For real, this headline almost gave me a fucking “babe wake up and grab your bug-out bag; it’s happening” panic attack.

Yeah, RBG really screwed the pooch when she refused to step down after Obama started his second term. He asked at the beginning of his second term, so he would have plenty of time to get a new justice appointed. But she wanted to have the distinction of serving under the first female president, so she refused to step down. And instead, Hillary lost, we got Trump’s first term, then RBG fucking kicked it.

It’s honestly a gigantic stain on her legacy, because her pride had her shitting in the pool right before she got out.

Yeah, the court rushed their decision specifically because they expected Alito to drag his feet and stall as long as possible. Alito was going to stall through the Easter weekend, which would give the jackboots time to rush the deportations. And the court has learned that Trump is using the deportations as a way to circumvent the law; If the deportees out of the ICE’s hands, then ICE can just shrug and go “talk to Venezuela about it” when ordered to give the deportees due process. So the SCOTUS 100% expected a massive surge of deportations over the weekend while Alito was stalling with writing his dissent.

In emergency orders, the justices don’t even need to say which way they voted. But Alito did anyways, specifically because he expected them to wait for his dissent before they announced the ruling. The fact that they didn’t wait (and Alito had to hurriedly shove the first draft of his dissent in) means that all seven justices who pushed it through were tired of putting up with his shit. To be clear, the rush was a giant “fuck you. We see what you’re doing; you’re not slick” to Alito specifically.

Yeah, congress refusing to check Trump has really allowed everything to snowball. They’re abdicating a LOT of power, purely because Trump has an ® next to his name.

It’s a little bit of a misnomer. They had tripcodes, which functioned similarly to usernames. It’s basically a password (called a tripcode) that you include when making your comment, and the site does a hash on it. The result of that hash appears as your name. Reversing the hash is computationally difficult, so the only way for another user to steal your “name” is to guess the tripcode you used. So you can essentially “sign” your comments with a username by using your tripcode.

And since reversing the hash is computationally difficult, you know that users with interesting usernames likely devoted a LOT of time into figuring out the tripcode they needed to use. That’s part of why the whole “Musk was on 4chan talking about being a god” thing is so funny. All of the posts had the username “The Antichrist” and the tripcode for it likely took several months to crack; Cracking the letters would be difficult, but doing so with the capitalization likely took a lot longer. So if it was actually Musk, it means he is such a tryhard that he devoted significant resources towards cracking it just to have a “cool” username. Most anonymous users made fun of tripcode users; The nickname for anyone with a trip code on their posts was “tripfag”.

And the fact he was about 37 felonies under his belt? And led to insurrection. And it is his SECOND term. And he has made threats against his own people and the world.

You’re preaching to the choir. You don’t need to try and convince me he’s an asshole. At best, that entire paragraph is just whataboutism.

But most of the country didn’t vote him in?

Correct.

You had ample time to deal with your dirty laundry.

And it’s clear that the people who were supposed to be in charge of doing that only put up a token effort to do so, to keep the public placated long enough for the next election cycle. There are a lot of Americans who were (and still are) deeply angry at the way the entire investigation was handled. And even more who are frustrated at the fact that the system’s checks and balances only work when congress is willing to actually use them.

You take responsibility and fix your shit. Till then. Yeah, the US IS a giant monolith of hatred, anger and aggression.

In case you weren’t aware, the vast majority of America is only one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness, and enacting real change would require a massive effort (and create a lot of new homeless people) because it’s not Europe where you can just roll up to the capitol building on a weekend trip. Imagine if you were in Naples, and had to travel all the way to Madrid to protest your own government. Now imagine you have zero funds for a plane or train ticket, and need to drive the entire way. It’s a ~20 hour drive, which you’d inevitably need to take over the course of several days.

That’s essentially a full work week for the round trip, and it’s less than many Americans would need to travel to get to DC. And you think they’d get paid time off work approved for that? No, they’d get fired for missing an entire week of work. And that’s assuming they’re even able to return to work afterwards; Hopefully they avoided getting maimed, crippled, and/or arrested by police during the protest.

