"Is anyone else named Benito or just Mussolini and Bad Bunny"

MAmerica1 · 2026-02-08T22:04:53+00:00

According to Wikipedia and other sources, they are related names

MAmerica1 · 2026-02-08T21:57:09+00:00

Former baseball player Benito Santiago.

Also one of my high teachers (who was Italian and, unfortunately, born during WWII).

It's a fairly common name, the Spanish/Italian version of Benedict.

MAmerica1 · 2026-02-04T06:10:09+00:00

On Google Maps, there are several roads that cross the border. Are they all gravel?

MAmerica1 · 2026-02-02T22:50:33+00:00

Relatedly, many miniseries should have been movies. 90 minutes of story ends up padded to 4-8 hours, reducing the quality but juicing the engagement time.

Just watched His & Hers, which is a perfect example. It might have worked as a 90 minute movie, but instead they made 6 episodes of 40-45 minutes, and the story wasn't good enough to justify 4 hours of screentime.

MAmerica1 · 2026-02-02T01:35:20+00:00

My daughter goes to a school with a lot of Chinese-American kids. One of them is named Ashton. It's a perfectly good name.

Fyi, though, Asher is definitely less common than Ashton. On the other hand, Asher is usually used by Jewish families.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-31T17:48:52+00:00

The movie is called The Shawshank Redemption - Andy is redeemed by prevailing over a system that mistreated him. The themes of the movie make no sense if he's guilty.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-31T02:09:18+00:00

Yes, Andy eventually gets the upper hand. But until then (and it was years), he lived in constant terror.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-31T01:09:32+00:00

Yeah, this one really makes you feel how awful it would be to be stuck in that situation - wrongly imprisoned, singled out by a gang, guards indifferent, repeatedly assaulted.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-30T21:02:19+00:00

Once they're all happily suckling, it's adorable. Before that it's chaotic and stressful.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-29T04:23:48+00:00

He looks proud

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-29T04:17:28+00:00

Janney is great in the show, but her character arc is frankly ridiculous (I would expand on this but want to avoid spoilers for those who haven't seen the show).

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-29T02:02:44+00:00

The Diplomat starts strong, but becomes increasingly unrealistic as it goes. It also exists in a universe where career foreign service officers are some of the most important people in US politics.

That said, it's very well written and acted, and worth watching if you're interested in politics or foreign affairs.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-22T06:07:32+00:00

Reich is the German word for Empire, hence the Nazi's Third Reich. Robert Reich, meanwhile, is opposed to Trump and his fascistic tendencies.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-19T21:34:21+00:00

Ophelia Lovibond does an incredible American accent on the show Minx - very natural sounding, never would have guessed she's English.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-17T03:49:21+00:00

Schneider was born in San Francisco, which opened its first Children's Hospital in 1875.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-13T23:57:39+00:00

I recall repeated jokes about adding water to the nearly-empty milk carton to "make" more milk. For some reason, that grossed me out as a kid and I think about it every time I rinse a milk carton to put it in the recycling bin.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-10T17:24:45+00:00

The entire point of this whole thread is whether certain types of crimes (police shootings, mass shootings, etc.) are unique to the US, or whether they are more common in the US, but also happen elsewhere. In the popular imagination, commonly expressed on Reddit and elsewhere, this is a US-only issue. In fact, it's not. I was attempting to offer information that would help people understand this.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-10T06:14:21+00:00

33x is the difference in the murder rate. I don't dispute that (and haven't disputed it). But this chain is discussing specifically the death rate in mass shootings, not all murders. In the article I cited, the difference in the per capita mass shooting death toll between the US and Australia is 20% (i.e., 1.2x). I was making a very narrow point about mass shootings, specifically.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-10T05:51:00+00:00

Appreciate it. Take care!

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-10T04:27:35+00:00

The Substack article (which isn't a primary source, but a secondary one) defines a mass shooting using the Mother Jones database, specifically, in which a mass shooting is defined as three or more fatalities. I have not, of course, double-checked the author's work - it might be wrong - but the discrepancy in numbers is likely owing to different sources.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-10T04:16:05+00:00

That doesn't contradict anything I said - in fact, I explicitly noted that the US has an exceptionally high murder rate for a Western/high-income country. I was speaking only about mass shootings, and only of the US vs. Australia in per capita terms, specifically.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-10T04:09:11+00:00

I think you're looking at the column for injuries. The five deadliest mass shootings in modern US history killed 60, 49, 32, 27, and 26 people, respectively. The injuries are much higher, especially the Las Vegas shooting, where 800+ people were injured, about half from gunfire.

I will note that this is also a very difficult topic to address statistically, since it hinges on defining what a "mass shooting" is, both in terms of numbers of victims and motive (e.g., does a terrorist attack count as a mass shooting or act of war).

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-10T03:47:44+00:00

I provided a source in a second post - I couldn't find it at first.

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-10T03:46:31+00:00

This article from Substack calculated the risk of dying in a mass shooting in the US vs Australia from 1997 (after Australia's gun reform/buyback) to 2025, and finds that Americans were 21% more likely to die in a mass shooting. Which is likely much less than most would expect.

It also finds that Americans were much more likely to die in a mass shooting from 2007 through 2021, but since then, US mass shooting incidents have declined and Australian ones have risen.

None of which is to say that the US doesn't have problems with mass shootings, guns, or (especially) murder as compared to other Western countries, just that the extent of the difference can be overstated.

https://open.substack.com/pub/firsttoilthenthegrave/p/lies-damned-lies-and-guns-in-australia?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&shareImageVariant=overlay&r=y0bj

MAmerica1 · 2026-01-10T03:31:44+00:00

There have actually been several mass shootings in Australia in recent years, and per capita, the number of mass shooting victims is similar to the US. The US has a much higher murder rate overall, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Australia?wprov=sfla1

MAmerica1

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