If Trump wins, all these idiots that voted for him because “thuh conomee was better” are going to act all shocked when he actually does all the really insane stuff he’s promising to do and tried to do in his first term but the handful of rational Republicans around him stopped him from doing.

I saw interviews with voters recently that basically showed people don’t believe he’ll do all the crazy stuff he’s promising, that it’s just a negotiation tactic or to “keep the base onboard” or to “generate attention.”

When things really go to shit, I guarantee the people that voted for him will take no responsibility for it.

Byron Donalds, a black Republican Representative from Florida, said Democrats need to stop talking about Project 2025, a policy document created by hundreds of people who literally worked for Trump during his term, because it’s “dangerous.”

But he also thinks Trump calling Harris a communist dictator who literally wants to destroy America, take your guns, force everyone’s children to undergo surgical sex reassignment surgery against their will, flood the country with millions of noncitizens so they can vote, among hundreds of other extreme and completely false accusations, are all perfectly fine and fair game.

They all know it’s not consistent. They all know Trump’s rhetoric is worse, but they see a cynical opportunity to gain a political advantage and they take it. Assholes.

The pardon power is explicitly given to the president by the Constitution. Therefore it’s a core power with absolute immunity.

The president is also given the clear authority to direct his subordinates in the executive branch as the “chief Executive.” The SCOTUS has ruled that the president has almost unfettered power to hire/fire/order anyone in the federal government to do just about anything he wants with no restrictions.

So logically:

1. The president can order an agency head to issue a new rule that’s probably unconstitutional.
2. Someone sues in a district court to block it.
3. A court issues an injunction preventing its enforcement.
4. The agency head ignores the court order and enforces it anyway.
5. The court finds the agency head and/or other employees of the agency in contempt for violating the injunction.
6. The president pardons anyone subject to the injunction (and this pardon power is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution or investigation).
7. The rule goes into effect and gets enforced despite being enjoined by a federal court.
8. We now have a constitutional crisis because courts no longer have any way to check on the Executive because the president can simply neutralize any criminal penalties with a pardon even if that pardon is clearly issued as part of a conspiracy to violate a court order.

I guarantee this is not what the Framers envisioned or wanted, but this is what “conservative” judicial extremists on the SCOTUS have given us. Although I would be entirely unsurprised if they decided to roll this power back somehow if ever a Democratic president were to wield it.

They also like to complain about the “crime in blue cities,” but somehow never seem to acknowledge that if it’s a problem that’s so easy to solve, why do red states with red legislatures and red governors not just fix the issue in their blue cities?

5 of the top 10 cities with the highest violent crime rates are in red states with Republican legislatures and Republican governors. They sure as hell act like they know the simple solution to violent crime in cities, but for some reason they don’t seem to implement those obvious solutions in their own states. Instead, they blame the Democratic mayors.

It’s almost like it’s a lot harder of a problem to solve than Republicans let on and they’re being disingenuous about knowing how to fix it…

The vast majority of elected Republicans are opportunists willing to use any opportunity to advance their narrative even if it’s clearly blatant lies or bullshit.

Vance pushes the “eating pets” crap to anyone who will listen, and when he gets hard enough pushback from someone and can’t bullshit his way out of it, he falls back to the “okay, maybe it’s not true, but it represents real concerns people have so it’s valid for me to talk about it.”

Which is exactly what happened with the election results in 2020. They pushed the stolen election crap until it was pretty much irrefutably disproven, then went around saying they had to make it harder to vote because their voters, for some strange reason, thought the election wasn’t fair.

DeWine is one of the very few Republican politicians left that has any sense of principle and isn’t a cynical opportunist, even if most of those principles are pretty shitty.

True, it wouldn’t be ethical to conduct an experiment, but we can (and probably do) collect lots of observational data that can provide meaningful insight. People are arrested at all stages of CSAM related offenses from just possession, distribution, solicitation, and active abuse.

While observation and correlations are inherently weaker than experimental data, they can at least provide some insight. For example, “what percentage of those only in possession of artificially generated CSAM for at least one year go on to solicit minors” vs. “real” CSAM.

If it seems that artificial CSAM is associated with a lower rate of solicitation, or if it ends up decreasing overall demand for “real” CSAM, then keeping it legal might provide a real net benefit to society and its most vulnerable even if it’s pretty icky.

