It isn’t, actually.

Contrary to what people seem to assume, putting up minor obstacles to prevent suicide has been scientifically proven to be effective at reducing suicides not only at that specific location, but in the general area (meaning people don’t just find another way to do it).

Suicide is generally an irrational, often spontaneous act. Suicidal people are, in the vast majority of cases, not thinking clearly. Requiring someone to engage their brain enough to come up with another method of suicide often makes them also question whether they actually want to do it or not. Having a big open fall on the other hand, offers a quick, convenient escape that someone who is feeling overwhelmed or desperate might be tempted by, even if they wouldn’t do it if they had to actually make a plan.

Empirical evidence suggests that restricting access to certain suicide methods is highly effective at preventing suicide, prompting the construction of physical barriers in many high-risk jumping locations. However, some have argued that these measures are too costly and only lead to method or location substitution.

Results clearly show that physical barriers are highly effective at preventing suicide by jumping with little to no method or location substitution occurring. Furthermore, their cost is far outweighed by the monetary benefits of averted suicides.

A related concept, requiring guns to be kept in nested containers where you have to open multiple layers has been shown to reduce road rage incidents. Every additional barrier provides a chance for you to remember yourself. And having an easy means of suicide around the house (such as a gun) increases suicide rates. People are not computers.

If you ask me (or the scientists who have studied this), any large drop like this ought to have nets, and people on the internet can whine all they want about it.

I’ll never understand why so many people hate suicide prevention.

How much does a net even cost?

I’m not saying that Trump has embraced the divine light of Allah and is doing all this to ensure that the US has to keep giving the Islamic Republic money years and years after he’s gone.

I’m just saying, he did recently tweet “Praise be to Allah.” 🤔🤔🤔

Lol.

Presenting a crayon drawing reading “incels are bad” to the National Portrait Gallery and calling them incels when they refuse to frame it.

Traditionally, America has seen itself as standing for goodness, morality, doing the right thing, Democracy, etc… Most of the voters have, at least.

That’s extremely debatable. If anything, it’s the politicians who pretend to see it that way moreso than the voters. That’s why Trump became a thing.

Now maybe America has sometimes acted like this in the past, but Trump openly stating it is new.

Sometimes??

If you want to talk about “traditionally” and “new,” that depends on what time scale you’re talking about. Like, I suppose when the US was colonizing the Philippines it was nominally in the name of “democracy” (but of course those savages aren’t ready for democracy yet, so we’ll just manage things for a bit, while we take their resources and put in a naval base), but Trump is also nominally talking about “liberating” Iran. WWII was explicitly justified in terms of protecting the national interest, rather than humanitarianism.

In the post-WWII era, some people recognized the importance of soft power in maintaining the global empire we’d acquired, and for countering Soviet narratives, so extra effort was put into these pretences. Sure, we’d still go around invading poor countries like Vietnam, committing mass slaughter and bombing them back to the stone age, but it was in the name of “democracy.” While that was happening, the CIA was also overthrowing democratically elected leaders around the world and propping up dictators who could more easily be bribed to keep the resources flowing, and we didn’t have to worry about justifying any of that because the government could just lie about it.

The problem with all this propaganda is that it kind of worked too well. People thought that committing mass slaughter of the Vietnamese and dropping Agent Orange on them and propping up a puppet dictator was all done for their benefit. And when it failed spectacularly and got a ton of people killed, a lot of people took the lesson of “we need to stop helping anyone ever again.”

That’s why when Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, he was so insistent that “this is not a nation-building exercise.” All of the early rhetoric was quite emphatic that we were not going there to help anyone or build democracy, it was just about “finding the killers.”

Low and behold, despite what the American public wanted, it did turn into a nation-building exercise. And low and behold, just like Vietnam, people didn’t appreciate us slaughtering them and bombing weddings and stealing their resources, so it was yet another failure in the “helping people” category.

As public dissatisfaction grew and grew, as the bodies stacked higher and higher, the establishment of both parties refused to bend. Trump seized on that dissisfaction and promised an alternative and received so much popular support that the Republican establishment couldn’t stop him.

