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Cake day: January 12th, 2025

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  • As a reminder, the only people who conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism are raging anti-Semites. They hold the Hitlerian belief that to be Jewish is to owe allegiance from birth to Israel. They don’t believe Jews can truly be real Americans, or citizens of any country except Israel. Schumer believes in the old Nazi belief that Jews are, by nature of their birth, foreigners in every country except Israel. This is why they believe any criticism of Israel is an attack on Jews everywhere, because they believe that Jewish people cannot be truly American. They are always suspect. They’ll always have dual loyalty. Schumer is a raging anti-Semite.





  • Sure, there is that difference. But the series doesn’t even address the fact that he’s already killed hundreds of people. Intentionally or not, it’s still absurd to hand wring about killing when you’ve already killed hundreds of people, accidentally or not, and the one person you’re worrying about taking down is literal genocidal maniac. To me that just sounds like not being willing to take responsibility for your own actions. Intentionally or not, Aang killed hundreds of people. And it’s not like he never went into the Avatar state again after taking out the Northern fleet. Hell, he fought Ozai while in the Avatar state. Maybe he should have just “accidentally” killed Ozai while in the Avatar state and just washed his hands of moral culpability, just like he did all the other people he killed before then.

    Regardless, Aang found a way to make peace with the fact that he had taken hundreds of lives. But when the person in question is someone of power and renown? Then it becomes something to fret over.


  • It need not even be over permanently. Many nations have come together, broken apart, just to come back together again in the future. Look at how many times China has gone through that cycle. Look at German dissolution and reunification. I imagine some time apart would do the nation and its various political factions a lot of good. And probably in a generation or two, a movement would likely develop to try to bring things back together again. The idea of united America isn’t going anywhere. But our present form of government just isn’t what is needed to produce that unity. The Constitution is a collection of compromises meant to satisfy the needs of the 1780s. Perhaps in the 2080s, a new attempt can be made, a new set of compromises forged, and the nation rebuilt. If nothing else, an EU-style customs and open boarder union between the states would likely be implemented even from the time of first dissolution.


  • Look, I don’t know why you have such piss-poor critical thinking skills and a complete lack of any ability to read the voluminous coverage on the subject.

    But the entire reason Trump wanted this ruling was because it would make it easier to trample people’s rights. Without national injunctions, your rights do not exist. This is especially true for immigration. The Trump admin is also fighting to be able to deport people without due process, and you’re already not entitled to representation during immigration procedures.

    What portion of immigrants can afford a lawyer? If you’re a low-income US citizen, and Trump decides to revoke your citizenship, what exactly is your plan? Yes, you have citizenship from birth, but that doesn’t matter. Trump has decided to just fucking ignore the Constitution entirely. And yes, in theory, you can sue the admin in court, but good luck with that. If you can even afford a lawyer, by the time you find one, you’ll already be on a plane to Sudan.

    How are you so dense that you can’t realize that the entire point of Trump pursuing this is that he wants to remove from people the ability to challenge his illegal actions? There’s literally no other reason to do this. If you live in the US, you have seen your own rights massively curtailed by this ruling. But you’re either too stupid to realize that, or you’re just happy that you’re not likely to be at the front of the line of people being fed into the meat grinder.

    Don’t link to a massive ruling and tell people “just read it” you fucking goober.




  • For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously [sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.}(https://youtu.be/JhD9bzzkjlM?t=350)

    How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?

    The point of this is not to condemn Aang’s actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he’s hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there’s zero chance that Armada didn’t have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.

    So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about…Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler’s head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn’t a conscript. He had full autonomy; he’s the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn’t even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.


  • New law. LLMs will only be accessible in very particular forms. Engaging with an LLM will be more like visiting the Oracle of Delphi. You’ll have to travel to some remote location and ask the LLM in person. It will then respond in riddles or vague prophecies that leave a lot open to interpretation. This will be the only legal way to use an LLM.






  • Honestly, we need to dissolve the union at this point. It’s just common sense.

    Look, it’s time for a reality check. When a nation’s political culture becomes this dysfunctional, there’s no bringing it back, not without some massive bloody civil war that leaves millions dead. What they don’t teach you in school is that every written law or constitution is ultimately meaningless. The Constitution does not enforce itself and neither does any law. They all require a certain amount of good-faith interpretation. It is always possible to come up with a strained bad-faith interpretation of any law that will allow you to do whatever you want. But in a healthy political system, this doesn’t happen. Both sides practice restraint and realize that their overreach will be answered by overreach on the other side.

    But if you lose that? The nation is effectively shattered. The United States, as a functioning democracy, is already dead. It’s zombie corpse is just limping along. The president is openly defying the laws passed by Congress. The Supreme Court is openly corrupt, openly partisan, and ignoring the plain language of the constitution. It’s all just might makes right now, and both parties view the other as fundamentally wicked and illegitimate.

    Once your politics have decayed this much, there is no bringing it back. We need to peacefully dissolve the United States. Will it be easy? No. But we also shouldn’t let one of our core national character flaws - American exceptionalism, blind us to the possibilities that exist. Plenty of nations have peacefully dissolved before. And they find ways to negotiate the hard issues like dividing assets, debts, obligations, military forces, etc. This has been done before, and it can be done again.

    When this comes up, the “umm aktually” crowd also comes out of the woodwork. They’ll point out that there’s no actual constitutional mechanism to do this. These people are blind or have been asleep the last six months. You would think they would learn by now that all it takes to do something is that there not be anyone there to stop you.

    We should grant all 50 states full independence. Just disband the existing federal government entirely. Let the states then come back together in whatever new nation or nations they want to form. How can this be done legally? Simple. Someone just needs to run for president on the platform of national dissolution, saying, “I’ll grant all 50 states independence. I’ll fire every federal employee, and I will not use any military force to stop all the states from seceding.” And then they get elected and simply do that. Congress or SCOTUS can complain all they want; it won’t matter. That candidate if elected would have an overwhelming political mandate, and there would be no way to stop them. Some may whine that it’s unconstitutional, but who cares? It’s pretty obvious by now that the Constitution is broken, obsolete, and no longer worth respecting. We’re walking away from that broken obsolete piece of trash. We can do better.