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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I could not disagree more about Contact. I read the book first. I found it to be an incredibly realistic depiction of what contact with alien life might look like. The clashing of world powers, science, and religion are central themes. The movie slimmed down the story as you would expect, but they completely changed the message at the end. The book ends with Ellie finding actual evidence for some divine being which eliminates her conflict with faith. The world governments had already been forced to cooperate much more. Now with the final conflict resolved, it’s implied that humanity can move forward in a more unified direction. The movie has her just believe in God, more or less. The Christians were right…











  • the Biden impeachment… zero evidence, no specific crime identified.

    Biden has not been impeached. There is an upcoming inquiry which is tasked with investigating Biden’s potential business dealings with foreign nations. The purpose is to gather evidence and identify crime if appropriate. Hot take: if there is evidence of a crime, he should be impeached. I think the inquiry is largely political but if they do find evidence of a crime, it should be publicly known.

    Overall, I don’t think we should be fighting fire with fire. Then we’re just sinking to their level. If my political opponent is doing illegal things, let them stand trial. Trump has a ton of indictments meant to bring about justice. I just think the legal process is too slow for the left to feel satisfied right now. Give it time.


  • The take is nuts. The amendment clearly applies to all state and federal politicians, judges, and beurocracts. It seems silly that it wouldn’t apply to the highest position as well, even if a literal interpretation wouldn’t include the president. The court agreed with that interpretation.

    During the civil war, the president was Lincoln. Obviously he’s not involved in insurrection. As a result, the amendment didn’t clearly include the president. After the civil war, the government officials of the Confederacy was a matter of public record. So you obviously didn’t require them all to stand trial before barring them from office. The amendment was written to keep confederate officials from regaining power. It was general enough to include any insurrection. Now we’re in territory the amendment wasn’t directly written for so it makes sense to interpret it with the original intent in mind. The standard for insurrection isn’t clearly defined so the courts are exercising their ability to interpret it. If they didn’t have this ability, any gun control legislation would require an amendment.

    In all of the indictments Trump has received relating to the election, he hasn’t been indicted for insurrection. Which tells me the prosecutors don’t feel they can prove it in a criminal court. I believe even Trump is innocent until proven guilty. Rule of law should trump political ideals.


  • I mentioned in another comment but I think conviction should be the bar. During reconstruction, we bypassed due process on this because it obviously applied to anybody holding office in one of the seceding states. Now that we’re in territory the amendment wasn’t directly written for, it’s appropriate to review the interpretation.

    One of the arguments of the defense was that the specific wording of the amendment meant it didn’t apply to the President. If we go with the specific wording of the amendment, we get pretty far from the intended effect of the amendment. The court agreed that the amendment applied to the president despite some discrepancies, but disagreed on whether due process would be violated by limiting the ballot.



  • Reposting my comment from another thread. Remember to bee nice:

    Personally, I don’t think Trump should be on any ballot because he has a history of undermining democracy. It’s self-defeating for a democracy to allow non-democratic actors to participate.

    That said, I also agree with the dissenting opinion. Without a conviction of insurrection, a court shouldn’t be able to limit democratic participation. That would be denying a person due process. I suspect the supreme court will see it that way too.

    If you disagree with me, just imagine how this precedent could be used by the right against a left-leaning candidate. If democracy is limited without a conviction of insurrection, you’ll see this applied to candidates on very shaky grounds.


  • The more I think about it, Warframe is a bad use case. What would give the NFT power would be the game recognizing it which is still a central authority. DE would be better served by implementing an API that the market could use to make trades.

    I think the best use case for NFTs doesn’t really exist yet. The “NFTs don’t solve any problem” argument is limiting your imagination to problems that have already been solved. I think at some point a type of game or software will emerge with no central authority. Maybe a FOSS project with lots of popular forks or a connected network of games from different developers. In this environment, ownership of a digital asset may be something that’s good to transfer between instances or trade between users without having to get all the developers to agree on who gets to control the market.