Ukraine’s fall without US support is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. That would assume Russian offensives are sustainable, which they are not. They’re involved in a surge of their warfighting potential, which is steadily depleting their arsenals and straining their economy.

It remains to be seen how long they can keep it up.

Let’s not ignore that there’s a real, policy-based disagreement here. Tech companies like to be able to import top talent from wherever they can get it (and are generally correct that this is overall beneficial), while white nationalists are dead set against the idea, as it strikes directly against the very core of their values.

It’s a legit disagreement, and pretty foundational.

That said, I do overall agree that we’re kinda beaten at the moment, and too busy licking our wounds and regrouping to care that much about this.

In 2008, Obama pulled off a surprising victory against establishment favorite Hilary Clinton, mainly off the back of a swell of online, small dollar donations. In his first term, among other things like stabilizing the economy in the midst of what we called The Great Recession (dumb name, I know, though a lot of people did lose their houses and jobs), he gave everyone health insurance subsidized by the government via taxes on health insurance and pharma companies, as well as Medicaid expansion. While not ideal, this was both realistically doable with the degree of Congressional support at the time, and a massive improvement over the previous system.

For some reason people have forgotten this in their zeal to pressure the dem party. I do get that, though I think it’s important to retain a degree of memory of what actually happened and why. Anyway, are we really sure a third party is necessary, when it is possible to simply win this one?

Or even that great of an idea? Because unless you pulled all the dems with you, you’re just leaving a dominant repub party by helping them divide and conquer. This is very frustrating, no question, but so is life sometimes.

Finding 9 repubs willing to stand up to Trump these days is easier said than done. You’re aware, I assume, of what happened to the last batch.

Regarding work, how about a whole bunch of judicial appointments? He already broke Trump’s record.

General reminder that we do not hold the House, greatly impacting our ability to pass the laws we’d like.

Awhile ago they released mod support, and I’m pretty sure I remember hearing about a mod that made it real time with pause.

I ended up dropping it too, but it’s more that I’m just not as into rpgs as I was in the past. I can recognize how good it is, but the genre just doesn’t do it for me anymore.

I may have disagreed with Ron on almost all things policy, but at least the man had a spine and stood up for his values with consistency. Rand does not.

Prob just a territory, really. Can’t be ruining our perfectly even 100 Senators.

That’s a really great analogy. lol “This is going to be really mentally scarring for you, and the stains will never come out of your clothes, you know…”

Yeah, the Bible-thumpers claim to have the answers and want you to realize something too.

grapples with political turmoil and North Korean propaganda.

Y’know, of all the world’s countries, I would expect S Korea to be one of the most resistant to adversarial propaganda. I mean, here in the US we were largely insulated from it during the Cold War, so we didn’t really have the exposure and thus experience in dealing with it. But S Korea has always been in radio range of an adversary, so shouldn’t it be pretty well understood as “a thing” by the public at large?

Like, when someone knocks on my door and asks if I’d like to talk about Jesus, I understand exactly what is happening and why. We’re culturally familiar with that here. If a S Korean picks a pamphlet up off the ground and it’s obvious N Korean propaganda, do they have that same degree of cultural familiarity?

The comment I was replying to said the following:

For anyone wondering, this is what those staff ignored for two hours (WARNING: this may well trigger you, it sure as fuck ruined my day): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx4in4UpdWE

This video is 43 seconds long. You hear that sound out of a little kid’s leg, followed by the screaming for two hours, and don’t immediately call the ambulance, you’re not a reasonable adult. You’re an inhuman monster. Anyone saying “well maybe they thought he was just acting out” is ignoring the basic facts of the case so they can be contrary on the Internet.

This implies staff knowingly ignored a severe injury, which is what I find unlikely and wanted to get straight.

Agreed, mostly. My issue is with the assumption that the staff knowingly neglected a severe injury, which is what the other commenter was trying to imply for some reason. There’s just no way that ends well for them, in our country where people will chew out teachers for even giving a bad grade. The only way this strikes me as possible is the staff severely underestimating the child’s condition after a “slip and fall”.

Perhaps I don’t. Though I think each of your examples has systemic reasons that make it unique from this situation.

It’s a school, so there’s no capitalist profit incentive unlike a nursing home. These are not bystanders, but people with a specific responsibility towards this child, and again, no profit incentive.

In this case, the child has parents that will be expecting their kid back from school in one piece at the end of the day. There is no way in hell they could realistically get away with knowingly ignoring such a severe injury. Broken femurs, again, can kill you due to internal bleeding. Not the death of some elderly nursing home patient, the death of a child (who has parents) under your care in a place where children do not die very often.

I don’t see it as very likely.

So let me get this straight:

You think the staff heard something like this, and therefore knew that there was a severe injury, but just ignored it for some reason? Maybe they hated the child or something?

Even though they would most definitely get in deep trouble for ignoring what is actually a life threatening injury after anyone found out?

We don’t know how the femur broke, I suspect it was likely a collision with something, otherwise it would have been noticed. You think the staff were knowingly neglecting a broken femur for the lulz or something, despite how very, very badly that would obviously end for them? I doubt it.

Sorry for upsetting you, but life isn’t simple. We don’t gain much from simply trying to identify some sort of bad guys and then blindly raging against them.

The hypothetical isn’t hard, a culture where a guideline is given that children “acting out” isn’t to be rewarded. In a case where a verbal child would be able to say “my leg hurts very badly”, this child was unable to though, so a system that worked fine with previous children became unable to handle this particular circumstance. The only outward evidence that something is genuinely amiss becomes the crying. At what point then, does crying go from “potentially acting out” to “okay, this might be severe bodily damage”?

15 minutes? 30? An hour? This is where the misapplication of training comes in, and where a judgement call did become necessary, as I doubt any specific timetables were actually provided. Two hours is clearly too long, I think we can all agree on that. But staff at schools are usually undersupplied and understaffed, they are under stress and there are other duties that demand their time. This environment can lead to gross errors.

The “why” and “how” is exactly what I’m on as well, since the beginning. It’s going to be more complicated than any sort of simple “wow, those people are really fucked up”.

No, not really. This persons expertise in autism, their child, etc has no bearing whatsoever in how that one specific school treats its students. These are two completely separate topics, and that person’s child has zero bearing on the discussion, since they are not a student at the Virginia school.

I’m saying it was likely an error in judgement, a mistake that reflects far more than the mindset of the people actually at fault in it. This was not a home, it was a professional environment wherein people are expected to follow the instructions they were given, even when those instructions are at odds with common sense. Choosing to follow your own common sense over any training you have received can be a fireable offense, even if that training has been misinterpreted and misapplied, perhaps even by those that trained you.

No, I did not say that.