Hold up, because this gives me an idea.

Let’s embrace the celebration. Let’s lean into honoring the man they claim Charlie Kirk was. Make remembering him all about the tolerance for debate and discussion, the respect for minorities and women, the traditional values of freedom of speech. In honor of Kirk, speak truth to power, and challenge the conventional ideas.

Nevermind, my mind isn’t limber enough for all thos gymnastics.

We don’t need a smoking gun. Trump has smoking guns in his hands at all times on national television broadcasts. He keeps firing them in every direction, and people are being maimed or killed.

Not exactly what you’re asking, but Cabin in the Woods is like a love letter to all horror movies. It drops references and homages left and right, making horror movie tropes actual plot points, including bizzare foreign horror movies that aren’t explained at all. The more you know about horror movies, folklore, and monster cinema, the more you will understand the movie.

If you haven’t seen it, go see it now. I won’t say anything else.

Can’t come in unless invited, don’t have a reflection, sensitive (or deathly allergic) to light, garlic, and holy water, these things are rarely explained.

Senior devs love vibe coding because they have the knowledge and skills to recognize and fix errors. They hate it because it makes morons think they don’t need the knowledge and skills to recognize and fix errors.

For what it’s worth, Vantablack isn’t a pigment, it’s a process for applying carbon nanotubes that absorb light. They don’t sell the “paint” part by itself because it requires special equipment and it finicky. They don’t sell it because then a bunch of social media influencers would try to spray their bathrooms with the stuff and make a bunch of videos about how it doesn’t live up to the hype.

The owner of the exclusive license to use it for art might be a douche who uses the licensing to make himself feel powerful, but there is a justifiable explanation for why the licensing exists in the first place.

Isn’t that how you’re supposed to do it?

If he talked to you about it, you probably would have talked him out of it. Tells me deep down he knew it was stupid, but he wanted to do it.

I would talk to him about that part of it, help him recognize the choice he made to ignore your voice of reason in his own head.

I wouldn’t punish him for it, especially because he came to you to talk about it, but he’s getting closer to the age when he has to really pay attention to that voice in his head because you won’t be with him for every decision. Although, my kids often act like having to talk to me about things is punishment enough.

Well that’s the trick, isn’t it? The people who rule presume consent, but what they are really expecting is compliance. Your compliance is presumed consent. You can revoke your compliance any time you like, but the rulers will respond to noncompliance with force.

There’s a process within the law, and there’s a process where we replace the current law with something else. Within the law, we can vote for representatives who will impeach the current corrupt justices and approve new ones who are hopefully not corrupt. Let’s call that option A.

Option B is the total overthrow of the government, which is ridiculous to even consider, but it’s the alternative you’re hinting at. Denouncing the SCOTUS doesn’t change the ruling government in any way. Society is built on the idea that we all more or less agree to be ruled in exchange for fair rules and national defense. In a democracy, you have the appearance of agency, but you cannot simply withdraw consent to be ruled. The difference between democracy and fascism is that fascism explicitly defines violence as the means of control, while democracy merely implies that violence will be used to keep order. Once a democratically elected ruler decides to become fascist, there is no remedy but violence.

To wit, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.

That said, I do not think we’re quite there yet. I have no doubt Trump will try to go all in to remain in power, but I don’t think he actually has enough followers to pull it off.

But that still leaves the corrupt justices on the bench. We need to focus on elections for representatives willing to impeach corrupt justices. If you think that process is too slow, consider that a violent revolution would probably take decades of bloodshed, and there’s no guarantee we don’t get some other despot as a result. Violence is not the answer to this question.

The water wars will probably kill us off before we run out of oil.

No, I’m sorry, the answe is “profit.” The US has a lot of natural gas, and the people who force it out of the ground bought enough politicians to build pipelines everywherr so we could sell gas to more people. Electric and heat pumps are far more efficient, but the cost per btu of heat is so cheap for natural gas that it doesn’t make sense to switch to electric even when the energy costs are low, and the cost to install a heatpump or geothermal might reduce monthly costs, but it would be decades before it pays for itself. Most people don’t expect to live in a house long enough to reap the benefits of more efficient investments.

“Effective” is a relative term. Going meatless won’t fix the underlying problems that allowed factory farming to destroy the world. Why aren’t electric cars mandated? Why do we pipe natural gas into homes? The same shortsighted, profit-motivated decision processes will still exist even if we make better personal choices.

You can just block whole communities and even instances, if you prefer. I use the blocking feature for forums in foreign languages. It’s not like an insult or anything. You can just hide all the F1 and comic book stuff.

I mean, yeah. The centrists run the Democratic party. They aren’t going to relinquish control.

I would say that there’s a lot of work to do in general. Protest voting is like any protest. It’s disruption to draw attention to a problem. It doesn’t solve problems, it isn’t even an attempt to solve a problem. Protest is the last step before violence, and most people aren’t willing to go any further.

The fact that people are willing to protest vote is everybody’s problem. You can’t say the protesters are wrong, or their methods are wrong, or that they don’t have valid concerns.

No third party president will ever succeed at all under the current system.

That’s precisely the way I described it working. The ratchet effect exists because there’s never more progressives willing to leave the party, but some do and the remaining progressive voters weaken their own position with compromise.

Wait, is it milk made by stoats, like goat milk, or milk made from stoats, like oat milk? Which ilk of milk is in the same boat? Do you bilk the stoat out of it’s milk? Or is there a moat of smote stoat passed through silk on a float?

Local parties are generally more in tune with the community. If you live in an area where a progressive party candidate would be viable, the Democrat candidates are probably progressive (or at least claim to be, Shitbag I mean John Fetterman).