A trial attorney? I could see it she wanted to be like a corporate attorney or real estate or something, where your character as a person isn’t relevant. How is she going to empanel a jury without potential jurors having preexisting feelings about her trustworthiness? “Yeah, she seems sincere, but remember that time on her reality show where she was faking tears for sympathy?”

I don’t know her, or how competent she would be at trial, and anyone can be anything they want to be. But also, recognize that choices have consequences. Maybe trading dignity for fame and fortune means you don’t get to live any dream you like.

Regan was corrupt, selfish, racist piece of shit who was terrible for the economy. But he would have vomited to see what Trump is doing.

I think it’s one of those apocryphal quotes that gets misattributed to different people. Most commonly Ledru-Rollin, as Pumpkin Escobar mentioned.

“Check where my people are going so that I might lead them there.”

I would just think you’re trying to be funny. If you keep a deadpan face, you might succeed.

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There have been several high-profile systemic failures in the past few years that give us a glimpse into the hypothetical you’re describing. Most interruptions have lasted mere hours, if not minutes, before causing mass panic and devastating economic catastrophes. Planes are grounded, banks stop operations, global trade shuts down, and hospitals can’t access patient records.

The question isn’t how long before it would be a huge problem. That starts immediately. The better question is, how long before people adapt to a world without the internet? How long would it take to build an alternative?

Ok, so the coroner and his brother had a hidden room where they kept decomposing bodies, some as long as 15 years. This was discovered and he resigned his position as coroner. A new coroner was appointed.

That coroner’s office also, separately, planned a community event for a Halloween party. The planned Halloween party would have had zero corpses, and the creep who kept the corpses wasn’t invited to attend (probably?). Cancelling the event had nothing to do with safety, in spite of what the unnecessary quotes in the headline would suggest.

For sure, there have been events that affected all Americans in various ways, good and bad, but the context of the conversation is events that would encourage a general labor strike. The moon landing, world wars, the Great Depression, the Macarena, big things happen. I probably could have been clearer by saying that nothing in history has unified the American working class as a singular political group to use our power as a labor force to exert pressure to stop oligarchical abuses by means of a general strike, but that seems overly pedantic.

It’s never happened before because the working class has never been unified nationwide before. Soybean farmers in Utah are not connected to teachers in Boston or steelworkers in Pittsburgh or auto manufacturers in Michigan or nurses in San Diego. There’s never been a singular cause that affected all of those groups of people at the same time.

If it ever could happen, it would be because the President was a colossal dipshit who fucked every aspect of the economy across the country, except that would almost certainly cause the legislature to put an end to such rampant and corrupt tyranny.

Right?

They also refused to release the remains of the people killed, denying they retained any. Eventually, the University of Pennsylvania admitted to retaining some of the remains of 12 year old Delisha Africa and returned them to her family, in 2021.

Telescopes would be fun. Everyone doesn’t need their own, if you can sign it out on a clear night and return it in good shape.

I oppose it simply because it doesn’t work. It is not a deterrent, and it does not serve justice to put people to death, and it costs far more to execute someone than it does to rehabilitate them (the most expensive alternative - I’m not suggesting rehabilitation is an option for everyone).

And sometimes we execute innocent people. Like, how many of your family members would you be willing to put to death to keep the death penalty? Every innocent victim of the death penalty had a family, and that family never imagined it could happen to them.

I would argue that it would impact the effectiveness of the effort, but the intention is just as important.

Like if you want to make the world a better place, you can pick up litter in your local area. You could volunteer at the library or conserve energy in whatever way is easiest for you. The desire to move forward is critical, because nobody has all the information. Nobody can know all the angles, and be aware of every impact. Everyone is just doing the best they can with the information they have.

Wanting to be better informed is also a progressive ideal. Know better, do better. We might discover that something we thought was beneficial is actually harmful. The difference between a conservative choice and a progressive choice is that when new information demonstrates that behaviors conflicts with values, the progressive changes their behaviors while a conservative changes their values.

I fully believe that this is an attempt to proactively delegitimize any attempts to prosecute former Trump officials for their actual crimes. You can just hear the dipshit chorus of “You protested when we prosecuted Comey and James, and now you’re trying to do the exact same thing to us!”

I don’t think it’s helpful to think in terms of left and right. That presumes that each side is roughly a mirror analogue of the other.

Think in terms of forward and backward. Will your ideas and political leanings push society forward? Will you be making the world better than you found it? Or are you trying to resist change, fighting against progress because the status quo, or the recent past, benefits you in some way?

Yes, but will they be able to capture the true narrative complexity of asking a desk toy to provide randomized platitudes and admonisitions? How can they please the built-in hardcore fans without alienating the newcomers who don’t have an encyclopedic understanding of the extensive lore? Will they tackle some of the more problematic canon events that have aged poorly in a more enlightened society? Or will they gloss over those moments and modernize the deep mythology on which the intellectual property is based and risk abandoning the edge that made it popular in the first place?

Concentrate and ask again

Fuck.

Bull, and I cannot emphasize this enough, shit. Everyone is not a little bit bigoted. That’s something bigots tell themselves when rationalizing their own prejudices. You should probably take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’re the problem.

“Progressive” describes a position, not a person. A person can be many things. A person can hold contradictory viewpoints, and fully believe two incompatible thoughts at the same time. It’s tragically naive to assume that people are rational or consistent.

Can a person think they are progressive and also be a bigot? Of course a person can. Everybody is the hero in their own story.

There are thick, uncrossable lines, and there are a lot of people who don’t mind crossing them. You cannot compromise with a bigot. You cannot find common ground with a person who would subjugate you, or someone who sees you as less than human.

We can have disagreements about many political issues, but when you are standing next to pedophiles, rapists, fascists, and bigots, you shouldn’t be surprised to be called a Nazi.

So the question becomes, what is the test of “purity”?