The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[MATTROSE94]

This post strikes me as pretty geopolitically ignorant.  Iran is not a "miserable" global outpost like Afghanistan or Libya, it is a relatively wealthy, urbanized and developed regional player.  Iran's HDI rating of 0.783 makes it roughly comparable to U.S.-aligned democracies such as Mexico and Ukraine in terms of development, and it has a well-developed manufacturing, research and education sectors by international standards.  Most Iranians alive in 2021 live comfortable, consumer-driven lifestyles comparable to the urban middle classes of other large, developing powers like Brazil or China. 

Yes, Iran is a Islamist theocracy but it is not really any more authoritarian or cruel than the average Middle Eastern country.  Iranian citizens vote for democratic representation at both the federal and local level, which is more than can be said for the U.S.-backed House of Saud after all.  The U.S.' policy of isolating post-revolutionary Iran has pushed it into an unnecessarily antagonistic position with the West, and U.S. leadership to normalize this relationship would have the dual benefit of improving regional stability as well as neutralizing the potential for Russia to build Iran as a counterweight to U.S. influence in the region.     

[MATTROSE94]

I’m not saying that 2023-2030 should look like 2020. I’m just saying that there’s a good chance that the new normal contains some of the lessons learnt from this year.

I took a series of classes in undergrad, back in ‘18/‘19 looking at the public health, focusing on the malaria epidemic. One of the major sticking points in getting the disease under control is getting the populace on board with health measures. Rebuilding your sanitary infrastructure is complex, and it’s often uncomfortable to sleep under a bed net.

The hypothetical used by the lecturer to explain reluctance was this ‘we could probably get rid of 90% of flu cases in we wore face masks in public during the winter’. Such an experiment would of course be impossible, thanks to the cultural norms such a mandate would breach. Fast forward, and lo and behold, influenza fell off a cliff this year. The disease is less transmissible than COVID, and was controlled by masks, distancing and reduced air travel (primary intercontinental vector of the virus).

What I’m trying to say, is that we always lose vulnerable people in the winter. For those who worry about their health, I think it would be acceptable for them to maintain the current standards of hand-washing, mask-wearing and physical distancing. No enforcement, but they should have the option.

And if shopping centres continue to mandate masks, I’ll be happy to comply - COVID is endemic now, and we need to stay vigilant for the arrival of another virulent strain.

Edit: apologies, this rambled on longer than I’d planned.

[MATTROSE94]

The most likely outcome is that the original election result stands, but it's complicated. 

1. If the state being disputed has a single certified slate of electors under its laws within the safe harbor deadline (2nd week of December), and there is a House/Senate split over whether to reject those EVs, the original EC results stand and the original winner becomes president.  This has historically been ceremonial and it is also very unclear whether Congress even has the constitutional right to reject a single certified slate of EVs.  Federal courts may very well order them counted even if they tried.

2. If there is a legal dispute in the state continuing beyond the 2nd week of December so no one certifies the EVs by Safe Harbor day, and supporters of both candidates submit their slates, congress is voting on which slate to pick.  If both houses pick one slate, it counts of course.  If there is a House/Senate split where each chamber endorses a different slate, the governor of the disputed state picks the winner, but the language of this section is highly ambiguous and there would surely be a long, complex legal challenge.

3. If 2 separate EV slates from the same state are certified and submitted prior to the safe harbor deadline, both houses of congress must agree to count them.  A House/Senate split on which slate to endorse means that the state's EV just don't get counted.  Whether this reduces the # of EVs needed to become president is unclear.  This arises from when there were multiple entities claiming to be the state government in certain Southern states during Reconstruction and is probably not relevant to the modern era.  This is not the Old West or the Civil War.  The fake governor/SOS/etc. would simply be arrested.

The scenario where the Speaker of the House becomes president involves a long legal dispute over #2. 

[brucejoel99]

I don't think that there's anything wrong with telling people not to come here illegally, but we need a functional and affordable legal method of immigrating to the United States, which we currently do not have. I am obviously nowhere near the "center" on the immigration issue, and I have more gripes with the right on immigration, but I think that the left is also far from perfect on immigration, and seems to only focus on helping illegal immigrants and doesn't give nearly enough focus to those coming here legally.

There are some harsh truths neither side wants to accept. The left doesn't want to accept that some people do abuse the system, and how some parents treat their children is truly despicable. Parents who leave their kids alone at the border, or force their kids to make the dangerous trek north alone honestly belong behind bars for child abuse. There are videos of children crying while their parents abandon them at or near the border, hoping that their kid will get citizenship and be able to bring them over using a family immigration visa a few years down the road. This is terrible, and no one on the left should be defending this kind of behavior, regardless of the race of those in question. Some illegal immigrants do basically want to cut corners and don't care about the consequences for those who are trying to go through the process legally. I don't support kicking out illegal immigrants who haven't committed another crime, but they should face consequences, and shouldn't get to "cut the line."

The right doesn't want to accept that the United States is at least partially responsible for the current situation in many Central American countries and communities. By financially supporting the drug cartels, it very much is "our problem", and it is our moral obligation to be part of the solution. Turning our back on refugees is not exactly being "responsible" for something which is at least partially our fault. The right also focuses only on the types of cases I mentioned in the paragraph above, and not in the many people trying to come here legally, and facing absurd wait times and costs. "Strong border security" isn't going to solve the problem of USCIS being comically incompetent at their job (or at least, it would be comical if it weren't affecting people's lives.) USCIS regularly loses documents, test results, and other evidence, and forces those in an immigration process to foot the bill by resending documents or retaking tests. Imagine if a school "lost" the records of a student, and made the student retake all of the classes they had taken in the past year. Who would honestly defend that? Further restricting legal immigration will only exacerbate the situation; who would want to come here legally if the process is absurdly expensive, takes an increasing number of years to complete, and reject rates increase? At that rate, people have a better chance of coming and staying if they do so illegally, and some already have that impression. I don't think that many people who are right-wing on immigration understand just how much people have to go through to come here legally, and use a simplistic narratives without any nuance to justify blatantly inhumane treatment of immigrants.

We need an immigration system that incentivizes legal immigration, does proper vetting of potential immigrants, but also gives those who are willing to come here and contribute a path that is not excessively long or expensive. I think too many on the left are only concerned with forgiving illegal immigration, and too many on the right are only concerned with punishing illegal immigration and some vague notion of "security." And I'm not suggesting we take an approach that is "somewhere in the middle." We need a complete overhaul of the system.

