would not the fact that blue shifted galaxies being rare, mean that in general all galaxies are red shifted from the perspective of all galaxies, thus they are expanding away from a point on a similar vector, and thus have a central point?

No, it means the opposite. They are expanding away from all points, because space itself is expanding. In fact, stars are able to move away from each other faster than the speed of light, which is only possible because space is expanding. Again, like the surface of a balloon, we can imagine that the further away two points are from each other, the faster they’ll move away from each other as the balloon expands, so even if there’s a certain maximum speed that you can move along the surface of the balloon, if two points are far enough away from each other the rate that distance is created between them can exceed that speed.

If there was a single, specific point in space where all the stuff came from, then we wouldn’t observe the same thing in every direction. Sure, we might see stuff ahead of us redshifted because it’s moving faster and stuff behind us redshifted because we’re moving faster, but we should also expect to see stuff to the sides moving alongside us at similar speeds that would not be redshifted. The fact that there’s consistent red shifting in every direction, getting more pronounced the greater the distance, leads us to the conclusion that space is expanding.

And a balloon does have a vector of direction: the mouth piece

It’s an analogy, don’t take it too literally.

Imagine the universe as the surface of a balloon. The Big Bang Theory stipulates that at one point, the balloon was extremely small, like a single point. But now that the balloon is bigger, you can’t find a particular spot on the balloon where that point was, because everywhere was that point. No matter where you are in the universe, if you turned back time and shrunk the balloon back down, you would be at the point of the Big Bang. Nowhere is closer or farther away from it.

That it’s trivially easy for them to just casually decide to do a genocide with no input or oversight from any democratic process that could hold them accountable or allow the people to actually control what our foreign policy is.

It’s pretty much in line with the “Lizardman Constant,” named after a poll that 4% of Americans think the world is run by lizard people. You can ask anything in a poll and you’ll pretty much always get around 4% trolling or whatever.

And that in itself is a reason why the intelligence community cannot be allowed to exist in its current form.

And I think it’s funny that you’re blatantly lying about what other people believe, and your response to that is, “Ha! Not every word that comes out of my mouth is a lie, only lots of them!”

Of course, the classic “don’t ask, don’t tell” of the national security state. The careerists don’t want oversight and the president wants plausible deniability so they’re left to just do whatever tf they want with no democratic accountability whatsoever.

Despite his contributions, he was forced to undergo chemical castration because of his sexuality, so it was a pretty big deal.

due to choices made by the Indonesian government

If you knew anything at all about the thing you’re talking about, the democratically elected Indonesian government were some of the ones being targeted in the genocide, by far-right groups who were able to overthrow it due to US backing. Absolutely disgusting to try to blame this on the Indonesians and trying to absolve the US of guilt.

If I go through your post history, what’s the over-under I’ll find you blaming Russia for the rise of the far-right in the US?

Yeah, but that resulted in John Tyler who was a pro-slavery democrat in all but name. Can’t really win.

I agree with most of this, but slave owners could dream of a lot of violence.

I have never seen anybody on any platform anywhere defend Pol Pot.

The reason to hate Carter is that a lot of the economic policies attributed to Reagan had their beginnings under Carter.

The post WWII economic consensus was Keynesianism, but beginning around the time of Nixon there was an economic phenomenon called “stagflation,” which refers high unemployment at the same time as high inflation, something that isn’t supposed to be possible under Keynesianism, which advocates confronting high unemployment with injecting money into the economy, and then reducing those injections when employment comes back down. Nixon attempted to address the problem with price controls as a short-term solution, Ford’s idea was just asking people to spend less, but Carter was the one who made the decision to view inflation as a bigger problem than unemployment and began moving towards Neoliberalism.

The big difference between Carter and Reagan was branding. Carter branded the policy terribly which is to say he was honest about it. Work was going to become more alienating and purchasing power would decrease, but it’s ok, because we as a society will just have to pursue meaning outside of the economic sphere, making do with less, cultivating out personal virtue. There’s likely a connection between Carter and the right’s meme of, “You will own nothing and be happy.”

Reagan has much better branding for these policies, which is to say he lied. Look at how cheap we’re gonna make everything! You’re gonna be able to buy so much stuff, it’s gonna be great, let’s party and celebrate capitalism and consumerism! Of course, with wages divorced from productivity and the decline of the power of organized labor, purchasing power would decrease, but the effects of that would take time to fully manifest.

There were a wave of wildcat strikes during this period but unions had already defanged themselves, they kicked out all the communists and the leadership sold out, because from the New Deal era up to this point things were going fine.

Reagan definitely bears a lot of the blame but there wasn’t a huge difference in economic policy, the democrats didn’t really have anything to propose as an alternative and voters weren’t given much of a choice about it.

Honestly the worst thing Lincoln ever did was choosing Johnson as his VP. Even then, I learned recently that he asked a different (better) guy, Benjamin Butler, to be VP but he turned him down. Had he lived to do Reconstruction, we might have more to critique, certainly he’d have done better than Johnson (not a high bar), but since he died he’s off the hook for figuring that one out.

You could also criticize him for not being committed enough to ending slavery from the start. But really, other than the mass hangings of the Dakotas (which could’ve been worse but was still not great), most criticism of him is just Lost Causers whining about “authoritarianism” by freeing the slaves and expanding the scope and power of the federal government as was necessary to free the slaves.

