My favorite thing to do with these people is to ask them "okay, would it be alright if these issues were decided on a per-county basis then?", if they say no they've outed themselves as just wanting to hold as much control over others as possible from a minority position, if they say yes ask again but with individual towns, if they say yes to that, then you narrow it down to individual people, then they tend to get mad when they realize what you've done

Russian tank -> Ukrainian scrap metal

Married Russian woman -> Widowed Lada owner

As the distance between two species widens, viable (ie, not sterile) offspring become rarer and rarer (although not impossible), so there would be a biological incentive not to "waste time" banging something that looks too different from yourself

It's extremely frightening but now that the rule of law is dead in America, I am forced to ask myself, what are my red lines? One person in this country has almost completely unchecked power, what would a criminal president have to do before I start condoning violence?

I'm running out of boxes of liberty here

We’re supposed to be evolving into a more free society… this is just going backwards.

You have discovered the great fallacy, the presumption that democracy and freedom are the natural course of things: they are not. Every single inch of it we have was taken by force from kings and dictators, and they're always waiting in the shadows for their opportunity to take it back.

The peace dividend created by the end of the cold war has unfortunately made an entire generation of people who believe this fallacy, this is one of the glaring reminders that it's not true. Democracy and freedom are things that must be actively maintained in perpetuity by everyone who wants them, we must be ready and willing to use all four boxes of democracy (soap, ballot, jury, AND ammo) to defend it for the rest of our lives. We must educate, we must vote, we must nullify unjust laws, and we must arm ourselves, because at the end of the day, violence is the one enforcement method that everyone is forced to listen to. It doesn't matter how right you are if the other side has more people willing to kill and die for their cause than yours does, so we better damn well make sure that's not the case.

The ruling more or less explicitly states that Biden could go on national television, say "Won't someone rid me of these troublesome justices?", have them assassinated, and face no legal repercussions because using the bully pulpit is covered by presidential immunity

Yeah but I don't think the average smash and grab thief is going to be smart enough to recognize the potential value of the data on the laptop, they're just going to pawn the thing off as quickly as possible

Anyone smart enough to want the data probably doesn't need to smash a window, they'll just access the data remotely when the computer is on and the drive is unencrypted

So even then, it only protects you from the very narrow overlap of thieves who are dumb enough to need to break into cars for a living, but smart enough to harvest data off of stolen laptops

I still stand by full disk encryption accomplishing almost nothing for the average user but separating them from their own files

If you don't have data on your PC that someone might be willing to kill you for, you probably don't need it, and Microsoft enabling it by default for Win11 installs is crazy

Peace offer:

I receive: your land

You receive: I stop trying to kill you (for now)

I can't believe the only reason they're not accepting this deal so graciously offered by Russia is the US stopping them

The west sure did buy a FUCKTON of oil from the Soviet Union for people who were apparently trying to bankrupt them since 1917

In fact the US is so NOT a member of the ICC that it's currently federal law that if a US soldier was being held at the Hague, the US military would be obligated to invade The Netherlands in order to recover them

Correct, the entire concept of physically backed digital lending is being threatened, and many physical libraries contracted with IA to digitize their books and then facilitate digitally lending their physical copies to their patrons

"Lifehack: Literally just steal"

Yes it predates the country

It seems you have read a book in the last 2 hours, I'm glad we're in agreement that it doesn't involve the US then

Good thing we have this expert history book reader to tell us that the first thing the UNITED STATES did wrong was import slaves into the ENGLISH COLONY of Virginia in 1619

Sorry sweaty, but saying anything bad about authoritarian governments (aside from Israel) is xenophobia, you're clearly just suffering from transnationalism and were born in the wrong country

I appreciate skibidi toilet, it's good to know that even across generations, children still yearn for stupid gmod videos

The founders were entirely aware that not only an entire party, but the entire government could become irrational and work against our best interests: that's why we have the second amendment as a backstop and last line of defense against authoritarian rule

The nature of democracy not being a system that relies purely on violence for legitimacy (unlike authoritarian forms of government) means that it is a constant forever war against the lapping waves of fascism attempting to slowly erode away our democratic institutions (because we, thankfully, don't just use violence to immediately silence dissidents)

I think an entire generation of people raised in the peace dividend have forgotten this fact, figured that democracy is the natural course of things, ignored its badly needed maintenance, and are swiftly being reminded of it now that the damage is so readily apparent