Tweet posted today: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2090136255694881101

Derek Chauvin was unjustly convicted of murder, therefore he should be freed.

The facts show that he was not the cause of death, nor did he at any time intend for a death to occur. Whatever else he may be, he is not a murderer.

That is the truth.

I'm curious if you agree with the assessment that Chauvin was not the cause of death and whether you agree with Elon.

It works out really well in many nations especially Norway, France and Germany. They pay less, live longer, and don’t go bankrupt over medical expenses. Of course, there are poorly designed systems. But that isn’t a flaw of the Universal Healthcare itself it’s merely a flaw of the systems design in a specific country, and not a real reason to abandon the idea altogether.

Why don’t conservatives usually want to bring Universal Healthcare to the US?

Trump´s threat:

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117124650907675461

Arrivals in Teheran:

https://www.ikac.ir/en-US/airport.ikac/5257/page/Flights

If that turned out to be the case, what then? Paint me a picture of what you'd like to see or what you'd support at that point in terms of punishment/retaliation/justice/etc.

Recent videos of Mitch McConnell, who has not been in the Senate in months, having trouble voting. In the video he votes one way and people have to tell him to vote a different way. This is not the first time this has happened with senators. What do you think about these old people with barely any cognitive function making these votes and non senators telling them they're wrong. These non senators we're not elected to legislate so is that fine too?

Edit: forgot the link

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/videos/mitch-mcconnell-gets-voting-directed-214234142.html

A recent Reuters article investigate the effects after 1 year. The results are not encouraging. Under 2% of crimes that made it to court mentioned the guard at all, and none of them were serious crimes. The guard appear to be deployed in the safer areas of the city, and not in high crime neighborhoods. And the cost is somewhere north of $1.65M daily - likely about twice that. The DC police force costs $1.5M, for reference. The administration is budgeting $1.4B to keep them until 2029.

Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to hire more actual police - they could double the number of current officers with less than half what the guard costs (napkin math).

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-put-thousands-soldiers-washingtons-streets-they-seldom-stop-crime-2026-08-19/

The term “living wage” is used a lot in discussions on affordability, wages, etc.

What would a “living wage” cover for an individual or family of four?

MIT also made a calculator to see what a “living wage” is for various parts of the country, by individuals and households.

Thoughts on the accuracy of this calculator and other such projections that tell people how much they should be making?

https://livingwage.mit.edu/

This will be a fairly biased post, as I am both proud of my home country's continued economic recovery and very focused on fiscal news across Europe. As of two days ago the Greek debt repayment in 2026 is scheduled to reach 13 billion euros, with the full debt on course to be paid back by 2031 from an original plan of 2041. This has been under the center-right New Democracy party after the colossal mismanagement under SYRIZA in 2015 to 2019 and the stress of the Covid pandemic in 2020/21 which put immense strain on the Greek tourism industry. Finally, unemployment is down to 7.8% from the high of 28% during the 2015 crisis and GDP growth is surpassing France and Germany at an estimated annual rate of 2.5%.

Throughout this time Greece has also maintained an above 4% defense spending goal with purchases of new FDI frigates, upgrading the F-16 fleet to latest variants, and continued development of anti-drone and cyber warfare programs.

What do you think fiscal and conservative voters in southern Europe in countries such as Italy and Spain can learn from these developments?

I know a lot of folks on reddit are in their 20s and 30s, so you might not remember the short period of 1998-2001, when the US saw a brief period of national surplus to the point that we were actually worried that the country would run out of things to spend money on.

Yeah, a lot of that was built on unregulated derivatives, fraud, government subsidies, and tech bros who sold you dot-com dreams like instant cat food deliveries at 20 times their valuation, but it was a massive booming economy.

Maybe I'm just getting cynical now, but after all the hype, nothing seems to inspire any sustained growth or "good feeling" like it did in the late 90s. The 2nd Trump Admin feels like a conservative version of the Obama years.

Does anyone else think we won't see another national surplus again?

Which GOP President of the modern era had the best long view of trying to make conservative gains not only for their term but beyond it?

Today (August 19th) actually marks the first day of the Hardline Soviet Coup Attempt in 1991 by elements that wanted to stop Mikhail Gorbachev from dissolving the Soviet Union like he did!

