• Snot Flickerman
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    6 months ago

    Devil’s Advocate: It’s been needing to be determined since fucking Nixon left office, and our entire government has been waffling about it for 70 years, because it’s a question they don’t actually want answered. It’s only convenient to them now as a reason to give Trump a legal time-out so he can make it to the election without more indictments.

    The District Court in question has already defined official versus unofficial acts, which is part of why the SC released this so late on fucking purpose. Because even though the DC is ready to go with their findings, they’ll have to wait until October to kick it back up the chain to the Supreme Court when Trump inevitably appeals.

    • Flying Squid
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      86 months ago

      It won’t be answered if Trump gets in. I guess that’s the hope.

      • Snot Flickerman
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        6 months ago

        That’s the plan, yes. I think it goes a little farther than “hope” with these guys. They think they can manifest reality.

        We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.

        -Karl Rove

        • Flying Squid
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          56 months ago

          They see 1984 as a manual without recognizing the warnings in Animal Farm.

          • Snot Flickerman
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            6 months ago

            In some ways, you can almost see why trying to “erase” bad ideas is intoxicating, since humans seem endlessly drawn to them.

            It’s like in tech circles, the joke goes that some Sci-Fi writer creates a horrible invention and includes a warning “DO NOT BUILD THE TORMENT NEXUS” and that warning, repeatedly, goes ignored. People are like “but we could make good profit from the Torment Nexus!”

            AI is a good example. “If we don’t make the terrible AI, someone else will, so we have to make the Torment Nexus, errr, I mean AI.”

            But trying to stop all these bad ideas is just Fahrenheit 451 with extra steps.

            • prole
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              16 months ago

              AI is a good example. “If we don’t make the terrible AI, someone else will, so we have to make the Torment Nexus, errr, I mean AI.”

              That mode of thought is a byproduct of capitalism.

              • Snot Flickerman
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                6 months ago

                I think the Soviets and the space race with the USA would prove that the “We have to build it faster, first!” isn’t just a capitalist thing.

                Capitalism incentivizes it, absolutely. To be clear, I’m not making some “it’s human nature” argument, culture plays a huge role. Capitalist culture influences it greatly, but I think humans “racing” to achieve something before another does is outside the scope of just capitalism.

          • @pdxfed
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            36 months ago

            They don’t mind being the pigs, their only driver is to jot be the other animals who suffered with someone else in power.