• 1 Post
  • 155 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

help-circle








  • It wasn’t a joke from me. Democracy dies when the good man does nothing. I am a good man and I will fight for this democracy, as fucked up as it is. The right believes the left to be weak pacifists because we choose compromise, tolerance, and acceptance over bigotry, hate, and subjugation. They will need to learn the hard way that we choose that because we know that mutually beneficial social contracts make living better and provide a safe, prosperous world. They obviously do not want to be party to these social contracts with me, so I will not allow them any of the safety or benefits.


    1. Yes please.

    2. The way you framed this is dangerous as conservatives already want to eliminate retirement so everyone who is not rich has to be a wage slave until death. This just gives them incentive.

    3. You will just create a shell game. Their spouses or children or cousins will just suddenly become amazing at trading. Or that weird company that incorporated in the Maldives with Fred Flintstone and Betty Boop as the board of directors will be doing weirdly well, but be out of the reach of the DoJ.

      • Ranked Choice voting, fixed that for ya.
    4. This one I have mixed feelings on. The spirit of the filibuster is good. Its purpose is to allow a minority, or even a single legislator, who feels so strongly about a proposed law to actually fight it. This purpose has been perverted, obviously, but that purpose is important for a truely functioning democracy. The ability for someone who actually sees something nobody else does to pump the brakes is vital. That said, I do believe there need to be severe consequences to doing what is effectively trying to break the legislative process over your knee. Personally, I believe that it should be the nuclear option. If you break that glass, you nuke your whole career in the process. No person who utilizes the filibuster is allowed to hold ANY public office for the rest of their life. Anyone who signs on as a supporter is allowed to hold federal office. Period. If you feel SO strongly that the passing of a law is either abhorrent to your beliefs or is fundamentally flawed in a way that will forever scar our way of life that you feel it is necessary to pull the emergency cord, then you need to have that cord available.

    5. Yeah, and voting is mandatory. I’m not sure if I would allow abstention, but your ass has to mark something down for sure.

    6. I hate that this has to be listed as well. 😮‍💨



  • Unconscionable, yes. Necessary, most likely. There are times when someone must wear the mantle of villain in order to be the hero who can actually do what is needed.

    Also, the unconscionability of the act does squarely depend on one’s philosophical definition of “justice”. The conscionability of any decision is predicated on how one values the world around them. Personally, I lean towards a form of altruistic utilitarianism. As long as an act does not genuinely do harm, and it is for the benefit of the majority of people, it is good. If an act is harmful to some, but benefits the whole, it is justifiable. If an act harms many, but benefits few, it is unconscionable.

    As for what OP said, I believe he mispoke or misunderstood the ramifications of the word “dissolve” in this context. What he described is not a dissolution of SCOTUS, but a forced full reset. Dissolution would be to eliminate it as one of the 3 federal houses of government, leaving only the Presidency and Congress to govern. Removing all members and pursuing filling the seats as the constitution dictates would not dissolve SCOTUS. It would be the same resultant event sequence if something happened and all of the justices died simultaneously. All sitting justicesl being replaced by the Democratic process of the country would be fine, and indeed, would be a good thing. As much as I love Sotomayor and Kagen, removing them would be necessary for it to not be a political action, but one which recognizes that the body is no longer able to do its sworn duty in its current state and it needs replaced.



  • Someone needs to do Project 2029 figuring out all the most effective ways to abuse all of this bullshit. We need to detail how to define fascists as enemies of the state under their own rules. Figure out how to use their rules to place the nuts of every landleech in a vice and spin the wheel like we are on the Price is Right. We need to put every religious tenent on the walls of every school, starting with the Satanic Temple. Just point for point find the abuses in their entire plan, then we all make sure to kick as many of them out of congress and state and local governments as possible and start going ham on flipping every abuse like we are Jesus chasing lenders from the temple.


  • Republicans are just waiting for lefties to revolt. A. it gives them an excuse to call us dangerous and use it to imprison or execute us without trials. B. they think they will win whatever war they have planned so they can point to the good men pushed too far and call them radical antifa terrorists in the history books. C. they think that just because they have guns they are safe. They forget that those guns were designed by engineers, many of whom are likely very left leaning if we follow stereotypes. Hell, most all of the things modern conservatives love today were invented by leftists. Hell, Jesus is about as far to the left as you can be. What that also means is we have the knowhow and means to fuck shit up in ways they can’t even imagine. The left built the nuclear bomb, y’all can’t even build a functional wall.





  • Oh, I get that. I actually have a BS in Applied Mathematics and specialize in Statistics, Probability Theory, and Data Science professionally. I am well aware of how unstable thses numbers are, which is why I made the jab at the “soft sciences” and their acceptable sigma analysis points.

    What I was more noting was the linguistic tic of OP saying that they ‘exaggerated’. I freely admit that I did not actually read the article and do not know what the author did in it, but the click-bait title was accurate given the data shared. So what was done is to ‘sensationalize’ the results. If we are ever going to get better and teach society how to understand when statistics are being used to manipulate, we need to be sure to describe it in a way that people can recognize one manipulation from another.

    I would see an example of manipulation through exaggeration being “cops kill more white people per year than black people”. Yes, this is true, but it is inflating one piece of the statistics that ignores a lot of relevant factors, like the per capita rate, the proportion of stops and actions by police which result in violence, etc.

    Sensationalizing is what we have here. Intentionally choosing words that fell the full picture of the statistic in a way which causes knee jerk reactions. There isn’t anything left out per se, the time frame is described, the change in the statistic is mentioned, and a potential causal relationship is proffered. Would "The overturning of Roe has caused a statistically significant increase in the number of voluntary sterilizations among young US Citizens’ haave been more genuine, yes. Is it catchy or emotional, no.