This decision so blatantly ignores the constitution, history, tradition, case law, and all available evidence, that I have to question why they even bothered writing such a long decision. They might as well have just said “Fuck it, we say Trump is immune. Eat shit America, we can do whatever we want.”
I had felt the same way, until they ruled that partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally protected, that racial gerrymandering can only be unconstitutional if it doesn’t provide a partisan advantage to one side, and that the court must assume that legislators are acting in good faith because their need to not be embarrassed outweighs the constitutional rights of the people and the need for honest elections. I read that decision and said “shit, they’re gonna rule that Trump’s immune.”
I never thought the Court would put out a decision that could rival Dred Scott for worst in history, but these asshole’s have put out multiple contenders for that title in a single term.
Fucking insanity.
Civil immunity makes sense because anyone can sue anyone for anything at anytime, and allowing people to sue the president for official acts would leave him vulnerable to a nonstop barrage of lawsuits. Crime doesn’t work that way. The only way the president should be facing criminal prosecution is if he’s breaking the fucking law. That’s kind of the opposite of what the president is supposed to be doing. You know, faithfully executing the laws and all that. If a presidential action violates the law, it can’t really have the legitimacy that’s being presumed for all official acts here, because by definition it violates his official duties under the constitution.
Now, I would never suggest that a sitting president order the unlawful detention or summary execution of political opponents and/or corrupt justices. But I might suggest that, in the interest of national security, that he order intelligence agencies to troll through communications records, financial records, etc. to search for signs of treason and corruption at the hands of foreign powers. And if that search should happen to find evidence of any kind of illegal activity among his political opponents or on the Court, well…
France on Sunday took a step closer to delivering what was once seen as an unthinkable nightmare: a far-right government taking power in Paris for the first time.
Well… the first time in a while. And just as the last time was exiting living memory.
I’d vote for ToS era Pike over Trump. I’d vote for a candidate who only communicates via ouija board over Trump. I’d vote to not have a president for 4 years before I’d vote for Trump.
It’s crazy that Trump can get convicted of fraud, be found liable for sexual assault, promise to abuse presidential power to get revenge against those who cross him, actively undermine both national and global security, promise to round up millions and put them into camps, attempt to overthrow the election and refuse to not try it again, and so on, and his side is still so loyal they’ll wear solidarity diapers for him.
They need a format that breaks the debate up into sections and actually includes fact checking, and a cross examination after each section. Have a team scrambling to find the records, studies, video clips and other evidence that they can bring up. Someone who is mostly honest gets lay ups and affirmation. Someone who lies constantly gets called out and put on the defensive.
Wouldn’t happen of course. Even if the hosts were down to have someone take on a more adversarial role, Trump would never agree to something that actually holds him accountable for spewing nothing but bullshit. It’s his entire strategy, if he can’t sell snake oil he has nothing to sell at all.
This means that anyone who doesn’t like a particular rule or regulation can pick a venue with a friendly judge, challenge it in court, and likely get the outcome they want. Even if judge shopping wasn’t a major problem right now, this would still be a bad idea. The reason Chevron told judges to defer to agencies in matters where the interpretation is ambiguous is because those agencies have the experience and and expertise to understand the issues involved far better than a judge who has to try to master the subject from inside the courtroom.
This is all the more crazy in light of the recent racial gerrymandering decision, where Alito not only ignored the deference that appeals courts are supposed to show to trial courts (where the case is actually experienced and not just summed up in a brief) but then says that the judicial branch must defer to the legislators when they claim that they are being fair. So judges can just override the executive branch in subjects that they likely do not understand, but they can’t actually contradict the legislature over something like whether a policy is violating someone’s constitutional rights, despite that being one of their core functions for the past couple of centuries.
Precedents get overturned from time to time, and the way that generally happens is when a new case comes along challenging that precedent.
Maybe this goes nowhere. Maybe a conviction gets overturned on appeal. But maybe we could see a new precedent set. Might as well try, you’re probably not going to find a better case to do it any time soon.
I like wireless, I just fucking loathe earbuds. Unfortunately, they have completely replaced the wrap around on-ear headphones that were the best for wearing while running errands or exercising.
I don’t want something big and bulky while I’m walking around, but I also don’t like having shit jammed into my ears. And critically, those on ear headphones are just the right size to have a convenient button layout so I can easily pause or go back a few seconds in my audiobook whenever I need to.
But Apple decreed that wireless earbuds were the future and the market for everything else fucking died.
He’s firing from both ends.
On the one hand, yes, these movies are products being churned out for profit by a corporate machine that cares more about marketability than creativity or quality. Anyone signing up for a big studio blockbuster production (superhero movie or not) should know exactly what they are getting into.
On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with actors in flopped movies pointing out that they flopped in no small part because they are the product of a system that seems focused on everything but the quality of movie being made.
