PrinceWith999Enemies @ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

In very recent high profile/high consequences cases (Gore v Bush, the Voting Rights Act, etc) the court has generally found that a state has a right to determine the rules governing their federal elections. I know (by now) to never say never, but if they do force Colorado to surrender to federal command regarding conducting their elections via their laws, they’re going to have to become complete pretzels. Should at least be interesting.

Oh, and I was told that by Colorado law the ballots must be finalized on Jan 5th, so the self-imposed stay until Jan 4th is because that’s the latest possible date. By putting a stay on the case, SCOTUS would have to then essentially a second Colorado state electoral law. I’m probably missing some stuff, and I really don’t know what to expect myself.

I absolutely do know that if trump’s not on the ballot, the R down ticket races won’t generate much of any turnout. It’d be funny if the MAGAs were the ones who stayed home so that every red district candidate from Colorado would be a moderate.

I just want to make sure I understand your answer. I’m going back to the cannabis example to make sure I’m clear in terms of what I’m saying and understanding.

Texas cannot make it illegal to smoke pot in California. We are on the same page there. Texas can however make it illegal to have drugs in your system while in Texas. If you get back from CA and test positive in Texas, I believe you can be charged for having drugs in your system. For instance, you will probably go back to jail if you test positive while on parole. I don’t want the parole thing to confuse the issue - the point is that smoking in CA is not what’s illegal. Being in TX with drugs in your system can be.

This isn’t ex post facto because the law against having terminated your pregnancy would have existed before the patient traveled.

What I’m thinking about specifically is the concern many people have about things like menstrual tracking apps being used by law enforcement to determine if someone was pregnant and now is not. To my reasoning, that means that the concern is ipso facto the termination.

And I agree on keeping any conversations about it in a manner that a prosecutor would be unable to use them to show motivation for travel. I mentioned that when o was asking whether it would be a reasonable defense if/when someone were to be charged (pretending that it doesn’t get overturned).

Yes, absolutely. I’m talking about the in court defense, not what you say to the officers.

If you’ve been following all of the Trump investigations and trials, you’ll see a lot of it comes down to the prosecution proving that the defendants knew what they were doing was illegal and that they don’t have a credible alternative explanation for their actions. I’m speculating that a medical consultation may be a credible alternative explanation.

I know. Or at least I really hope so.

I’m more interested in the theoretical question.

I was also wondering if it would be possible to make it illegal to have had an abortion. The analogy that comes to mind is that cannabis is legal in California, but if you fly back to Texas and still have it in your system, I think you can be busted because there’s specific laws against testing positive (iirc). I’ve never heard of anyone getting charged for coming home high from California, so I have no idea whether it would pass a challenge.

No, but the timing might change. Honestly, I’m not really sure that Trump gives a crap about the culture war issues. I think he’s LGBT-phobic, racist, misogynistic, and personally abusive - but I also think that his clinical level of narcissism means virtually everything he does is self-focused. His support for the far right agenda seems performative to me, where he’ll use it to whip up his base and make deals with the true believers.

If the Dems take 2024 in a sweep, I think we will breathe a little easier, but as you said without being able to unstack the courts or get rid of the filibuster, there’s no way we’re going to change direction. We’re also going to still be dealing with the red states and the culture war propaganda coming from them.

Right now I think it’s probably about a 50% chance we will be moving in the next 5 years, which will increase if the situation continues to evolve. I’m mostly looking at Portugal, but we might also move someplace else first if needed for work, then look to get permanent residency someplace.

For myself and friends who are also members of Team Rainbow, we feel that we are in much more danger than we were in 2015. It feels like if this goes on uninterrupted we will end up with a legal system back where it was illegal to be LGBT. I think that there will be more state level than national level legislation at first, but like with abortion, that’s going to be the ultimate goal.

For women, they’re already there. Republicans have indicated they’re going to be trying to pass national anti-abortion legislation. Again, they start with the states, and each state pushes through slightly different legislation to see what they can get away with. If one gets overturned they pass another with different wording but the same effect.

We live in a safe state, but we (and many of the people we know) have started making plans, like looking into countries with golden visa programs (basically a path to immigration by investment). We’re also looking what it will take to transfer to work for our companies in one of their European offices. If we had been living someplace like Texas (even Austin), we would have moved to the coasts by now.

Excellent analysis!

I did read the books on the original series. I have but haven’t yet read some of the others (I have at least one audiobook that was free at the time). I absolutely loved them, after sitting in shock as one “main character” after another was killed in a horrible and tragic way. I had gone in cold, and did not realize that GRRM took the authorial advice to “kill your darlings” quite so literally.”

I didn’t get into them until the pentology was finished, and I remember wondering to myself “Who the hell does he finish this? He’s introduced a major new plot line on the third book (maybe it was the Dorne subplot) and new, major characters kept popping up. I had no idea how he was going to start tying everything together, because even the last book had not started winding things down quite - the tensions were still building. It felt like he was painting himself into a corner while doing the floor like the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Given the pace of subsequent development, I think I may have been just a bit right on that. I’ve done it to myself and recognize the symptoms.

