Were you aware of this? I was not. Anyway, I edited the title; how’s that seem?

Hm… maybe I am wrong. It’s definitely not just a conservative talking point, it was how historians looked at early modern cities for a while, I thought. But it seems like modern historians aren’t sure that’s the case:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2598176

With just a quick look around, I couldn’t find anything that seemed definitive in the other direction, but also, the little preview that shows of that paper seems like it does a pretty good job of saying “Yo the reasons they said this is true are incredibly weak when you dig into them.” So maybe it was just premodern science from the leeches-and-ECT days.

There’s also this. Deaths are exceeding births in almost half the US, now:

https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/deaths-exceeded-births-nearly-half-us-counties-last-year

(And, of course, it’s mostly in the rural areas)

This is the way it used to be. Cities didn’t used to be able to sustain themselves through the birthrate alone; they were so toxic and dangerous that they would eat the populations within them, and needed a continuous flow of people from the countryside to sustain the population. Who would then, as the years went by, get fed into the maw and replaced in their turn.

Doing the whole country that way hasn’t been tried before to my knowledge, but what the hell, we might as well be the first to give it a shot.

Sure

Like I say, other people might have other wordings or summaries. Honestly hair-splitting about it just pisses me off. A court proved that, by the normal-human definitions of these words, he’s guilty of rape. How’s that?

That’s not to mention the many, many allegations of rape, sexual assault, and child rape that other people have credibly raised. That’s just the time that it’s been proven in court with him having every opportunity to vigorously defend himself against the allegation, and failing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump

renewing her claim of defamation and adding a claim of battery under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law allowing sexual-assault victims to file civil suits beyond expired statutes of limitations

A jury verdict in May 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, and ordered him to pay US$5 million in damages.

Regarding the jury verdict, the judge asked the jury to find if the preponderance of the evidence suggested that Trump raped Carroll under New York’s narrow legal definition of rape at that time, denoting forcible penetration with the penis, as alleged by the plaintiff;[d] the jury did not find Trump liable for rape and instead found him liable for a lesser degree of sexual abuse. In July 2023, Judge Kaplan said that the verdict found that Trump had raped Carroll according to the common definition of the word, i.e. not necessarily implying penile penetration.[e] In August 2023, Kaplan dismissed a countersuit and wrote that Carroll’s accusation of rape is “substantially true”.

The official finding of the jury was that he was “liable” for sexual assault. The rest of it, I think pretty much speaks for itself. I would summarize that as him being proven in court to be guilty of rape, other people might have other wordings or summaries. Whatever.

The man don’tbe corporealanymore center

Sounds like someone needs a visit to the MDC

He was literally proven in court guilty of rape, in the defamation case.

OK, so Biden made things better across the board. he could have made some things even more better, but wasn’t able to. and he at least didn’t make anything worse.

is that an accurate summary of what you’re claiming?

Mostly. I wouldn’t agree with “he didn’t make anything worse,” because US immigration post-2001 is a terrifying hell run by horrible people, and it would be hard for anyone to lay hands on it in any way without making something worse in the process. But yes, aside from that, it’s accurate.

because if so, we need to get back to those details you claimed I don’t care about. the ones you’ve never actually responded to on their substance:

Because I’m not interested. I already laid out what I thought about this: Looking at the whole of his impact on immigration is a way better way to analyze his overall impact on immigration than extensive Lemmy bickering, and I think you’re focusing in on details as a way to distract from the idea of looking at the overall.

because if you actually read what I said, notice I phrased it as “you seem to be arguing”. that was intentional. I’m listening to what you’re saying, and trying to tell you “here’s what your argument is coming across as” because I do actually care whether I’m understanding you correctly or not.

Okay, fair enough. That previous paragraph is what I’m saying.

Honestly, it’s not a bad point.

“Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs.” -David Ben-Gurion

It needs to be some separate military force coming in from outside and making “both sides” behave. Primarily, the “both sides” of the Israelis since they’re doing the overwhelming majority of the killing. And then as if by magic I think you would see a lot more peaceful situation.