And it absolutely can be life changing when it works. Just look at the early MCU movies and tell me that they didn’t have a huge impact on careers. Of course younger actors who take these roles are hoping they will be life-changing. You don’t become a superstar by doing nothing but small independent arthouse films that kill at festivals and award shows and are never seen by the general public.
And finally, I gotta call bullshit on the assumption that you can’t have artistry or depth in movies based on “some fucking universe for cartoon characters.” There’s no reason why a superhero movie (or any other genre film) can’t be more than just a two hour trailer for itself, or a soulless vehicle for merchandise. It’s not the medium that the IP came from that determines the artistic value of the movie adaptation, it’s the people making the movie (and the suits controlling them) that determine whether it will be a cinematic masterpiece or further proof that AI generated movies are inevitable.
Steam isn’t a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don’t, and it generally hasn’t abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we’ve seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn’t something they wanted, it’s them backing down from a stand-off.
I want competition, but there’s good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.
For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.
I think it’s easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.
What’s really clobbered Firefox has been the rise of smartphones, where Firefox has very limited uptake.
That’s fucking crazy, because Firefox has been far better than the default options for as long as I’ve had a smartphone. I only recently dumped chrome on desktop for Firefox, but I took one look at Chrome when I got an android and immediately dumped that shit.
Not for the Dominoes trip specifically, but they were paying for me to be there. I would assume that the local Dominoes got some kind of money out of it.
I’m not saying that the Chik-fil-a thing is something that would have interested me as a kid or that I would pay to send a kid to it. For one thing, the focus on customer service stuff does make it a bit weirder to me. Just pointing out that I had a similar experience and that it was something I enjoyed.
Some kids would probably love getting to see what happens in the kitchen, making something, and eating it. As long as it’s safe and age appropriate, and assuming they aren’t actually being used as labor, I don’t see how this is harmful.
When I was a kid a summer daycare program I was in took us to a Dominoes and I got to make my own pizza. It was awesome.
She believed it only because she had experienced many similar revelations during the last few years, ever since she heeded Trump’s warnings about the “corrupt, lying mainstream media” and decided to disconnect her television. Her friends introduced her to far-right media platforms online like Mike Lindell’s Frank Speech and The Elijah List, where each day she listened to a rotation of self-proclaimed patriots, biblical prophets and also sometimes political figures like Lara Trump. They offered Zakas not only conspiratorial ideas but also the promise of a community that extended far beyond the loneliness of her house, with a grandfather clock ticking away in the living room and views out the window of an emptiness that stretched clear into California. Each day, something urgent was happening in the far corners of the internet — something big and dark and secret, and that knowledge fueled her days with both purpose and agency.
A major part of the problem is that a large portion of the population will always choose the lies that resonate with them over the truths that bother them. And while I would love to see legal consequences for fraud and defamation when possible, that can only reduce the damage being done, and force the bigger names in misinformation to stay in a gray area of half truth and innuendo while still misleading people for economic and political gain. They can still lead people to the wrong conclusion, they just need to phrase it as a question rather than a statement (Note: This is a massive oversimplification).
I don’t see a good solution to the problem. Any tool strong enough to stop media that isn’t just overtly committing fraud and slander is a tool that will also likely be used to silence dissent and legitimate free speech.
She came to believe, along with millions of others, that Covid was a creation of the federal government used to manipulate the public and steal elections; that two doses of the vaccine would make men infertile; that Trump had been anointed to lead a “government cleansing”; that fighting had already begun in underground military tunnels; that Trump’s election in 2024 was preordained by God; that he would return to power with loads of gold collected from other countries that had capitulated to his power; that, during his next term, Americans would have free electricity, zero income tax and “medbeds” powered by a secret technology that could harness natural energy to heal diseases and extend human life; and that the only thing standing in the way of this future was a deep state so malicious and vast that its roots extended all the way into tiny Esmeralda County.
But maybe psychiatric help would be a good place to start.
Or a constitutional right to censorship.
The NDA was apparently against voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement. Essentially, it was agreeing to only cooperate to the extent required by law.
That’s still bad, but wouldn’t overtly compel someone to commit a crime. It’s just heavily implying that crimes are being committed and could easily push someone to do something illegal simply to cover their own ass.
The next steps would be ordering the justice department to prosecute him, going to court, and appealing all the way to the new Supreme Court so they can overturn the precedent. Which would require either moving very quickly or preventing the other side from taking power, one way or the other.
Of course, by then pandora’s box is open. As long as someone is willing to follow those kinds of orders, nothing would prevent the next president from doing the same thing. It’s a slippery slope not unlike the one that caused Rome to go from being a republic that viewed regicide as a fundamental virtue to an empire that would persecute groups for denying the divinity of the emperor.