[MATTROSE94]

I'm pro-choice, but I do not support Roe v. Wade as an interpretation of the Constitution. I don't have significant disagreement with what the SCOTUS said about abortion in Roe v. Wade, but I completely disagree with what the SCOTUS said about the U.S. Constitution in that case (along with what the SCOTUS had said about the U.S. Constitution in the cases of Skinner v. Oklahoma and Griswold v. Connecticut -- the two most important precedents that led the Court to decide Roe the way it did).

[MATTROSE94]

If you told me we could run against DeSantis and have a 100% chance of losing or against Trump and have a 15% chance of losing, I would still pick DeSantis.  I genuinely do not believe this country can survive another four years of Trump.  We were very lucky to barely survive the last four.  I will never risk that.

[Geoffrey Howe]

There is, as a general rule, a certain level of inertia which tends to make decentralised countries become more and more centralised as time goes on. The reason being that "new" tasks tend to be taken on by the federal, rather than local authorites. So for instance, things like railways or motorways that developed in the late 19th/mid 20th centuries respectively often fell under the remit of the federal government; same with much of the development of the welfare state that even in "federal" countries has tended to become a primarily centrally managed provision. Or more recently, responses to newer challenges like the provision of telecommunications infrastructure, regulation of the internet, the response to climate change.

Not that that directly answers the question - but explains why, say, Switzerland has far less regional diversity in terms of local governance and political behaviour, than was the case over the previous decades.

[Pouring Rain and Blairing Music]

Change in the Fujimori vote between 2011 and 2021 runoffs:



Note: the Putumayo province (Loreto Department) was created in 2015, I use the combined result obtained by Fujimori in 2011 in the districts constituting now the Putumayo province but then part of Maynas province.

While Fujimori obtained in 2011 (48.1%) and in 2021 (49.6%) a very similar result in Peru itself (excluding the diaspora vote) while facing pretty similar opponents (a leftist outsider accused by the Peruvian right of being secretly a communist), a series of changes happened in a decade in the distribution of the Fujimorist vote. Broadly speaking, the far-right candidate further improved on her already strong results in the littoral (especially in several medium-sized cities: +14.4% in Tumbes province, +13.1% in Sullana province, +12.5%; in Santa province,+10.6% in Piura; but also, to a slightly lesser extend in the major cities of the coast: +10.4% in Callao province, +10.1% in Trujillo province, +7.8% in Lima province) while making inroads in the Amazon provinces notably in Maynas (+12.6%) where is located Iquitos (seventh-most populated city in Peru) and in Coronel Portillo (+8.4%) where is located Pucallpa (tenth-most populated city in Peru).

Conversely, she continued losing votes in the highlands, especially in the indigenous-populated areas, receiving her worst results in the provinces of Cusco and Puno departments (3.5% down from an already disastrous 6.4% in 2011 in Chumbivilcas province, Cusco; 4.4% down from 10.2% in 2011 in Canas province, Cusco; 4.6% down from 14.7% in 2011 in Azángaro province, Puno and so on). Well, she improved a bit (+0.4%) in the Jivaroan-populated province of Condorcanqui (Amazonas) but no reason to celebrate as she went from 8.9% to 9.3%. The Fujimori vote also receded in the eleven provinces of Ayacucho department but one (Páucar del Sara Sara where she improved her result from 26.3% to 27.0%) despite the fact that it is the familial homeland of Ollanta Humala, her 2011 rival. She however marginally improved her result in the urbanized parts of the coastal southeast: +1.5% in Tacna province and +3.0% in Arequipa province.

Eight of the ten provinces where the Fujimori share of vote declined the most are located in Cajamarca Department, the homeland of Pedro Castillo, with the most significant decline (-32.0%, from 46.1% in 2011 to 14.1%) happening in Chota, Castillo’s native province. Local opposition to mining in Cajamarca probably also probably explained the decrease in the vote for Fujimori as the far-right candidate suffered in a decade heavy losses in Pasco province (-21.0% from 45.4% to 24.4%), home to a controversial and very toxic lead mine, as well as in Espinar (Cusco Department, -16.1%), the theater of a conflict surrounding a mine operating since 1981, in Huancabamba (Piura Departement, -12.7%) where local communities are opposed to a mining project (in the neighboring province of Ayabaca, also concerned by the project, Fujimori’s result remained stable though, at 26.7%). Fujimori also lost a lot of ground (-18.2%) in Oyón province (Lima Department) whose economy is dominated by mining activities, which suggests that she has united miners and opponents to mining against her.

All in all, Fujimori improved her result in 43 provinces while losing ground in 153 others. She has gained eight provinces won by Humala in 2011 and lost twenty-three provinces she won in 2011 but had been gained by Castillo this year.

Looked at the first page of his posting history and saw that most of not all of his posts could fit here. 8 years and only 400ish posts, but wow. Solid quality.

[Kamala's side hoe]

I have no objection to making Juneteenth a holiday, just making it an additional holiday. They should've gotten rid of a different holiday to make room such as MLK Day, Columbus Day, or Veterans Day (the holiday formerly known as Armistice Day).

The US is short on national holidays vs. other wealthy countries.  Why not add a couple? 

I like the idea of going to 1 federal holiday per month.  So in addition to Juneteenth, we also need something in August, March and April.  We currently have 2 federal holidays in January and November.  MLK Day could reasonably be moved to August 28th to commemorate the March on Washington and his "I Have a Dream" speech.  Veteran's Day could reasonably be moved to April 9th, commemorating the official end of the Civil War, which was drastically more important in US military history than the WWI armistice.  For a March holiday, consider Cesar Chavez Day (March 31st), although this is admittedly really close to April 9th, even closer than the current Veteran's Day is to Thanksgiving.  And August MLK day would fall even closer to Labor Day in this scenario.  Another option would be Good Friday, which can land anywhere between late March and late April.

Also axe the stupid Monday Holiday Act and honor historical events on the day they actually happened when it is known (using Friday/Monday only when they fall on Saturday/Sunday).  President's Day currently cannot legally fall on Washington's actual birthday, which is idiotic.   

[MATTROSE94]

What concerns me most are the variant strains and the fact that this virus is still multiplying an extraordinary amount of times in human bodies. If we had 80-90%+ uptake of the vaccine, I wouldn't be too concerned. It's clear the vaccines are working and I'm glad to be one of those that is fully vaccinated. However, I also think the warmer weather is keeping the infection numbers lower. Looking at where vaccine rates are low, there probably will be a fall resurgence in some areas and it won't be pretty with the current variants.