If anything, the US is a giant monolith of poverty and struggling individuals, with a thin veneer of manufactured exceptionalism keeping it from completely unraveling. The only Americans able to exert international pressure are the billionaires who have been robbing the proletariat blind for decades, and the lawmakers who are in the billionaires’ pockets.

PS: literally the dumbest use of quotes I’ve ever seen lmao

If you have to resort to insulting someone’s grammar on the internet, you’ve already lost the argument.

I’m fully convinced he does IVF so he can selectively have sons… And it’s also why he’s so incredibly shitty to Vivian (his trans daughter) because she breaks his “only sons” plans. And Vivian is a constant reminder that even with all of his money and power to bend the natural selection process to his will via IVF, he can’t control individual people or stop them from being themselves. He just wants an army of mini-Musks, and Vivian flies in the face of that.

Yeah prion diseases are fucking horrifying when you actually look into the details.

all Americans… they all

Trump won with less than 30% of the population’s vote. And even now, he only has an ~30% approval rating. It certainly isn’t “all” Americans. It isn’t even “most” Americans. But sure, speaking about an entire country as a single monolith makes the circlejerk easy.

I’ve personally heard a few people say that’s exactly their plan. It’s basically “I’m a citizen but I’m brown so I’m fucked either way. I might as well make em work for it since the end result for me will be the same regardless. If I’m gonna get taken down, I might as well make it worth it. Why wait to die in an El Salvadorian prison, when I can go out where it’ll at least make some headlines?”

Again, I have heard several people say things like this individually. I fully believe it’ll happen eventually, as soon as they try to stop the wrong person.

fairly passive in their expression

It was still harassing a student all the same.

So wristbands are okay… Because they’re just clothes, not marching in circles and chanting? How about if it’s t-shirts instead? After all, both are just clothes. How about if those shirts or wristbands have wording that calls the student a slur?

The student will undoubtedly find any kind of protest clothing offensive because they’re protesting her existence… So where do we draw the line on parents’ right to offend a student? Is it just slurs that aren’t allowed? Who decides what is and isn’t offensive? It obviously can’t be the person doing the protesting, because their entire goal is to offend the targeted student.

How about if it’s signs instead of clothing? The student will likely find any kind of signs demeaning, but are they okay because they’re just passively holding them? How about if those signs call the student a slur?

The issue with allowing protest (especially one that targets a specific student) is that someone has to decide where to draw the line. And every individual will have a different line in the sand… So if our goal is to protect the student, (and again, this protest is 100% without a doubt harassing a student) they need to go by the lowest threshold, not the highest.

Public schools aren’t private institutions though, which is where things get so convoluted. The school is a government funded organization, and therefore has to do its best to avoid infringing on constitutional rights. However, courts have repeatedly ruled that schools have a higher obligation to protect the students in their care, even if it means restricting first amendment rights. So schools have a fairly high degree of discretion on what they do and don’t allow.

A more mild example is dress codes. Students could easily argue that a dress code violates their freedom of speech, as the way they dress is a form of speech. However, courts have ruled that dress codes are allowed, because the school has a duty to maintain an environment that is conducive to learning; even if it means restricting their students’ freedom of expression.

Yeah, I was going to mention that modern gun control was started by republicans because they were scared of armed black protestors. But that felt a little too tangential for a single comment.

Here’s a reminder that the Black Panthers started because people realized that peaceful unarmed protests were quickly met with police violence… But peaceful heavily armed protests had cops politely watching from across the street. Turns out, cops are a lot less likely to blindly fire into crowds when the crowds are capable of returning fire with overwhelming force.

Even MLK Jr said that peaceful protest only gets you so far; Disrupting highway traffic is fine for bringing awareness to your plight, but at a certain point the lawmakers and dug-in oligarchs need to be forced to change.