Enacting a Palestinian state with Israelis running around all over it taking farms or killing kids whenever they feel like won’t do a damn thing. It would be good for them to have representation on the world stage, that would come with recognition and would cast what the Israelis are doing in a somewhat different light, but just the state alone is not the pressing problem.

It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid
Now we stand outcast and starving 'midst the wonders we have made
But the union makes us strong

you seem to be arguing “Biden had good intentions, so even if he did some bad things, you should give him a pass because he had good intentions”

Not even slightly. I’m saying that he made the situation and outcomes better, and also tried to make it better than that, but failed at some of what actually should have been done.

(And yes, I can pretty much feel the talking-point response to that coming… whatever, I’m familiar with them at this point lol)

You seem very interested in telling me what I am saying, instead of just listening to what I’m saying.

My point is, I don’t think there are very many people at all who were fine when it was Joe doing it. I think there are people outraged and horrified that it’s happening in the first place, whoever’s in offce, and I think there are people who think it’s “antisemitism” and just some crazy protestors, and I don’t think there are too many people who are conditionally in one camp or another.

Like who are you thinking of, that’s suddenly speaking out against it when they were silent about it before? Who can you point to (a public figure or a person on Lemmy)?

the NTSB chair has been going after the FAA, saying that the FAA failed to adhere to 15,000 close call warnings at Reagan National Airport between planes and choppers, failed to act, failed to move the helicopter route so that there would not be a disaster. Failed to listen to controllers who warned of a possible disaster. And she says the FAA has been dragging its feet and not cooperating in this investigation.

This is precisely why the FAA and NTSB are two separate agencies: When you’re looking into why a crash happened, it often develops that the FAA wasn’t doing some things it should have been doing. And, of course, if the FAA was investigating itself, it would be tempted to downplay how that happened or how big a deal it was. Since it’s a totally separate organization that does investigations as the one that enforces airline safety day-to-day, though, they can just state the facts and if it hurts someone’s feelings or career prospects, oh well.

It’s a leftover from an earlier and more honorable time in American governance.

Okey dokey. If I ever make a simulator that lets you step into a political organization (like Sim City) and try various theories about how to make changes and what’s going to happen as a result, I’ll be sure to include this scenario, and I’ll send you a link so you can give it a shot.

That’s actually one of the significant problems that came about during his admin: If you just let ICE “rot on the vine” (which was more or less what was happening, not even because of anything Biden did but just some additional factors in the world), then they keep arresting people but just keep them in increasingly overcrowded and shitty conditions. Which was precisely what happened. It was a fucking nightmare for anyone in detention, and some people died.

This just overall sounds like you have no idea how things work and are making sweeping proclamations about how easy things would be.

because now you don’t want to talk about details. you just want to talk in broad strokes. read the wikipedia summary. look at the whole picture of everything Biden did.

Yeah, pretty much. Put it in context, then talk about details and complain about them when they’re wrong. Doing it the other way around, picking individual details and then using the specific ones you picked as a reason to conclude things about the whole of what his intent was, seems wrong to me.

So you think the answer is that Biden should have torn up the constitution first, before Trump could do it?

I think we may have to agree to disagree. I think fixing a lot of the structural things that got us here (legalized bribery in government, massive corruption / dysfunction in media and education, a basic lack of real direct democracy, gilded age economic dysfunction, among other issues) would have been a better way. “I’ll seize control and fix it, trust me, look at the good things I’m doing” generally doesn’t work out real well even if the good things are on the side that you think they should be done for.

Okay, so now we’re talking about the reality again?

The reality is that changing ICE requires congress, and a lot of who’s in congress is reactionary idiots, and so “kneecapping” ICE would have just not passed and accomplished nothing. And, there were genuine emergencies (overcrowding in ICE facilities, deliberate racism and cruelty by ICE, and the massive backlog of people waiting to get in the country with nowhere to go) that needed to be dealt with, which a performative effort to kneecap it that actually accomplished nothing would have done nothing at all to solve.

Not to mention all those people separated from their families which the Biden administration was trying to find and reunite. It’s just not that simple in reality. Accomplishing good things (and failing to accomplish some other realistic things which are also good things) is just not the same as deliberately causing all the cruelty in the system on purpose because you’re a terrible person. It’s like the Alice in Wonderland thing about mountains and valleys.