AutistoMephisto

Exactly. You get what you give. You give the bare minimum to society, and society will give it right back. You want more, give more. Go help your community. Take out your elderly neighbor’s recycling. Volunteer at your local shelters/soup kitchens. Attend some local events. Sit in on city council meetings. When I moved out of my small town a couple years ago, I learned that real life is a lot like online forums. You have to lurk before you can post. Learn the language, the local etiquette and taboos. Watch the people in your neighborhood, their interactions. Blend into the background, and observe. Talk little, hear and see much.

Exactly. This is a conservative-majority SCOTUS saying, “We decided long ago what we were going to do about this issue and many others. Nothing you can say will change our course. This conversation is over.”

The problem is the Federalism. Individual States have legislatures of their own, with, AFAICT, unchecked power to pass whatever laws they want within their borders. Congress, when it works, can only pass laws that regulate commerce between States, ensure citizens can move freely between States, collect taxes from those States, and other things.

But again, when a State with a conservative legislature has control, they can enact parts of Project 2025, but only within their borders. They can’t force other States to follow suit unless they want SCOTUS involved.

Eyeball every single purchase the Israeli government makes. If they start buying Zyklon B or any of its precursors, and building showers in these camps, then we know. I guess when they said “Never again” after WW2 they meant “Never again, to us.”

Disney winning sets a precedent that will ultimately lead to vigilante justice by necessity.

If Disney wins, then our “justice” system does not work and cannot be trusted, thus leading people to doing what they need to just to survive when every company starts using that clause to prevent us from holding them responsible for anything at all.

And if that’s the case, I guess I need to dig out my mask and cape, and get back to work as a crime fighter.

It’s funny. I have a blog post from Ken Arneson who talks about “The Right to be an Asshole” and here’s how he defines an asshole:

An asshole is a selfish person whose selfishness causes foreseeable indirect collateral damage to the people around them.

He goes on:

Assholes take risks that provide upside to themselves, but transfer the downsides of those risks to other people.

But the true test case for the limits of freedom is the asshole. Philosophically speaking, assholes walk the line between intentions and consequences. Assholes form the boundary between freedom and control.

Assholes don’t intend to do direct harm. They just don’t think about, and/or care about, and/or believe, and/or comprehend, that their actions can or will have negative consequences for other people beyond their direct intentions.

He goes on to recount the tale of COVID Patient 31 from Seoul, South Korea. Shortly after receiving her diagnosis, she decided to seek comfort at church. Hundreds of deaths and thousands of infections were traced back to her through contact tracing. So, now we come to intentions vs. consequences. Patient 31 wasn’t intending to make anyone sick or die, she was merely seeking comfort through faith. Any reasonable non-asshole could have told her and probably did tell her, that attending church while infected would cause others to be infected and possibly die. How should this asshole be judged? If we judge her by her intentions, then she’s as much a victim as anyone. But if we judge her by her consequences, then she’s a mass murderer.

So the question we have to ask as a free society is: What the fuck do we do about assholes?

Assholes have a very clever trick that allows them to keep being assholes.

If you try to stop them from being an asshole, they will declare you to be an asshole who, although perhaps intending to prevent some bad thing from happening, causes harm by denying some very fine people, who have no intention of harming anyone, their freedom. So who’s the real asshole here, anyway?

At least Biden allows the protests to happen. Under Trump, the first protest would be the last as he would immediately mobilize the National Guard and authorize the use of lethal force to suppress it.