shhhh. it just works.

tldr: there is the electoral system.

governments change because of who leads/ represents the people in their governments.

in the US, “the people” have little to no understanding of their government(there have been studies about this for the last 60 years), and because conservatives campaign on emotional bigotry, which is immediately hard-hitting and compelling versus waiting 2 years to receive a tax decrease(which works, but takes 2 years), undereducated and unsupported American citizens have been put into increasingly untenable situations where they are struggling to survive while working themselves to the bone and receiving lower compensation, and if an emergency arises, they are denied basic services.

when you have no other options to support yourself, murder becomes an option, since nothing else has worked and they are provided with no other options they are comfortable with.

there are some civil services, and the government can always change, regardless of what popular opinion fashions, but right now in the US you have a couple hundred million people desperate to survive in a country that provided survival wages, and now that they have reelected Trump and he’s already before even taking the White House began turning against unions and civil rights, those wages will probably lower again, living cost increasing and civil benefits decreasing.

out of 200 million desperate people, some of them are willing to take the most drastic measure because maybe it’ll make a difference, who knows.

i mean, lots of people know, but most Americans have been clinging to the edge of a cliff by their fingertips for years or decades, so they don’t have the perspective that others may.

a rucksack with a bunch of nifty tools inside

podcast addict, I cannot believe how customizable and useful it is.

I tried it, it blew my socks off, I’ve been using it ever since.

this is exactly my argument.

I completely agree with everything you’ve written and I even suspect George does, despite his disinclination to discuss it.

a complacent aristocracy hoisted by their own failing traditions and impotent bureaucracy.

yea, the jedi were ideological conservatives.

and that meme where Qui-Gon jinn brings back both Anakin and his mom instead of just Anakin?

is a very legitimate point.

the Jedi council chose to keep a jedi’s mother in slavery instead of reuniting their family, freedom which would have come at a truly insignificant cost to the council.

I’ve learned many languages from many sources, and rosetta stone is the fastest and the most comprehensive.

you can move at your own pace, they have audio, written and reading positive reinforcement, speaking exercises, it’s pretty fun overall, and extremely practical and encouraging.

it is also by far the most premium experience, nothing else comes close.

you can tell the devs and linguists put a lot of work into developing the course and it really shows when I compare it to any other app or program I’ve used.

Spanish was one of the first languages I learned, and I used Rosetta stone for it and can testify that spanish in particular is fantastic, although I haven’t really come across a Rosetta stone course that isn’t highly effective.

for when you’re walking around or you don’t have a lot of time to sit at a computer, pimsleur audio courses are the best runner-up

they’re amazing for training your ear to acknowledge foreign languages and feel comfortable with unfamiliar cadences and speeds.

either one will help you get used to the language, but you will learn more words and phrases quicker with Rosetta stone; it’s the best language program out there.

ah yyyyup.

it’s a pretty good time, thanks

got it.

Democrats want to help society and civilization as a whole, and they know civil War would only make things much worse.

anyone who wants civil War doesn’t care about the country or its people as it is.

plus, civil wars are a lot of trouble.

in real life, conservatives are afraid that somebody is going to take away their fill-in-the-blank, despite having zero evidence for that anxiety.

so they repeat whatever the crazy or ignorant extremist next to them says because they’re standing on the same side of the road.

Kamala was trailing in the polls nearly the entire election season, and a lot of minorities were very upset that the democrats didn’t do more quicker to stem the genocide in Palestine, so I’m not sure where the shock is coming from for people being surprised that she lost.

also important to note that women have so few rights in America that they’re dying in hospital parking lots with stillborn babies stuck in their wombs, so that misogyny probably didn’t help a female candidate.

also, misinformation is crazy.

The USD is as strong as it’s ever been, immigration policy finally enforced under Biden, national debt reduced, inflation from Trump’s first term has been reined in, civil rights have been reatored and expanded, but as you can tell from the internet, people don’t like optimistic facts as much as exciting emotional sound bites, accurate or not.

W bush was elected twice and that guy literally raised carcinogenic levels in public drinking water(as did trump), because he told all the frightened conservatives that the brown people were coming to get them.

didn’t even matter that they blamed a totally unrelated country.

Trump did the same thing and it worked again.

