How anyone can sympathise for him I don’t know

At the end of the day he is a human being, that’s why. I’m not trying to defend the guy, but fundamentally that’s what is supposed to divide the progressives/liberals vs the conservatives. The conservatives don’t care except when it’s their own while the progressives and liberals are supposed to care about all people supposedly.

Well I can, but this is where people will argue what counts as “Europe.” Wikipedia maintains a list specifically titled “List of School Shootings in Europe”.

Using the same metrics as the US number (1999-current) the total number of European school shootings is 88, if not for 2024 the US and Europe would be pretty close between 1999 and 2023 (US 131 vs Europe 84).

For the other statistics the “What is Europe” becomes an even bigger problem and also the way schools are structured in Europe gets fiddly. Europe much more prefers a higher quantity of small schools while the US seems to prefer concentrating more students in less schools. So Europe has ~1.47 million primary education schools and 79k secondary education schools for ~70 million students vs the US with 130k schools for ~50 million students.

So, Europe has 40% more students, ~10x more schools, and ~25% as many school shootings. If we don’t count 2024 then Europe would have 64% as many school shootings as the US. One of the biggest holdups for making the data comparable is adjusting the European number of schools to match US schools or vice versa. If Europe had school distributions similar to the US the EU would have ~182,000 schools (70mil/x=50 mil/130000) and if the US had schools distributed similarly to Europe the US would have ~1.11 million schools (70 mil/1.54 mil=70mil/x).

When the number of schools is adjusted for differences in school structure European students have an annual average chance of a school shooting of 0.00185% (0.00184% not counting 2024) (88 shootings/26 years/182000 adjusted schools) or a 0.03% chance of ever having a school shooting ((1-(1-0.0000185)^12)). The US on the other hand would have an annual average chance of a school shooting 0.01369% (0.00403% not counting 2024) (463 shootings/26 years/130000 actual schools) or about 0.2% chance of ever having a school shooting ((1-(1-0.0001369)^12)).

Before anyone points out that my previous math showed 4% I’ll remind you that that was only using 2024 data, not all 26 years.

So when you actually look and adjust for Europe fundamentally having 10x more schools for 40% more students the incidence of school shootings over the last 26 years haven’t been that different. In the US it is about 7.4x more likely that a school will experience a shooting per year than in Europe, when adjusting the quantity of schools, but the % chance is already so incredibly low it doesn’t really increase the chance that a given student will ever experience a school shooting.

It is worth noting that Europe does have 10x more schools, and so when a school shooting does occur less people are in the school to be exposed to the shooting, but not taking it into account is an apples and oranges comparison.

EDIT: Just to quickly bring it back to my original argument, the difference between Europe and the US isn’t really how often a student will experience a school shooting, but rather the attitudes toward such events. Europe seems to grieve, find justice for those hurt, learn from mistakes, and move on with what works. On the other hand, in the US the parents grieve, someone sues, the school system looks for someone to blame, and the only thing learned is how to avoid a lawsuit.

EDIT 2: Revisited to double check and fix some math and numbers, if I messed something up feel free to let me know.

That’s not the take away you should be getting by any means. Yes, school shootings are more common in the US than the rest of the world, but they are statistically very very rare in the US. The reason why schools in the US react so dramatically for such a rare event is because they are trying to protect themselves from liability and lawsuit, not because they are trying to protect students or help troubled kids.

You don’t seem to have read my post…

A lot of this is overblown really. A few things:

1. The vast majority of school kids in the US will never deal with an active shooter situation.
2. 43% of school shooters in the US are themselves active students
3. Only 20% of school shooting perpetrators had no affiliation to the school, meaning that ~37% of shooters were former students, teachers, or parents.
4. From 1999 - 2023 there were a total of 131 school shootings, but in 2024 alone there were a reported 332 school shootings.
5. These are some terrible numbers, but statistically it’s a rare thing. There are approximately 130,000 K-12 schools in the US and ~75 million students per year. If we assume all schools have the same chance of having a school shooting (they don’t) they would have a 0.2% chance that your school will have a shooting that year or 4% chance that in your k-12 years that you would be at a school shooting.

When people talk about school security in the US they often don’t consider how litigious and risk adverse the US is. You don’t lock doors, build fences, and hire security guards to protect from such a small risk chance, if they actually cared there would be a greater emphasis on mental health. No, they do these things to minimize risk, lower insurance rates, and ward off lawsuits.

The defense writes itself,

“Hey, you can’t sue us for your child’s trauma, we did everything we reasonably could to ensure that a shooter couldn’t get into the school. We built a fence, we locked the doors, we made the kids wear clear plastic book bags, we used a metal detector, we hired a guard, we expelled kids who made threats, and we called the police on people who aren’t allowed to be here. If a kid then sneaks a 3D printed plastic gun on site and traumatizes the students it’s not the school systems fault.”

