In small (population-wise) rural areas like that, where positions are running uncontested or only contested in the primary, it’s actually possible individuals could make a difference. But there’s some caveats.

If the area is extremely Republican and would never vote for a Democrat, don’t run as one. Unlike in races like President and Senate, independent and third party are actual choices at this level, they’re not simply false choices.

An individual could find some local issue that matters to a lot of people in the area but seems to be being ignored. Talk to neighbors, local people, etc, figure out what they’re upset about that actually falls under the purview of local or state government, then make that the core of your platform.

As long as you’re not officially listed as a Democrat, you’re not platforming on things that the locals would never vote for (and you probably couldn’t do anything about anyway in the lower office you’re running for) and you’ve actually done some local research and found an issue that a significant number of people in your area are upset about, you actually have a chance. You’d probably lose, but there’s a real chance.

It’s kind of a difficult issue. Jury nullification has been used for both good and bad, with the simplest and most obvious examples being from Civil War type stuff - people who unambiguously broke the law against helping slaves escape have had their verdicts nullified. Good thing. But also people who lynched black people in the south have had their verdicts nullified. Bad thing.

Making sure that verdicts are determined purely based on the law and whether the law was broken means that people need to work to change the law, they can’t just apply the law unevenly by nullifying against some defendants and not against others. So I can see the case for nullification being a bad thing. Ideally, you deal with that by removing or reworking the law so that it doesn’t come to the point of needing nullification.

But, well, reality isn’t ideal. Still, it’s unavoidable - as long as a jury can’t be forced to explain the reasoning behind their verdict beyond insisting ‘I was not convinced of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt’ and as long as a jury verdict of Not Guilty is final and cannot be retried, jury nullification will de facto exist. That said, it’s the entire system not just ‘this judge’ that is attempting to prevent jury nullification from happening. The judge’s question about following the law is boilerplate standard basically everywhere, and it’s a systematic and intentional attempt to weed out potential jury nullifiers.

That’s exactly the reason for those questions. So they can ask ‘would you consider using jury nullification’ without informing people that jury nullification exists.

And also so that if you at some point admit something that sounds like you’re voting not guilty because you disagree with the law, they can kick you off the jury and possibly charge you with perjury.

If you ever find yourself in a jury and intend to nullify, you must not admit it ever: you must maintain simply that you are not convinced by the evidence.

It feels to me like people did unite after those attacks…it was the crazy conspiracy theories about them that really seemed to get the ball rolling as far as division goes.

Thing is, Republicans have been using any crisis and our ‘unite behind leadership’ behavior to fuck us since before Reagan, so I’m not sure it’s really such a bad thing that we stopped ‘uniting’.

Nope, wouldn’t really be in less danger. That’s something that bothers and concerns me, people act like it’s Trump that’s the problem, but he’s really kind of irrelevant. This is the Republican party, this is all Republicans. Trump is not some bizarre outlier, at least not in the sense of the things he wants to do and will push for and enable as President. Every Republican wants those too.

You probably had the same damn book I did, with an illustration of him eating an orange and seeing the wings of a butterfly coming up over it and supposedly realizing they look just like the sails of a ship and so, gasp, the world must be round like this orange!

I don’t usually recommend movies in situations where the solution space isn’t already limited significantly by the context, but 2001 is the one I thought of first upon reading the title, so I suppose there’s at least two of us!

This is what I said to someone who asked a very similar question about the same thing a while back:

‘Females’ is, effectively, a ‘technical term’ you might say, that isn’t used in normal conversation. It’s used specifically in situations where distance from the subject being discussed is intentional. It is the sort of language used in police reports, medical reports and the like…when it’s even being applied to humans at all. Its use is perhaps more common referring to animals; it’s the sort of terminology you’d expect to hear in a nature documentary.

The people trying to push its use are intending to make the subjects - women - sound ‘other’ and separate and alien by referring to them as ‘females’. Not everyone who is picking up this terminology intends it that way, but the connotations are unavoidable because of how language works in common use, and therefore if you don’t intend it that way, you badly need to be made aware of it so you can stop.

