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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Now show me where they’re paying attention to what they can’t do.

    Like, how nobody can just access secure government systems without proper clearance, which the President can’t actually just give without procedure.

    Or even more simply, the fact that Trump is not in fact currently eligible to be President in the first place due to his part in the events of Jan. 6.

    I do not have confidence that they will be stopped by the fact that something is not permitted, because they aren’t being stopped by things that are not permitted, and if this continues for 4 years…there will be nothing left of the system that is supposed stop them.


  • Weight of a shrunk item is approximately its original weight multiplied by 0.00025 (or 1/4000th if you prefer fractions) of the original weight.

    Shrink item doesn’t affect the movement of the item, so it would retain the same velocity, it would just be bigger. There is precedent for this in, for example, the reduce person spell, which shrinks a person and all their equipment, but as soon as an item leaves the possession of the shrunken person, it expands to full size (but does not become less accurate or have its range altered in any way).

    However that did remind me of one thing. It wouldn’t work with a projectile weapon. With a projectile weapon, it deals damage based on the weapon that fired it. A thrown weapon would deal damage based on its size at impact. Funny little quirk there.


  • As with most of these things, this doesn’t actually work. Antimagic fields suppress magic inside them, they don’t dispel it. So the bullet would be unshrunk while inside the field (and the field would affect the bullet while it’s still inside the gun’s barrel, so that would turn out really badly) and then instantly shrink again as soon as it exits the field.

    Ironically, this is actually just an overly complicated way to do something the spell alone can achieve. You can end shrink item with a command word from the caster. It would require two people working together, but if the caster readies to give the command immediately after the gun is fired, the bullet would be unshrunk midflight and have the desired effect!





  • Primaries are only rigged in that yes, the rules and the entire framework is built to benefit those currently in power, but that is less rigged than the general is against a third party, which is to say, totally, absolutely, and unassailably rigged. Proclaiming it impossible because it’s rigged is silly when you’re advocating for instead competing in one that is far, far more rigged and has far more structure to prevent any upsets.

    We have never actually won a primary and had them ignore it. They use their structural advantages as much as they can, but if we push hard enough to overcome those advantages, they don’t just nullify the election and go with their candidate. We do get people like Ocasio-Cortez in there from time to time, when people actually show up to the primaries enough to flip it to the more progressive candidate. If we got enough candidates like her in, not just in congress but state houses and such too, we’d actually start getting places.

    Now the bribes and money on the corporate side, nothing we can do about that - we have to overcome it so that we can get officials in place that will do something about it.

    Now lemme put it this way. I live in bumfuck Ohio where there’s no chance of a progressive candidate being elected. But I still vote in every primary. People who live in places where there is more of a chance of doing something need to be as diligent as I am, if not more, damnit.


  • No, a third party is non viable. But the right move would have been exactly what the crazy right wingers have done with the Republicans. Get organized and primary the fuck out of the people blocking things.

    The “tea party” gave us the blueprint, but we’ve been too dumb and lazy to follow it. When they didn’t give us the public option with Obamacare, every primary since then should have been about cleaning house of the corporatist, establishment Democrats and replacing them with real progressives. But since we’re too lazy and dumb to vote in primaries in mass numbers, their establishment people keep sailing to victory.



  • The time to do this would’ve been immediately after it was discovered that Trump took classified documents and had them in his home during visits from foreign agents.

    The Republicans would’ve howled about it, but I think it could have been done, at that moment. Like, have the first news about it not be talking about the documents, but simply that former President Trump has been detained and will not be allowed to communicate with anyone but his legal representation, because of suspicion of potential coded communication to enemy agents.


  • At the end of Obama’s term wouldn’t have made any difference because by then McConnell was committed to holding the seat open for the next Republican.

    But people called for her to resign back during the middle of Obama’s presidency, when the Democrats controlled the Senate, and her hubristic old ass decided to fuck everyone else by hanging onto power and prestige and trying to be even more historically important.

    Woman had a bigger ego than Trump and Musk, and I really hope that historical opinion of her fucking remembers that.


  • This is not quite accurate. The vice president must be eligible to be the President, not to be elected President. The 22nd amendment has some very specific language.

    “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

    It prevents someone from being elected President, but does not make the person ineligible to be the President since it only restricts that one method of gaining the office. A person can definitely become President through succession even if they have served their full two terms already…at least by the constitution as written.



  • Up until the court decided to start ignoring centuries of legal tradition that is the bedrock of our legal system and threw out stare decisis the decision was actually more secure than a specific law.

    Any law codifying it can be challenged on many grounds, especially the 10th amendment. It could easily have been struck down as unconstitutional because the federal government has no power to pass a law affecting this issue, since the constitution doesn’t grant it.

    Only a constitutional amendment would have been likely to survive a court willing to do what this one has done, and there is zero possibility the Democrats could have passed one.




  • Every former president tends to be called president still quite often. If you look up news articles about most former presidents you’ll find a pretty solid split between just saying ‘President X’ and specifying ‘former President X’.

    It might be related to a military rule where retired officers get to keep using their rank title unless discharged in negative ways. Or maybe it’s just sort of traditional.




  • Yeah, while there was mockery it didn’t come from ‘official’ sources. They called him serious names and didn’t ridicule him. They made it clear he was dangerous, but they also gave him respect like a serious candidate, contender, opponent, rival.

    It probably would have worked from the beginning to just laugh at him, IF it was coming from the actual political establishment. If Clinton had essentially based her entire campaign around ‘hahah…oh wait you’re serious? Let me laugh harder.’ there’s a good chance he would’ve crashed and burned before ever getting off the ground, I think.