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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • No, stop dismissing this as “just a distraction.” Just his comments alone already violate the sovereignty of several independent nations and should not be trivialized.

    Control of the Arctic circle is a very real strategic goal, and one that Putin has had his eye on for decades. Currently, Greenland and Canada are the only controlling interests in the region with oil drilling moratoriums in the Arctic. Controlling those countries’ territories and improving relations with Russia are completely congruent efforts toward that goal.

    If there’s anything we should have all learned about trump so far, it’s not to dismiss anything he says as just a joke. Sure, there’s damaging scandals to distract from, but that doesn’t mean this is just theater.


  • According to their narrative, he has already been shown in court to have MS-13 affiliations in two separate court cases. Just a quick trip through “no saint fallacy” land and to them it justifies bypassing due process.

    The muddier truth is that he was ruled to have ties to MS-13 after he was picked up from a Home Depot by Maryland police, which he contested, but the finding was upheld in his US Immigration hearing. The evidence, however, was extremely dubious and introduced by an officer who has since been fired and an informant who linked Abrego Garcia to a gang chapter in an area where he’s never lived. You can look into the details more (the Wikipedia article is good), but the point is that those two technically legal findings of fact, dubious as they may be, are enough for the USAG to insist that he’s already had his day in court and shift the conversation away from the fact that he’s never actually been accused or convicted of a crime and that he had a withholding of removal status applied by an immigration court.

    As long as they have “but the court said he was a gang member” to lean on, they’ll never engage with you on your “but it violates due process” turf.





  • I think it’s really dangerous to keep dismissing the Greenland talk as a distraction. We have learned the lesson dozens of times before not to dismiss anything he says because it’s just “crazy talk.”

    Taking control of Greenland and Canada would give a US-Russian alliance complete control over the Arctic circle, which has been a tactical goal of Putin’s for decades.

    The day could come very soon when the US will take military action against Europe on behalf of Russian interests, and the rest of the world should take it seriously and prepare.









  • It’s almost difficult to believe Kant wasn’t just pulling a Schrödinger and proposing a ridiculous thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of genuinely holding those views.

    The idea that morality exists only as an intrinsic quality of an action, regardless of context or consequence, is more theology than philosophy. It’s useless to the point of harm to anyone faced with a world beyond a university or a monastery.


  • Yep, but the states with sales tax get tired of getting cheated out of their tax revenue. The specific example where I saw this was a major hardware store chain in Oregon (no sales tax) right near the border of Washington (6.5% sales tax). They asked everyone “Washington or Oregon” at the register and checked ID for anyone who said Oregon.

    Quick search says that Washington considers it a “sales and use” tax, so anything purchased out of state, but intended for use in Washington is supposed to be taxed. Kinda messed up, really.





  • Well said.

    I get Jon Stewart’s position and agree with nearly all of his criticisms, but I think the biggest thing he’s not acknowledging in his “why can France and the UK do this but we can’t?” argument is that this would absolutely not be confined to just the Democratic Party. Literally every step of the process would be decried as election fraud, cheating, “the steal of the century” etc. by republicans. If they got pissed enough to attempt an insurrection in 2020 when there was absolutely no credible evidence of fraud, just think where things will go if there’s this whole slew of unprecedented last-minute decisions that are nearly impossible to reconcile with every individual states’ laws. I’m not saying we have to bow to repubs demands, but the more excuses they have to claim anything isn’t above board, the greater the risk that the “stolen election” narrative gains traction beyond the far right.

    We’ve spent the last 4 years witnessing how slowly our legal system works on huge matters like this. By the time the dust settles on all of the legal challenges, the resulting chaos will have already rendered the decisions nearly irrelevant.