I appreciate House of the Dragon being good. The problem is that S1 was also good. The problem is in the prequel-ness itself. I know that it all ends with Dany going inexplicably insane and Jamie’s arc goes from scoundrel to hero to … whatever the hell that was. I know the complex plot lines they’re setting up will never be closed. If GRRM ever finishes the book (I’m certainly not expecting two) and winds things down properly, I might again feel invested enough in the universe to try the other stories set in it, but right now it might have just ended with “and then Ned woke up and realized it was all a dream.”

Lastly, you raise a good point and that would have at least maybe delivered some interest. I can’t see anything but civil war with Bran as the bored and incapable god-emperor facing a Stark-Lannister alliance or something. The problem is that the most central and intriguing plot lines were left hanging or ended in the fastest and worst way possible.

“Dany forgot about the Black Fleet?” A queen capable of bringing her people from the literal point of extinction to conquering the known world, with a team of advisors and tacticians forgetting about a major armed force whose betrayal and push for conquest was well known? That’s like “The President of the United States forgot they were at war with China who had dispatched their fleet to attack Washington.” And then to have a ballista, fired from the pitching deck of a sailing ship, and hitting not only a moving target but a flying one? No one in history has ever shot a ballista at a moving flying target, to my knowledge, then pull in the wind and the waves.

I really only picked on Bran in particular because that was the ending-ending. From top to bottom it was absolutely terrible with every authorial decision worse than the last.

Like I said, I think GRRM painted himself into a corner. I think he gets some of the blame, because the show runners are obviously nowhere in the league of GRRM when it comes to story creation, and I don’t know how involved he was at that point. I don’t know if he skimmed a paragraph and signed off or what. Honestly, I don’t think even George knows how to finish his story because he kept adding one more thing. He’s a mature writer and gifted author, but I don’t have a competing hypothesis right now.

I do blame the showrunners for deliberately turning out an absolute piece of crap just to finish the thing even after being offered additional seasons by HBO. It was the worst example of deus ex machina I’ve ever seen.

“Who has a better story than Bran the Broken? Let’s make him king!”

Okay, not happy in the moment, but it was supposed to be. I’m still mad about it. Of all the shows I’ve re-marathoned, I’ve never even been tempted to redo GoT. It was like S8 was so bad it went back in time and ruined the entire rest of the show. I can’t even entertain watching any spinoffs.

I may buy the rest of the series as novels (ha) but even then it will be with trepidation.

businesspost.ie

I wonder if it leaked from one of their support centers in Ireland.

The point isn’t to disguise them. The point is to call attention to their country’s misdeeds by refusing them the honor of flying their colors. Perhaps the individual athletes should still win medals, but the IOC wouldn’t assign the credit to Russia, who would not be eligible for them.

One. Ping. Only.

I would say that, like chatgpt, agent smith managed to be not entirely wrong but also not right.

Yes, human beings are absolutely massacring life on the planet - the only planet that we know has life on it. I have a whole hours long spiel on the potentials for extraterrestrial life which I’ll spare you, but it’s truthful to say that, as far as we know, we’re all there is. Does that matter? That’s something that people (who are the only beings we know of who ask questions like that) will have to answer. As of now the answer is between undecided and no.

Anyway, unlike what Agent Smith says, literally everything is trying to do the same thing. If anything, the problem is that we’re exactly like all of those other organisms that are spamming the environment with copies of themselves. All of that fun alcohol we use to manage our perception of our existential crises come from the same dynamic - yeasts reproducing on sugars until they poison themselves with their own waste products, for which we as humans found a useful application.

The key is that when the species co-evolve as part of the same ecosystem, they mutually adapt. When one species invades another ecosystem, the other species there haven’t have had a chance to adapt in evolutionary time and so it sends shockwaves and possibly extinctions throughout the system. Some people believe (with a fairly strong argument) that the disappearance of megafauna - big land animals - followed human radiation over the land masses, and didn’t happen in Africa because all of the big animals co-evolved.

So we started out as an invasive species that just went pretty much everyplace. Were finishing up as a species that has the same kind of tight reproductive loop as those yeast friends, but in doing so we are going to take down a lot of our fellow beings.

What do you believe is organic to Canada (either in the provinces or nationally) and what is driven by US politics?

I’m asking because there often seems to be a lag time where US conservatives will launch a new hate campaign (eg transphobia), and it will start showing up in a significant way six months to a year later in Canadian politics. I don’t know if that’s an artifact of how the US press reports on Canadian news, or if Canadian conservatives use US politics for inspiration and ideas.

I’m going to pretend your question was serious.

Should we allow people with diagnosed psychoses to vote? People with schizophrenia or other psychological conditions?

In the traditional good-and-evil model of the prison system as it exists in the US today, I am very much in favor of allowing prisoners to vote both while in prison and after having served their time. I believe that because I believe that the prison system is fundamentally unjust, that innocent people are jailed, that there is significant racial prejudice constantly driving the system, and that there’s no scientific evidence driven justification for what we do and how we do it. Rubin Carter should have been able to vote. Leonard Peltier should have been able to vote. Until we fix the criminal justice system, I think it’s wrong to deny prisoners the right to vote, and I think we need to make sure their votes are made without coercion and properly registered.

