Probably fair to assume that the shooter was aiming for center of mass. A stationary person at 180m is pretty easy to hit in the chest, and someone with enough skill/confidence might have opted to aim for the head, but nobody is aiming specifically for the neck. A hit on the neck almost definitely means the shooter was aiming for something else and missed high (or low) by inches in a way that still hit the guy.
It has long been used as a transitive verb. The Oxford English Dictionary has collected examples going as far back as 1897 using it generically to make something disappear, but this particular meaning, of government officials forcibly abducting a person and not explaining where the person went, really started to pick up by the 1960’s. The novel Catch-22, published in 1961, had a character use it in the transitive way, with the protagonist complaining that it wasn’t even proper grammar. And that novel was popular enough that it started to appear a lot shortly afterwards, in magazines and newspapers and books.
You might enjoy dunking on them (which is fine) just as long as you’re not actively pushing them away.
The easiest way is to enlist their involvement in dunking on the actual politicians, officials, and policymakers. A fascist movement relies heavily on a reluctant populace complying in advance, which is why little pieces of resistance can be effective against fascists. Humor, sarcasm, and outright mockery of the people giving the flimsy orders diminishes their power by persuading the public that there won’t be consequences for those who ignore those orders.
It’s not going to be enough by itself, but having the apolitical comedians turn against fascism is still a useful thing to have on our side.
I don’t think it’s an insurmountable challenge. Just that the ratio is what matters, which means abrupt changes to birth rates might be more problematic than the magnitude of the change over time.
But I also don’t think that a stable population size solves the climate crisis or resource depletion. It might be the case that 8 billion people in 2075 end up consuming way more energy and natural resources in an even less sustainable way than the 8 billion people of 2025.
Even if you take money out of the equation, people need the productive output of other people to survive.
A man alone on a desert island cannot retire. As soon as he is unable to provide for himself, he dies. Yes, he can accumulate certain “savings,” but much of what is needed to survive cannot be banked and used later. Food storage is limited, and any method of long term food storage tends to require additional processing to be edible, so there will always need to be some kind of just-in-time cooking process to keep people fed. Same with shelter, where maintenance needs will always be there, or health care, where real time treatment will always need to be done.
In a society with a shrinking population, there will be an unrelenting pressure to simply stop supporting those who are not productive. And those who are productive will selfishly shape that society to cover their own needs first.
That’s not just capitalism, it’s every economic system. Taking care of our elderly and our disabled is a luxury of a prosperous society. If the ratio goes out of wack, the willingness to continue supporting that luxury may not always be there.
we’ve been fed this narrative that overpopulation is eventually going to destroy the world
It’s always been wrong, and some of us have been arguing against that kind of neo-Mathusian worldview this entire time.
Note that the same view also leads to the incorrect conclusion that population shrinkage will be good for resource management, pollution, etc. If one believes that a large and growing population will deplete the world’s resources and destroy the environment, one might conclude that a shrinking population will help conserve the world’s resources and preserve the environment.
But look at how things actually play out. The countries with the shrinking populations are still increasing their resource consumption, and the slowdown in population growth hasn’t slowed down resource depletion in large part because humans don’t all use the same amount of resources. If the population of India shrinks to the size of the population of the United States, but then increases its greenhouse emissions to match that of the United States, that would be bad for the environment despite the population reduction.
A shrinking population isn’t really a problem in itself, but an aging population is. That’s the concern about birth rates, is the worry that unproductive old people will have their lives cut short rather than enjoying a reasonable retirement.
That’s a misleading picture. Yes, the population of veterans did support Trump over Harris, but the population of veterans skews overwhelmingly male, white, and old.
Look at Pew’s 2023 survey. Among veterans:
Meanwhile, Biden probably won among active duty in 2020.
I suspect that if you surveyed veterans under the age of 50, you’d get a very different result. Or, if you surveyed the general non population but weighted it to be as old, white, or male as the veteran population, would the results be very different from veterans generally?
These narcissists would never agree to endure insults as part of a scheme. They’re also too incompetent to plan this kind of stuff.
There’s no plan here. It’s just always been an inherently unstable situation, with schemers who aren’t as smart as they think they are, all trying to achieve their own ends using ideas they don’t understand.
I didn’t think I’d ever agree with Hawley
Hawley represents the future of the Republican party, in my opinion: populist conservatism that is willing to bend on party orthodoxy on how taxes and regulations shouldn’t be captured by big corporate interests, but is just completely abhorrent on cultural issues (and whether the government should be involved in those issues).
In an earlier political era, there would be opportunities for cross-party dialogue on the issues that the parties have deemed non-partisan (where divisions don’t fall within party lines and party leadership doesn’t care that their members hold a diversity of views on), but the number of issues that fall within that category have plummeted in the last 20 years.
Republicans killed a COVID era $3600/year child tax credit, letting it lapse in 2023 back to the 2018 amount of $2000, which was increased from $1000 as a replacement for the $5050 tax exemption parents used to be able to get before the 2017 Trump tax reforms. For a married couple whose combined income was between $75k and $150k, that $5k tax exemption was worth about $1250, so it was a bad trade for them (or anyone making more).
If Republicans were serious about financially incentivizing having children, they’ll need to support the kids throughout the entire life cycle: healthcare for pregnant women, including through labor and deliver and post partum, support for families with young children (including parental leave mandates), subsidized daycare, good schools, parks and libraries, and economic stability (including in housing costs).
But they’re not, so here we are.
That’s not an outrageous medical bill. It’s an outrageous bill for clawing back government benefits for those whose full time care for family members prevents them from working.
school gun team
This fucking country, man.
Seriously. It’s like looking at a map of a battle and assuming the arrows are actual terrain features.
The poverty line was historically measured simply by multiplying the USDA’s cheapest food plan for a household to buy groceries with adequate nutrition, and multiplying by 3.
Then, in the intervening 6 decades or so, food inflation has gone up significantly slower than housing inflation, to where that simple assumption of “barely enough to eat, times 3” began systematically understating actual poverty.
Today, feeding the reference family of 4 (2 adults 20-50, 1 kid aged 6-8, 1 aged 9-11) costs $996.20 per month (as of March 2025). That’s basically $12,000 per year, so the poverty line for a family of 4 is $32,150 (updated every January with September data).
Their tattoos?
They also know hurting themselves.
General Milley was his first term appointee for Chair of the Joint Chiefs, and one of the first things Trump did in his second term was to strip Milley of his security clearance, security detail, and even his placement of his portrait with the other former chairs.
Jerome Powell was Trump’s pick for Chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing Yellen (the first time that a Fed chair had not gotten a second term, and Trump has been clamoring for the power to fire him.
Jan. 6 “rally”? Uhhhh
He’s fired a bunch of lower level officials.
His pick for acting US Attorney for SDNY (basically Manhattan) was fired a few weeks later for refusing to drop charges against Eric Adams.
The acting IRS commissioner has changed over 5 times in the 90 days of this current presidency, including the most recent firing of a guy that was too close to Elon (in some kind of Bessent-Musk feud), just a few days after his appointment. The previous acting commissioner was fired for refusing to illegally share IRS data with DHS to help with immigration enforcement.
And the current turmoil in the Pentagon is the firings of people he appointed to these positions. It’s a mess.
The listeria outbreak also exposed Boar’s Head as a deeply mismanaged company. When the CFO, who had been at the company for over 20 years, was deposed under oath, he couldn’t answer the question of who the CEO was, or who his boss was. It came up in a lawsuit between family members of the family that owns and controls the company, and has their own competing factions in charge of different parts of the company.
From a pure corporate governance perspective, that type of dysfunction is a recipe for disaster.