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SatanicNotMessianic @ SatanicNotMessianic @lemmy.ml
Posts
4
Comments
930
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • There’s a reason why republicans donate to the Green Party candidates. That’s how we got Bush (and Trump, tbh).

    On the flip side, we got Clinton because of Ross Perot.

    Do you know what didn’t happen? The major parties didn’t look at their third party rivals and decide they needed to change their policies. Protest votes do not work.

    In 2012 I voted for Jill Stein. Jill fucking Stein may be the literal worst presidential candidate I’ve ever voted for. I mean, worse people have run. KKK grand wizard David Duke ran. Donald Trump ran. But Stein is definitely the worst, most idiotic person I voted for. I did it because Obama was going to win my state, no questions asked. If I were in a purple or even a red state, I’d never have voted for her. I just wanted to send a signal about Obama’s policies being too far to the right. Obviously, that did not work.

    Hell, it doesn’t work even when they lose the election with vote splitting. All of the party post-mortem analyses say that they lost because they needed to be more centrist.

  • As part of the deal, she will serve six years of probation, will be fined $6,000 and will have to write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents. She also agreed to testify truthfully against her co-defendants at future trials.

    They gave her what barely amounts to a slap on the wrist. I hope they did so in exchange for some pretty damning testimony.

  • The greatest example of this was McCain’s thumbs down vote on them killing Obamacare. There’s an old saying among lawyers that you don’t ask a witness a question that you don’t already know the answer to, and the congressional equivalent should be that you don’t hold a vote you don’t know you’re going to win. The whip and party leadership should have figured out how everyone is planning to vote before even calling the question. Instead, they have to vote 15 times to get the last guy in, and now he’s out again because he had to capitulate to the party’s extremists who are simply lobbing bombs at this point.

  • Constructive dismissal was advised as a suit by an employment lawyer representing Twitter employees in California in a published article when Musk ordered employees whose employment offers specified work from home needed to work in the office. It’s a hostile change to the work environment that is alleged to encourage employees to quit, as indicated by the messages saying that people who do not return to office will be considered to have quit.

    I mean, you’re not necessarily wrong, and I’m sure Elon hopes you’re right. But we will have to see how it plays out. The fun part is that CA law specifies that some types of employee cases have to be tried individually rather than collectively.

  • As a Californian, I am fully used to being horrifically underrepresented proportionally in national politics, danke. Tax our billionaires. Give us healthcare. Make us use public transportation and drive on better roads. Do your worst. I triple dog dare you.

  • I’m blocked from the article, but as someone who used to work in the industry I’m going to hazard what I think is a safe guess, and which is an under discussed aspect of intelligence.

    If you put 5 cctv cameras in the worst parts of the city, you can pay someone $20/hour and have them monitored 24/7. The person’s one job is to call in a crime when it occurs and vector in police. As long as they’re not terminally addicted to instagram, you have that area covered.

    Bump that up to 10,000 cameras and you run into a problem. You’re not going to hire 2000 people to watch them. You’re going to try to come up with something clever, maybe, that allows you to track back to a crime that was otherwise reported, but real time responses are out the window.

    Even those that supported the development of the levels of surveillance that Snowden exposed have to acknowledge that looking at everything means you’re looking at nothing. The signal to noise ratio goes to absolute shit. It’s actually worse than useless because you’re thinking you’re monitoring, but you’re really not because you’re drowning in noise. It’s like they teach every yuppie in B school - if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. There’s a known phenomenon in defense and intelligence to center in on the gee whiz aspects of technology and lose sight of the actual mission.

    I’m not a conspiracy theorist and as much as I dislike the current government of Israel, I don’t think this was some kind of nefarious plot. I think it was a massive fuck up thats going to have a body count in the tens of thousands and that will change the history of the region for a decade.

  • If people were hired (say, in 2020) under the condition that they’re allowed to work from home, this might be considered constructive dismissal - that is, forcing an employee to quit in a way that is equivalent to firing them. The employees are then entitled to the normal rules for unemployment, and potentially severance pay, unused vacation cashout, and so on.

    I think Musk is facing several lawsuits along those lines, but might be moving to settle because the cost of arbitration would potentially bankrupt the company.

  • Honestly, it could be a real power move for some blue state republicans to flip parties. If they could pull a Reagan and say that the Republican Party has changed but they haven’t, they could take both the democratic voters and centrist republicans while losing the MAGAs, and still carry their district.

    That would be something for the history books.

    1. It has nothing to do with bots. Bots were his way of trying to get out of being forced to make good on his legally binding offer to buy Twitter. He goes on and on about bots, but he’s stopped reporting metrics about monetizable users and just started reporting made up metrics like number of user-seconds and crap like that.
    2. The funny thing would be to use a VPN to simulate traffic from NZ so it looks like they try accessing it and then just give up.
  • Every democracy that I can think of has laws against hate speech, including all of the ones that score higher on the freedom index than the US. Outlawing hate speech increases freedom. All of the questions about who gets to define what constitutes hate speech and where to draw the line have already been answered. Different countries have arrived at different answers, but the US clinging to the right to continuously blast hate and weaponize far-right ideologies into terrorist attacks in the name of “liberty” is idiotic. A Nazi group marching down Main Street chanting about how they want to kill the Jews doesn’t make society more free. It terrorizes society. It makes it less free.

    And in any case the US regulates the crap out of speech. Theres no lack of regulation as to what constitutes legal and illegal speech. There’s laws against libel and slander. Many on the far right - including Donald Trump have both taken very liberal advantage of those laws and have called for them to be made stronger. They are the ones calling the press the enemy of the people. We also have laws against making false statements, against deceptive advertising, against counterfeiting, against passing bad checks. We have laws against verbal assault. We have laws against making terroristic threats. We pass those laws because speech can and does produce harm. If you falsely and maliciously accuse someone of rape, if you write a bad check and defraud someone out of their car, if you call in a bomb threat, you are causing harm with speech.

    250-odd years ago, they were still figuring that shit out. We’ve had a couple of centuries since then to better understand democracy and political dynamics.

    Somehow, it’s only hate speech that people want to hold up as the linchpin of liberty. Hate speech decreases freedom because it increases fear and because it empowers the enemies of freedom. It is the paradox of tolerance. No country is perfect and everyone is dealing with a bizarrely well funded and strangely internationalist far right, but at least hate speech laws offer the opportunity for at least some level of control.

    We put the power in the hands of the government to criminalize, well, basically everything we consider criminal, including speech.

  • I’m not all that much of a sailor, but I’m pretty sure lashing yourself to a mooring is absolutely the wrong metaphor here. A mooring is a solid point you tie your ship to while (for instance) in dock. They’re like those metal cleats you throw your ropes around. A ship lashed to a mooring is safe (ish).

    What I think they meant is that they lashed themselves to the mast or the wheel. Both of those are metaphors for wanting to go down with the sinking ship.

  • I suggest you re-read the posts you’re replying to. The problem is not that a person has an opinion, the problem is not being able to choose where and when to express what degree of opinion and still think you should have a position at a white shoe kind of firm.