With that said, what concerns me even more is a viral mutation that could render our current vaccines useless. That's partly what bothers me about declaring victory right now. This virus is still multiplying exponentially in human bodies across the world. Every replication is a chance for the virus to become something else.

I'm in the minority now, but I'm still sticking with my mask when I'm grocery shopping. At the very least, I haven't been sick this year or last year. I will probably reduce my trips to places like the grocery store though. I've already seen people coughing without covering their mouth.

[Continential]

Haven't read Hash's post fully, but these posts should be on here.

The RN top candidate in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté regional election, Julien Odoul, is currently embroiled into a controversy wonderfully illustrating how social the RN is and how it genuinely cares for popular classes. An audio of a 2019 reunion of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté RN group of regional councilors dedicated to the ‘peasant well-being’ was leaked by Libération. In it, the RN councilors can be hear being hilarious and making jokes about the wave of suicides among small farmers (I saw the number of 600 for last year). One RN councilor is asking ‘Did the farmer who hanged himself from the ridge of his shed leave a mark? Did he urinated on himself?’ while Odoul responded ‘Was the rope French?’ making other councilors burst out laughing. Odoul initially pretended the discussion never happened and announced he would sue Libération for defamation, then claimed the discussion finally took place but has been secretly recorded and edited and he is now saying that the part about the rope was actually about a wolf and not a farmer. Strong suspicions that the audio was provided to Libération by internal RN opponents to Odoul (the RN group in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, like many other RN regional groups, has suffered many defections since the 2015 election with the number of its members having been reduced from 24 in 2015 to only 15 now and with 3 outgoing councilors being actually on an eligible position on the list headed by Odoul).

Odoul is only 36 but has been already the member of four different parties, starting with the Socialist Party as a supporter of Fabius, then the pro-Sarkozy center-right ‘New Center’ of Hervé Morin before joining the centrist Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI) under Jean-Louis Borloo in 2012. He joined the then-FN two years later. When young, he was also a cover model for various gay magazines and reportedly appeared in an erotic video his opponents inside the RN attempted to use against him. He received a lot of media coverage in 2019 when he confronted a Muslim hijab-wearing mother accompanying pupils on a school visit in the regional council building and demanded her to remove her veil. He since has become some sort of recurring guest (to the point like one could think he’s spending more time in Paris television studios than in the regional council) in the various garbage TV political shows involving loudmouth morons with no expertise in absolute no area giving their uninformed and very predictable opinion on absolutely every area that are now polluting airwaves, in particularly on ‘CNews’, once an all-news channel but now a TV channel without any actual reporting and even barely actual journalists at all. Of course, Odoul has never missed in his TV-appearance or on social networks an opportunity to criticize the Macron government for its class contempt, its arrogance and its disdain for rural areas.

Other RN candidates have some problems like the RN top candidate in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Thierry Mariani, a former UMP/LR who as mayor of Valréas (Vaucluse) presided over the sharp decline of cardboard industry in that city before serving as a totally forgettable minister under Sarkozy. Mariani has reportedly difficulties to prove he is actually residing in the region he is running in (quite bad for a party which is championing 'localism' and loathing 'globalism'), as he spend his life between Brussels (where is an eurodeputy), the TV studios in Paris and Russia for his lobbying activities in favor of the most brutal dictators on Earth including Bashar al-Assad and Ilham Aliyev.

Meanwhile, in Creuse, one of the RN candidate for regional councilor has been sentenced to nine months in jail and incarcerated few days ago for domestic violence and death threats; in Ardennes, a RN candidate for départementales turned out to have been sentenced to an eight months suspended prison term in 2017 for sexual assault on a minor under 15; in Creuse, again, one candidate for départementales has previously flooded social networks with racist and antisemitic messages including one praising Shoah denier Robert Faurisson; in Gironde, another candidate for départementales has also posted antisemitic messages on her Facebook. The RN has withdrew in a hurry its support for all the aforementioned candidates. Still, few days ago, a Jewish member of the RN national council complained that people of Jewish origins have been sidelined in favor of ‘authentic anti-Semites’ in the choice of candidates and reported that someone in the party told him that ‘if there are anti-Semites, why don’t you leave the RN’.

I received today the electoral leaflets in my mailbox and, truly, the RN is considering voters as complete morons. The only information on its two candidates for départementales in my largely rural canton figuring on its leaflet is the names and their photos and that’s all! The three other lists are mentioning what are the jobs, their age, the commune of residence and, in case they have one, the elective offices held by the candidates they field as well as those of their alternates (for the RN alternate candidates, their names don’t even appear on the party’s leaflet, you have to check the ballot paper provided with each leaflet to know them). The RN leaflet only specifies that the two nobodies are ‘MARINE LE PEN’s candidates’ with ‘MARINE LE PEN’ written in a larger font that the names of the actual candidates and a picture of Le Pen in case you haven’t understand.

On the other side of the leaflet, another photo of Le Pen, the sentences ‘FOR OUR DEPARTEMENT MAKE THE CHOICE OF PROXIMITY and SOCIAL PROTECTION’ and in [insert département name] WE WILL DO IT followed by the ‘platform’ of the candidates which is pretty transparently the exact same one, word for word (except the name of the départment, of course), that those of every other RN candidates in every other French canton. Said platform is just a collection of platitudes with absolutely ZERO concrete measures; stuff like ‘one euro spent by the département will be one euro in favor of the quality of life of French people’ (that the #1 ‘proposal’) and ‘We will favore the culture and the identity of our département’ (#5 and last ‘proposal’), the one being totally surreal as the RN leaflet is the only one without any word in Breton language nor photos of the natural or urban sites of the area (it even possible that the two candidates, appearing on a white background, weren’t photographed together). Also included is a ‘Do you know?’ about minor migrants who aren’t actually minors you see, are costing ‘40,000€ a year to the département’ and are responsible of the ‘explosion of insecurity’ like ‘2 infractions/crimes a day in Bordeaux in 2020’ but, fortunately, ONLY OUR ELECTED PEOPLE WILL PUT AN END TO THIS SCANDAL!, because apparently, voting for RN candidates in Finistère for départemental councilors (an electoral function with zero prerogatives in the areas of justice and public safety) will somehow solve insecurity problems in Bordeaux.

