Yes, and if Democrats continue to refuse to understand why, they’ll continue to lose. This meme is a sterling example of that refusal. Third-party voters didn’t shift the election outcome. (If anything, there were more votes for right-wing third parties than left-wing third parties.) Polls show that Gaza was simply not a major factor, either. (The exception might be Michigan, but with 15 electoral votes, that wouldn’t have changed the ultimate outcome.)

JFC you don’t even live in the U.S. and you want to tell me that the type of people who would be happy to have American women in the same situation as Afghan women don’t exist here?

Something about a full-court press?

Who compared the situation? This is about comparable view of women.

That feeling of dread when the anecdote begins with a specific date…

I live in the United States. I don’t have to imagine, I can see it up close.

Speaking of real, the USA is not a law of nature. It’s only been around for a short time, historically, and it took a bloody civil war to keep it going this long. The warning that we have to vote for the correct color every time, or the country falls apart, is wrong. Voting for the correct color and the country still falls apart is possible if that color can’t make the fundamental changes needed.

Not just obesity, but also the loneliness epidemic, since mental health is boosted as much by the weak relationships of the people that one sees regularly, day-to-day, whose name one might not even know, as it is by close, intimate relationships. (And even the latter are suffering the loss of social contact.)

Disable the ad block, wait for all of the ads to load so the text stops jumping around like a crack-addled wallaby, accept the cookie notice, try to hit the tiny X to close the inevitable video overlay with shaking fingers, try to hit the tiny X to close the ad overlay, too, decline signing up for email alerts, decide whether to accept notifications, and then read the article one sentence at a time while scrolling past ads.

Maybe your local news sites aren’t as insane as mine?

I said September 21, 1996 was the time, but as the old aphorism goes, the second-best time is now.

I have the same question. I can’t. Cars are all luxury items nowadays.

I strongly disagree with VMT as the proper measure, and here’s a simple, constructed example of why:

There are two cities of about 200,000 people. One is compact, and easy to get around by transit, walking, or biking. The people drive around 2,000 miles per year each. The other is a low-density, mostly suburban area, and people drive around 15,000 miles per year. They have the same casualty rate per VMT of 3 per million miles.

Those two cities aren’t equally as safe. Not even close! The one city would have 1,200 crashes, injuries, or deaths each year, and the other would have 9,000. That’s a major difference which should be accounted for in policymaking and land-use decisions.

As far as the American landscape, it’s spread out not because it was cheaper. How could that be, when it takes more infrastructure to spread out? It was more expensive, and that was actually the point of car-dependent suburbs. They were more expensive to build and maintain, which kept the undesirable people out. Then, the desirable people were subsidized, through the GI Bill, tax breaks, mortgage lending standards (e.g. redlining), and the like.

I don’t claim it’s a grand conspiracy, but it is verifiable history.

Aw, c’mon, cars are objectively speaking luxury items today. A modernized Daihatsu Opti with a sticker price of about $5,500 (the inflation-adjusted price of a Ford Model T) would completely meet the requirements for getting and keeping a job.

Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.

Another way to say this is that designing an entire landscape around the car has shaped everybody’s lives in ways that make millions of people poorer/deeper in poverty.

The danger comes from cars, and the reason the distances are so great is because the landscape was designed for cars. Those fatality numbers are biased to make it seem like bicycles are dangerous by framing it in terms of the mode of transportation the victim was using, instead of the agent causing the fatality, and by comparing the numbers to VMT.

But, spin it differently: Capitalist elites bribed lobbied politicians to force you to spend your money and time on a motor vehicle to schlep your family around like sacks of potatoes to all your destinations by locating them unreasonably far away, so that the huge amounts of space needed by motor vehicles fit in between, and they could enrich themselves by selling motor vehicles. Now it’s become an arms race of bigger and bigger motor vehicles, further lining the pockets of the capitalist elites, at the expense of people’s (especially children’s, the disabled’s, and elderly’s) agency and freedom—because otherwise they’ll die under the bumpers of the maniacs operating motor vehicles that you’ll encounter in all of those extra miles you’re forced to travel.

Different spin, different bias, but still 100% fact.

The Cannibal Sandwich, which doesn’t actually use human flesh, but is also not a sandwich. Anyway, you take a slice of rye cocktail bread, spread on some raw, ground beef, then top it with some sliced onion, salt, and pepper. You can’t get it ready-made, because nobody likes e. coli or salmonella poisoning. In fact, you have to make special arrangements to get the beef ground by a butcher in a clean grinder, and pretty much eat it the same day.

I believe that the first one is (fictional) The Onion publisher T. Herman Zweibel, the second one is hockey hall-of-famer Joe Sakic (who wore jersey number 19), and the 5th one looks like Mary Kay Letourneau (who infamously got pregnant with her 12-year-old student). Number 4, I can’t make out.

And boom, with the sound of a national foot being shot, the UK just drops out of the top 5 in 2020.

At least there’d be a good reason for him to be there.

Indeed, it’s fun to talk things over even if we don’t disagree. My username is an old, nautical version of shooting the breeze, chewing the fat, etc. The tendency to see every interaction as verbal combat was slowly driving me off the red site even before the API fiasco, and Lemmy has been refreshing that way.