ricecake

"no propensity" is still equal. :)

My take is that 6-7 is the "kids can be pretty great sometimes", with room for "I have one or more that I really care about". 8 is for those people who just get legitimate pure joy out of kids. Usually grandparents or certain types of educators. 9 is creepy, and 10 is vile.

It's likely phrased in the law as closer to while serving on a swat team, as in they're actively wearing a ballistic face shield and gas mask for legitimate reasons.

It's a prime opportunity for things to get lost in translation between the law, the person talking to the press, and the report.

Showing up isn't arguing against them, it's sending a message to other people (amongst other things).

Arguing with fascists is pointless. Showing that not everyone agrees with them is different though, and has value. They may not have a singular static narrative, but they rely on the perception that dissent is a minority position.

All the other benefits of a non-violent protest aside, there's also immense value is reminding people that they're not as singular in their viewpoint as they feel.

For a lot of people, it's been very easy to feel like everyone else must be in board with this.

I'm not sure what you're looking for to codify the implicit threat. A couple million people calling you a king at an event called "no kings day" in a country whose founding narrative is "violently rebel against kings" seems pretty implicit to me.

Also, I just realized that there's a red coat/red hat parallel I haven't seen leveraged yet that has a lot of potential.

While money is used to by goods and services, it isn't those goods and services. It's essentially a measure of resource allocation. More money means you get more resources.

People don't go hungry due to lack of money, they go hungry due to lack of food. In an area undergoing famine, you can give people money and they'll buy food. This means people who were eating before are now going hungry. If you keep giving out money, the price of food starts to rise. Keep going, and eventually it's cheaper to leave the country than it is to buy food.

The systemic causes of hunger are complex. The complexity is sufficient that fixing them would take more money than any billionaire has.
In the US for example, we keep production high and costs low by subsidizing agriculture to the tune of $30-60 billion a year. We give individuals about $115 billion a year in money to buy food. Another $3 billion for emergency food aid. Another $25 billion for lunch for school children. Then there's intangibles, like a side effect of food subsidies being the government owning millions of tons of milk, cheese and produce that it just gives to people. Not cheap, but difficult to quantify exactly.
This all has side effects and weird consequences. Like agricultural subsidies driving down costs of grain for the entire world, making it unprofitable to be a farmer in areas with borderline arable land and causing communities to depend on imports for food, making global food market fluctuations another source of famine risk. There's also some obesity and other health impacts, as well as things like improved academic performance, but those aren't relevant to this.

To actually solve the issue, you need to invest in agricultural development. The US government spends another $200 billion a year on this. Basically, instead of just buying food or paying people to grow it, you need to invest in the tools to do so, and to manage pests and everything. Roads, water, tractors, bulldozers, powerplants, education, and all the things that support those things.

All told, the US government spends about $500 billion a year on this, and it's given us a consistently high ranking in food security indexes, with food being generally affordable and safe, and slightly less available, depending on the economy. All that, and only about 50 million people are in food insecure positions in the country.
This is before we get to the costs of doing foreign food aid.
There are billions of food insecure people on earth, and 700 million hungry.

Elon musk liquidating all his assets at face value couldn't cover the bill for one year in the country that needs the least assistance.

That being said, while they can't solve it they're certainly part of the cause. The systemic failures that have led to hunger are embodied in them. If we decided to not allow billionaires to exist, we'd be making changes to society that would actually allow us to make those expensive and overwhelming changes to solve the problems above.
One person doesn't have the resources to build roads and infrastructure needed to build the infrastructure needed to support modern farming in areas that can only scrape by, teach people the new methods needed, teach the people needed to support those people, and all of that again for getting the food to the people who need it. But if society decided people like that shouldn't exist, the resources spent so that some portion of the resources end up in their pocket would be enough to do that.

Yes, I understand what you're saying, it's not a complicated position.
Your position is that national reputation matters more than anything else. And most pointedly, the national reputation of your allies matters more than any other argument.

What I'm saying is, is that the actions the US, or any other nation, took before the people currently running things were even born have no bearing on current events. Nations aren't people, and they don't possess a national character that you can use to try to predict their behavior or judge them.

Would the world be justified in concluding that it's only a matter of time before Germany does some more genocide? Before Japan unleashes atrocities across Asia?

If you're getting down to it, the US can't control other nations, beyond stick and carrot means. And the US has the same right to try to keep Iran from getting nukes as Iran does in trying to get them. Because again, nations aren't people. They don't have rights, they have capabilities.

And all of that's irrelevant! Because the question is, is Israel justified in attacking Iran? The perception of hypocrisy in US foreign policy isn't relevant to that question.

No, what I don't understand is what relevance that has to this situation. The US using nukes on Japan 80 years ago doesn't make Iran making nukes justified. It doesn't validate Iran not having nukes. It neither strengthens nor weakens Israeli claims of an Iranian weapons program, and it doesn't make a preemptive strike to purportedly disable them just or unjust.

It seems like you're arguing that the US nuked Japan and therefore Iran, a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, is allowed to have nukes. Israel is falsely characterizing their civilian energy program, and we know this because of their backing by the US.
It's just a non-sequitor, particularly when there's relevant reasons why US involvement complicated matters. .

What does that even mean? How is what a nation did generations ago relevant to two different nations in a totally different scenario?

The USs actions in world war two are an odd thing to bring up in this context. It was a radically different set of circumstances, 80 years ago, and none of the people involved are alive anymore.
It's entirely irrelevant.

May as well point out that the US was the driver for the creation of those watchdog groups and is a leading force in nuclear disarmament. It's just as relevant to if Iran has a nuclear weapons program or Israels justification for attacking.

Iranian opposition to US strategic interests in the region giving the US a strong motivation to let anything that makes them weaker happen is a perfectly good thing to mention.

So, my question when I run into that argument is: who do you think people would rally behind?

There's always this assumption that the party has someone that they know would be super popular but they then make a conscious choice to run the most conservative person to the left of the Republican.

There are primaries. They're made up of people who can get enough support. The local parties are closer to voters, and it's much easier for people to join.
Somehow the people who consistently get elected are the sort of people they keep fielding as candidates.

So I'd love it if we had a great inspiring candidate. But literally who are they?

We stopped maintaining a handful of them, but waay later than you would expect. At some point we decided we didn't need a plan to deal with an invasion by the British empire kept up to date at all times.

The US has a water system effectively comparable to the ones across Europe, FYI. That includes lead levels, since it wasn't just the US that used lead pipes.

In most circumstances lead pipes are safe to replace with different materials as part of routine maintenance. It's only very notable incidents where things go wrong that have driven a push for greater haste, since it highlighted the consequences of things going wrong.