That said, I have a nagging suspicion that the thing many abusers like most about CSAM is that it’s a real person and that the artificial stuff won’t do it for them at all. There’s also the risk that artificial CSAM reduces the taboo of CSAM and can be an on-ramp to more harmful materials for those with pedophilic tendencies that they otherwise are able to suppress. But it’s still way too early to know either way.

I mostly agree with you, but a counterpoint:

Downloading and possession of CSAM seems to be a common first step in a person initiating communication with a minor with the intent to meet up and abuse them. I’ve read many articles over the years about men getting arrested for trying to meet up with minors, and one thing that shows up pretty often in these articles is the perpetrator admitting to downloading CSAM for years until deciding the fantasy wasn’t enough anymore. They become comfortable enough with it that it loses its taboo and they feel emboldened to take the next step.

CSAM possession is illegal because possession directly supports creation, and creation is inherently abusive and exploitative of real people, and generating it from a model that was trained on non-abusive content probably isn’t exploitative, but there’s a legitimate question as to whether we as a society decide it’s associated closely enough with real world harms that it should be banned.

Not an easy question for sure, and it’s one that deserves to be answered using empirical data, but I imagine the vast majority of Americans would flatly reject a nuanced view on this issue.

I don’t know about firstest, but he was definitely firster. That’s why they call him a founding father, not a founding fathest.

I have a pact with the spiders in my house. If I spot them running across the floor or on the ceiling or tucked away in a corner, they’re not bothering me, so I won’t bother them. If I see one in an inconvenient place like the dinner table or hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, I gently relocate them outdoors.

But…if I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep and I feel one crawling up my arm, it’s broken the pact, and it can’t be trusted to leave me alone anymore, so it gets a quick and painless death.

“Nah, your fingernails don’t need a trim. If she can’t handle your adult man’s untrimmed fingernails inside her, she does not deserve to have sex with you.”

Hair that’s long and overgrown can cause problems just like long fingernails can cause problems. Keeping them trimmed so they don’t is just being considerate of your partner.

It definitely is.

If a recipe calls for 3 and 3/4 cups flour, I know right away I need three 1 cup scoops of flour and one 3/4 cup scoop.

If it calls for 15/4 cups, now I need to calculate how many one cup scoops it is and also what the additional remaining fraction is in addition to how much I’ve actually measured out so far.

The more numbers you need to keep in your head when following a recipe, the more likely you are to make a mistake.

Right wing pundits and politicians:

“How can I frame this as a bad thing?”

It wouldn’t. THC has to be decarboxylated via heating before it has any psychoactive effects.

If you eat an ounce of weed, you’d just get a tummy ache. If you heat up an ounce of weed in the oven just hot enough to decarboxylate the THC before you eat it, you’ll be experiencing your tummy ache on an entirely different plane of existence.

Can he swing from a web?

No he can’t, he’s a pig.

But that’s not what TypeScript does. The joke in the meme doesn’t really even make sense.

A better analogy would be you have a basket that’s explicitly labeled “Fruit” and TypeScript complains if you try to put laundry detergent in it because you said it’s supposed to be a basket of fruit.

This meme was clearly made by someone who doesn’t use or understand TypeScript.

I prefer just calling everything I eat the flesh of whatever it came from. Tomato? Flesh. Lettuce? Flesh. People? Flesh.

What if you soak them in high fructose corn syrup first?

The President can’t just order DEA to unschedule it because it would very likely be a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act (the same thing that the Supreme Court said Trump violated when he tried to end DACA). Just ending the scheduling altogether with no strings attached would really need an act of Congress to be safe from being overturned by the SCOTUS.

A few months ago, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services submitted a formal recommendation to the DEA to reschedule cannabis to Schedule III. It’s now in the DEA’s hands. Schedule III means if you have a prescription, you can no longer get fired for it if you test positive and it’s recognized as having real medical value with moderate to low physical dependence. Not ideal, but complete unscheduling is something the DEA would never go along with. Rescheduling or an act of Congress are the best bets, and Biden has formally requested the DEA to do the former.

The maps are actually reasonably fair. The Senate seats up in 2022 didn’t have enough competitive districts for Dems to win the Senate, but the other half in 2024 provides a decent opportunity. The Senate is actually more favorable to Democrats than the House districts.

There are about 27 Senate districts that are blue-leaning or 50/50 under the new maps. The House on the other hand actually tilts red just a bit.

https://davesredistricting.org/maps#state::PA

Rattlesnakes and alligators (and non-unionized automobile manufacturing facilities)