Or anywhere relatively rural. I just got home from a long weekend in rural Minnesota/Wisconsin, and there’s literally no viable way to run public transit out there in a manner that wouldn’t either be so restrictive as to be useless, or would lose so much money it would be first on the block for service cuts (and therefore become useless). I’m talking “town of 600 residents, most people live on unincorporated county land on a farmstead, and the only grocery store in a 50 mile radius is a Dollar General” rural. Asking these folks to give up cars is an insane prospect.

Nope. Been there, done that, turned a relatively amicable breakup into a “you’re a piece of shit and don’t ever speak to me again” situation, ruining another friendship in the process. It’s a horrible, horrible idea.

I’m personally a little nervous about Harris–I remember the 2020 primary where her only notable accomplishments were accusing Biden of being racist over opposition to federal busing policies, and then flaming out shortly after and shuttering her campaign two months before the first caucus and polling single digits in California. Admittedly, she doesn’t have the same headwinds now that she had in 2020–she doesn’t have to differentiate herself from over a dozen other candidates and she won’t struggle to raise money–but she also made some unforced errors (e.g. coming out for total elimination of private insurance before revealing a plan that included private plans, or admitting her own policy on busing was essentially identical to Biden’s).

Hopefully, she’ll run a much tighter campaign now since she’ll inherit Biden’s staff and can focus solely on attacking Trump, but I do have some concerns.

I’m pretty sure he was agreeing with you…?

And on the other side of the coin, hard-right Israelis work to paint any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, regardless of legitimacy.

So on the one hand, you have antisemites using this as an opportunity to blame all the world’s ills on tHe (((gLoBALiStS))) (I really hope that came across as sarcastic enough), and on the other, you have ultraconservative Israelis using the first group to lump the people saying “please don’t do a genocide” in with them. And on top of that you also have Hamas doing the goddamn Goofy “and I’ll fuckin do it again” meme, along with a bunch of people in Palestine who are literally taught antisemitism and hatred in the classroom, while Russia, Iran, and the same goddamn Israelis painting everyone as antisemitic pour money into the group that would genocide Israel back in a heartbeat. And caught in the middle of this category 5 shit hurricane are a bunch of innocent people who just want to be treated like human beings with equal rights, and to be able to go to the goddamn grocery store without worrying about getting exploded by a piss rocket / laser-guided cluster bomb made by Lockheed Martin.

I’m so goddamn fucking sick and tired of everything with this. Literally the only “good guys” in this entire fucking 70-year conflict are the noncombatants on either side of the Gaza border wall trying to go about their day and whose entire lives are reduced to a casualty sheet and a propaganda blurb, while both sides just keeps fighting and killing because perverse incentives mean it’s the only way both Netanyahu and Hamas can cling to power, innocent life be damned.

I think it’s because Spotify frequently includes the same song as being on multiple albums separately–for example, if a band has a greatest hits album, Spotify considers the greatest hits album as a different song, even though it’s identical to the song on the original album.

It’s all well and good to say “choose another system of governance” but how do we implement this change? What is the mechanism under which we can replace our current system of government with Swiss democracy, without the old government just saying “lolno” and bombing it to shit? The only method I can think of is a constitutional convention, and right now we’re closer to the right wing being able to call one and rewrite it to take pur rights back 200 years than we are to leftists implementing Swiss democracy.

Like… I would be thrilled if that were within the realm of possibility, but as it stands any possible options for dramatically overhauling our system of governance is more likely to lurch us straight into permanent hard-right minority rule by a bunch of fascists. That’s what I mean when I say I’ve never seen an actual plan by leftists to overhaul the system–it’s all arguing about what the sexy end goal should be, without bothering to talk about the boring minutiae of how to actually get to it. So far as I can tell, the “plan” to make all these needed changes, so far as any thought is put into it at all, is just a silent assumption of either “we lobby our politicians and they do what we tell them and nobody opposes our ideas” or “we do a violent revolution and kill all the bad guys without harming the good guys and we definitely win and accomplish our goal without someone else taking advantage of the chaos to do a fascism instead,” depending on how radical the change is.

More like we don’t want to crash our only car when we don’t have another means of transportation, and oops, now we can’t get to work.

It’s great to say “the system is broken and must be replaced.” I agree! But nobody who says that, me included, has ever had anything resembling an actual plan to replace the system or to prevent something even worse from taking over once the system is destroyed.

Everyone gave the GOP shit for screaming about how Obamacare needs to be “repealed and replaced” but never saying what it should be replaced with (though that was because the “replace” part was a lie and they just wanted to go back to the bad old days of people being trapped in a job or entirely unable to get insurance because of a preexisting condition). It’s the same thing with people saying the entire system of government needs to be replaced.