Of course, Trump was merely seizing on that dissatisfaction for his own benefit as an opportunist, and the only real difference he offers is peeling away the ridiculous pretences that other politicians have paid lip service to, while doing the same shit of starting wars everywhere.

Meanwhile, the Democrats were delighted at this development because they believed there was a large contingent of center-right people who still believed in and valued these silly pretences. They were proven wrong twice. That Vietnam-Afghanistan “nation building” “spreading democracy” bullshit has clearly become discredited in the public consciousness. This is not something that’s Trump created or that will go away once he’s gone.

“Fighting evil” what on earth are you talking about?

It’s oil. Money. It’s material resources and power. It’s always been that.

Why did the CIA go around the world deposing democratically elected leaders, including Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, who was replaced by a literal monarch? Do you think they genuinely believed the people they were overthrowing were “evil” and the dictators they installed were not? When they invaded Vietnam and funded Pol Pot, was that about “fighting evil?”

Of course not. Democratically elected leaders are more likely to respond to the public will and thereby assert control over their own country’s resources. Tin pot dictators can easily be bought off as long as you cut them in on the exploitation. US foreign policy has never been driven by any high-minded “morality.”

Right now, we are giving weapons to the Saudi royal family so they can continue murdering gays and journalists. If such things are so horrible that our “morality” drives us to forcible invade other countries that do that in the name of “liberation,” then why don’t we start by not actively supporting the Saudis? I’ll tell you why: because the Saudis keep the damn oil flowing! That’s all the US cares about and all it’s ever cared about.

Angron gets it!

He’s getting back to his roots.

God wants you to wear a hat

Many will say I should have seen this coming — that the right has and always will be against LGBT rights. And maybe there’s some truth to that. But that just wasn’t my experience.

Yeah, no shit dumbass. They were acting nice because they were using you. Divide and conquer, exactly like all those people screaming at you were saying.

If only there was some kind of historical precedent so we could know what would happen immediately afterwards if, say, a prominent gay Nazi helped the Nazis exterminate trans people. Like, maybe if somebody had just appeased them by helping them exterminate one or two small minorities, they’d have mellowed out! Unfortunately, there was just no way to know this would happen. I mean, other than all the people who did predict it, but they clearly just got lucky.

On an unrelated note, I wonder if I could interest her in a nice set of long kitchen knives.

Thank you, I’m glad we could reach an understanding.

My view on that is that voting in a presidential election (especially if you’re not in a swing state) is primarily performative and an expression of loyalty, rather than actually influencing the outcome. The presidential race is, unfortunately, the only thing anybody cares about. I voted for democratic candidates in downballot races, where my vote is far more likely to matter, but nobody I talk to cares about that, at all.

The fact that this is the way that everyone engages with politics and forms their political identities makes me see it as all the more important to make a point of voting third party in presidential elections, as part of defining myself and my positions as distinct from the democrats. I sometimes feel that people use the talking point of third parties starting small in local races as a way to shove them into something they don’t give two shits about so they can stop thinking about them entirely. Because presidential races are such a spectacle, the primary way in which people engage in politics, I view it as necessary to engage with them on that front.

If someone makes a big deal out of my third party vote (particularly in a safe state, like most Americans), that’s a clear sign to me that their perspective is all out of whack. And conveniently, they tend to come at me for it, which gives me a perfect window to criticize their views.

Because:

All the other presidents:

My worry with that approach is that this plan may be too long-term. That, in the attempt to save democracy, you’d let a regime seize power that proceeds to dismantle democracy. When Trump’s campaign includes the promise that you’ll never (“have to”) vote again, attempting to use votes as leverage is gambling whether they will have any value as leverage when the next election comes around.

In my view, Trumpism is not a spontaneous thing that came out of nowhere and might disappear just as easily, but rather something that emerged as a natural result of declining material conditions. You can’t hope to just weather the storm, because it’s not just Trump as an individual, and when Trump is gone whoever the right turns to will be just as bad, if not worse. Furthermore, as things stand, they will continue to gain power over time and will become an inevitability. This inevitability is caused by two things.

