I’ve waited 239 races and this is what I get?

I’m sorry you feel that way and I find myself having the same thoughts from time to time. I have to concede though, that the US is in fact the center of modern Neoliberalism and legal bribery.

Yet… You know who the lobbyists and donors don’t bother talking to? Bernie Sanders (and Ron Paul when he was still in office). Why? Because they know that they have core principles. Then the question becomes: How do we organize (meaning financial resources, outreach, strategy, know-how, recruitment, analysis, policy creation, media and many more) to get more of these people into office? And how can we put pressure on elected officials to enact “our” policies?

Agenda 2025, or the decades long judicial take-over did not come from Trump, but from such organizations like the Heritage Foundation. Which of course are funded by billionaires like Peter Thiel. These people and organizations have huge advantages over the rest, that is clear. But they need more than just money to be able to put public pressure on elected officials, to the point where 25% of voters are ride-or-die with that program and a further 25% are at least ok with it or were duped.

And yes, I am well aware it is an uphill fight. But please: Don’t let bad experiences doom you to inaction. Especially when this very moment, with the daily over-reach of the republican regime, there is real potential to galvanize an effective resistance.

Although I understand your point and would want to add that something like the Citizens United decision further diminishes power of the people without immense funds, I would like to point out, that participating in a democratic process doesn’t merely mean drawing a cross onto a piece of paper every 2 or 4 years. Much more is possible and in fact necessary.

As an example and can be witnessed right now, there is a severe lack of organizing of pro democratic forces. Which is also the result of a decades-long campaign by the capital-interest-serving political establishment to delegitimize or outright destroy such movements and organizations, from worker’s unions to independant media to the “Bernie Bros”.

Make no mistake though. They did this, because they know, that this type of collective political actions bare real power. It is upon each one of us wanting to defend democracy, basic rights and the rule of law to do our part to take back that power. Voting is but a small part of that, if you don’t have the people you need actually running, because they can’t afford to and you cannot seriously pressure those elected like the donor-class does.

Well there’s also a different mindset behind voting, if you can directly weigh in on important issues every few months. It’s not like in other countries where direct ballot measures are much more rare. But yes, I wished more people would try to participate in a responsible manner.

Fully agree with Nina Turner. If you don’t wanna do politics, you blindly leave major decisions over your life to others, who - as we can see world-wide - don’t necessarily have your interest at heart. Democracy, human rights, freedom or any other such ideas require a populace to vigilantly fight for them and not let those with opposed agendas undermine them.

But that analogy afterwards is simply dishonest on many levels.

Firstly, if you are talking about “harm reduction” or the “lesser of two evils”, ice cream is hardly a fair representation of the lesser evil.

Secondly this mixes in non-political people, who do not participate in the democratic process with moral objectors and the duped.

Thirdly: It diverts equal blame (literally in the response) to those groups and to the voters, who actually want the bigger evil or the powerful actors enacting it. This presupposes some moral value on active vs. passive behavior, which can be argued.

And lastly: Even if we find a fitting ice-cream substitute like throwing one of the passengers under the still moving bus, or - how another user suggested - braking before driving off the same cliff: The two who voted for that lesser evil also fight the four voters who are against evil harder, than they are fighting the ones who want the bigger evil. Why? Because they’d rather still drive off the cliff than not. And then they turn around and dishonestly shame the anti-driving-off the-cliff crowd for wanting to speed up instead. That is not a very good strategy.

Are they the same? No. But please keep your arguments honest, or you might get the exact opposite reaction from people, than you are hoping.

From Mirriam Webster:

terror, noun, plural: terrors

(…)

2. violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion

a regime that rules by terror

especially : violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands

an act of terror

the war on terror

-> sometimes used before another noun

a terror attack

Several senators commented on the incident, questioning Alderan’s intentions, since they still don’t seem to want to return to the negotiating table.

Stupid reason for a ban, but I assume revolutionary means that it came to exist out of the islamic revolution in 1979 and is independent from the US empire as opposed to the former one under Reza Pahlavi which came to being out of a CIA/MI6 coup in 1953 and was a puppet regime to the West. Not really an inaccurate description.

Die Hauptschwäche dieser Staffel ist m.M.n, dass die Autoren vor lauter Antagonisten vergessen haben, einen Protagonisten vorzusehen.

Interesting. May I ask where the data is from? From the picture there seem to be more demographics available.