The US is crazy litigious, especially if a government entity is involved and someone might get a pay day. In my area a high school girl and some similarly aged boys ran away from school while at recess to a forest a mile or two off site. The girl then said she was sexually assaulted by the two boys, called her mom and was picked up and taken to the hospital directly (never came back to the school). The school had reported the girl missing, but only found out about the sexual assault after the mother filed a police report and the police reached out. The school cooperated with the police and reached out to the girl and her mother asking if she was ok or there was anything they could do, but the mother refused to answer their (the schools) phone calls or cooperate with the police. A year later the mother sued the school, the school system, the municipal government, and the police each for several million dollars for allowing her daughter to run away from school and for not protecting her from sexual assault in an offsite location. This lawsuit went on for over a year before the judge dismissed the case.

My only guess would be that the flotilla relaunched faster than anyone thought it would so the writer just updated the article. Looks like they departed Sunday, turned back on Monday, and relaunched within the same day (maybe even just a few hours).

Example, god would never allow the mass starvation of children no matter which god.

What makes you think that? Your concept of a god is that if they exist they would conform to human ideals of good or that their own rules would apply to them. You could instead argue that if god isn’t good then they therefore do not deserve to be worshiped which is a fair argument as well. However, if god does exist, does not conform to human ideals of good, and there are consequences for not believing in it or obeying it’s orders then you’re just up shits creek.

Just to throw out some examples from the bible but God allowed Satan to torment Job because Job was a loyal and good person, God allowed Lot to offer his daughters for rape rather than some angels, God turned Lots wife into salt for looking in a direction, God flooded the world and killed everyone but one small family, the plagues of Egypt, when the Israelites came to the promised land they encountered other civilizations which God told them to kill every man, woman, child, and beast. We don’t need to look at modern examples, we don’t get past the old testament without it being clear that if the Christian (or Jewish for that matter) God exists he doesn’t follow his own rules.

I don’t know other religions as well as Christianity, but considering Islam, Judaism, and Christianity share some commonalities I’m going to lump them together. In Greek mythology the gods are straight up sadistic at times and the people were supposed to be ok with it, Hera tormented Hercules for being born and the Trojan War was started because one god didn’t get invited to another god’s wedding. I don’t know a lot about the Aztec gods, but as far as I can tell it was believed they required human sacrifice at least on some frequency. I’m sure there are more examples in other religions, but the fundamental argument is the same.

I’m not really trying to change your mind, I myself would probably be closer to agnositic, but a lot of atheists try to logic their way around the existence of god as if god is another person when in reality the relationship may be similar to you conversing with an ant. You might be right and god doesn’t exist, but to say they don’t exist because they allow suffering in the world is fundamentally counter to what most religions say about their god(s).

It already turned around due to bad weather

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/aid-flotilla-heading-gaza-returns-barcelona-due-stormy-weather-2025-09-01/

Please forgive me, but I’m going to answer your post in the opposite order it was given.

I completely agree about the comedy and the satire of the original comic, I’m not opposed to it being over the top to deliver it’s comedic message. I’ll also say that the message is comedic in a dark way. The issue inherent to it is when you have people giving seemingly literal agreement to satirical statements, which is what a lot of these comments have devolved into. Your own post was 659 words, 44 lines, and 14 paragraphs obviously this discussion isn’t just about visual shorthand of a comic, it has some amount of real world investment.

As to your first question, I can’t give a concrete answer. As with many psychological things I can’t tell you what is a reasonable amount of suspicion, but I can say what is an overreaction. Similarly, I can’t tell you what a reasonable amount of collecting is, but I can spot hoarding. I can’t tell you what a reasonable attention to detail is, but I can spot an obsessive compulsive behavior. I’m not a doctor, and won’t pretend to be one, so I can’t tell you in definite terms what a reasonable suspicion is, but I can certainly identify an overreaction.

If someone sees an overly dramatic comic about women being fearful of men and their reaction is to defend the over dramatic behavior then that’s an overreaction. When men call out this behavior as overly dramatic and someone defends it, and in fact doubles down on it, then it’s clearly not just satire or a dark joke.

If we’re using the example of the hotel room I would venture to say that a reasonable level of suspicion would be to lock the door, turn the deadbolt, put the swing arm on, and don’t open the door for strangers. If you start getting into hiding, configuring contraptions, barring the door with chairs, and checking the mirrors to see if they are see through, that’s an overreaction in my book.

First off, uh no I would not blame the victim for being raped and murdered and the fact that that is what you lead with is pretty telling. Next I think it’s really telling that you are saying the over reaction is “basic precaution.”

If a woman does a normal amount of precaution, such as locking the door and not opening it for strangers, that’s normal and perfectly reasonable. If the woman literally barricades herself in that’s insane. In either case, if she is attacked or raped it’s not her fault and but that doesn’t mean overreaction isn’t overreaction.

I’m all for saying fuck the police, but what are you talking about with quasi-military garb and why are you bashing them for wearing high-vis vests?

These look like the worst equipped cops I’ve ever seen. I’m from the USA and I’ve seen Italian Police look harder than these guys, they at least had cars and sub-machine guns. These guys have boots, handcuffs, pepper spray, a fucking belt mounted medkit, a collapsible billy club, a baseball cap, cheap-ass-commercial-laundry-uniform-contract cargo pants, a black t-shirt, and a stab vest. The pigs don’t even have guns and they are wearing “please-don’t-run-me-over” safety vests.

