Hell, at the last protest I went to there were people driving by cavalierly playing "Bomb Iran" (written in 1980, and trotted back out every time the topic is back in the zeitgeist). It seems like the only real difference there is abstraction. Supporting violence is [unfortunately] deeply embedded in our culture.

Perhaps the popularity of this thread is causing you to preemptively seek out more terrible comments, rather than letting flagging do its thing?

Maybe try looping over popular divisive threads, and reading the flagged short comments that didn't get many upvotes. There is a lot of fucking hate in the world.

(and certainly a hat tip to you for making it your job to sort through it so we don't have to see much of it. But if this is hitting you differently (personally) than the usual flood does, perhaps you need to take a step back?)

They were.

Honestly with "AI" helping a lot of the boring configuration tedium, I feel like I might finally reach the stage where I like my desktop environment config.

If we're discussing wealth, that means something different than merely a level of income and expenses, but rather having resources (including saved resources) that give one economic power to make their own (usually better) choices. Being able to afford food and sundries is not wealth. Even buying premium brands or not worrying about sales does not imply wealth in and of itself. Being able to rent, even a nicer/bigger apartment than strictly necessary, is not wealth. Being able to buy a home, where you're now making larger-scale economic decisions (rather than merely accepting whatever your landlord has decided), that is wealth. And one of the bedrock assumptions of our capitalist economy is having this kind of distributed wealth where individuals are making decisions over their little domains - eg do I install these solar panels that will cost me much more money than I am paying for electricity right now, but will pay me back over a period of 10 years.

This ties back to the failings of framing the CPI - big ticket purchases are infrequent and thus statistically making up a smaller portion of an average. But when an individual is staring them down, that increased big-ticket price becomes acutely relevant. When consumers then tend to settle for cheaper options, the aggregate amount spent goes down and the price inflation is then not reflected in the CPI. As just another metric we could give this a pass for the inherent difficulties of measuring such things. But as the metric is a critical part of the feedback path for monetary creation, it's exactly those shortcomings that become magnified.

In this instance, if the murderer had been prevented from reentering the country, this murder would not have happened. Everyone can agree this would have been a much better outcome.

But we can easily imagine a slightly different situation where the mother gets deported, the kid stays here in the "care" of the boyfriend, and then gets subsequently strangled by the citizen-but-criminal boyfriend.

Without data and a logical model, we're hopelessly lost in the weeds. Data for putting in context how prevalent various types of these occurrences actually are. And a logical model that keeps the focus on the relevant details. For instance, the [presumably criminal] convictions seem much more relevant here than the immigration status. And the immigration status seems like a red herring that feeds into those simplistic answers.

It's good that most people can still afford food, toiletries, and other sundry expenses. But it's not really relevant to this conversation. And if this does change as well, that will be a different discussion.

Keep on at it if you're fine effectively supporting the current idiots. But don't be surprised when people call you out for it.

But in retrospect, it makes sense - they're both countries with imperialist genocidal ambitions over their neighbors. The grounds to condemn Russia attacking Ukraine is the same as the grounds to condemn Israel's long term subjugation of Gaza and the West Bank - they're both a rejection of might makes right in favor of valuing individual human life of the other. And of course one pillar of US neofascism is this exact same type of othering (eg how they can so readily write off the summary executions of Pretti, Good, Taylor, et al).

Seeing how the fallout from the Epstein kompromat operation has been playing out, I suspect there are some deep ties between their intelligence operations - if not outright collaberation, at least respect that they're working the same "marks" (eg Trump and his circle being the most visible, but also all of the other enablers in the US power structure like the Senate and House).

It's looking like this is the exact type of magical thinking of the most useless "president" ever. Meanwhile in the real world, such things take hard work.

There is plenty of criticism to go around when analyzing how we got to Grump, but keeping it in the right context is key.