I think of it more as if you were to give a pen to an alien child and said “draw a circle around the main landmasses on this planet” they would probably logically draw circles around North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. They wouldn’t look at the Ural Mountains or any sort of canal systems, just “these are the main blobs on this world map.”

But that’s just the way I think of continents.

Since continent doesn’t have a strict definition, in my book, giving the isthmus of suez (and the isthmus of panama) a pass makes sense. Both of those were historically very difficult to traverse and not viable sustained trade routes compared to just sailing around them. Hell, there’s still not a road that links North and South America through the Darian Gap, which is wild to me considering what seems like should be a vital connection point bottleneck.

I understand “continent” a mercurial word and so people can define Europe and Asia as being different contients, but it does seem like it’s the only continental division that doesn’t make logical sense to me.

Yeah, fair enough.

Still seems like, with the way that continent is typically defined, Eurasia should be the continent with subcontients of Europe, Asia, India, and the Middle East.

Eh, words change and sometimes terms outlive their etymology or grow beyond it. We “hang up the phone” but no phone these days is actually hung up. 🤷

Europe being on a different continent than Asia always seemed like bullshit. I can forgive the isthmuses, but Eurasia feels like it’s a thing to me.

I found that you get the biggest upvote response when you are either edgy or more black and white takes. Medium takes may be both more correct and nicer overall, but they don’t get the most engagement. I would find that after I had a “big comment” that did well, I would make edgier comments for a while after, chasing that high.

That’s not so much a problem here since a thread doesn’t have thousands and thousands of comments or is flights against for attention. Typically I read all the comments on a Lemmy post. Doing the same on Reddit would both suck away my time and my soul, haha.

This is embarrassing but Goosebumps. I think I watched an episode that just caught me off guard while I was in a strange place (first sleepover at a friend’s house) and the super campy episode freaked me right out.

Runner up was poltergeist. My older sister thought it was very funny that it was rated PG and so I saw it when I was maybe 7 or 8. 😂

We are enjoying…by arguing about it constantly. That is the fun now, right?

While it’s definitely still possible, I’m optimistic that the US doesn’t have a history of being forcibly silenced. While we may not be great at mass‑movement or general‑strike action on a national scale, or at least we are out of practice, we’re not used to being afraid of speaking our political beliefs and I don’t see that switching overnight.

In a nation like Russia, that kind of political submission to the state was seemingly drilled into people during the Soviet Union (really, through much of recent Russian history). No one runs into the street to take cell‑phone video of Russian thug troops rounding up political foes. They know that if they speak up, they’ll be alone, isolated, and face a bad fate. But in the US, we get outside and document. We know the names of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

And consider hypothetical war support: there’s no way the political ruling class would survive if the US got into a meat‑grinder war like Russia’s in Ukraine, with millions of casualties. Vietnam almost broke the country, and there were only 58k deaths (not to belittle the number, but Russia has suffered around 1.2m in military losses in just four years).

I think Jan 6 was a wake‑up call that it’s not a joke and not crazy to think they would attempt (and could succeed with) a coup here. I 100% think Trump and co. will try again to stage a coup or fix themselves in power, but I don’t yet believe they’ll succeed.

Yeah, agreed. I guess what I meant was it’s not controversial to say “I want to stop fraud.”

No one is checking the “Agree” option when the survey question is “Should the government allow for more fraud?” It’s just a matter of if the person who is trying to stop fraud is actually trying to stop fraud or they’re just trying to kill (or defraud) the program themselves.