So, this is tomorrow, right? Yeah, I haven't followed much and the outcome is likely to recomfort me in my decision to avoid paying attention to these elections, and in any case I'm meeting a friend rather than following results tomorrow.

A quick reminder of the rules of the game:

For the regional elections, the threshold to qualify for the second round is 10% of valid votes (7% in Corsica). A list which has won less than 10% but more than 5% may merge with a qualified list. In the runoff, the winning list receives a majority bonus of 25% of all seats, the remaining 75% of the seats are distributed proportionally. This means that there is a possibility that, in a three or four-way runoff, the winning list may not win an absolute majority even with the majority bonus - this would likely happen if the winning list only wins ~33% of the vote. In 2015, in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, in a close three-way runoff, the victorious left-wing list won 34.7% and 51 out of the 100 seats, a one-seat majority. Given the very high possibility of closely disputed three or even four-way runoffs in some metropolitan regions, next week we could very well see one regional council without an absolute majority.

For the departmental elections, 'ghost' elections largely ignored and forgotten by the national media, there are 2,054 cantons which each elect two councillors (one man, one woman), a binôme (which run as a single ticket). The rules are the same as for legislative elections here: to win outright in the first round, a ticket must win an absolute majority and at least 25% of registered voters; to qualify for the second round, a ticket must win at least 12.5% of registered voters (if no ticket has obtained this, then the top two qualify) and there is no possibility of mergers. Therefore, with turnout expected to be quite low, we will likely see fewer first round victories (even if a ticket has 50%+ of votes cast) and fewer three-way runoffs. In 2015, with turnout just below 50%, there were 278 triangulaires (about 14.6% of second round matchups) and 149 first round victories.


Here are my assorted thoughts, if anybody cares:

• Incumbent presidents, especially those elected in their own right six years ago, will have an advantage and most of them should be reelected. Presidents who replaced someone since 2015 - Renaud Muselier (LR, PACA), Jean Rottner (LR, Grand Est), Loïg Chesnais-Girard (PS, Bretagne) and Christelle Morançais (LR, PdL) - will face a tougher contest.
• Given the electoral system, the division of the political field in four (left/macronismo/right/RN) and the difficulty of reconciling these parts, all regions will likely see at least three-way runoffs if not four-way runoffs. These can be quite uncertain, as Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and Centre-Val de Loire in 2015 demonstrated. As mentioned above, this also opens the possibility of a regional council without any absolute majorities if the victorious list only 'wins' with a third or less of the vote in the runoff next Sunday.
• The left, as always, is divided almost everywhere (split in two if not three or more), and even if it is united in the two regions where it is at its weakest (PACA and Hauts-de-France, where they have no representation after having withdrawn from the runoffs in 2015 to block the far-right), that's still not enough to even hope for a second place in elections polarized between the right and RN. In some regions, with their divisions, the left are playing with fire and, if things don't go well, they could be dealt a very nasty surprise: not qualifying for the runoff (I still have nasty memories of what happened in Languedoc-Roussillon in 2010). In Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the two top left-wing lists (one PS+allies and EELV+allies) are evenly matched and both hovering close to the 10% threshold, which is too close for comfort. In Île-de-France, there are three left-wing lists (Julien Bayou's EELV-G.s, Audrey Pulvar's PS-PRG-PP and Clémentine Autain's LFI-PCF) which are very closely packed, again right around that 10% threshold.
• Macronismo has gone it own ways everywhere except in PACA, where they are supporting LR (something which created a long and confusing psychodrama on the right, which might have been FBM's intention all along). Several prominent figures and cabinet ministers have lined up: Marc Fesneau (MoDem junior minister for parliamentary relations in Centre), Brigitte Klinkert (DVD ex-LR junior minister for professional inclusion in Grand Est), Laurent Pietraszewski (LREM sec. of state for pensions in Hauts-de-France), Geneviève Darrieussecq (MoDem junior minister for veterans in Nouvelle-Aquitaine), Marlène Schiappa (LREM junior minister for citizenship is the top candidate on the list in Paris), Amélie de Montchalin (LREM minister of the civil service is the top candidate on the list in Essonne) and Éric Dupond-Moretti (justice minister is the top candidate in the Pas-de-Calais).
  In most places, LREM is likely to do rather poorly, although they should clear the 10% threshold nearly everywhere. Their strongest regions will likely be Bretagne, Pays-de-la-Loire, Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Centre. Their behaviour may become quite critical in several regions in the second round: given that alliances with LREM would likely do more harm than good for both the left and right in most places, they're unlikely to be wanted (although Jean-Yves Le Drian would love to see his old PS and LREM reconcile - without the pesky greenies - in his Breton hometurf, although the PS might not want that), but in some cases they might be needed, particularly if the RN is a real threat.
• RN's best chance at winning a region is PACA - where they are probably favourites now, even if the left and macronismo were to withdraw to block them and create a two-way runoff. RN has benefited from a perfect storm in PACA: it is naturally one of their strongest regions; the LR-LREM alliance psychodrama with LR incumbent Muselier backfired and has played right into the hands of the RN's strategy here, which is to be the real right-wing alternative to a confusing and Macron-contaminated old right. For that, their candidate helps as well: Thierry Mariani, now a RN MEP/lobbyist for Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, is a former (very right-wing and FN-adjacent) UMP deputy and was a (very forgettable) cabinet minister under Sarkozy, and had already run in PACA in 2010 as the UMP's candidate.
• The RN has a realistic shot in several other regions: Centre (an underrated possibility of a real clusterfark in a potential 4-way runoff), Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (again in the case of a 4-way runoff), Normandie (as previous), Grand Est (as previous, depending on whether Rottner allies with LREM, as some on the right have suspected him of wanting to do) and Hauts-de-France (as previous: here it may come down if Macron wants to roll the dice on a RN victory here if it could potentially scuttle Xavier Bertrand's 2022 candidacy). But I would be wary of making overly pessimistic or optimistic predictions about the runoff even before we have first round numbers: a lot can happen in that week, as 2015 showed.
• The left's best chance at gaining a region in metropolitan France seems to be the Pays-de-la-Loire, a region where muh trends have in general been favourable to the left. LR incumbent Christelle Morançais took over from Bruno Retailleau in 2017 and is not very well known. While she will likely finish first with an anemic result tomorrow, she will have almost no reserves. Whereas the left could benefit from second round unity: in the first round they are split between the PS-PCF-PRG's Guillaume Garot (Mayenne deputy, former agriculture minister and former mayor of Laval) and EELV-LFI-G.s's Matthieu Orphelin (ex-EELV and ex-LREM deputy close to Nicolas Hulot), with the latter having an advantage. LREM's candidate is Loire-Atlantique deputy and former environment minister François de Rugy, fan of taxpayer-funded lobster dinners, who may win upwards of 15%.
• Corsica will be an interesting mess: unlike in 2017, the outgoing nationalist majority is divided between three lists: executive council president Gilles Simeoni's autonomist Femu a Corsica, Assembly president Jean-Guy Talamoni's separatist Corsica Libera and Porto-Vecchio mayor Jean-Christophe Angelini's PNC; in addition to the more radical separatist Rinnovu/Core in Fronte led by Paul-Félix Benedetti. Together they face a stronger and united (!) right, led by Ajaccio mayor Laurent Marcangeli. Next week will be interesting...

