PaintedSnail

Nah. That would piss off the mailroom employees, but they don’t control who gets sent mail. The weight costing money does hurt the people who make the marketing decisions, though.

Blame Kellogg

That does come with the unavoidable side effect that the majority of the people will simply not participate. It then follows that sites like Reddit will continue to be the place where the majority of the people will go.

If your goal is to participate in small communities and you are okay with the slow pace of those communities, then that’s fine. If your goal is to move people away from corporate-sponsored media for whatever reason, then this won’t work.

And now you compare the Republicans to some natural force, as if they are inevitable and inescapable. Gravity has no will, no plan. It just is. Republicans have a will and a plan. Getting mad at the Democrats for not being good enough to stop that is akin to victim blaming. The Republicans should never have gone down this road in the first place.

Do you blame the thief, or do you blame the homeowner for not having better locks? Who do you hold accountable?

We’re not talking about a diseased animal, we’re talking about people who are making conscious decisions knowing what the results will be. I can and so absolutely blame people for that.

Your metaphor insinuates that Republicans are unable to control their actions. If that were the case, that’s all the more reason to vote and get them out of positions of power.

Because the Republicans control Congress, and at this point only an act of Congress can restore it.

It comes down to this: a Republican president would veto any abortion protection law, but a Democratic president would pass it. But the law has to get to his desk first.

I agree. Please read my last sentence.

The statement, however, indicated that they were more annoyed that a politician would change their stance because of poling numbers rather than because it’s the right thing to do. My point is that our political system is designed for just that. Politicians have always done what is best for themselves, and expecting different from any politician is naive. Our system is deliberately designed to allow people to put pressure on politicians to (try to) keep them from sacrificing the people they are supposed to govern for their own gain.

I was talking more to the general sentiment of the statement, not to these specific circumstances. Don’t blame a politician for bowing to political pressure from the people. That’s what they’re supposed to do to keep your vote. Allow them to change their policy, even if they don’t change their stance. Instead, blame the ones that double-down on harmful decisions because they don’t want to appear “weak.”

This is all theoretical, of course. Recent elections have shown that too many people are willing to be sacrificed to allow those in charge to appear “strong.”

Oh, no. A politician doing what the people want in order to save his job.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s better than the usual m.o. where the politician does whatever they want and screw the people. Yes, it would be nice if they did what you want from the get-go, but I will vote for the one that changes their stance due to popular pressure over one that “sticks to their guns” no matter who it’s hurting.

(I’m speaking in generalities here. Obviously Biden hasn’t changed his stance yet.)

Roulette is not a positive sum game, though. If you keep playing, eventually you will lose everything to the house.

A positive sum game is where repeated plays will average out to a net gain. The secret is having enough initial capital to keep you alive if your initial gambles don’t pan out. People living paycheck to paycheck don’t have that

We absolutely can unless he wants go go for an insanity plea, because that’s the only way it could be claimed that he is unreasonable enough to not be held accountable. If he can’t plead insanity, then he must be a reasonable enough person to be held accountable.

Intent is always hard to prove. Not a lawyer, but I believe this is where the standard of “reasonableness” comes in. Since we can’t read Trump’s mind, we can’t just guess that he thought they were there and wave it away. We have to ask if a reasonable person, under the same circumstances, would have known whether or not those 11k votes existed. Given that he was told by basically everyone with knowledge of the matter that they didn’t, we can conclude that he knew the votes were not there, and asking for the votes to be “found” was asking for them to be conjured up.

Roughly speaking, there are three different ways people handle when something they enjoy is changed in a way they don’t enjoy.

The first simply cut their losses and move on, abandoning the thing. Nothing wrong with that. Things change and it’s okay to move on to something else. Companies that are causing harm to their user base should suffer the consequences of their decisions. Do this too much, though, and you may find you abandon your loves too easily.

The second just accept and bear it. Arguably nothing wrong with that as long as you still enjoy it. Just be careful that apathy is not taken for permission for further change.

The third will attempt to fight back in an attempt to preserve it. These are the type who still use Reddit even though they know it’s broken. They do not abandon it because to do so is to lose it entirely. They are trying to work within the system to change the system. Nothing wrong with that either, as long as you know when the battle is lost. They obviously don’t believe it has been lost yet.