They can be found in the blood of every person.
When they were trying to do a study and compare people without them in the blood, they went as far as remote indigenous populations, faraway Eskimos, basically anyone they could think of that had absolutely 0 contact with modern civilization. Nope. PFAS. It's worse if you're in the first world (probably significantly worse if you're in the US), but it's everywhere. Anywhere there is water, there is PFAS.
Hey, you're right. We do need to urgently work to improve the systems of media and education so that people have some idea of what the fuck is even happening, so that they won't elect open fascists to power and think that they're doing a good thing. We have some urgent problems now that can't really wait for that, of course, since that whole vital apparatus has been deliberately destroyed by the rich people over the course of about the last 50 years. But yes, the elections aren't the only piece. If we could have a Mamdani level event in even one out of every ten elections that happens, that would be fuckin' fantastic, instead of just letting one open socialist get within a hair's breadth of the literal US presidency in 2016 and then giving up because the rich people cheated him out of power. It almost fuckin' worked. Also, gerrymandering, mail in voting, open fraud enabled by Trump and his allies, et cetera. There are a ton of problems that we will never in a million years vote our way out of.
I'm glad you said that. It would have been absolutely nuts if you were agreeing with my parent comment which more or less to me could be interpreted as "Let's bring political assassination by random nuts into the mainstream of the US political spectrum as a way of making change, that'll help and the left will definitely win that game in the end."
Well, yeah, if you reframe what he actually said into something totally different, obviously it's not going to make a lot of sense.
"Liberal," at least on Lemmy, has become more or less a meaningless word. Any word that has so many definitions, different depending on who you talk to, it becomes sort of corrupted and useless.
I've literally seen several times a conversation generally of the format "You support Israel!" "wtf no I don't" "Yes you do because you're a liberal and I know that because (whatever)! You're lying, you support Israel! All liberals support Israel!" I'm exaggerating slightly but that's the basic core of it.
Interestingly enough, the proto-MAGA movement was trying for years to turn "liberal" into a slur before the internet turbo-leftists got in on it. It basically fulfills exactly the same function in both cases: Just a checkbox that means "enemy" which can be used to shut down critical engagement, because humans have an instinctual category for "enemy of the tribe" for which engagement is meaningless, and you just need to attack.
IDK what word you could use to refer to news like MSNBC. I actually don't see a problem with saying "liberal" to mean news like MSNBC / The Atlantic / similar points on the spectrum, but on Lemmy, you're going to really get people confused. The word in general is just best left avoided I think.
If you had told me in 2005 that events in the future would make me start looking at rank and file FBI agents as "the good guys" to a certain extent in American politics, I would think you were out of your goddamned mind.
Yeah. Sometimes for high-profile cases, lawyers have a habit of giving press conferences and things, but that's kind of an exception to the norm and not necessarily a good idea I think.
Part of the point of the Snowden leaks was that they don't completely give a shit about those limitations. I'm sure the details vary in various parts of the apparatus, but as I understand it they don't even really bother with the fig leaf anymore (even as of that pretty long ago time at this point).
They're not going to. One of the bedrock principles is that it's never the leader's fault. Hence the endless cycle of suddenly discovering that some particular person is horrible, just the worst, and we tried to give him a chance but we have to get rid of him now, all the blame is on him, and welcome to our new genius who will do great things.
I should fucking well hope so
They are afraid. That's why all the nonsense, and calling out the National Guard and whatnot.
Edit: I am banned from here under a different account. I commented without realizing, I've now deleted the comment + moved it to a separate community so as not to do ban evasion. @Five@slrpnk.net feel free to replicate the ban on this account if you want.