The guys on the street have the right reaction, there’s obviously no threat here.

I think the problem with your argument is the measure of paranoia. It’s 100% reasonable to be suspicious and cautious around men, strange or familiar, if you’re a woman. The issue I think most men have to this isn’t reasonable suspicion or reasonable caution, but rather the over the top reaction women online seem to have.

An example of this might be a youtube video about women checking into a hotel alone vs a man checking into a hotel alone. The man checks in and goes right to bed, the lock on the door automatically engages when the door closes. The example with the woman has her block the one way peephole, double check the deadbolt, brace a chair against the door handle, string a tight rope from the door handle to a firm anchor in the bathroom, unplug the phone, close the blinds, check that the mirror isn’t see through, and sweep the room for listening devices. You see this and think it must be satire, and it might be, but then you go into the comments and there’s a ton of women saying how true this is and how you gotta be careful of men when traveling alone. Every so often you’ll see a comment from a man about how this is insane and all the women respond how he’s privileged and doesn’t understand why women have to do all this.

No man is going to begrudge a reasonable reaction to strangers and safety, but relating to a comic about seeing a spam notification about singles in your area and locking your door is ridiculous. It’s this over the top reaction that men become offended by, not reasonable caution.

Eh, that’s not really a good example. The US already has more people incarcerated per capita than any other country. The biggest limitation is how many people they can arrest at one time, not how many people they will arrest total. You might be able to get enough people to protest at once that they can’t arrest them all at once, but they absolutely will arrest them over 1-3 years. They kept arresting Jan 6th people for 4 years under Biden, you don’t think that the current administration will be after you as long as possible?

Except there’s been no supporting evidence of that. Protests, large or small, get the people who protest to go vote. If they are the type to go to a protest then statistically they were already likely to go vote. The problem is the demographic of people who talk about issues but don’t historically go vote.

Historically conservatives go vote whether they protest, talk at work, or literally say nothing. Conversely, liberals and progressives historically do not go vote despite protesting, arguing, or anything else.

When I was in college I was still conservative leaning based on my childhood. I had a class with ~60 other people and we were given a group activity in which we could pick 2 guaranteed rights. The rights varied greatly, such as being accepted for your sexuality (as in from this day forth your sexual orientation would always be accepted without question), or you will have the right to universal healthcare, or you can move to any country you want without persecution. The premise of this question was that you would get the things you picked, but the others you would probably lose the other things. Out of that group of ~60 people only 2 chose the right to vote. The professor then pointed out that while each person had picked certain rights that couldn’t be taken away from them, two people now had 100% control of the political decisions for the rest of the group. With this they could give themselves more rights or even strip the unpicked rights from others.

I’m not sure how it happened, but conservatives instilled in their base that they need to vote no matter what while liberals don’t think it’s that important unless it’s the literal end of the world.

It’s a mixed bag in my opinion. I think the majority of people who show up to protest are likely to go vote, but the majority of people don’t protest. There is probably a small subset of people who would show up to protest and not show up to vote, but the biggest problem is people who say they dislike something, brigade it online, tell everyone at their work or school about it, but then don’t turn out to vote. The one side requires action, the other is just talk, the problem with liberals and progressives today is that they talk but don’t vote. For conservatives the majority of them vote, but don’t talk.

Except that protests that actually disrupt something get you arrested. Still doesn’t actually do much in the USA.

As an American (I know some people will scoff at that statement but that’s what we would genuinely say), but I feel like protests are effectively pointless in the modern day. The people in power don’t care and even Amy Coney Barrett has said how she has people around her house day and night and that they are wasting their time. Protests are great for the morale of the protestors, but they effectively don’t have any impact on people in office. I like the idea of protests, I support what most protestors are doing, but I don’t feel like they are making any real difference to the political stance of those they are protesting.

Maybe Trump just needs to get a BJ so he can calm the fuck down. I swear, the GOP just screams of sexual repressed energy just ready for some release. Only problem is they want those BJs from 16 year olds.

Yeah, where I am from it’s primarily used by businesses these days. Most people don’t answer phone calls from numbers they don’t know so if it’s important business then they leave you a voicemail. The thing is that if you don’t then check your voicemails you miss important business. It has a lot of other odd impacts as well, I was in a car accident not to long ago and the guy that hit me broke his phone and tried to use mine to call his emergency contacts. As you might have guessed no one answered because they didn’t recognize the number and he wasn’t able to call anyone for help.

It’s a double edged sword:

1.) Not all phone lines have text enabled (especially service lines).

2.) One reason you might not answer a call is because you don’t recognize it. So if the line in question doesn’t have text options then you might miss important calls if you don’t check your voicemail.

3.) If you don’t take unknown calls and you don’t check voicemails then you probably won’t answer random text messages either.

At the end of the day more people need to be grown ups and at least have a decent voicemail message and check their voicemails as they come in. It’s not an all or nothing discussion, it’s a do the minimum discussion. Screen your calls, check your voicemails, call people back who seem legit. It’s not rocket science, it’s adulthood.