None of those feelings are accurate examples of American sentiment in the real world, but these commenters all live on the internet, so they’re parroting whatever hyperbolic thing the person next to them says.

civil war’s an outsized, extreme solution to simple problems, and I have never met a conservative who actually wants civil War.

every Trump supporter I know and have talked to is very frightened of something, covid or immigrants or some other non-issue they don’t know enough about. they’re just frightened.

in real life, both sides go to the same supermarkets and libraries, it’s just that the conservatives don’t want to anybody except themselves to have access to the libraries and supermarkets and the democrats think they can preserve public access if they can convince the conservatives that democratic laws are more fair.

selfishness vs naievete.

conservatives are selfish all the time, but democrats are only naive half the time, and they do have better laws for society as a whole.

The brainwashing does go both ways, with the significant caveat that brainwashed Republican voters support laws that restrict civil liberties and brainwashed democratic voters bemoan that everything is over forever and nothing will ever change while supporting laws that advance civil liberties.

they’re both irritating, but the democrats pass better laws.

they’re all whiny doomsayers right now, it’s pretty irritating.

things will get worse, but the vague popular defeatism is useless tripe.

you’ll be fine on valid visas.

North Dakota is cold, it’s not a cultural hot spot, but there are tons of natural features, hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, fishing and all that stuff.

it is a sparsely populated state.

“This is the part where you’re dense as fuck”

buh-hurrr?

“I said from the get go, I wasn’t trying to do that, you absolute insecure buffoon.”

The crippling insecurity of… let’s check your notes… my having been correct, not getting distracted by your tangents and make-believe and you now furiously insisting that there never was an argument about the main point and all you wanted to do was fruitlessly quibble about one irrelevant point on the number line for a dozen comments.

where shall I ever gain the confidence to stand up to your relentless onslaught?

“Go back and re-read the first comment”

nah,; I got it the first time.

not a brain buster.

“I was literally, as you say, correcting a typo.”

or rounding error, butI know, that’s why I literally said it.

“Your first comment is grossly misleading”

mmm, nah, that’s the one you agreed with, you silly goose.

“Then you went off on insane ad hominem tangents”

here are your quotes:

“you’re dense as fuck.”

“you absolute insecure buffoon.”

you get a confused between what I wrote and you wrote again?

Hey, did I teach you the word “tangent”? look at that, time not wasted!

““Wikipedia has a half billion cash and is evil for asking for more” is very different than…”

it’s also a made-up quote from you, just now, that you made up.

or have you been responding to a different person this entire time and you think you’re making a point to someone with completely different comments?

that would be the funniest thing, if the reason it’s so easy to dispel all of your made-up quotes is because you think you’re talking to a different person.

that would make a certain sense for you, you conflate a lot.

“I’m ambivalent about donating.”

clearly, you have no horse in this game.

you are carefree and feckless.

“Maybe, just maybe, it’s like I’ve been saying…”

We already agreed that it is not and as you freely admit, it is like I’ve been saying from the first comment.

are you talking about the typo/ rounding error that doesn’t affect the outcome and nobody disputed?

Great work on sticking with that mote in a sandstorm.

“as I like to call them…”

you do it! you go ahead and call them whatever you like!

you can call them unicorns or wyverns, whatever strikes your fancy.

“they don’t have decades of cash saved up” isn’t a disagreement with your main point"

I agree, it doesn’t affect my main point at all.

glad we’re doing this.

makes a lot of sense for you to combatively agree with my point over and over again.

“Then you went off on insane…”

how crazy it must seem to you to stick to a single point and not deviate from it, not to get distracted by relentless quibbles, not even to make up quotes or delve into irrelevant rabbit holes that do not affect the outcome!

imagine how much simple being correct in the first place about the actual topic must be.

smoooth sailing.

“You aren’t coming across as cleverly as you seem to think you are.”

virtue of the medium by which I am constrained.

like you said, you agree with my main point straight off the bat, but then you insist on creating fictional arguments so I am limited to responding to you raving and ranting about the number four not being the number three, or feeble insults, or you pretending that cash are somehow not assets.

or pointing out your made-up quotes.

at this point, I’m just helping you polish your turds.

that’s okay, I have time and you have…who knows, I’m sure you have something.

you’re probably great at getting all the toothpaste out of the toothpaste tube, right?

you can be proud of that.

“You’re a surprisingly dense person.”

Huhh?

“You’ve managed to mistake a news article for a financial audit,”

nope, that’s a straw man you’ve been trying to prop up for a dozen comments because you can’t refute my main point that WMF has plenty of money and shouldn’t be lying to and manipulating donors for more.

“misread a number of comments”

still no evidence for that after a dozen comments? rad.

“misinterpret numbers”

you don’t think three is next to four… that one’s on you.

“think that the phrase “article I agree with” means I don’t agree with”

also nope

so your strategy is to keep making things up?

consistent.

