The people who care about executions being humane are generally opposed to the death penalty. People who support the death penalty generally want suffering to be inherent to the process. Only limit is whatever the Supreme Court deems “unusual”. Cruelty is allowed by the Constitution as long as it is “usual” cruelty.

In states that have death penalty (and federal when we have a president who supports death penalty), it’s the pro-death penalty groups - the ones that want it to cause suffering - that get to pick the process.

Being invested at an identity level is a human trait, not a Republican or MAGA one. It’s not “lately”, it’s all of human history.

We all readily recognize the blind spots in people we consider part of an out-group. Becoming more aware of the blind spots of people we consider fellow in-group members, and especially in ourselves, is more difficult, but I believe important to strive for. Having blind spots is natural. Recognizing them and trying to compensate for them in our thinking can benefit decision-making.

In the case of “are the tattoos on this guy’s fingers MS13-related”, there is way more substantive discussion to be had than demanding the guy’s girlfriend dig up and share publicly a years-old couple’s picture without the emoji. Some quotes below if they are of interest, and the article has a picture with the full fingers and their tattoos fully visible in case that really was what you were going for. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/politics/abrego-garcias-tattoos-explainer

“I see a bunch of symbols that could be interpreted any number of ways,” Jorja Leap, a University of California, Los Angeles professor who has served as an expert gang witness in court, told CNN.

…“These are definitely NOT MS-13 tattoos,” Thomas Ward, a University of Southern California professor who spent years embedded with MS-13 researching the gang, and is the author of an ethnography that studies MS-13, said in an email.

…While some gangs will opt for more low-profile or ambiguous means of identifying members to evade detection from law enforcement or rival gang members, MS-13 tattoos, according to Leap, aren’t exactly subtle. They are used to market the gang’s brutality.

“MS-13 members have tattoos that say ‘MS-13,’” Leap said. “They’re not head-scratchers; they’re billboards. There’s no ambiguity.”

Birthers claimed for years that seeing Obama’s long form birth certificate would alleviate their citizenship concerns. Spoiler: it didn’t, they moved the goal posts.

Once people are identity-level invested in something being true - in this case that deportations are about public safety and not racism, because no way could they or people they respect be racist - sinking time into producing evidence for them is futile. It is no longer about facts, it’s about identity. Sometimes people break out of these self-imposed mental prisons if a main trusted person who helped lead them there loses their trust for an unrelated reason (not one that had become identity-latched). Sometimes being welcomed into a different community that fulfills those identity needs will let them see their previously identity-latched falsehoods as false. But evidence is always futile.

Or work to implement ranked choice voting. The more localities use it, the more comfortable people get with it (the primary anti-ranked choice argument is it’s “too confusing for voters”), the more chance it has to be adopted by more states beyond the current Maine and Alaska beachhead.

The Republican demands were to NOT do things, which can be moved towards by filibuster and delay. The Democrat demands are to DO things, and filibuster and delay would just get the Republicans what they want, while being able to blame the Democrats for all the negative effects that are surprising to their constituents. They need to find better messages and ways to get those messages out, absolutely, but it’s not a mirror image to the Republican situation four years ago.

A lot of US benefits have “benefit cliffs” where making $1 more substantially reduces or even completely disqualifies a person from programs like SNAP (food stamps) or childcare subsidies or Medicaid. https://www.ncsl.org/human-services/introduction-to-benefits-cliffs-and-public-assistance-programs

It’s not surprising people whose families are directly affected by, or who know people affected by, benefit cliffs think the lawmakers set up taxes the same way.

It’s not coming from a centrist in this case: the article is written by someone who argues Bernie is insufficiently left.

Reading the article, the argument is that Bernie isn’t left enough, and more radical candidates need to be run in primaries.

they’ve been shrinking as we evolved changed our diet

No genetic changes (evolution) happened. If as children we ate only very tough meat and lots of chewy vegetables - no bread or rice or potato softness - our same genetics would result in much larger adult jaws.

Using the original meaning of a word and not chasing off on the euphemism treadmill is hardly shifting to the right.

The politics aspect is much more driven by identity and social group than by sunk cost or refusal to have buyer’s remorse. A singular respected leader can turn the ship - churches and pastors were critical in the US civil rights movement, for example - but groups can be more nebulous without a particular leadership structure, like how difficult it is for people to leave Twitter: even though most users agree the experience has significantly degraded, there is no critical mass agreed on a replacement.

The more nebulous groups can break up - Twitter’s engagement is declining - it’s just slow. Maybe years or decades slow to get to the point it’s no longer one of the dominant social media. So I guess keeping the social connections open (giving someone who wants to make a major change an option to still have a friend or family member who will talk to them after), and patience.

A quick internet search suggests 36 weeks (eight months), which is well into the third trimester, is the most common start of restrictions, and many airlines will accept a doctor’s note the woman is low risk even past that. It was a 2008 election blip when the media got ahold of Sarah Palin flying while in labor because she wanted her special-needs baby delivered by the medical team that had prepared for him, which suggests even the written restrictions in airline policy are not consistently enforced.

Both Roberts and Barrett joined the liberal block on this vote, and as a 5-4 ruling both of them were required to get to a majority. That only Barrett is getting social media energy over it says something.

It’s a slow day in some little town… The sun is hot… the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich tourist from back west is driving thru town. He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the feed store. The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her services on credit. She, in a flash rushes to the motel and pays off her room bill with the motel owner. The motel proprietor now places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money & leaves. NOW,… no one produced anything…and no one earned anything…however the whole town is out of debt and is looking to the future with much optimism.

That version from here: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/an_answer_to_a.html

I sometimes come across a dead baby pigeon inside my work building, a large manufacturing structure many pigeons find their way into. Presumably the death is from falling out of the kind of nest in OP’s image.

I enjoyed your analysis, and appreciate the time you spent on it!

What a heartless attitude to value their aesthetic preferences over the safety of your pets. (Adorable pets as we can tell from the cat tax!) And good on you and your neighbor to go through all that research, and inquiries, and installation work (not to mention navigating the negative social interactions with that board) to provide your cats with the best environment. I can understand how with all that investment in the current setup why the neighbor would get attached to it.

They could have avoided all this by just doing their own research and offering some safe alternative to cat safety, working with you guys, instead of going power hungry and heartless. Thanks for sharing your successful ‘compliance’!