The first is the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. In regular language, what that means is that as an economy gets more developed, the number of untapped, productive ventures shrinks, it becomes harder and harder to make profits through the development or expansion of productive industries. That’s why we get things like the enshittification of the internet, because companies have to find ways to increase their profits and if there’s no more room to grow, all you can do is squeeze customers more. This is the general, overarching cause of economic decline.

The second part of the inevitability of the far-right is that they are the only ones who are positioning themselves as an alternative to the existing status quo. Liberals are very much wed to the existing system, and they do their best to shut down any leftist voices calling for change.

Now, what happens when you have an economy that is declining because of fundamental structural reasons, and the options are sticking with that forever, or… the Mystery Box? People are going to chose the Mystery Box. And as it stands, the only Mystery Box out there is fascism. Now, we could offer our own Mystery Box, but any time we endorse a status quo candidate, we discredit ourselves as actually being distinct from the status quo. We are telling people, “This is acceptable, this is good enough” even when we know that’s not true, and as a result, when they fail they drag us down with them and discredit our messaging.

Because I see defeat as a near-certainty in the long term, I am willing to accept risks of the whole thing blowing up in the short term in an effort to avert that. There is no gamble if we were doomed anyway. If it is a political impossibility to actually address the structural problems, then we at least have to provide alternative explanations and an alternative vision. We have to hold a candle in the darkness, even if all we accomplish is guiding a few lost, confused souls towards the truth and away from the enemy.

The ship is sinking, and I’m saying, “We have to plug these holes,” and the liberals respond, “It’s actually really antisemitic for you to say the holes exist, and if you try to fix them we’ll break your legs.” And so, what can I do except rip planks off so I at least have something to cling to when it all goes down?

You ran out of ink too, didn’t you, ya bastards?

Personally I like to compare it to my favorite anime, Revolutionary Girl Utena, as they both have some surrealist themes and weird symbolism and homoerotic undertones with some normal episodes but overall being a mindfuck. I kinda see Evangelion as the shounen version and Utena as the shojo version, and I’m more into the latter but a lot of that is just which aesthetics you prefer.

Utena vs Evangelion, see, practically identical 😆

And some point they just need to cut out the middleman and start selling ad space in politicians’ speeches.

Military spending under Biden was the highest it had ever been (and more than the next 9 countries combined).

Sure, that money could’ve gone towards reducing the cost of living and giving them a chance at reelection, but at least this way they ensured the Republicans have a bunch more planes and shit to play with. Great job!

She wants to be the next Dick Cheney. I can’t wait to hear all the takes of, “What’s wrong with Gavin Newsom campaigning with MTG?”

If she wants to prove her worth, she can leave the Republican party, declare herself an independent, and caucus with the Democrats.

How about, if she wants to prove her worth, she can retire from politics forever, give all she has to the poor, and spend her weekends volunteering at soup kitchens.

I’m not opposed to forgiveness or giving people second chances, unless that second chance means putting them in a leadership role after they’ve already fucked up in such a role. At that point, it’s just failing to hold powerful people accountable. Are there not enough people in the country to find someone who doesn’t have a track record like hers?

This a completely wrong view. Nobody is judging arguments based on the person making them here, we agree when she says things that are true. However, in politics, it is all to easy for someone to say things people want to hear in order to achieve power, and then use that power to pursue an agenda completely contrary to that. Look at Fetterman or Sinema. These people are opportunists who are only interested in advancing their own careers, cannot be trusted, and we should make efforts to root them out an expose them to avoid the mistake of investing them with power, because they can be utterly disasterous otherwise.

The disclaimer is entirely necessary, because people need to understand the fact that she’s just co-opting these talking points for the purpose of advancing her career.

This whole perspective of “people change” or “we need to be forgiving” does not apply, at all, to politicians. If a politician uses their position of power to do evil shit, and they come to regret it, then my forgiveness is completely contingent on them retiring from politics forever and never again seeking a leadership position. What, are there not enough people in the country to find someone who doesn’t already have a proven track record of doing shitty things in office?