No, but having it be justified by a portion of the population with violent tendencies makes it easy to avoid getting in trouble with the law for doing. You say that you’re getting rid of worker safety programs and bringing back child labor, and people start asking questions. You say that the children yearn for the mines but the woke won’t let them, and half the country will start punching elementary teachers for not letting kids get Black Lung.

Basically, it’s a combo of the two. They get to do the things that they want to do anyway, and they get support from a group of people trying to destroy regulations simply for doing it.

You mean the best Christmas movie?

It’s the perfect excuse to cut back on funding expenditures and increase cronyism, and that’s all the justification that they need.

Yeah, pretty much what I was getting at. We live in a country where everybody believes themselves to be the hero in their own Rambo style action movie.

It was also opposed by George Washington on the argument that “A bunch of farmers with guns will never defeat a trained army.” He basically did exactly that, but it took the support of one of the world’s largest super powers at the time in order to do it - France.

Not to say don’t arm yourself. I plan on doing exactly that myself. But don’t expect to be overthrowing the dictatorship to come. There are no resistance groups being armed by the EU here.

Vance is a smarmy piece of shit who will do anything for power

You just described the entire Republican party.

But more to the point, the other side of the coin is that either Trump’s views align with those of his owners, or he’s just as easily manipulated, and either way, he believes himself to be a dictator and acts accordingly. He has no morals and no qualms about breaking the law. He says that people who disagree with him politically should be locked up and talks about how he needs generals like Hitler had. He has been putting people loyal to him in positions of power since day one of his first term. What infighting he has created in the Republican party may slow him down, but it might create more collateral along the way from his cronyism and disregard for rules of politics. At least Vance wouldn’t be ignoring the FBI vetting his appointments and talking about replacing the heads of the FBI with people more loyal to him.

Both are bad for the country, I just don’t know if I can say one would be worse than the other. Vance is the corrupt official while Trump is the Florida man riding the high of who only knows what squared up to fight 5 cops who will probably win the fight.

I’ve been debating this with myself, and my conclusion is that Trump might be worse because Vance is at least a politician. He has some knowledge and “respect” (maybe) for the trappings of the office, whereas Trump gives no shits for rules or regulations and is all too happy to trample on every right and freedom we have.

But who knows, I could go both ways on which would be worse.

It’s like with cults - it’s a source of affirmation that their opinions and emotions are the right ones. It pairs really well with fascism because the fascists give you somebody to blame, and then the Twitter cult content farm tells you that you’re righteous in your hatred.

And that’s also why it’s so hard to break people away from it. To break away, they’d have to recognize and admit that they’re wrong, that everything they’ve done up to that point hasn’t been justified, and that they’ll have to face the consequences of what they’ve done (“are we the baddies?”). After a certain point, the sunk cost fallacy sets in, and people will double down on the cult rather than admit that they were wrong, even when they know it.

Most other countries don’t make you do the math and then guess how much you owe, and give you jail time if you guess incorrectly.

This is like tying a dead rat to your door to keep the plague away.

And north as well. Every county in the state of Massachusetts is currently rated as being in a critical drought right now.

The law makes no distinction between the two. Open marriage? More like 5 years in a federal penitentiary waiting to happen because a cop coveted your wife. It’s your word against their’s unless you want the state to issue permits for sex or something.

What you’re looking for is civil court, which is entirely different from criminal court and works differently as well. And that already exists for cheating on your spouse.

That’s never going to happen. What will happen is that companies will raise their prices slightly higher than the tariffs cost them, fire more of their workforce, and then brag to investors about their most profitable quarter ever. Plus, that would require the tariffs to be on finished products only. I’ve already heard of several companies announcing no Christmas bonuses this year because they need to stock up on materials in anticipation of the incoming tariffs.

And most of the people supporting tariffs thought that they were going to make things cheaper AND that China was going to pay them.

Personally, I prefer Law Abiding Citizen.

And yet these same news organizations reporting on this will conveniently ignore their own culpability in spreading the hateful propaganda for profit.

Tyranny of the Early Birds: Morning People Dictate Our Society

Was trying to find that photo of the woman giving a presentation on how morning people are an oppressive class, found this article from the American Council on Science and Health instead.

“Sorry, that’s above my pay-grade.”

Amazon already has their own pharmacy, btw. They even bought a prescription delivery service a few years back, called PillPack or something. Buying CVS would give them brick and mortar stores for the pharmacy they already run online.

As much as I hate Amazon and their overreach into every sector of the economy, I’d love to see them bring the full might of their lawyers against Musk.

On Barq?

IMO, I think creative people are at the heart of a social media platform. A big part of art is the community aspect of sharing it with others. So they interact with each other as well as create Content ™ for others. This is especially obvious with platforms like YouTube, but even Twitter is like this. If there weren’t people posting photos, drawings, music, game dev posts, and livestreams, Twitter would be a very different place. Creative people are responsible for much of the original content online. Without them, Twitter would basically be news, political rants, and reposted memes.

Twitter was largely considered the best place for artists by process of elimination, and I know plenty of artists were dying for an alternative but didn’t have one. Places like DeviantArt don’t get traffic from the general populace, and Instagram’s algorithm is horrible for discoverability. With Bluesky getting enough people to make it worth the migration, the creative people are moving over, and their followers will join them.

I know the only reason I ever made a Twitter account was because 70% of the people I followed on Tumblr left for Twitter after the porn ban. Hell, Tumblr dropped like 99.7% in value after the porn ban because they drove off almost their entire userbase.