If everything was started from scratch tomorrow, the likelihood of present day California and Texas naturally ending up together in the same nation is pretty much zero, IMHO.
Those two are kept together by pretty much a country-sized version of a Sunken Cost Falacy.
One can't even count on language or culture as a unifying element, otherwise the whole of Latin America would be 2 countries, Brasil & Everybody Else.
Well, since I will also browse Lemmy quite literally "at Work" it makes sense to check the Profile option that blurs the Not Suitable For Work stuff even if having the Show NSFW content also ticked.
Explicitly going back and forth changing the option depending on where you're accessing Lemmy from is a recipe for mistakes, at best embarassing but, depending on where one works, which can go all the way up to being fired for cause.
It also depends on the sorting used under All.
In my instance you generally need to scroll a lot before finding NSFW stuff when sorting by Top for anything longer than Day.
Ticking the option in user settings to "Show NSFW content" because of scientific curiosity...
That's the rational take and I'm sure plenty of people will vote Biden following that rationale.
The top poster's "pestilence is a good thing" (i.e. Biden is a "good guy") statement on the other hand is insanelly tribalist and pure fantasy.
Being a Lesser Evil by comparison with an extremelly Evil option is not at all the same as being Good.
Lots of talk, no action: that's bullshit Political Propaganda 101 when a politician in power wants to do something which most of his voters are strongly against.
His Administration's actions are exactly the opposite, from the weapons shipments to Israel going around Congress that included 2000lb bombs to UN Vetos and saying that the ICJ shouldn't even be evaluating the case against Israel for Genocide (clearly this Administration fears a veredict of "guilty", which means they do believe Israel is likely comitting what amounts to Genocide under International Law).
The non-sociopath path for America would've be "Perfect Neutrality" (no action at all), yet Biden choses actual military and diplomatic support, including condemning anti-Genocide demonstrators as "anti-semitic" and condoning the use of police violence against them all the while in this specific subject lying just as shamelessly as Trump.
Well, they seem to be replenishing their submersible fleet in the Black Sea with lots of new under water vessels: for every ship they lose they get a new sub...
Also a lot of the late Soviet Union military technology came from Ukraine, plus their military were also trained in the same kind of school of thought as Russia and still know it.
So it makes sense that, when push came to shove, the Ukranians would fast come up with asymetric war solutions against Russia, that Russia wouldn't be as fast in effectivelly countering them and Ukraine would be quicker at developing new or adjusted solutions once Russia found a counter (or, more generally, that Ukraine would remain ahead of Russian in the cycle were each side develops a counter to the other side's counters).
Had Russia's initial blietzkrieg attack worked, it would've been a different story, but at this stage it makes sense that Ukraine has the technological edge, not just in the weaponry it gets from the West but also in their own weapons development, especially now that it has much better AA to protect the installations far away from the frontlines working on weapons tech.
Russian Propaganda: "Our Glorious Nation has acquired a brand new submersible to help its fight against NATO in Ukraine"
I've noticed that the loudest the politicians in a country rant about how great a Democracy that country has, the less of a Democracy it is.
In Europe, for example, you get British Politicians going on an one about how the country has the "Oldest Democracy in The World" (this in a country with a King who a few years ago - well, his mother - was found to actually have some power over what legislation gets passed, an unlected second chamber with members who inherit their seat from their parents and First Past The Post for Parliament) all the while in The Netherlands (who, IMHO, have probably the most Democratic system in the World, including Proportional Vote, though with a powerless King) politians pretty much never rant about the quality of their Democracy.
At least in the West, the most loud and relentless proclaimers of how great their Democracy is by a large margin are American politicians.
The American voting system is not Proportional Vote and instead is massivelly Mathematically rigged with (for Congress) huge single representative electoral circles which in some cases have borders designed exactly to make it near impossible to defeat incumbents (aka Gerrymandering), with (for the Senate) even larger electoral circles (literally, each state) with 2 representatives, and something somewhat similar for Presidential elections (though worse since ultimatelly it all adds up to a single representative electoral circle with 300 million voters for a position with lots of power, unlike most European countries - with some notable exceptions like France - which either don't have a President or have one which is mainly symbolic and has little power).
Further, the very nature of the system will, beyond the Mathematical rigging, push the people who would otherwise go for a 3rd party to instead go for the "useful vote" (i.e. chose an electable candidate instead of the one they want) - it's not by chance that the heaviest argument of the Biden campaign was "vote Biden to defeat Trump".
Since new parties take various electoral cycles to grow, it's pretty impossible for them to do so because it's Mathematically near impossible for them to even establish a foothold that shows its earlier supporters they do have a chance to one day influence what laws are made in the US and how the country is ruled, so new parties invariable lose steam after the first or second election they go through.
You can see something similar to this in the UK, were for example the Green Party gets 1 million votes out of 40 million (2.5% of votes) but only 1 member of parliament out of 300 (0.33%), and remember this is with lots of people chosing electable candidates from other parties, so the Green Party natural vote would likely be larger in a different system
This stands in marked contrast with, for example, The Netherlands, were vote is Proportional and there are 15 parties in their Parliament (Tweede Kamer).
It doesn't even need to be alone to gain energy and still works fine with just one or two people who you're close to.
It's the "lot's of people" and the "people I barelly know" that are exhausting.