Yeah, nobody at that time knew slavery was wrong. Well, I mean, except for all the slaves, obviously, they knew, but there was no way for them to get their perspective heard because they were cut out of the political process. Who cut them out of the process? Well, uh, well you see…

I’ll believe Trump actually intends to cut the military when he does it and not a minute sooner. People on both sides like to pretend he’s an isolationist but military spending only went up in his first term. Likely, he’s just going to pivot to China.

Ofc it’s congress who sets the budget so he can just quietly sign off on the increases the same way he quietly gives tax cuts to the rich.

What they think they’re doing and what they’re actually doing are two different questions. What they’re aiming to do is keep things trucking along while making as much profit as possible, more or less the same as most politicians, but with a bit more of a realpolitic approach. There is no long term plan, and that goes for basically anyone remotely near to the levers of power. What we have is a system of competing groups all singularly focused on maximizing their profits for the next quarter, nobody’s actually at the helm and it’s an open question whether anyone could take the helm and alter the course from the natural progression determined by systemic forces.

Where we are actually headed, regardless of who’s in charge, is a matter of several inconvertible facts. First, the US is clearly in decline and will eventually lost its spot as global hegemon, at this point, there is a serious risk that it will start WWIII in response, as Americans are not ones to accept defeat gracefully. Second, climate change will render more and more areas in developing nations unstable or uninhabitable, causing a major refugee crisis which has already started and is going to get considerably worse. What measures will be taken to maintain the dividing lines that keep people from poor countries out of rich countries is another question, and it may well be answered with genocide.

If, by some miracle, cooler heads prevail and we don’t start WWIII, and you’re lucky enough to have been born in a rich country, then we will likely just see things get gradually and progressively worse. But it will be the kind of apocalypse where you still have to go to work. Day to day life will carry on, just with more uncomfortable things you have to push out of mind, more frequent shootings, the reemergence of all kinds diseases and more pandemics that you’ll be expected to work through. There isn’t going to be a tipping point that causes a revolution, nor are the elites going to unveil a secret plot to make everyone eat bugs or whatever. You’re just going to be working longer hours, affording less, retiring later (if at all), and probably having to navigate and even more bullshit process for applying for jobs. Going further into this sort of “boring dystopia” is almost certainly where we’re headed.

The two most important political priorities, arguably the only two priorities that really matter, are demilitarization andopposing war with China, and opposing genocide of foreigners/refugees/immigrants. These are the things we will be facing, perhaps within the next 10 years (but if not then certainly later), and if we aren’t able to organize resistance along those lines, things are going to get very ugly. Actually stopping the decline is very unrealistic/implausible and has been for some time.

I was raised Catholic but rejected it pretty much immediately when I reached the age of reason (~13 or so).

So all I have to do is listen to and obey everything my parents, teachers, and religious leaders tell me and I’ll go to heaven, but, if I had been born into a Muslim family in one of the countries we were bombing, doing that would get me sent to Hell and I need to reject everything I was taught, get on a plane, randomly walk into the right church, and believe everything they tell me. Oh, and if I was like some random Chinese farmer a thousand years before planes were invented, I guess I’m just fucked. Yeah somehow I don’t believe that an all-good perfectly-just god would have every soul play fucking roulette to determine what their chances in life will be of getting into heaven.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned about the history of this contradiction, which goes back to a 400’s debate between Augustine and Pelagius regarding original sin. Pelagius argued that it was theoretically possible, but incredibly difficult, to live a life free of sin and therefore not need Jesus’ forgiveness. He was also critical of the way Christians were integrating with the Roman empire, with all the same practices but now the social climbers called themselves Christian to win the emperor’s favor while otherwise doing all the same shit they would otherwise. Augustine rejected this, arguing that the Father would not sacrifice the Son unless it was strictly necessary, furthermore, Pelagius’ arguments would undermine the authority of the church (this was stated explicitly). Augustine invented the concept of original sin as something passed down through generations (despite this making zero sense), cited a mistranslated passage from scripture to support it, and used that to explain how even someone who lived a perfectly innocent life deserved to go to hell. This included, of course, fetuses. It was the Church’s position for a very long time that if you have an abortion, or even a miscarriage, then your baby’s soul is burning in hell.

What’s particularly funny to me about this is that, after Pelagius was denounced as a heretic for saying people needed to actually live virtuously instead of just relying on Jesus to forgive them, he became so reviled that people were often accused of “semi-Pelagianism.” All through the Reformation, everyone was accusing each other of being “semi-Pelagians” and trying to position themselves as the true inheritors of the Augustinian tradition. It wasn’t until relatively recently that anyone started saying, “Hey, maybe the Augustinian position is actually kinda fucked up.”

Holy shit, I never saw that. If I hadn’t lived through it I’d think that ad was a parody. The fucking smugness of it, I stg, Bush makes me hope Hell is real.

Why the hell do liberals rehabilitate Bush like this? He invaded sovereign countries and began a 20 year long occupation, hundreds of thousands were killed in his wars, he also stripped away out civil liberties and conducted mass surveillance, indefinite detention without trial, and torture.

“Always did what he thought was best for the people” what an absolute load of horseshit. I guess it just so happened that what he thought was best was to ship people off to kill and be killed while he and his buddies got rich off it.

Like goddamn, what do I gotta do to get people carrying water for me like that? “Yeah I robbed a convenience store at gunpoint, which was bad, but you have to acknowledge that I was doing what I believed was best for the American people. It’s not my fault, it’s just all the people I chose to surround myself with who led me to do it.” Where is your hate? You should want that motherfucker to hang!