[MATTROSE94]

It did, however, demonstrate solidarity with families of POWs and MIAs whose whereabouts have never been confirmed.  It was a source of comfort to many of these families.  And the difference between this issue and others is that it was our Government for whom they fought and were captured and/or died.

Our POWs that came back DID suffer torture.  I suspect you care not one whit about that.  They weren't liberals.  They were brave, they were held captive, and the North Vietnamese DID ignore all standards set by the Geneva Convention as to how to treat Prisoners of War.  Perhaps you could recognize that.  

[MATTROSE94]

Trump is a wise guy corrupt  mob boss like John Gotti. The name Teflon Don was actually first give to John Gotti, not Trump. The Trump Organization is also a criminal enterprise filled with fraud like a money laundering mob business.

[Kamala's side hoe]

An interesting aspect of Canadian progressivism is multiculturalism, which is celebrated in Canada to an extent rarely seen elsewhere. Ironically, this is in part due to a relatively selective immigration policy that places huge emphasis on economic and family migrants who are much more likely to integrate easily, and it shows.

To be sure there are ethnic enclaves in Canada, like Brampton, but I would hardly call it a ghetto. But there is an easy acceptance of Canada that immigrants have that helps with integration. I grew up in an area with a lot of Iranian/Persian migrants and generally they were some of the most patriotic Canadians I've known. It's much harder to stoke fear of "outsiders" when the outsiders are often your neighbours.

Immigrants from socially conservative countries also tend to accept Canada's freakish social progressivism more easily than you'd see in places like the UK. I'm thinking of Rob Oliphant, an openly and vocally gay MP who represents a heavily Muslim constituency in Toronto and has a lot of support from the Muslims there. There was also talk of an anti-Liberal backlash among minorities, particularly Muslims, in ontario after the former Liberal government in ontario introduced a new sex ed curriculum that would discuss sexual orientation and gender identity early on. To be sure there were Muslim faith leaders who spoke out against this, and yet the precint-by-precinct data from the following election shows that areas with large Muslim populations were much more Liberal than average. So even if socially conservative immigrant groups maintain that social conservatism within the household, they are more than happy to support socially progressive politics that are pretty foreign to their homelands. By second and third generations, they assimilate and this personal conservatism tends to fizzle away too.

I get the sense that the last paragraph is very applicable to Canada's South Asian and ethnic Chinese communities (although the first partially overlaps with "Muslims").

[The Right Honourable Martin Brian Mulroney PC CC GOQ]

An interesting aspect of Canadian progressivism is multiculturalism, which is celebrated in Canada to an extent rarely seen elsewhere. Ironically, this is in part due to a relatively selective immigration policy that places huge emphasis on economic and family migrants who are much more likely to integrate easily, and it shows.

To be sure there are ethnic enclaves in Canada, like Brampton, but I would hardly call it a ghetto. But there is an easy acceptance of Canada that immigrants have that helps with integration. I grew up in an area with a lot of Iranian/Persian migrants and generally they were some of the most patriotic Canadians I've known. It's much harder to stoke fear of "outsiders" when the outsiders are often your neighbours.

Immigrants from socially conservative countries also tend to accept Canada's freakish social progressivism more easily than you'd see in places like the UK. I'm thinking of Rob Oliphant, an openly and vocally gay MP who represents a heavily Muslim constituency in Toronto and has a lot of support from the Muslims there. There was also talk of an anti-Liberal backlash among minorities, particularly Muslims, in ontario after the former Liberal government in ontario introduced a new sex ed curriculum that would discuss sexual orientation and gender identity early on. To be sure there were Muslim faith leaders who spoke out against this, and yet the precint-by-precinct data from the following election shows that areas with large Muslim populations were much more Liberal than average. So even if socially conservative immigrant groups maintain that social conservatism within the household, they are more than happy to support socially progressive politics that are pretty foreign to their homelands. By second and third generations, they assimilate and this personal conservatism tends to fizzle away too.

I get the sense that the last paragraph is very applicable to Canada's South Asian and ethnic Chinese communities (although the first partially overlaps with "Muslims").

To be fair Chinese Canadians are a swingy group and probably leaned Conservative in the last election. Marijuana legalization in particular was a huge bridge-burner with the Chinese community, who tend to have very conservative views on drugs.

You're right about South Asians though, apart from some flirting with Conservatives in 2011 (which I think is greatly overstated, but it did exist), the South Asian community has been loyally Liberal. Sikhs are easily the most left-wing subgroup there, usually voting Liberal but with a strong NDP base, especially now with Jagmeet Singh. Muslims (and especially those of South Asian origin) are deferential Liberals, even in 2011 Muslim Canadians voted Liberal in huge numbers. Tamils are a large but relatively new group in the GTA, who have "shopped around" a bit politically, but Tamil-heavy areas seem to be somewhere between Sikh leftism and Muslim deferential Liberalism. Non-Tamil Hindus are the most conservative of South Asian groups and probably voted CPC in big numbers back in 2011, but in general they too lean Liberal.

[Joe Republic]

The key to dealing with Republicans that seems to continually escape the Democrats to the point where I'm finding it difficult to believe it's not deliberately, is to call their BS for what it is. Whether its "immigrant caravans", trans kids, "critical race theory" or Harris visiting the border, the Republicans spew a never-ending stream of BS. Not even lies, just BS. Countering the BS is futile, because it takes far more energy than it does to generate it, and has far less impact even when done successfully.

