It’s just about 3 things mood, moisture and temperature.

Nothing spoils a mood like fear!

Calm down, Satan

Bread made feeding people cheap.

Bread is a luxury, if feeding people cheap was the only concern, porridge would be a better use of grains than bread. Porridge predominated when peasant culture predominated; bread becomes common with civilization’s connections, innovations, and specialization.

Found the heretic

Give me a loaf of bread, and I will eat it and be happy. End of story.

Condiments are nice conditionally, but bread is always fantastic

“Not all cops, but so many and in such incredible proportions that it may as well be, especially considering the choice to be a bastard is one that must be made every moment of every working day”

There are cops out there who want to do good in bad departments. They are either pushed out of the force, or pushed under the extant culture of callousness and brutality.

There are cops out there who want to do good in good departments. They’re rare, and the way that policing is (not) regulated in this fucking country makes all good departments inherently unstable, as power tends to corrupt, and unchecked power doubly so - but they do exist.

But the vast, vast majority of cops out there are complicit with their departments - and the vast, vast majority of departments in this country are rotten. And until we, as a society, reckon with that - ACAB remains a valid criticism.

Late 18th century. The chaos of the French Revolution arguably diluted its viability as an example to other countries, despite the structure of democratic government being objectively better, so you can argue that we were still on the cutting-edge through the 19th century, even, when most countries were still autocracies or constitutional monarchies with extremely questionable de jure voting systems.

I would argue as late as the 1950s, our democratic structure was closer to average than below-average, but by the 1970s, what gave the US more in-common with other developed democracies was that we had extensive practice with our democratic system; by then our structure was not just hopelessly outdated, but a structure that no one in their right mind would take seriously as a foundation for a new government. Come the fall of most of the single-party Soviet-backed regimes of the 1990s, and the only countries we actually beat out for being a ‘good democracy’ are ones that… well, are only questionably democracies to begin with. And even then, most of them have structures that are superior to our’s; only a tradition of civic participation has led us to hobble on as long as we have without becoming an outright authoritarian state.

Though this might be the last month I can say that, which says a lot about the failures of our shitshow of an attempt at implementing democracy.

We were trailblazers for a time. Other than that, we were always kind of fucked as a democratic system.

The very next thing said in the article:

The team next looked at engagement to see if this explained why anti-CCP content was performing less well. But it found that TikTok users “liked or commented on anti-CCP content nearly four times as much as they liked or commented on pro-CCP content, yet the search algorithm produced nearly three times as much pro-CCP content”. This didn’t happen on Instagram or YouTube.

This is not news,

This has been known for years.

I promise, the CCP does not need you to play devil’s advocate; they advocate plenty well for themselves.

“It’s okay that the CCP pushes propaganda because billionaires do it too” - Tiktok defenders