SwingingTheLamp

Republicans also live in pants-shitting terror of... duct tape?

I'll add it to the list.

That's amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn't do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that's what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we'd switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

The Bush administration abrogated due process, but we might have been able to move past it as a shameful anomaly in our history perpetrated by one out-of-control political faction. But then instead of prosecuting the offenders, or at least disavowing their actions, the Obama administration doubled down on it! It decided that American citizens could be killed on the basis of an accusation. It cemented the destruction of due process as a bipartisan principle of American government.

The Turd Reich might be speed-running the course, but it's just using the tools that past administrations laid out for it.

Action items for the leftist folks who didn't read the article: Speak your truth, never equivocate, never apologize for what you believe, never badmouth other leftists.

Key point:

Sanders is not hurt by the term “socialist,” because he’s not frantically trying to prove to everyone that he’s not a socialist. He presents his thoughts, ideas, and beliefs without freaking out about “Oh, what will the others think?!?!” and that is a thing people tend to respect.

And just like in that survey which found that a huge number of Republicans blamed Obama for his response to Hurricane Katrina, the rubes will buy it.

People trust R’s more when it comes to the economy

I hate that you're right about this. I just saw an article yesterday that human intelligence actually is declining, and this is some of the strongest evidence. We truly live in the dumbest timeline.

The way the American legal system is supposed to work is that, in a trial, the court needs to determine two things: fact and law. In a jury trial, the jury decides issues of fact, while the judge decides issues of law. This may differ from the way legal scholars might describe it, but following makes sense to me. The 'fact' part has several components to it: 1. Whether the allegations are accurate, 2. whether the accused person undertook some or all of the actions alleged, and 3. whether it was a crime or not.

Sometimes, the second part is not even a question; the accused did it. There's even a thing called an "affirmative defense," in which the defendant says, yes I did it, but it wasn't a crime. That's the basis of a self-defense claim in a murder case. Or, the defendant did it on the 50-yard-line at the Super Bowl, with 125 million witnesses. A defense attorney probably isn't going to waste time arguing the issue. There's still number 1 and number 3 to argue.

So, I respect the "they have the wrong guy" energy. Maybe. But if Mangione didn't do it, somebody else did, and that sentiment seems to agree that it was a crime. I'm not willing to concede that point yet. Consider that we have laws which let domestic violence victims make self-defense claims when on trial for killing their abusers. We also have class actions in court, whereby an individual, or small group of plaintiffs, brings a case on behalf of all similarly-situated persons. Combine the two concepts: Brian Thompson was the perpetrator of torture and killing through bureaucracy, and just like in so many domestic abuse cases, the legal system offered no recourse. The person who shot Thompson may have been acting on behalf of all of his victims. This could be the first class-action self-defense claim.

(Which would basically be the wonky, legal way to describe the feeling behind the support for jury nullification.)

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. There's no statistical difference in the chances of victory between men and women when running for political office. Lots of Republican politicians are women. I don't see it as a big deal.

Also, lots of open racists voted for Obama. If you look at the polling and the interviews, it was much more about running conservative Democrats trying to get the votes of people who wanted to shake things up. That's what Obama promised, that's why Sanders would've won, by some measures, and it seems AOC is out there generating the same buzz.

I think the implication is that you're going to die in El Salvador, so better to die at home and maybe take a few ICE thugs with you.

Interestingly, those main squares were all built before zoning. If they were destroyed in a disaster, they could not be rebuilt.

FWIW, I used to take my car to an auto shop located in the middle of a residential neighborhood, next door to an ice cream and bait shop. It did not affect the neighbors in any way that I could see, and didn't affect the property values.

The first time I had ever heard of the word "tankie" was on Lemmy. It's just not a thing that about anybody I know offline is, or has heard of. So I don't understand the obsession with them. Even if they're doing every evil thing claimed, it's a) the metaphorical tempest in a teapot, and b) not even working, based on the number of people here who seem to make hating on tankies part of their identity.