1. I don’t expect anything catastrophic to happen so suddenly that I won’t have time to flee.

2. Everyone I know is here, including people who depend on me.

3. I don’t want to learn another language.

4. I feel a lot less connected to the USA than I did before, but I don’t feel more connected to any other country than I do to the USA. The one my family and I came from is a huge mess and I certainly don’t want to return to it.

I’m taking the idea of leaving the country much more seriously than I had before, but it still seems unlikely.

societies have utilized shame in order to shun unwanted or undesirable opinions forever

Using shame isn’t new. Using shame in this particular way at this particular time appears to be a poor strategy. It’s deliberately divisive and conservative reactionaries aren’t the only ones who are motivated to vote against it. By now many people who call themselves liberal and have a history of reliably voting for Democrats oppose it too. I think Nate Silver does a good job of expressing why in the context of Israel, although he’s looking at a much bigger picture. Most of these people are still voting for Democrats, because Harris is a centrist and Trump is, well, Trump. It’s still not helping.

Lemmy is a place where it often seems like leftist views are almost universal among Democrats, but Lemmy is not representative of the large majority of Democratic voters. I don’t think most Harris voters (as opposed to just the vocal Democrats online) despise Republicans.

In my experience, native New Hampshire libertarians aren’t the sort of libertarians you’d encounter on the internet. They generally don’t call themselves libertarians and they’re a lot more practical (as seen in your article - it was the internet libertarians attracting the bears). They’re more like small-government conservatives would be if the conservative movement in the USA hadn’t gone off the rails.

That’s not a similar act at all. Assassinating one of the leaders of Iran’s nuclear weapons program isn’t like blowing up a bunch of random people at a march.

Massachusetts is an interesting place to observe because it’s right next to libertarian New Hampshire, which has much lower taxes. I’m nowhere near being affected by this tax, but I used to live in Massachusetts and I did reduce my taxes significantly by moving to New Hampshire. IMO New Hampshire is better overall. The only thing I missed about the Boston area were the restaurants.

I don’t understand where the people taking these statements seriously (either to support them or to oppose them) imagine that the Palestinians could possibly go from Gaza. Egypt won’t take them. That means they’re not going anywhere.

they should not be allowed back in power

The law isn’t about should in that sense of the word. If Satan, the Devil, was running for President, whether or not he was legally eligible to do so would be an entirely separate question from whether or not people should vote for him. The article I linked to argues that

According to longstanding congressional precedent and legal authority, the phrase “civil office under the United States” did not include the office of president of the United States.

That might plausibly be true no matter how bad Trump is.

nobody is this insane to think that Trump didn’t break the law, and clearly based on the constitution is ineligible to be president again

Insane? There are law professors writing editorials in the New York Times about how, in their expert opinion, Trump actually is eligible. You might think they’re wrong (clearly the Maine secretary of state does) but this is a genuinely ambiguous and unsettled matter of law; there’s no “insane” side.

On the one hand, she has a bizarre compulsion to smoke. But on the other hand…

I hate how crafting systems work in most games…

What I want: meaningful decisions about how to customize my character’s equipment.

What I get: clicking all over the place like it’s a 90’s adventure game to collect pieces of shit so that I can put together a giant turd.

Isn’t that how most people socialize at parties? Some people can do it naturally, but I figure most people are pretending. I frequently ask myself “What would a normal human do in this situation?”

Does California have a problem of shootings committed by legal concealed-carry permit holders acting without premeditation?

As I did already say, I’m trying to prove that the casualty data as presented in the article gives the incorrect impression that “by contrast” the battle in Gaza is unusually dangerous for civilians by comparing absolute numbers of daily casualties to those from a battle for a much smaller city which actually involved killing a larger fraction of that city’s civilians. The article is overall shallow, low-effort, and misleading.

I don’t think the article does a good job of comparing the numbers from Gaza to those of other recent battles in the region. The way Raqqa is presented is just wrong, with “in contrast” used to imply that that battle was safer for civilians when it in fact wasn’t.

My own math is very crude, because I’m just working with the numbers given in this article. I think a good analysis would include more factors, like the number of combatants involved. Even then, some things are going to be difficult to count accurately or even to quantify at all. It’s hard to do arithmetic on how many people are killed every day without appearing callous, and I don’t think I succeed, but that arithmetic is still necessary to understand what’s going on.

By contrast, US-led coalition air and artillery strikes killed fewer than 20 civilians per day, on average, during the four-month offensive to drive IS out of the Syrian city of Raqqa in 2017, according to Amnesty International. It is unclear how many civilians lived there at the time, but UN officials estimated that there were between 50,000 and 100,000.

There are more than two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza so 300 people a day dying in Gaza is a smaller fraction of the population than 20 people a day dying in Raqqa.

And an Associated Press investigation suggested that between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians were killed in the nine-month battle between US-backed Iraqi forces and IS for the Iraqi city of Mosul which ended in 2017.

This amounts to an estimated fewer-than-40 civilian deaths per day, on average. Mosul had an estimated population of less than two million people when IS captured the city in 2014.

This, on the other hand, is a remarkably low number of casualties compared to Raqqa. About 0.5% of the civilian population dead compared to somewhere between 2.5% and 5%. Why was Mosul so much less bloody than Raqqa, given that those battles were fought by similar armies at about the same time? Is the current conflict an outlier compared to them? By the numbers, it’s more dangerous for civilians than Mosul but less than Raqqa.

They wouldn’t win the state anyway so being removed from the ballot is good for them - it makes challenging the nationwide legitimacy of the election easier.

If Trump loses, it will help him to have Fox News (truthfully!) say that millions of people who wanted to vote for him were prevented from doing so.

Nobody really knows why that’s supposed to attract a potential dating partner, but it’s really common

Back when I did online dating I wrote about playing computer games, not because I expected that to be attractive to the average woman (of course it isn’t) but because I was hoping to meet one of the rare women who shared my interest.

A friend of mine managed to marry a woman who agreed to have their honeymoon be a week-long canoe trip through the wilderness in Maine, complete with living off of the fish they caught. It can happen!

IMO this issue should be considered a political question by the courts, based on the notion that there exist some questions best resolved through the political process, in which voters can approve or correct the challenged action by voting for or against those involved in the decision.

Taking Biden off the ballot in Texas (like taking Trump off the ballot in Colorado) will almost certainly be irrelevant to the outcome of the presidential election, but it will contribute to an environment where approximately half the country considers the outcome of the 2024 election illegitimate no matter who wins.

Even keeping Trump on the ballot everywhere would not lead to him conceding quietly if he lost, but taking him off the ballot is going to make things much worse. Like it or not, he really could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and still have the support of Republican voters, and they (like anybody else) will not be content to have the court system tell them that they can’t vote for him.

I’m not sure I agree - the change of generations isn’t a new process and our political parties have survived it before. Certain ideas that were controversial for past generations won’t be controversial for future ones, but conservatism and the general phenomenon of the culture war will persist. (I think the Trump phenomenon is in fact conservatism adapting itself to modern conditions.)