Yeah, the “$15 an hour” debate has been going on for so long that the number has realistically increased to ~$23 per hour. And if a $23/hr minimum wage makes you balk, maybe you should consider how little you’re being paid for the job you currently do.

Not if the charges are brought by separate entities. State prosecutors are entirely separate from federal prosecutors, which means you can be hit with charges from both.

Musk needs to get lucky and avoid it every time; The public only needs to get lucky once.

Here’s a reminder that the Allied forces had multiple opportunities to assassinate Hitler, but chose not to do so… Because he was a laughably bad military tactician, who was surrounded by yes-men. He would repeatedly make bad military decisions, and everyone around him was too afraid to tell him it was a bad idea. The Allies were worried that if they assassinated Hitler, a competent military leader would take his place.

Sun Tsu’s Art of War has a line that goes something like “Never interrupt the enemy when they’re making a mistake” and it feels germane. I wouldn’t be surprised if historians are writing about how Europe had several opportunities to assassinate Musk/Trump but chose not to because they didn’t want anyone competent in charge.

I would rather not do it and hope nobody else does it.

While this is certainly something to dream about, I live in the Bible Belt. If I hadn’t taken it, there would have been a hundred others lining up to do it.

“Oh, if I don’t use my electrical engineering skills to bomb children for a MIC company then someone else will do it, nah bitch I’ll work in a different field”

It’s a bit of a stretch to equate it with making bombs. And if you have the flexibility to work in a different field, then you’re already speaking from a position of privilege. Not everyone has that luxury. Some people have niche skills or have small tight-knit job fields, where burning a bridge with one company could cascade to other companies as word spreads.

Edit: although I do have to say you have to consider all aspects. If you’re only making content that changes gender to sex and you gotta feed yourself, then it’s a big jump from killing people for a war company for fun.

There are absolutely arguments for why we should require engineers to take engineering ethics classes. Hell, even city zoning departments can be abused by racists. But it all eventually boils down to a cost/benefit analysis for the person considering the job; Ethics studies may cause an engineer to weigh the moral “cost” more heavily on certain topics. But it’s still essentially just a mental calculation when deciding whether or not to take the job.

At what point do the benefits of the job begin to outweigh the moral costs? When you’re going to go hungry if you turned down the work and burned bridges? When your family is going to go hungry? Sure, the high horse may be attractive when it’s just you… But nobody wants to see their child go hungry because they refused work. Eventually, people will compromise on their morals in order to put food on the table. And effecting change is a lot easier to do when you have a good job and can afford to donate (either your time or money) to causes you believe in. Homeless people aren’t exactly known for their political weight.

So I used to do a lot of freelance, and encountered similar situations a few times.

The most blatant example that comes to mind was a charity run. I had the client reach out for AV gear and crew for a charity run. They needed some projectors and a small stage (and all of the AV gear+crew to go with the stage) for a charity event; They were going to be at a college campus, with joggers making laps on a 1/2 mile loop. For every lap, sponsors would donate to charity.

The projectors and stage were to give the MC a place to be, and to keep the audience entertained while the joggers ran. They’d have a band playing, and cap the event off with a movie screening. Sounds fun. I quoted the job like any other gig. The perceptive reader may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned what kind of charity they were raising funds for. That’s because I didn’t think to ask ahead of time. I got there, and discovered it was a pro-life fundraiser. Fucking yikes.

But I still did the job. I needed the money, and didn’t want to burn future bridges with other companies that were involved. I simply made a mental note to ask more questions the next time a charity event came across my desk. But the big takeaway is that even if I didn’t do it, someone else inevitably would have. The event still would have happened, and the charity money still would have been raised. At least with me doing it, I was able to avoid adding another enthusiastic voice (whoever would have taken my spot) to the echo chamber. Even if I had climbed up on stage to interrupt the event, it wouldn’t have changed any minds. Afterwards, I donated what I could afford to Planned Parenthood and moved on.