I think what it all comes down to is most people don’t really want rational debate, and don’t participate in debates in the hope of learning or even to help others learn. Most people participate in debates to feel superior/“own” the other side. The result is debates that are typically lazy, uninformative, and downright mean.

I think all of us have a little bit of this desire for superiority in us and we need to consciously make an effort to suppress it.

if you’re planning to kill the guy, what would you do with our cat?”

So…this makes no sense. If I had to guess, I’d imagine your girlfriend exhibits this kind of strange obsessive behavior inconsistently, has occasional bouts of depression, and is no older than 30. Regardless of whether I’m right (but especially if I am), you should consider whether your girlfriend is suffering from something that requires a psych evaluation and get her one.

I’d argue madness is sticking with a candidate who now has virtually zero chance of winning what should be an easy race with anyone else. Democrats have stuck their head in the sand way too many times. They did it with how unpopular Hillary was in 2016. They did it with RBG not retiring. And now They’re doing it again.

This is the simple, undeniable truth: Biden is extremely unpopular. One could argue he might win, but that’s the best you can do. A remote, unlikely possibility that he could beat what should be the least electable person in history.

Ok let’s see how the polls move. If they move in the right direction, Biden stays on. If they move in the direction everyone knows they’ll move in, he steps down. Deal?

deleted by creator

Anybody. Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders, AOC, John Elway, I don’t care. Biden keeps saying he’s the only guy who can beat Trump. After last night’s debate it should be obvious that he’s the only guy who can’t beat Trump.

At this point it’s starting to feel like Biden’s holding the nation at gunpoint and making us have a second Trump term. He’s always been a terrible politician, running twice for the nomination and failing to get a single delegate, until Obama made him VP. Honestly I suspect part of the reason Obama chose him is because he didn’t wanna play kingmaker and figured Biden was too old to run again.

Then in 2020 I think the argument was Biden could benefit from Obama’s popularity. I certainly thought that was a terrible pick, but not totally lacking in logic. But in 2024 there was utterly no rational basis for Biden to be running in the first place. Now that he’s been a complete disaster, he’s just fucking us as a nation for his own narcissism.

We should start a campaign to write him in to force the Dems’ hand.

We would be, if not for Devo

deleted by creator

Now imagine this happens in a remote area with no cell coverage. In Arizona those are a thing too.

“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.

First administration: “We must do something about the asteroid. I’ve started a plan to divert it, but it’ll take several years.”

Second administration: “The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office.”

Third administration: “Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there’s just too much political resistance to solving it. Let’s focus on other priorities that we can solve.”

He deserves to lose every dollar, it’s the most arrogant business move in history and he disrupted thousands of lives of workers with good jobs in the process. Unfortunately it’s only like 10% of his net worth, he’s the one who will suffer the least relatively speaking.

Well that’s an even older decision:

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that established the principle of judicial review, meaning that American courts have the power to strike down laws and statutes they find to violate the Constitution of the United States. Decided in 1803, Marbury is regarded as the single most important decision in American constitutional law.

The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution contains a right to habeas corpus in Boumedine v. Bush. The Lincoln thing was never fully litigated and was probably unconstitutional.

The point isn’t to have it be a lie detector but a factual claim detector. So you have an neural network that reads statements and says “this thing is saying something factual” or “this is just an opinion/obvious joke/whatever” and a person grades the responses to train it. So then the AI just says “hey this thing is making some sort of fact-related claim” and then the warning applies no matter what.

Let he who has to deal with that friend who constantly sends blatantly false Xits to them throw the first stone. Honestly I feel like every social media post that makes a factual representation should come with a big flashing warning “THIS IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE, LOOK IT UP BEFORE YOU REPEAT IT YOU DUMMY!”

And I’m only like 10% joking. Given the success of language models it should be moderately trivial to train one to recognize when a factual statement is made and apply the above warning. It’s not even the children and teens I’m worried about. The people who seem to have the most trouble handling this are the adults.

I’m not the biggest fan of smoked herring myself, but thanks.

The problem with this argument is this very article, which is also backed up by interviews with John Kelly, Bill Barr, and others. Everyone verifies that that Trump wanted to do all the crazy stuff from prosecuting Hillary to executing former members of his administration for speaking out against him, but they’d just delay until he’d get distracted and move on to something else. Again, these are people who eagerly signed up to work for Trump, and changed their mind based on their experience with him.

This next time around though, Trump will try to hire people who are more likely to be yes-men. What happens then?

This is Snowden’s claim and it’s not implausible, but it’s also quite a coincidence that he’d end up in the top country for spying on the US it’s also possible that he wanted to be in Russia and simply made up the part about it just being a stopover. If Snowden was looking for asylum, there are several other countries that don’t extradite to the US. I can see why he’d temporarily be stuck in Russia, but after several years he couldn’t find any other way out? There was apparently a privately-funded attempt to get him to Iceland, but the last update on it was that they were in contact with a “third party representing” Snowden…and then nothing.

A third fact (in addition to Russiabot Greenwald’s involvement) that makes it questionable is that he eventually applied for Russian citizenship in 2020. One explanation is that he could do this to get a Russian passport and fly somewhere else with no US extradition treaty, but he hasn’t chosen to do so yet.