society. If you saw it in print, it was all but guaranteed to be the truth and nothing but.

People also forced themselves to break bread with their ideological opponents and never ever intentionally sought community exclusively among the like-minded.

The internet is the poison apple. The world was unambiguously and incontrivertibly Eden before.

Comforting.