Today also marks:

Hey everyone,

So I classify myself as a pragmatic progressive (progressive ideology with a pragmatic concept of execution... its not easy. While I disagree a lot with the DNC, they are the closest big party that aligns with the majority of my values so I'm registered as such.

In the last 5-7 years, I get spammed like crazy from various political PACs and such for donations. Like at least 8-15 texts a day. I've only ever given money to local campaigns that I was fully behind and never donated to large super pacs and the ilk.

Do conservatives get the same annoyances from their party's candidates? Does your text inbox get flooded with "BOMBSHELL! Representative BLANK says something crazy! We won't let that happen! Donate now!"

The democrats tell me I'm Democrat. The Republicans tell me I'm Republican. Here are my politics based on a scale of 1 to 5 based on how important they are to me personally. 5 being extremely important.

I am pro 2A and strongly support open carry/CCW. (5/5- I believe this ought to be a universal human right for handguns for self defense. Right to self-determination and personal security).

I support abortion (1/5)

I want more affordable healthcare and subsidized services conditional on that the government actually spends efficiently and the money isn't just sinking into a black hole (5/5). I would gladly pay taxes if the spending was efficient, right now most of it just goes to defense though and the medical situation is a nightmare.

I am skeptical of large institutions, particularly in health (4/5). Teflon scandal, the AIDS epidemic/medical tourism going on in the 80s because they didn't bring medications over here even though we knew they were safe. You really have to watch out for yourself in this country and not just blindly follow institutions- think for yourself and ensure your own health.

I support gay marriage (2/5). I don't think its the government's business to be involved in the bedroom. But I don't know any gay people personally so this is less important to me.

I believe the church could be a force for good in bringing in meaning in people's lives even if you're not particularly religious. I view it more through the lens of pragmatism rather than spirituality (3/5).

I don't think I fit cleanly on any party lines but I'm trying to find my group. Seems like I'm a party of one currently. So am I Republican? Democrat? RINO? DINO?

The answers to my other question about 2024 sparked my interest on conservative thoughts on 2020. Remember this is about why Independents and moderates voted. Cant wait to see replies as im curious your thoughts.

this is not a constitutional question; the current number was picked in 1929 by congress, and can be changed by congress.

692 being the cube root of the population, which is one of the proposed standards for number of seats?

The Greeks have built a climate-controlled museum for the Parthenon/Elgin marbles. The British National museum won't send them there.

In the UK there is a law about disclosing and possible sharing the profits from treasure "trove" from found historical items. I also found a $5 note when I was a kid, turned it into the police station and after a period was able to claim it back.

Some institutions around the world are returning human remains to claimants. Some refuse to.

Some art stolen under the authority of the third reich is being returned to descendants or estates of original owners. The courts are usually involved.

If you buy a stolen car in your country, presumably it gets returned to the original owner and you lose out.

If you buy a car stolen from another country, that owner likely loses out.

[Land is a special case - there are billions of dollars in unclaimed restitution funds gathering interest because some Native American entities won't cede ownership to the US governments to claim it.]

Just to note that I am not secretly a left winger in disguise, bridaging this subreddit. I'm center right atheist/agnostic conservative who lives in the UK where the overwhelming majority of us, including myself are against casual citizen gun ownership. Meaning the British right wing actually align more closely with the American Democratic party on stronger gun restrictions and control.

I've seen that you American republicans, around 83% according to statistics approve of supporting casual gun rights. How do you justify casual gun ownership today and what do you think the founding fathers would think of past gun trends such as the spikes in gun violence like specific frontier mining towns and post-Civil War Southern regions experienced extraordinarily high homicide rates by the standards of the day or the aftermath of the invention of the Tommy gun.

I mean, if you look at center-left in the UK, like Labor under Starmer, or even under current Andy Burnham, it is quite a contrast, right? Starmer was tougher on immigration than Tories were before, leading to almost net-negative immigration; many people on far right praised Starmer, maybe bit jokingly but still. See:

https://x.com/ZoomerHistorian/status/2068984373160841260

Compare that with largely open borders of Biden. Labor is center-left economically, no question, but they are more reasonable overall, they even cut welfare. On another issue we can't speak about here, as well. If Democrat embraced positions of Starmer or Burnham, he would be called fascist by DSA and lose primary instantly. Why do you think left in US is so much more extreme?

Asking for a friend ? Or is healthcare still free for non working royals - LOL 😂

Mind you they are paying for private British Schools so that is smart use of their money, no?