But should we allow someone with a clinically diagnosed psychological condition like schizophrenia to vote? They are wracked by delusions, what does their vote mean? For me, it goes down to the assumption of rational agency being part of the justification of a democratic system in the first place, versus the obvious fear of weaponized medical diagnoses being used for political purposes.

I’ve loved what I’ve seen of Lower Decks but my partner has a things against animated tv shows. I haven’t been able to watch it as a series as a result, but everything I hear about it makes me want to find a way to do it.

I believe the law was that a sitting governor could not run for another office while still in office, and the republicans overturned that because they do whatever DeSantis wants. I don’t know if there’s a term limits thing, but I don’t think he’s up against that sort of restriction.

What I’m curious about is the rats abandoning a sinking ship. As Ron starts to tank, are all those yes men he filled the legislature and the courts with going to stop returning his calls because they’re now on Team Trump?

That’s a fantastic question!

There’s archeological evidence that modern humans were far more mobile than we have generally assumed (see eg David Graeber), but we’re talking 10-20k years ago there, which is very recent in evolutionary time where we’d be talking about physical adaptations.

SJ Gould, who was the origin of the spandrel idea, warned frequently against telling “just so” stories to try to reverse engineer the processes of selection that led to this or that feature. However, I do think that the hominid physique enabled multiple things. It has been observed that you won’t ever see a spider or octopus or dolphin moving fire from one place to another. That’s something that bipeds are able to do, and fire is one of the things we think was a key development. It’s the same with generalized tool use. So we can see there may have been multiple selection pressures leading towards bipedalism.

If distance running were truly a spandrel, we’d have to say that it was a consequence of these selective pressures giving rise to the body plan, but wasn’t itself selected for. I’d be more conservative on that one, and hazard a guess that distance running (or efficiency in long distance movement) was also a selective pressure. I just don’t think the evidence is there to say that it was the dominant one at that time.

That would not be the case if ineffective resources dedicated to the prison system were properly redirected in an evidence-driven program designed to isolate people from larger society when they constitute a danger and effect whatever treatments are possible to fix the actual issues, not some misconstrued notion of good and evil. I believe that it is legitimate and moral for society to protect itself from people like this man. You’re just not going to fix anything by sticking him in a dark abusive hole for five years, much less letting him out on parole for a few grand.

This man’s brain is in the exact same condition that it was in when it caused him to react to a child’s statement as if he were sieging Fallujah. That same guy is still walking the streets. Having received some consequences for his action may have attenuated those signal pathways, but may have also exasperated them. He needs a combination of medication to reduce his reactivity and coping mechanisms for realizing when it’s happening. He may never be safe for society, but he’s certainly not safe because he was able to take $5k from his savings to pay bail.

Seriously, what the flying fuck are you talking about?

People who commit acts of violence like this are quite clearly psychotic - whether it’s a mother murdering her children, a teacher threatening to murder a student, a gunman on campus, or someone who gets into fight after fight in bars. There is something broken in their brain.

Let me walk you through this, since your background in the subject is lacking. I will bet you $1000 dollars that if we were to do a neuroimaging on this man, we would see that his amygdala - the part of the brain that senses threat and engages the rest of the brain in a threat response is hypertrophied. His limbic system, which controls emotional response, is primed to react to a level of stimulation so small that probably neither you nor I would notice. His prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for pushing back on those signals through rationality and long term planning is hypotrophied. It is decoupled and unable to do its job. This is the same as we see in violent individuals throughout the prison system.

There are a number of ways this can happen. Having been abused as a child is one. Having been malnourished. Having grown up experiencing social abuse and rejection. It’s more likely than average he suffered a traumatic brain injury at some point in his history. TBIs are about ten times as common in the violent prison population as in society as a whole.

This man’s clinical condition dictated his interpretation of himself, which includes his religion. It’s the same for the gunman. It’s the same for the child abuser.

You will find the same in the brains of Hamas and IDF combatants. You will find, in a time series study, that these conditions become more extreme as a result of combat stress and ptsd. The Palestinian children who are being subjected to this massacre will display these same symptoms. The inner city kids in the US who grow up in a culture of systemic racism and violence show these same symptoms.

If you’re the kind of person who ascribes this kind of behavior to someone being an “evil” person or having an “evil” ideology, I strongly suggest you read some textbooks on neuropsychology and behavioral science.

Okay, this is only barely related to what you're suggesting, but I always found it amusing. I went through a “detective” phase as a kid and got a bit obsessed.

I read an account of a man who thought he had that kind of thing figured out. He used rubber bands to cut off the blood supply to his fingertips, then used a razor to repeatedly scrape off the skin in order to eliminate his fingerprints before launching his criminal career.

He was caught and identified because the scar patterns on his fingertips were unique fingerprints.