Let’s reverse roles for a second. You’re the employer. What reasons would there be, for you to advertise an opening? Could your primary motivation possibly be paying people money? (Rhetorical question) Considering you already have a team, what kind of person do you want to fill the position? What profile should they have? And how would their motivation reflect on their expected performance?

P.S. I’m not saying, not to talk about money, but there’s a time for talking about that vs. finding out, whether you’re a fit. And answering a question about your main motivation on why you want to be part of their team with money, doesn’t reflect well on you or any expectations of you.

It’s funny to read back the thread. It makes it seem as if we disagree, when we clearly agree.

The overtaking rules were recently changed because of the way one driver exploited that set of rules

Yeah. But we don’t know how, because they only changed the unpublished guidelines… probably. We can’t really know. And you are probably correct that they want to maintain their leeway for nuance or/and manipulation, as can be witnessed nearly every season.

The kicker of this one driver’s behavior last season: it’s a clear breach of Appendix L Ch.4 2. b), c) and d). But all that has to happen because of that is a reporting to the Stewards. Everything beyond that is - by the rules we have access to - fully up to them. That’s all I’m trying to say. The actual rules don’t just offer grey areas, they lack any enforcement. It’s like if the lotg say, that if the ref sees a foul, he can do as he pleases. And these problems and discussions won’t cease until there are clear limits within the rules and guidelines and the public can finally see them. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t allow for nuance, but this is just ridiculously arbitrary.

I agree with the overall point, yet we have to be careful not to conflate the rules with the stewarding/refereeing. You mentioned the expression grey area and I would like to point out that the football rules have been revised in the last 10 years or so, to finally shrink the scope of interpretation. There is still a lot of ‘freedom’ for the referees and their interpretation, but I agree, that more clear boundaries have been established. I would point to some glaring examples to the contrary, but prefer to come back to F1, which has the exact opposite situation.

The rules for football (laws of the game) are widely accessible and available including how transgressions are to be punished. In F1 on the other hand the whole thing is absolutely opaque. We can’t really say, how much room for interpretation there is, because the FIA won’t publish their Driving Standard Guidelines (may I present a version back from the Imola GP 2022!). So we have no real reference to measure the Stewarding against. What this year’s exact wording is concerning the mirror of the overtaking car being alongside the axle of the other or whatever it is, we simply don’t know. The only thing we have is the International Sporting Code (ISC), and from that Appendix L is usually the one cited in the decisions, because it handles overtaking. But: There’s only a mention of a penalty points system in there, not how it is handled, nor what exactly gives someone a “right to the line” or anything in that direction.

For unsafe releases, we have ISC App. L Chapter IV 5. d) which states that “Cars must not be released from a garage or pit stop position in a way that could endanger or unnecessarily impede pit lane personnel or another driver”. The penalties for breaching this rule (or anything else in the ISC) is handled somewhere else (The same goes for the Formula 1 Sporting Regulations, where the unsafe release is defined again with a few specialties to F1). In Appendix B (Stewards Penalty Guidelines) they very vaguely describe, that Stewards have the authority to enforce these rules and that they “retain the discretion (…) to tailor the penalty to the specific situation.” (i.e. to judge mitigating/aggravating circumstances, etc.). Again, no clear reference to measure against. As an example for the seeming arbitrariness: In the decision document around Max’ 10 second time penalty and 3 penalty points, they mention the infringement of App. L Chapter IV Article 2 d) of the ISC, but as we’ve seen, there isn’t anything concrete in there relating to the severity of the penalty.

If we go back to Miami, Max got a 10s penalty in the Sprint for an unsafe release with a collision as a result. In their decision document the stewards write: “The Stewards acknowledge that the driver did everything he could to avoid the incident and therefore no penalty points are issued in this case.” So it seems that the Stewards could theoretically issue penalty points depending on the incident at question. But again, we have no possibility to actually know. In Oliver Bearman’s case in the same race, the time penalty was only 5s and there wasn’t anything mentioned about any penalty points.

So regardless whether we think the rules should be penalty points for unsafe releases or not, we can’t even tell how good of a job the stewards are doing, because there’s a lot of uncertainty within the rules, and we don’t even have access to all the relevant publications of the rules and their clarification.

consistently making mistakes no matter how minor should be getting a ban

We can find equivalents of this in other sports too. E.g. in football, when you’re cautioned twice, you’re sent off. And if you keep committing normal/non-cautionable foul play, you’ll be cautioned. But: Just like you can’t get cautioned for being off-side all the time, there’s a certain level of breaching the rules in F1 as well, that leads to penalty points in the first place.

