Too much light for it to be a grue, it has to be pitch black for that.

There certainly wouldn’t be any regrets (because you would not have time to do so before death).

Now show me where they’re paying attention to what they can’t do.

Like, how nobody can just access secure government systems without proper clearance, which the President can’t actually just give without procedure.

Or even more simply, the fact that Trump is not in fact currently eligible to be President in the first place due to his part in the events of Jan. 6.

I do not have confidence that they will be stopped by the fact that something is not permitted, because they aren’t being stopped by things that are not permitted, and if this continues for 4 years…there will be nothing left of the system that is supposed stop them.

It would mean that whatever the US might hope to gain from invading Canada would be dwarfed by what the US would lose in the conflict.

The problem is this is already the case. Nuclear weapons may make it even more lopsided, but the country is already losing more than it stands to gain from an invasion purely on the economic results.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot lately is that democracy is a process. It is a means by which we attempt to ensure a just and fair government for all. It’s not an end in itself; we don’t want democracy because democracy, at least not once people really think about it.

Which leads me to a saying. “The ends do not justify the means.” This is a commonly held statement. However, it also works the other way:

The means do not justify the ends.

That means it doesn’t matter if something was done by the rules, using the process, it doesn’t matter if we voted for it, it doesn’t matter what process was used to achieve it. If the ends are wrong, going “well, it’s what was decided democratically” isn’t an excuse.

If one person or a few people have a definition wrong, that’s a thing that can be corrected.

If the majority of people think that’s the definition, and it’s been that way for decades, then you have the definition wrong.

To be fair, hasn’t made much difference cause one, he got caught, and two, nobody else has done it.

I don’t blame any particular person for it, of course. Hell, I share the blame myself. I haven’t killed any CEOs or politicians either.

But it’s not gonna work unless more of us gather up the courage Luigi had and take action.

Nationalize the companies involved in production and distribution and eliminate profit, making and selling everything at-cost also works.

Primaries are only rigged in that yes, the rules and the entire framework is built to benefit those currently in power, but that is less rigged than the general is against a third party, which is to say, totally, absolutely, and unassailably rigged. Proclaiming it impossible because it’s rigged is silly when you’re advocating for instead competing in one that is far, far more rigged and has far more structure to prevent any upsets.

We have never actually won a primary and had them ignore it. They use their structural advantages as much as they can, but if we push hard enough to overcome those advantages, they don’t just nullify the election and go with their candidate. We do get people like Ocasio-Cortez in there from time to time, when people actually show up to the primaries enough to flip it to the more progressive candidate. If we got enough candidates like her in, not just in congress but state houses and such too, we’d actually start getting places.

Now the bribes and money on the corporate side, nothing we can do about that - we have to overcome it so that we can get officials in place that will do something about it.

Now lemme put it this way. I live in bumfuck Ohio where there’s no chance of a progressive candidate being elected. But I still vote in every primary. People who live in places where there is more of a chance of doing something need to be as diligent as I am, if not more, damnit.

No, a third party is non viable. But the right move would have been exactly what the crazy right wingers have done with the Republicans. Get organized and primary the fuck out of the people blocking things.

The “tea party” gave us the blueprint, but we’ve been too dumb and lazy to follow it. When they didn’t give us the public option with Obamacare, every primary since then should have been about cleaning house of the corporatist, establishment Democrats and replacing them with real progressives. But since we’re too lazy and dumb to vote in primaries in mass numbers, their establishment people keep sailing to victory.

At the end of Obama’s term wouldn’t have made any difference because by then McConnell was committed to holding the seat open for the next Republican.

But people called for her to resign back during the middle of Obama’s presidency, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, and her hubristic old ass decided to fuck everyone else by hanging onto power and prestige and trying to be even more historically important.

Woman had a bigger ego than Trump and Musk, and I really hope that historical opinion of her fucking remembers that.

This is not quite accurate. The vice president must be eligible to be the President, not to be elected President. The 22nd amendment has some very specific language.

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

It prevents someone from being elected President, but does not make the person ineligible to be the President since it only restricts that one method of gaining the office. A person can definitely become President through succession even if they have served their full two terms already…at least by the constitution as written.

Even Trump can occasionally be right!

Don’t feel like a dick for that! That again is management’s fault!

Remember that bagging your groceries used to be part of the service and part of the price, they eliminated that job to increase their profit margins!

At least around here Walmart still bags them for me, except they now have the cashier doing it instead of a dedicated employee for bagging.

Self serve gas was actually lower priced than full service back when the transition was happening, so there was actually a reason to do the work yourself.

If it had been the same price, only I have to do the work of pumping it, damn straight I would have felt the same.

In retrospect it was a bad deal because once full service went away entirely, so did the price difference, so I’m smarter now and wouldn’t use self checkout even if they gave a discount.

Up until the court decided to start ignoring centuries of legal tradition that is the bedrock of our legal system and threw out stare decisis the decision was actually more secure than a specific law.

Any law codifying it can be challenged on many grounds, especially the 10th amendment. It could easily have been struck down as unconstitutional because the federal government has no power to pass a law affecting this issue, since the constitution doesn’t grant it.

Only a constitutional amendment would have been likely to survive a court willing to do what this one has done, and there is zero possibility the Democrats could have passed one.

Yeah, this. I don’t understand it. Why does anyone not in the MAGA cult do anything for this man if not fully paid up front? It’s been decades since he was well known for not paying his debts and stalling as much as legally possible if taken to court to make him pay. There shouldn’t be a single person who is in a position to provide services to him that doesn’t know this!

Every former president tends to be called president still quite often. If you look up news articles about most former presidents you’ll find a pretty solid split between just saying ‘President X’ and specifying ‘former President X’.

It might be related to a military rule where retired officers get to keep using their rank title unless discharged in negative ways. Or maybe it’s just sort of traditional.

If I had to choose between global high speed internet access, and ground based astronomy, I’d pick the Internet every time. I’d completely blot out the sky forever if that’s what it took.

We don’t need ground-based astronomy to learn about the universe, I’d rather encourage more space-based astronomy. Or build some observatories on the moon if you really want to build on a solid space body.

However, Starlink is a for profit company run by Elon Musk. I don’t really want them doing it, because they’re not going to provide unlimited global Internet to everyone. So as the guy said, the idea is good, but Starlink is bad, although it is currently the only such option.

Yeah, while there was mockery it didn’t come from ‘official’ sources. They called him serious names and didn’t ridicule him. They made it clear he was dangerous, but they also gave him respect like a serious candidate, contender, opponent, rival.

It probably would have worked from the beginning to just laugh at him, IF it was coming from the actual political establishment. If Clinton had essentially based her entire campaign around ‘hahah…oh wait you’re serious? Let me laugh harder.’ there’s a good chance he would’ve crashed and burned before ever getting off the ground, I think.