What needs to be done is to associate BS with the Republican brand. Don't persuade people Republicans are wrong, persuade them that Republicans are a joke. Get it to the point where when any non-cultist citizen hears or sees a Republican speak, their immediate, instinctive reaction is "oh, more Republican BS". Make "Republican BS" (or some equivalent) the "there you go again" of the 2020s.

No matter what the subject is, whether its nuking hurricanes, coming up with excuses to abuse kids, having a meltdown over some random thing a Democrat did, or asking the forest service change the orbit of the Earth, taking Republicans seriously empowers them. They are a vile, dangerous joke, and that is how they should be treated. Always.

[Meatball Ron]

Cori Bush is the only out-and-out racist now that Steve King is gone.

Do you actually believe this or is white victimhood a convenient way to excuse a political agenda that perpetuates racial and economic inequality?

Don't answer, the question was meant to make you think... critically... about race... I know scary.

Anyway, the answer was Steve King, but nowadays it's obviously one of:
1. The kid who openly idolized Hitler (Cawthorn) 
OR
2. The woman who thinks Jews shoot lasers at us from space (Greene)

Not that it matters at all because an entire political party is oriented toward taking away Black people's right to vote, invading and destroying countries just because they are Muslim, preventing legal immigration... only one political party's members voted against a mere statement saying hate crimes against Asian people are wrong... only one political party has admitted openly to using a "Southern strategy" to pursue racists' votes... and I would keep going if I didn't think that the majority of people still supporting such a party were not themselves at least neutral toward the continuation of white supremacy and therefore impervious to facts or morals.

Which isn't to say that Democrats aren't racist. They did just elect a person who got his career started opposing busing as the president after all. But Joe Biden in 2020, unlike Joe Biden in 1972, did not campaign on white supremacy* and Donald Trump did. So, any argument that the most racist person in Congress is a Democrat is an insult to everyone here's intelligence.

*within our borders

[Badger]

It did, however, demonstrate solidarity with families of POWs and MIAs whose whereabouts have never been confirmed.  It was a source of comfort to many of these families.  And the difference between this issue and others is that it was our Government for whom they fought and were captured and/or died.

Our POWs that came back DID suffer torture.  I suspect you care not one whit about that.  They weren't liberals.  They were brave, they were held captive, and the North Vietnamese DID ignore all standards set by the Geneva Convention as to how to treat Prisoners of War.  Perhaps you could recognize that.  

I'm sorry, but how on Earth did you enter this banal response to my pointing out that the idea the North Vietnamese retained us POWS because they're evil inscrutable Asian communist basically meant that I did not care that our veterans had suffered horrific torture in pows camps, as remotely worthy of this thread?

I can genuinely say stepping back and removing the gross personal insult to myself, if it had been ordered to anyone else here, it would not only be a grossly unwarranted insult based on the response, but frankly such a non-sequitur and disingenuous response that it truly belongs in the bad post thread.

Seriously, what part of you thought that a responding to truthfully stating American pows remaining in North Vietnam is a groundless conspiracy theory I'm making the in comprehensible and frankly rather ugly conclusion that individual doesn't care Americans were in fact tortured in Vietnamese prison camps somehow equates a quality post, or even a non sh**tpost for that matter?

[S019]

Yes, so I was correct that you were referring to self defense.  

     It's the biggest licit reason to use a gun, though some others that came to mind were hunting, target shooting, and warding off wild animals. Reading the link you posted, It seems we both sold hunting short; according to Pew in 2013, 32% of gunowning Americans own them to hunt.

1.I'm not sure how anybody could show you that abortion is abominable in the eyes of God given that nobody has met God and really knows nothing about God (which they even admit, when pressed, pseudo Christians say: "God works in mysterious ways" I.E When defending voting for Trump.)  So, you can believe that this is what God believes all you want, but that is no evidence that aborting a fetus and killing in self defense are significantly different.

     I was not intending to present that as an actual argument, given that 1) I simply asserted my own position without elaboration and 2) it's off topic. My point in saying that was to criticize the Bulverism of assuming that I only adhere to positions because they are convenient to me based on a whopping sample size of two moral questions. Even more pointedly I could cite the numerous changes I have made personally that have inconvenienced me on account of faith, but that would be irrelevant.

2.Guns don't just kill when used in self defense. It would be wonderful if that was the case, but it isn't. In fact, that is a small number of deaths caused by guns in the United States in any year.

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/13/602143823/how-often-do-people-use-guns-in-self-defense


So, the main use of guns is to murder innocent people, to commit suicide with, and to assist in crimes.  So, if you are pro Second Amendment, you are pro death and pro crime.

     The problem with comparing crime and self-defense is that crime is proactive and self-defense is reactive. You only need an opportunity to commit a crime, but you cannot act in self-defense unless you are attacked. The study referenced tracked 29.6 million violent crimes, which means >90% of the population had no opportunity to act in self-defense. So the actual number of people who would offer firearm resistance to violent crime if afforded the opportunity is likely in the neighborhood of 10x the 235,700 who used a gun in resistance. Nevermind the people who would have used a gun but did not have access to one since they were outside of the house and lacked a concealed carry permit, since those numbers are unknowable.

     For reference, the BJS tracked 2,277,000 incidences of criminal gun violence in the period of 2007-2011. This is certainly fewer than 2,277,000 separate criminals, as multiple shootings are a real factor, but by the same token so are multiple victimizations so that is a moot point. It is unfortunately true that guns are used to commit crime more than they are used in self-defense, but to conclude that therefore their primary use is to commit crime is comparing apples to oranges.

It's not comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing pros to cons. 

Of course crime statistics are not perfect, but advanced Western Nations don't seem to have a problem with self defense even though they have much more restrictive gun laws (and generally much less guns.) 

Some of the world's lowest crime rates are seen in Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Japan, and New Zealand. Each of these countries has very effective law enforcement, and Denmark, Norway, and Japan have some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world. Countries such as Austria do see more petty crimes such as purse snatching or pickpocketing.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/crime-rate-by-country

As the original article I linked to said, using guns for self defense is likely more offer counter-productive than useful.

[Horus]

Has it struck anyone else that CRT is extremely America-centric? It's almost as if no other race has practised slavery, or that whites set out to enslave blacks because of their skin colour. As far as I am aware, that last point is untrue - whites often enslaved other whites whom they had beaten in battle, for example.

Notice how the slavers are still the white ones in the scenario you mentioned lol. Racial relations on US are very very specific though.