Seriously, ever since I drove alongside one of the new 2024 GMC Sierra Denali trucks and realized its hood was as tall as my entire car, I’ve been utterly terrified of being anywhere near them. You probably can’t see anything less than 10-15 feet in front of you, which is absolutely bonkers for a noncommercial vehicle. To say nothing of how getting hit by one is going to be like getting smacked directly in the face like a brick wall, because there’s no way you’ll be knocked up onto the roof to dissipate the force of the impact.

Car companies have absolutely lost the plot with this whole arms race of BIGGER BOXIER TALLER MANLIER trucks ever since Ford got made fun of around 2000 or so for making a car that was too “feminine” because it dared to have a more rounded exterior. The next generation refresh made it bigger and boxier, slapped a 12" Ford badge that was 2-3x the size of the badge on the previous generation, and it’s been all downhill ever since.

The problem is that as far as I’m aware there’s literally zero evidence of this doomsday scenario you’re describing ever happening, despite publicity rights being a thing for over 50 years. Companies have zero interest in monetizing publicity rights to this extent because of the near-certain public backlash, and even if they did, courts have zero interest in enforcing publicity rights against random individuals to avoid inviting a flood of frivolous lawsuits. They’re almost exclusively used by individuals to defend against businesses using their likeness without permission.

Holy fuck how do you not see the difference between “random nobody does an impression for free while hanging out with their pals” and “multi billion startup backed and funded by one of the richest companies on earth uses an impression as a key selling point for their new flagship product that they are charging access for and intend to profit from”

It’s amazing what proper regulations that are designed to prioritize safety over profit can accomplish, and how quickly stark examples of the dangers start happening when those regulations are sidestepped or dismantled…

I’d say “inb4 the AI cultists invade this thread” but it looks like I’m already too late

Yeah, and without Pence, it would’ve been Lindsay Graham acting as president pro tempare, and he would have gone along with the fake elector scheme as pretext to refuse to acknowledge electors from states Biden won, leaving him with less than 270 electors. Election stalemates, it goes to Congress in a one-vote-per-state contest, and Trump wins. That was the entire plan behind the coup–find a pretext to deny Biden 270 electors to throw it to the backup mechanism where Republicans outnumber Democrats.

I don’t, because IIRC the plan was to take Pence out of the picture, have Graham assume the role of Senate president pro tempare in his place, and then Graham would use the fake electors as a justification to refuse to certify Biden’s election. From there, it would get thrown to Congress, where each state’s congressional delegation get a single collective vote to decide who becomes president. Republicans outnumber Democrats in enough state delegations to throw the election to Trump.

In other words, the timeline Pence dies is the one where the coup succeeds.

God, same. One of my little annoyances in life is that my internal voice is a goddamn motor mouth and I literally CANNOT stop it.

I can stare at a white wall and watch paint dry, and my monologue will start philosophizing about watching paint dry, where the phrase came from, why I’m doing it (to try and silence my internal voice), then go on a wiki walk about how trying not to think about something makes you think about it more and the classic example of telling someone “don’t think about a brown bear” makes them think about bears, then I’ll start thinking about bears and my monologue is suddenly halfway across the world.

Put me in a sensory deprivation tank, and my internal voice starts ruminating about how Daredevil uses these to sleep, then goes off about fight sequences, and then superhero comics, and whoops I’m halfway across the world.

Even when I’m paying attention and listening, my inner voice is still motoring away, it’s just that it’s mirroring what is being said to me instead of going on its own wiki walk halfway across the world (though sometimes someone will say something that makes my internal voice go “wait a second, that makes me think of…” and then I stop listening while I go on a wiki walk).

I have ADHD, in case it isn’t obvious yet.

I see you read Piers Anthony too.

You seem to have mistaken my post as defending or supporting Garland’s appointment. Please rest assured that is not the case.

He doesn’t need to be a fighter. The only reason J6 got so bad is because Trump’s administration actively and directly prevented any security measures from being prepared ahead of time, and then stalled and refused to call for help when the skeletal security guards were overrun.

The default posture of everyone who handles security for these institutions and would be in charge of fighting off another J6 attempt is that they want to protect the Capital and prevent something like this from happening again by preparing adequate measures in advance and having backup ready and available. All Biden has to do is not actively block the national guard, capital security, and D.C. police.

At the time, picking Garland as AG was a giant fuck you to republicans to get revenge on them denying Obama the supreme court nomination in 2016, a way of saying “ha, ha, you denied him a seat and now we gave him one that’s almost as good.”

Unfortunately, in hindsight it turns out that when you put a very moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican in the cabinet, they will run their department like a moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican, and that resulted in the DOJ focusing on the mooks more than the masterminds out of fear of being seen as a political hatchet man.