BillyClark

There is no check for presidential pardons. Perhaps the pardon itself is supposed to be a check, but there is nothing to stop a president from pardoning criminals who were already serving completely justified sentences.

In Australia, for example, which has mandatory voting, the only requirement is that you participate. So, you can do the equivalent of submitting a completely empty ballot if you want to protest.

it’s unlikely to win many supporters

If I could just somehow get permission to amend the constitution for one day, I’d fucking shove democracy down people’s throats so hard, totally against their will.

forcing people to perform an act to legitimize an unjust system

I assume this means that you don’t believe votes are properly counted and that all of our elections are “rigged.”

If you have that belief, then what reforms do you think are possible? Most people who I’ve heard express those opinions are far right wing people who want to discard democracy.

Taylor Rehmet, a Democrat and local union leader, won a runoff for a state Senate seat that’s been held by Republicans since 1992. What’s more, he bested the Republican Leigh Wambsganss despite having one-tenth as much money. Much of Wambsganss’s funding came from Dunn and the Wilks brothers.

Republicans blamed low turnout for Rehmet’s victory, while pundits opined that the Trump administration’s unpopularity was to blame.

In America today, these are the same thing. The way you win is by encouraging certain people to vote and discouraging other people from voting. Trump has been taking care of discouraging Republicans and MAGA from voting all by himself.

I really think America needs mandatory voting to stop this behavior, but it’s much easier to encourage or discourage people to vote than it is to actually carry out the will of the people.

Even if it’s not entirely faked, you can instruct an AI to give you wrong answers to your questions. So unless you can see the entire conversation history, you can’t make any conclusions about a single response.

I imagine if somebody started a thread here that asked the same question, but said, “Wrong answers only,” people would find a lot of evidence that humans aren’t capable of figuring this out, either.

According to the article:

A grand total of zero — zero — grand jurors agreed to return the proposed indictment. As a former federal prosecutor, I have never heard of this actually happening before.

Pirro also personally appointed the two prosecutors who worked on the case: One of them is a lawyer and dance photographerwho had never worked in the Justice Department before last year, and the other is a former staffer for House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), who is not exactly famous for conducting competent and nonpartisan investigations.

“The average person doesn’t appreciate how stunning” it is for a grand jury to outright reject an indictment, as a former prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. put it to me. “The rules are skewed so heavily in favor of the prosecutor that it’s almost comical. But the public is essentially saying, ‘We do not trust you. We are skeptical of you.’”

In a statement, Pirro touted the office’s prosecutorial work, including efforts to curb homicides, and said she was focused on law, not politics.

You were using the phrase correctly. “They can’t compete with it,” is the standard way of saying what you intended to say.

I was playing off of the normal meaning of your statement to make a turn of phrase. In other words, I am intentionally using weird phrasing, and placing it next to your normal phrasing for humor and impact.

It says that xAI lost their second cofounder, but then it turns out that he just left the company.

I never worked for Google, so I can’t say for sure, but I have this weird suspicion that they use a shitload of open source software, and I’m not just talking about their Android OS or Chromebooks, but for their most core businesses.

It wouldn’t be odd to think that Google might not exist except for their being able to use the open-source software that people had made before they founded their company.

The alternative is that they were complete idiots who paid for all sorts of retail software.

Of course Google hates open-source. They can’t compete with it.

Again, it’s just my supposition, but I’d bet that they can’t compete without it, either.

For any major tech company, apart from ones that are absolutely dedicated to proprietary software starting from firmware up through the OS and on to applications, like Microsoft and Apple, it’s going to be deeply hypocritical to hate open-source.

I noticed something similar with video. Like, if I am paying attention, the difference between the highest quality encoding and the next level is usually visible.

However, I have a harder time telling the difference if I don’t do a side by side comparison.

And even when I can easily tell the difference, once I’m watching the thing, I get into the story and I don’t care anyways.

Obviously a slightly different criteria compared to music, but people do make a big deal out of stuff that even they don’t actually care about.

Women members of Congress are more likely to have a high-earning spouse. As the authors put it, they’re part of a “power couple.”

I’ve done a little bit of language studying and one thing I heard about repeatedly is that people tend to mistakenly believe in their own exceptionalism.

Like, their own native language has idioms, and they just assumed that other languages didn’t have idioms.

But we are all humans and languages are all going to exist in support of human communication. Therefore, you should assume that all languages have all major features of expression, including idioms and sarcasm.

Similarly, cultures are made from humans and to facilitate human interaction, so you should expect that things like sarcasm will exist in every culture.

I have wondered the same about scammers. Like, if their mother knew they were going to do that with their life, she’d probably regret all of that wasted effort raising them.

Probably the pages where his name was mentioned tended to have more than one mention.

And then there’s that one page they found in Donald Trump’s handwriting where the same phrase is repeated over and over hundreds of times, “All work and no play makes Donald Trump rape little children.” That’s a joke. You know it’s a joke because Donald Trump has never actually worked in his life.

The politicians I mentioned stood out because they didn’t always toe the party line. They actually represented their constituents, and that’s the bare minimum I think you need to be an elected representative. Whatever else they’ve done, the fact that they actually served as representatives makes them stand head and shoulders above the usual throngs of spineless losers who serve as our congresspersons.

When you give the party as much power as our politicians do, it violates the most basic principles that this country was founded upon.

There used to be some Republicans that I respected to some degree, even if I disagreed with their policies. John McCain, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney are examples.

Now the only hope I have for current Republican politicians is that some of them are secretly opposing Trump because of their own ambitions. I don’t think a good person could have kept quiet about Trump.

The Republican is Thomas Massie, as expected. It seems that he is one of a few Republicans who will act ethically as long as the topic is Epstein.

it’s important to have verifiable studies to cite in arguments for policy, law, etc.

It’s also important to have for its own merit. Sometimes, people have strong intuitions about “obvious” things, and they’re completely wrong. Without science studying things, it’s “obvious” that the sun goes around the Earth, for example.

I don’t need a formal study to tell me that drinking 12 cans of soda a day is bad for my health.

Without those studies, you cannot know whether it’s bad for your health. You can assume it’s bad for your health. You can believe it’s bad for your health. But you cannot know. These aren’t bad assumptions or harmful beliefs, by the way. But the thing is, you simply cannot know without testing.

I have been following British media a bit and unless I am mistaken, this Mandelson chap ran afoul of his Epstein conduct back in September, which was before the DOJ even started releasing the Epstein files as part of the Epstein act, which hadn’t passed at the time. The subsequent release and redactions seem to have exposed even more, but his goose was cooked before that.

Current allegations are that Mandelson handed Epstein extremely sensitive government information. I forget what Brits call it, but we’d say it was classified.

And it currently seems like PM Kier Starmer is probably going to fall with him, since he apparently knew about Mendelson’s continuing association with post-conviction Epstein.

Anyways, that one particularly seems somewhat unrelated to the redaction choices.