The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1yr ago
This is a guy who kept a journal of his daily activities while in high school. And when I say kept, I mean he still had it when appointed to the Supreme Court. "Detail-oriented" doesn't cover the half of it.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1yr ago
The Supreme Court's immunity ruling did not rule either way on self-pardons (because they weren't at issue).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
They had party discipline. Party discipline said not to admit to Biden's weakness. What they lacked is the ironclad control over public perception that they thought (not without good reason!) they had.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
They miscalculated. Either they thought the terms they offered for debate (e.g. cutting off mics) would get Trump to refuse, or they thought their candidate would make it through, either because they were mistaken/fooling themselves as to how bad off he was, or because he wasn't as bad when they made the agreeement.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
- the whole thing about official acts not being able to be used as evidence just seems so... flagrantly stupid?
It's not flagrantly stupid. It's the Court reacting to factors that this particular Court usually pretends does not exist -- that lower courts and prosecutors will simply ignore, deliberately misinterpret, and work around its decisions, and that juries may be politically biased:
That proposal threatens to eviscerate the immunity we have recognized. It would permit a prosecutor to do indirectly what he cannot do directly—invite the jury to examine acts for which a President is immune from prosecution to nonetheless prove his liability on any charge
Allowing prosecutors to ask or suggest that the jury probe official acts for which the President is immune would thus raise a unique risk that the jurors’ deliberations will be prejudiced by their views of the President’s policies and performance while in office. The prosaic tools on which the Government would have courts rely are an inadequate safeguard against the peculiar constitutional concerns implicated in the prosecution of a former President.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
What would you blackmail him over? Almost any accusation you make, everyone on the right would believe but it wouldn't shift their opinion, everyone on the left would pretend not to (and it still wouldn't shift their opinion), and Joe's still got the pardon pen. Maybe if you had photos of him in flagrante delicto with an obvious child, but so far as I've heard, Hunter Biden doesn't swing that way.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
Blackman points out that in light of Trump v. United States, the entire premise of this part two, all of the investigative work that went into it, all of the hoopla around whether it was enough to take down Trump, all of the effort to put forth a plausible case was all completely wasted and would have been nipped in the bud in hindsight had we had the appropriate long view. Directing subordinate Executive branch officials, firing them if desired, and wielding absolute prosecutorial discretion is a 'core' part of The Executive Power, and the President has unrestricted power and absolute immunity in such actions. "If Chief Justice Roberts is correct, Mueller should have never been appointed in the first instance," Blackman says.
The Mueller commission said outright they wouldn't indict a sitting President. The outcome given Trump v. US would have been the same; Trump's culpability would have still been a political question decided by impeachment. Just as it was for Andrew Johnson the first time Congress got tried to tell the President who they could and could not fire (and Johnson came a lot closer to losing)
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
We probably lose WW2 if the germans just wanted to dominate Europe and were pro-Jewish.
Who is "we"? Maybe we never get into a war with Herr Schicklgruber; he nukes Moscow and unites Europe under a 6-armed swastika, and the US just deals.
Point being that a WWII Germany that's pro-Jewish is so different that you can't really assume anything will be the same.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
Yeah, there's not much they can pull. Politically incorrect language? Baked in. Rape claims from decades ago? Baked in. Shady deals? Baked in. Conspiring with Russia? Who considering voting for him would believe it this time?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
They've been reading ahead to next session.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
I would be curious to find out whether trans people are more likely to come from communities which emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex) in the modern day.
There isn't any other kind.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
If the Democrats can swap out their candidate, they can get rid of all their negatives. Then turn the entire media machine on promoting the Democrat and denigrating Trump (as usual). The Ds still vote for the D, the MAGAs still vote for Trump, but the squishy center which says such things as "I just want a competent adult running things" votes D, and the squishy Republican-leaners who mostly believe Trump is the Devil (because the media keeps telling them that) loses their excuse (that Biden is incompetent) to vote for him anyway.
However, they would have to swap out their candidate without breaking the party long enough for Trump to win anyway. And critically, I think they have to swap with someone other than Kamala (who as part of the Biden administration wouldn't lose all the negatives, and isn't much of a politician)
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
Palestinians are fighting to stay where their great grandparents lived.
Must be a really great place. I can't imagine anyone fighting that long to stay in Jersey City or Bayonne, NJ.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
It seems to be a common pattern among highly intelligent tech workers that they transition MtF.
The joke circulated among the politically incorrect is that it it's like frogs. Tech workers sense that the gender-ratio is too unbalanced and try to change sex to balance it.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
Looks like the NJ bureaucrats got the memo, but not the officials.
https://www.nj.gov/health/news/2022/approved/20220922a.shtml
Everyone quoted (the First Lady of NJ, the Health Commissioner, and the Department of Children and Families Commissioner) uses "mothers", but the website uses "birthing parent" once, unquoted. The Labor Department Commissioner manages to avoid both.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
Sometimes it's meant ha-ha-only-serious, but I don't think it holds up. Our species does fine in groups when gender-imbalanced; militaries have done it for millennia. Blue collar workers aren't turning trans at a high rate.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
Push this hard enough and sometimes you can get to the true justification (before your ignominious exit): it's the trans/NB people they care about, not anyone else.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
It's predicated on the idea that to solve the problems with the homeless, you must solve the problems the homeless have. And that is simply not true. You don't need to solve the problems the yellow smoke has, and you don't need to solve the problems the (aggressive, drug-addled, mentally ill) homeless have either.
Suppose we've built institutions for the mentally ill. And we put people in them, and they take their drugs, and they get better. Now we let them out. We don't need armies of social service workers... we just tell them that if they don't take their drugs and they start doing whatever got them locked up, we're going to treat them as criminals this time. If they can't understand that, they're not well enough to be let out. And so each time they don't take their drugs, we lock them up for some fixed and increasing term until either they're locked up forever or stop committing crimes.
That's the nice approach. The nastier approach just treats them as ordinary criminals from the get-go and ignores their mental health problems.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
A demerit system can only be implemented in an institutional setting; you don't have fine enough control with people outside it.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
The unaddressed elephant in the room still is that right-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless is in it voluntarily because homelessness has become a comfy and appealing lifestyle of antisocial sloth,
No, those are a different group. Not actually unhoused, mooching off friends, relatives, and collecting unemployment / welfare.
while left-wingers mostly believe that the representative homeless would gladly move into and maintain housing if only they could.
And this is why there's no point in trying to persuade them.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
There's TWO criteria which matter, and the second is IMO more important than the first
-
Can he/she/it shoot?
-
Will he/she/it aim at your enemy?
It's the second which would be the one at issue here.
(this particular formulation is taken from the Liaden books, but I'm sure the idea is older than that)
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
One question I think this doesn't answer is "How does he keep getting away with this?" Why hasn't someone stopped him from pulling all the crap he did? Why did Mike Godwin shield him from some of the consequences of his actions?
My answer is that the people who could stop him agreed with him, politically. They could pretend they were decent and neutral arbiters of policy even as they allowed (and allow) Gerard to do for them what they actually wanted to do. But I suppose there are other possibilites.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11mo ago
You cannot expect them to sit around for years waiting for enlightened technocrats to come up with the most humane remedies for societies' ills while they are harassed and threatened on a daily basis on the subway, going to a grocery store, or walking home.
Yes, you can. And if they don't, you can have them imprisoned. And that will teach the other regular people that the homeless crazies are not to be interfered with; unlike the homeless crazies, most people respond quite well to incentives.
Except their case to blaming white Americans for their plight is much weaker, and the US descendants of slaves aren't about to let them forget that.
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