"the second article you shared, which doesn’t get their cash or assets wrong "

see, every time you respond, you make up a whole bunch of stuff, and then right at the end you angrily insist “also, I agreed with you all along!”

fine, I’m glad you can’t refute these things anymore.

You can keep ranting about irrelevant details and then agreeing with my original conclusion.

from the first comment.

I’m fine with that.

“Also, congrats on actually running with “bold of you to assume I can read”.”

thank you!

given that I’ve roundly quashed all of your efforts here, I figured that insult was a facetious, last-ditch attempt of yours to distract from your illogical meandering and thought it would be fun to turn that little insult back on you.

it was fun!

your insults and tangents have that “water off a duck’s back” quality I enjoy.

weird non-sequitur.

how?

they should ask a question if they want a specific answer.

you’ll notice that they complained about not receiving an answer despite 1. they didn’t ask any questions for the first dozen comments or so until I repeatedly taught them how questions work and 2. I responded to the relevant parts of every one of their comments that I hadn’t answered fully before.

their comments do not entitle them to a response, especially if, as in this case repeatedly, their response is flawed, irrelevant or has already been answered.

I correct them, they say " fine. you’re correct but I don’t like it."

I don’t care if they like the truth of the matter or not., and it doesn’t matter If they like being corrected or not, so I’m not going to address that.

If you scroll up, you’ll see that every part of every one of their comments stems from a single rounding error from one number among dozens from two otherwise solid articles for no other purpose than for the commenter to get a foot in the door of denying the actual crux of the argument, which is that Wikipedia does not need your money and them pretending they do to stay in business is manipulative and flat-out false.

that is a straight up fact, and after accepting that in I believe their second comment, they’re trying to deny that they were wrong by pointing out a tangential rounding error.

they’re looking for a gotcha through an insignificant detail.

I think they forgot what they were talking about in the first place to be honest, or that they already conceded the point of the main argument and can only remember their overwhelming personal commitment to that rounding error(or typo? who knows?)

but that’s okay.

it’s funny.

“you’re confusing cash with assets”

you are incorrect again. I wrote assets, because I was talking about total assets(which, this sounds like it’s going to blow your mind, includes cash!)

maybe you aren’t reading closely enough and are conflating my comments with the one sentence in the two articles you don’t like for some weird reason?

your next comment kind of explains another one of your blind spots:

“And, for pedantic ness: “what the fuck are you talking about?””

questions are not pedantic.

you can’t find out what somebody else meant unless you ask them a question.

what you are doing is assuming an answer and then extrapolating off of that, which is very easy for you to attack, but is often wrong because you’re making things up.

The fact that you’ve finally except in my tutoring and have begun asking questions is a huge step forward.

I’ll go look for someone who knows how to golf clap.

“I sort of assumed that basic literacy”

that sounds like it’s your problem, you should stop assuming basic literacy and practice reading.

If you’re just assuming literacy, in your head it sounds good, but out here it is rough for others to deal with you.

"So again, what “mistakes” are you correcting? "

that there’s no way to confuse 300 with 400.

that you can’t tell the difference between an opinion and a number from financial audit.

that because of one incorrect number you’re dead set that both articles are wrong, even though their numbers are from the financial audit that you originally referenced.

you mistake a statement for a question.

there are more, but four of your mistakes should be enough of a start for you to recognize a few of your errors.

don’t want to move too fast for you.

ps, good work on finally asking a question!

all I had to do was teach you what a question was for half a dozen comments comments consecutively and you learned!

that’s progress.

“You seem deeply upset”

nope I forget you’re here until you comment again and I have to correct you all over again.

correcting people is fun for me, so this isn’t particularly upsetting.

“your opinion”

not my opinion, dozens of accurate numbers from two articles, one of those many numbers in one of those articles you have picked out to focus on.

One of the articles overestimated a budget by 100 million, four instead of three, that’s not going to bother me too much.

you seem deeply upset by one source’s overestimate.

“that number seems preposterous…a totally bogus number detached from reality…”

yeah who the heck could write four instead of three?

how could anyone make that mistake? they must be nuts!

adding one number in hundreds of millions of dollars of asset valuation?

how could that even happen?

guess we’ll never know…

“giving some sort of response…”

you keep whining about receiving a response (desperate), but you still haven’t asked a question.

do you know how responses work? (that was a question. see the curly thing at the end? there’s another!)

go ahead, check your comment. not a single question, you’re just rehashing you’re earlier mistakes I have to correct all over again.

which is fun.

I’m down.

more than? how?

The apple shape is pretty indicative for me.