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The 8 traffic fatalities are not just for Springfield but all of Clark County for which Springfield is the largest city. Ohio compiles traffic data on an online database at the following site:
https://ohtrafficdata.dps.ohio.gov
I plugged in January 1 to December 31 2019 for Clark county and it appears they also had 8 fatalities for that calendar year which would have been before most of the Haitians showed up. So while MP and Eri were off base for dismissing the statistical significance outright I think if we dig a little deeper we won’t find much more than a cherry picked stat by the NYPost.
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On September 19 2024 03:57 Fleetfeet wrote:Show nested quote +On September 19 2024 02:39 GreenHorizons wrote: Beyond the statistical minutia, people would do well to realize that Republicans/right-wingers aren't really trying to win the arguments or persuade people based on logic. They are (wittingly or not) simply trying to control the Conversation, and fwiw, effectively winning that fight here and nationally. That could be catastrophic for Democrats if they can't figure out how to stop it. If someone controls the conversation by stabbing themselves in the hand, don't they still look like an idiot? Past examples of republicans controlling the conversation are changing the subject to avoid people talking about a Trump court case or something else. In this case, they 'stabbed themselves in the hand' to garner attention and accidentally took attention away from a second assassination attempt on Trump. What do you think politicians should be talking about that this takes away from?
Yes, that sounds like something that would be reasonable. But on the other hand, if people were reasonable, we wouldn't be here. The fact that Trump has been elected once and is candidate a second time shows that we are not in a world where people react reasonably to stuff.
However, i agree that rightwing people are really good at directing the conversation to rightwing issues. What politicians should be talking about is wealth inequality. Billionaires get richer and siphon more and more wealth from everyone else.
In the past, the cake was growing fast enough that everyone else was still increasing their standard of living at a reasonable rate while those at the top gained more and more. But those greedy fucks are never satisfied, and so we have the current situation where basically all gains in productivity and wealth just make the billionaires more wealthy, while everyone else stagnates.
And they use that wealth to influence everything, starting with politics, to make sure that the system stays set up in such a way that they can siphon more wealth.
That is the thing politicians should be talking about. Day in and day out.
We need to figure out a way for everyone to profit from the progress we make, not just the billionaires. AI would be an amazing thing that should lead to many people having the same amount of stuff while working less, or working more and getting more stuff. Instead it leads to a lot of people being fired while some people work the same amount for the same amount of stuff, and a billionaire gets richer.
Maybe a bit of climate change sprinkled in, because that is also a major problem that will fuck us over majorly in the future. Or a bit about how social media is used to destroy our democracy through disinformation. Also a relevant problem.
But the rightwing billionaire stoogies are very, very good at deflecting from those problems. They just start fucking over some minority, their lapdogs lap it up, and now everyone else has to defend that minority again instead of talking about billionaires fucking all of us over.
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While I generally agree with Simberto about the billionaires, Democrats won't substantively do that because plenty of the billionaires donate just as much to Democrats, Trump being a poignant example of that for most of his despicable life. It's an ostensibly rational thing to do as a billionaire.
Democrats already decided what they will "talk about" in this context and it was supposed to be bodily autonomy. That flopped because (among other reasons) even a cursory examination of their rhetoric exposed it as cynically hollow at best.
Democrats intended to spend the week talking about Amber Thurman and presumably some of them are, it's just not what the national Conversation is focused on because Democrats can't help themselves and Republicans are better at controlling it (in part because of bipartisan efforts to insist those two are and will always be people's only choices)
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On September 19 2024 05:53 GreenHorizons wrote: While I generally agree with Simberto about the billionaires, Democrats won't substantively do that because plenty of the billionaires donate just as much to Democrats, Trump being a poignant example of that for most of his despicable life. It's an ostensibly rational thing to do as a billionaire.
Democrats already decided what they will "talk about" in this context and it was supposed to be bodily autonomy. That flopped because (among other reasons) even a cursory examination of their rhetoric exposed it as cynically hollow at best.
Democrats intended to spend the week talking about Amber Thurman and presumably some of them are, it's just not what the national Conversation is focused on because Democrats can't help themselves and Republicans are better at controlling it (in part because of bipartisan efforts to insist those two are and will always be people's only choices)
I think Massachusetts could be pointed to as an example here. They made a very small change. Way less than what I consider a moral imperative. And they still raked in a huge amount of money.
Similar to how a lot of our current tax structure issues are from a slow and steady erosion of reasonable taxation, I think it’s reasonable to recognize pulling it back an inch is still an enormous gain. If Oregon suddenly had another billion dollars, it would help a ton of people.