They might be something like 2nd most diverse country in the world, behind only Brazil, in terms of how many different people from all around of the world eventually moved there. With the specificity that historical approach was more of segregation, which prevented miscigenation. So the racial lines tend to be very strongly divided and not spread under a wide spectrum.

That’s something that naturally creates conflicts. I feel like here the combo of miscigenation + the cohesive cultural assimilation prevented tensions in the same level even if the bloody colonial history was even more racist and violent, because stimulated people to believe we’re all Brazilians regardless of how we look like. The creation of Brazilian identity as mixed-race and of a place where there’s no “Brazilian look” (Everyone from any part of the world can look Brazilian).

In the US, besides not having as many mixed people, the way speech constantly singles out minorities by their race as if they don’t belong to the country is something very particular. Black Americans are referred as AFRO-Americans in order to reinforce the fact that they came from outside the US, as if they aren’t fully Americans. White Americans are never called Euro-Americans, they’re just “Americans”.

It’s weird but it’s like, I think Black American culture is seen from the inside as a “niche” thing, separated from what the country treats as if it was the “real” American culture (based on the white majority social construct).

There’s lots of racism here and depending on what particular aspect/angle you’re focusing from, it’s worse. But in terms of the social construct of the nation identity, miscigenation really stimulated to redefine all these external immigrant influences as “Brazilian” regardless of where in the world they came from. Like, there are no “rules”, people could be a Syrian immigrant celebrating their African religion in a Japanese park in a town with Germanic architecture. And that would still be “Brazilian culture”.

Same way White Americans have more in common culturally with Black Americans than with White Europeans. There’s something that connects them whether they like it or not, so there’s no reason to act like Black Americans (or Asian Americans, US Latinos, etc) aren’t really as Americans as them. White US people should drop these supremacist thoughts inherited from Europe and colonial history, because they aren’t European or even perceived as such. And even Europe today is becoming increasingly multirracial, even considering the fact there’s still strong resistance against it there too because of old racist ideals of “pure culture”

[MATTROSE94]

It is becoming increasingly clear that lifting of social distancing and other Covid-related restrictions happened too early. At the beginning, we should’ve stayed under lockdowns for three straight years until the population was 90% vaccinated, whichever came first. Now, it is best to renew the restrictions for one more year and assess the situation later as we get in more data.

[President Johnson]

It's not like he hasn't already said that he is or anything.

Well, of course he would say that.  If Biden wants to get Congress to pursue a bold legislative agenda he has to angle himself as a potential electoral force in 2024.  Announcing or indicating that he won't run for a second term now would destroy most of his currently available political capital and give him the stench of a lame-duck three years too soon.

Biden's whole raison d'etre for running in 2020 was to be the Democrat unifying enough to soundly defeat Donald Trump, who Biden views as an existential threat to American democracy.  If Biden feels Trump has been dispatched in 2024, then he loses a big motivation for potentially seeking a second term.  Biden sat out an open Democratic primary in 2016, so it's also reasonable to question the assumption that he would not walk away from the White House when he declined to pull the trigger at what was believed to be his last chance to do so. 

The fact of the matter is that, as of this juncture, no one really knows what Biden may be planning to do in 2024.  Biden himself is probably personally undecided, even.  The good health of a 78-year old American man is not something you can assume for the next three years, much less seven (see: Senators McCain and Ted Kennedy.)   

Although your reasoning is mostly sound, it's simply not significantly persuading insofar as refuting his publicly-stated intent that's frankly supported by the vast majority of the available circumstantial evidence on the matter is concerned.

For one, I just don't find it unreasonable to presume that a guy who's wanted to be President for a long-enough time that he sought the job 3 times over the course of 32 years (the lattermost time knowing - even after watching the detrimental effects that it had on #44 everyday for 8 years day in & day out - that he'd the oldest person to ever hold the office in the event that he won) is open to the idea of serving as President for a majority of his 80s. Indeed, I think Atlas as a collective has consistently underestimated the depth of Biden's desire to be President. As American politicians go, it's just not reasonable to assume that they'd think about running for the Presidency for 5+ decades, seek it multiple times over the course of 32 years, & finally reach that mountain-top only to then say, "meh, 1 term was enough, I think I'm done now."

As for Biden having only ran in 2020 because he thought he was the only potential Democratic candidate who was capable of beating Trump, I think that's become at least a bit of a revisionist myth in recent discussions. Yes, Trump's.. well, being Trump (particularly with regards to Charlottesville, which Biden publicly pointed to on multiple occasions) is certainly something that helped to motivate his ultimate decision to proceed with a run, but he was already planning said run by May 2017, which - being 3 months before Charlottesville & well before we started to understand just how bad a President Trump would truly end up being from the average Democrat's perspective - seems to be indicative of the previous understanding at hand: that this is somebody who's always had that want for the presidency in the back of his head even if the timing was just never right, finally saw an opening in the aftermath of Hillary's upset defeat that was too good to resist, & provided the rationale necessary to back up the message that he was gonna be campaigning on anyway (i.e., "restoring the soul of America"). Indeed, that much is bolstered by the fact that he didn't even sit 2016 out because he didn't value an opportunity at hand of trying to finally get elected President so much as he sat it out because he & his team concluded that Hillary - not least due to Obama's behind-the-scenes support of her - was unbeatable & because he & his family didn't consider themselves to be up to the emotional task of a full-scale presidential run right after Beau's passing.

All of that's before one even considers the fact that his camp has already backtracked on the oft-noted "transitional candidate" line, with his own sister/one of his closest political advisors having already offered a 'what he really meant' - that "[h]e's transitional in that he's bringing in all these young people and bringing [us] back again [so] we're not a divided country.... But sure. He's going strong" with regards to the fact - as she sees it - that he'll "absolutely" run for a 2nd term.

Combine all of that with the fact that he seemingly instinctually said stuff like "in my first 4 years alone" & "just in my 1st term" over the course of campaign town-hall Q&A's & the like without even thinking about it (which - if, as hypothesized, was just anti-lame duck posturing⁠ - is posturing that nobody outside of us junkies who've been paying attention to such deep posturing would notice, given that he could've just-as-easily instinctually said stuff along the lines of "what I'll do as President" without the 99.99% of America's non-Atlas browsing population even noticing the difference), & it just sounds like Biden is somebody who - health permitting - was indeed being truthful when he publicly stated that his intent is to run for re-election, which is why I tend to think that what he's said - & said rather consistently so, given the aforementioned campaign excerpts - is actually how he feels on the matter rather than some 4D-chess style move to not be a lame-duck, especially in light of recent reporting that his "resolve to run in 2024" has only ever grown since finally reaching the aforementioned presidential mountain-top, almost as if he's not inclined to give up the digs of the presidency 'til he has to.

