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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • I’d bet either just fines, a suspended sentence or if there is a custodial sentence that it will explicitly be delayed not to begin until Jan 21, 2029. Pretty sure there’s something somewhere about not being able to use law enforcement powers to interfere with the ability of Congress/the Presidency/SCOTUS to do their appointed jobs. Otherwise the Chief of the Capitol Police would be the most powerful legislator in the country, by simply holding legislators he opposes for questioning any times there’s an important vote.




  • …and yet they’ve had power before - several times, including once with it being literally this dipshit - and haven’t burned it all down to gain power yet.

    But then this election is different, it’s the most important election of our lifetimes, just like the Democrats have said about every other election since at least 2004. Down to the literal phrase “the most important election of our lifetimes.”

    The reality is both major parties benefit from the system, and both market based on fear because they don’t have anything positive to offer voters that isn’t an outright lie that the voters know is an outright lie. The big difference is the the GOP markets on fear of the other and the Dems market on fear of the GOP.


  • Tusday was maybe the best a thousand years ago but who cares?

    Closer to two hundred years ago, since the law in question was passed in 1854. But the point was it’s that way for a reason, and that reason was a good reason at the time it was done. It seems so weird now because of social change that has since made it inconvenient.

    It can also be changed if Congress wanted to, as it’s just a regular law and not part of the Constitution or something else that would be harder to change.



  • It’s on Tuesday because that was actually convenient with the flow of business at the time. Most were Christian and wouldn’t work or travel on Sunday if possible, it often took a day’s travel to get to the nearest town with a polling place, and Wednesday was market day.

    If Sunday and Wednesday are right out and you need a day’s travel time (which also can’t be Sunday or Wednesday) you’re basically left with Tuesday or Friday. And if you’re going to be in town for the market anyways then Tuesday makes more sense.

    It is in November because that’s after the biggest harvests, but not so far after that the weather is likely to be rough. And it’s the Tuesday after the first Monday so that it can’t overlap with All Saints Day.

    On the upside it could be changed with a regular old law, it doesn’t require an amendment or anything.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyz...
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    19 days ago

    Do you or have you ever worked in science? I did for a bit and that was not my impression.

    I imagine it depends heavily on the field. In some fields there are ideas that one can’t seriously study because they’re considered settled or can’t be studied without doing more harm than any believed good that could be achieved. There are others subject to essentially ideological capture where the barrier to publish is largely determined by how ideologically aligned you are (fields linked to an identity group have a bad habit of being about activism first and accurate observation of reality second).



  • instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.

    imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can’t even tell what’s real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.

    There’s an ad blocker that does exactly this. Called Ad Nauseam. Chrome blocked it from their store super fast, then blocked it from being installed in Chrome from 3rd party sites, then blocked known versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode. I used to run it set to a low percentage - if I “clicked” every ad they’d know to throw my data out, but if I click say 3% of them…


  • In the modern day or historically? And would the perpetrator in this case be a man or a woman?

    Because I can point you to an interview from about a decade ago where a prominent researcher of sexual assault (as in she coined the term “date rape” and is the origin of the 1 in 4 number you see sometimes) reacts in utter disbelief to the idea that a woman could rape a man, and when given an example where the man is drugged into compliance declares that situation to not be rape but just “unwanted contact”.

    In the UK, a woman cannot commit rape by law unless she is trans (rape requires the perpetrator to penetrate the victim with the perpetrator’s penis, cis women simply lack the equipment).

    In the US the definitions aren’t that bad, but they’re close. The FBI redefined rape a few years back in a way that allowed for the possibility of a woman committing it, but is also phrased in a way that implies only the penetrating party can rape.





  • I didn’t say it necessarily was or should be, but it’s definitely closer to the line. Signing a meaningless petition that you support your 1A and 2A rights is a lot farther from voting than making a plan to vote is.

    The only closer example I can think of was that Fuel the Vote thing a while back where one city in PA set up “satellite election offices” that had all the functions you’d associate with a polling place (you could go in, register, receive your ballot, fill it out and turn it in all in one go) but technically weren’t and so didn’t need poll watchers and other things required of polling places. So people set up stands giving away free food in a clear attempt to lure people in to vote, but since they technically gave you the food whether or not you voted and weren’t giving it to people in line at a polling place (because giving it to you if you are in line to vote is giving it to you because you are going to vote and would step across that line) it wasn’t technically illegal.



  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtomemes@lemmy.worldMAGAts be all ...
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    1 month ago

    I think the difference in geography makes a, well, difference. It’s just a lot of people stuck in tiny towns that are several miles long in one direction and around 150 yards in the other, most of them up different hollows or branches of hollows. Mass transit that’s actually workable would be difficult. Hell, I used to date a woman who was a social worker who did in home adult education and more than a few of her clients had directions to get to them that involved things like turning off the road to drive several miles up a creek bed, because neither federal, state, nor county considered it a place worth running a road to.

    I kinda think running a ferry line that went up and down river and across, with each line going from one set of locks to the next with a shuttle to take you from one side of the locks to the other and local busing could work, but only for the places on the Kanawha. But even then going from where I used to live to Charleston would look something like bus->ferry->shuttle->ferry->bus. Going to be hard to make that look attractive compared to a 20 min drive.

    And mind you I actually like mass transit. The times I’ve been to Boston I literally just grab a 7-day pass for the T and take it everywhere, but something like it just doesn’t seem practical given the geography and population distribution here.