This isn’t just incrementalism. The cultural impact of “we raised taxes on rich people and it was a good thing long term” is really important. It makes a big difference. The working class will keep losing the culture war being pushed by the ruling class until we have something to point at as evidence or recent, direct, targeted taxation.
Edit: to more clearly specify my point: Cletus isn’t on the fence right now. Cletus firmly believes it is better to give billionaires a tax break. We need to win over Cletus. We need to show him his life can be better by taxing the rich. The working class has already been successfully divided and we’ll never get to a good place if we don’t win over Cletus first. Cletus will fight against his own wellbeing to the death until we change his mind.
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On September 19 2024 08:30 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On September 19 2024 05:53 GreenHorizons wrote: While I generally agree with Simberto about the billionaires, Democrats won't substantively do that because plenty of the billionaires donate just as much to Democrats, Trump being a poignant example of that for most of his despicable life. It's an ostensibly rational thing to do as a billionaire.
Democrats already decided what they will "talk about" in this context and it was supposed to be bodily autonomy. That flopped because (among other reasons) even a cursory examination of their rhetoric exposed it as cynically hollow at best.
Democrats intended to spend the week talking about Amber Thurman and presumably some of them are, it's just not what the national Conversation is focused on because Democrats can't help themselves and Republicans are better at controlling it (in part because of bipartisan efforts to insist those two are and will always be people's only choices) I think Massachusetts could be pointed to as an example here. They made a very small change. Way less than what I consider a moral imperative. And they still raked in a huge amount of money. Similar to how a lot of our current tax structure issues are from a slow and steady erosion of reasonable taxation, I think it’s reasonable to recognize pulling it back an inch is still an enormous gain. If Oregon suddenly had another billion dollars, it would help a ton of people. This isn’t just incrementalism. The cultural impact of “we raised taxes on rich people and it was a good thing long term” is really important. It makes a big difference. The working class will keep losing the culture war being pushed by the ruling class until we have something to point at as evidence or recent, direct, targeted taxation. Edit: to more clearly specify my point: Cletus isn’t on the fence right now. Cletus firmly believes it is better to give billionaires a tax break. We need to win over Cletus. We need to show him his life can be better by taxing the rich. The working class has already been successfully divided and we’ll never get to a good place if we don’t win over Cletus first. Cletus will fight against his own wellbeing to the death until we change his mind. As I said I believe the US has passed a point of no return and it's just taking the population a while to come to grips with what that actually means.
Basically there's plenty of space for Democrats (social and otherwise) to occupy between being as bad as Republicans and actually fixing things (even to their standards, let alone objectively fixing things). They have no intention of leaving that space and their supporters have no intention of forcing them to, so they won't. Short of something extremely drastic happening outside of their control, the course is set to a destination none of us (even the people supporting the parties) actually wants.
What you're suggesting isn't new, people have been telling Democrats that for decades. One of the key roadblocks is that the US is a capitalist system and capitalists run capitalist systems, not politicians or the masses. What people most commonly know as "regulatory capture" isn't a bug, it's a feature and an inevitability of capitalist systems.
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Uhm...
Last time the Democrats were in power you got giant improvements in Healthcare and Gay marriage. This time you got the infrastructure Bill, Marijuana legalization, improvements in enviromental protections, stronger unions and plenty of other objectively good stuff for the "small" worker. Afaik they also proposed higher taxes on "the rich" in various forms, not that it's enough but it's not nothing.
But yeah, it's not suddenly all rainbows and they don't try to end capitalism and so on, so buh, they are nearly as bad as Republicans!
Your issue is that the average american is (still) pretty darn well off.
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Northern Ireland22123 Posts
On September 19 2024 15:48 Velr wrote: Uhm...
Last time the Democrats were in power you got giant improvements in Healthcare and Gay marriage. This time you got the infrastructure Bill, Marijuana legalization, improvements in enviromental protections, stronger unions and plenty of other objectively good stuff for the "small" worker. Afaik they also proposed higher taxes on "the rich" in various forms, not that it's enough but it's not nothing.
But yeah, it's not suddenly all rainbows and they don't try to end capitalism and so on, so buh, they are nearly as bad as Republicans!
Your issue is that the average american is (still) pretty darn well off. They think they are, which isn’t necessarily the same thing. Or alternatively that effective real change is effectively out of reach in certain areas
Us humans are an immensely creative, ambitious and hopeful species in many domains, bar political/economic structures where we seem to flip over to that a mentality probably best encapsulated by the classic ‘this is fine’ meme.
I mean you don’t have to go to GH territory, or even where I inhabit to see that mentality in action. Never mind new paradigms, many Americans for whatever reason can’t even envisage having a healthcare system that mirrors what most equivalent countries take for granted
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