[brucejoel99]

Looking at it from al-Qaeda's perspective, there is a pretty clear answer. It was just the minimum amount of time it took for al-Qaeda to have the necessary means, motive, and opportunity to target the US on that scale after its founding. Al-Qaeda was officially founded in 1988 as the Soviet war in Afghanistan came to a close. It was able to conduct its first international attack in 1992 in Yemen. In its very early years, al-Qaeda leadership (i.e. bin Laden) wasn't particularly interested in targeting the US directly.

However, the Gulf War, and specifically US basing in Saudi Arabia changed that. Bin Laden's extremist rhetoric against the US basing in Saudi Arabia was a major factor in him relocating to Sudan, also in 1992, which I think it's safe to say is really when al-Qaeda's efforts to directly target the US on a grand scale began. Interestingly though, they miscalculated the US's reaction to such an attack, thinking (not too differently from Japan on the eve of Pearl Harbor) that a massive attack on the US would dissuade the US from further activity in the Muslim world, rather than be a catalyst for increased US involvement across the region.

Bin Laden issued his first official fatwa against the US presence in Saudi Arabia in 1996, around the time of his relocation from Sudan to Afghanistan and also around the time Khalid Sheikh Mohammed originally pitched the idea of hijacking commercial airliners and crashing them into twelve different locations across the US. At this point, bin Laden reportedly rejected the idea as being "too elaborate."

In 1997-1998, al-Qaeda made a concerted effort to grow their notoriety in the west, with bin Laden conducting multiple interviews with western outlets and bin Laden and Zawahiri issuing a second, joint fatwa laying out their justification for targeting both American members of the military and civilians. The Looming Tower presents the May 1998 interview with ABC as when the countdown to 9/11 began, or as a "point of no return" for US-al-Qaeda relations. I think this is a bit of dramatic re-interpretation for the series, but it's also grounded in a lot of truth that there was a major inflection in 1998 that made a major confrontation between the US and al-Qaeda seem much more inevitable with hindsight.

Two months after that ABC interview, al-Qaeda conducted the embassy bombings in East Africa. While you can tie al-Qaeda to events like the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing or some of the activity in Somalia in the early 90s, this was the first direct attack by al-Qaeda on a US target. Not at all coincidentally, the attacks took place on the 8th anniversary of the arrival of US troops on Saudi soil. From al-Qaeda's perspective, the attacks were a huge success, as the only US retaliation was a missile attack on some bases in Afghanistan that caused no long-term damage to al-Qaeda, and it seemed clear to them that al-Qaeda could attack the US with impunity until their aims were achieved.

A few months after the successful embassy bombings, in late 1998-early 1999 bin Laden gave Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the go-ahead to proceed with a "scaled-back" hijacking plan, in what would later become the 9/11 plot. This is really the point when the timing becomes more logistical than anything else.

There were two other al-Qaeda plots against the US in the meantime. The failed millennium attacks in January 2000 and the successful attack on the USS Cole in October 2000. Neither received any sort of substantial blowback from the US, in part because of concerns that a heavy-handed response would be seen as a "Wag the Dog" type situation. The limited response to the 1998 attacks had already been heavily criticized because (possibly coincidentally, possibly not) it took place three days after the Lewinsky scandal broke and critics claimed it was just an effort to distract Americans and the media.

Ironically, the scale of devastation on 9/11 probably was limited somewhat due to poor timing from the attackers. The first plane hit early enough that most people with a 9am start to their work day would not be in the office yet, while the fourth plane was hijacked late enough that it was already clear what was happening, the two potential targets had already been evacuated, and the passengers were able to respond even before it reached DC.

If this question is meant to be broader, as in "why did this unique event happen in the early 21st century," I probably can't give as detailed an answer, but the end of the Cold War played a massive part. The transition from bipolarity to unipolarity paved the way for a lot more unilateral action, both from actors on the ground like Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, from the global hegemon in its responses to those action, and from random other forces who were suddenly not part of proxy wars and had no attention on them as a result. In short, there was an inevitable resettling of the global power balance in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, and one of the few groups that had both the means to conduct major attacks, the motivation to attack the global hegemon, and the opportunity to do so without being caught was al-Qaeda. And even then it took them a full decade to decide it was worth it and actually execute it.

[beesley]

I learned to drive in 1966, and was good at it, even though not talented in other physical endeavors, and when I turned 16 in Jan 1967, Dad gave me a car he was about to ditch, and the key, and a gas credit card, and set me loose, and I drove all over the Western US with my pals, exploring all the blue highways, and have been at it ever since. In 1970 while in college in Chicago, I got a stick shift Volvo, and mastered that too.

The Eastern seaboard has opened a whole new venue for Dan and myself, and when we hit a hamlet, Dan looks it up on his cell phone, and we learn its history, and check out its interesitng venues, and hiking trails, and of course dog parks, with Roby in his basket over the console, playing close attention to it all, eager for the next foraging expedition to commence, licking one of his daddies, and then the other, just to let us know, that his life is good. I have more miles yet to go before I sleep. I really do want to live for a bit longer. It has more meaning and joy for me, than at any time before, despite my challenges. I am blessed. And Dan coming into my life was a miracle, yes he was. And Roby coming into our life was his idea too!

My one prayer to you all, is never, ever lose your childlike curiosity. Jaded certainty or indifference is the most soul killing state of mind that I can ever imagine. And give yourself permission to change and grow, and take some risks to reach out beyond your comfort zone.

Amen

[MATTROSE94]

I don't want to go back to lockdown either, but there are intermediate measures we can take. Mitigation is not a bad thing. I still fail to see how masks are some apparent massive violation of rights to some people. They are one of the most effective measures we have against this virus (and viruses and other pathogens in general) after vaccines. Lockdowns, although necessary at times, are harmful to businesses and the economy in general. Masks and social distancing indoors are minor inconveniences. That doesn't mean everywhere. It just means in certain places, like stores. There is no harm in basic personal mitigation measures. At this point, I have to wonder how many people decided to stop basic hand-washing since it's apparently probably too much of a chore for most.