I know unsafe releases are the teams faults but its not like fines have actually reduced their occurrence

During races unsafe releases are penalized with time penalties. So there’s a clear deterrent there, even if there aren’t any penalty points. I’m not sure about qualifying. The fines are certainly levied during free practice sessions.

Yeah as far as I know, it’s the easiest difference to spot. Also the colors as a whole aren’t as vibrant, even if comparing our pictures, you couldn’t tell the difference. It might be that they change looks over their lives or seasons, because I remember a female (from her calls) last year as being more brownish, than this one.

So that’s where he went! 🙂 (Pic from ~ 1 week ago)

lol yeah. They didn’t edit out all the flirting though or all the embarassed or indignant reactions by the characters around them, which presents those “cousins” in a really interesting light ;)

The US version of Sailor Moon was also censored and edited in different other ways. IIRC:

• All Tokyo references were changed to New York. So they’ve changed where the whole thing took place.
• They changed all Japanese writings (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji)
• Multiple characters had their gender or sex changed as to avoid homosexual relations.
• The music was completely changed for some reason
• They took out many scenes or even whole episodes if they thought, they might vaguely get into conflict with the FCC.
• They scrapped a whole season, because the Sailor Starlights (I think that was their name?) changed gender in their magical transformation.

The most infamous would be South Park episodes S14E05 and S14E06 named “200” and “201”. The central theme of the episodes: Censorship. Something South Park had been subjected to ever since its inception. And this time, they centered around the limits of what is allowed around depictions of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. For context: These episodes aired after controversies around such depictions in media around the world had people killed.

So in an attempt to protect themselves, the network engaged in censorship of the episodes and it is sometimes unclear, what was intentionally in there as a plot point from the creators and what was added by the network. Although some egregious examples are clear, such as the complete bleeping of Kyle’s “I’ve learned something today” monologue at the end. While Stone and Parker inserted clear plot points like characters like Moses of all people asking, whether something was OK to show or say. I’m still uncertain whether the huge censorship bar over the Prophet is a plot point, or censorship or both.

The kicker: Prophet Muhammad had been shown in earlier episodes already, without sparking controversy and in “200” and “201” they even reference those episodes. As expected, they received death threats after the airing of the episodes and later pulled all five episodes with Muhammad depictions from their streaming sites (Super-Best Friends, Cartoon Wars 1+2, 200, 201).

Bis morgen hat er die historische Niederlage bestimmt wieder vergessen und kann unbeschwert nach vorne blicken…

Sorry Leute. Ich finde die Tür auch alleine… im Gegensatz zu Herrn Scholz. Ok ok, ich bin dann mal weg.

Mein Punkt ist ja, dass es nicht unbedingt logisch (=präfrontaler Cortex lastig) ist, sondern im Gegenteil eher widersprüchlich. Rein spekulativ, aber das mit dem Image würde ich nicht auf Merz vs. Scholz/Habeck einschränken, sondern auf das wahrgenommene Parteiimage an sich. Den Gutmenschen und Weltverbesserern wird eine harte Gangart halt weniger abgenommen. Im Gegenteil steht Weltoffenheit halt diametral zum Drang nach Abschottung.

Der Schuss kann ferner noch weiter nach hinten losgehen, da sich die beiden Parteien von ihrer Basis entfernen und diese jeweils weniger angespornt wird, aktiv zu werden oder gar zu wählen. So etwas ähnliches sah man international am prominentesten vor ein paar Monaten in den USA. Sie ist jedoch nicht das einzige Beispiel. Die Union hingegen darf weniger Skrupel haben, da die Basis nur schon aufgrund ihrer Geschichte breit, insgesamt weiter rechts ist und durch die AfD beeinflusst wird. Die dadurch erlaubte Klarheit in der Kommunikation kann ein Vorteil sein.

Hinzu kommt die wenig ruhmreiche Regierung der Ampel, welche v.a. für Stillstand und Streit steht, als für tatsächlichen Willen und Fortschritt. Und was erreicht wurde, kam in der Öffentlichkeit auch in schlechtes Licht. Als Beispiel fällt mir spontan die unsägliche Posse um das Gebäudeenergiegesetz ein, welches in den Medien, gerade auch in den sozialen Medien, durch mit Falschinformationen durchzogenen Angriffen traktiert und nie effektvoll verteidigt und präsentiert wurde.