The combination of competence, the necessary skills, intelligence, and most importantly, the willingness to sacrifice oneself to effect change is…rare. It’s also uncertain whether results would be positive.

Consider what is needed to pull off ‘focused’ violence - that is to say, assassination of key targets. You need to be sufficiently skilled to manage at least one successful strike. You cannot communicate with people to do this - it’s far too easy to get caught in the modern day. You need supplies and equipment, and sure, guns are somewhat easy to get in the US, but they aren’t the only thing you need. You need access and information, some of which is public, but some of which can be hard to get, and can draw attention by being sought (keep in mind algorithms are pattern matching to find this stuff).

Then consider the potential outcome of these actions. As mentioned before, organizing is impractical since it would mean getting caught before doing anything with much higher probability. Regardless of your skills, the chance of getting caught approaches 100%. You may be able to take out two or three key senators, or if you’re very good and very lucky, a few supreme court justices, before being caught. At this point you will either be imprisoned, or you commit suicide to avoid this fate.

And what’s the result? Violence of this sort to effect change is hard to pull off, but even harder to predict the outcome of. If you’ve succeeded in all plausible goals, you might manage to change the makeup of the supreme court - that’s probably the best possible outcome you can hope for with this sort of violence, but right now on the gay front, the supreme court shockingly has yet to do anything too bad, so you may not want to provoke that shit. But there are a lot of possible bad outcomes. And as someone smart enough to pull this off, you’re smart enough to see that. It could lead to increasingly strict rules, to retaliation against the group you’re trying to help - it could even be the catalyst to strengthen your opponents position enough to make things worse elsewhere.

The idea of someone killing a bunch of the key bad guys is great, but it has so many impracticalities, and worst of all, such an uncertain and potentially worse outcome that it’s probably just a bad idea overall, even as much as I too sometimes wish someone would just kill some of these motherfuckers already.

Schlock Mercenary. Amazing webcomic, by one of only like 2 webcomic authors that I’m familiar with that have the simple capability of putting out a comic on time (although this no longer applies as the story is finished) and is a fantastic story from beginning to end.

Yet, none of the friends I’ve ever recommended it to have been willing to read it

Honestly, I don’t know for sure since I’m not an expert; my reasoning was the hope that being able to examine the entire line of advancement would allow the necessary technical knowledge to be extracted and duplicated. I knew that just bringing the latest one would definitely do nothing.

Highest ranks, yes. It’s actually reasonable for the Senate to pay attention to who is getting promoted to the highest ranks. Every rank, no. It is my understanding that we are talking about every officer rank in the military needing confirmation by the Senate, which is meaningless because the Senate simply cannot pay attention to every one of these. That is precisely why Tuberville is able to hold this up, because it is logistically impossible for the Senate to check on every one of these people.

Basically, every promotion of every officer in the military apparently needs to be confirmed by the Senate.

Normally these are confirmed via unanimous consent - the entire Senate agrees and they’re confirmed with no further procedure.

But any senator can insist that the full normal procedure be followed, which means committee hearings, discussion time, and an actual vote at the end of it. He would not be able to stop them from being confirmed on those votes. But the normal procedure requires a lot of time during which the Senate would be able to do nothing else because the procedural rules require all this discussion and voting time.

Really, the problem isn’t that he had a lot of power; it’s the absurd situation where every single officer in the military needs to be confirmed by the Senate. I’m not sure that made sense in George Washington’s day, much less today with the size of the military.

That’s why most of the stuff is technical or scientific information for the researchers; things that aren’t subject to change, just technical info. The money stuff I would hope to manage in less than 6 months from my arrival, because even in that short time I’d expect a lot to change by the end of it.

It’d just be a question of getting that initial funding off the ground with which to set up my research institution. After that, the few things I don’t release for free should cover expenses.

Sidenote since I didn’t address it in the original reply, taking over the world is impractical even with future knowledge, but as the person in charge of this outfit that would quickly be the world’s most advanced research tank, I’d probably have a lot of influence, which is the best anyone can practically hope for, I imagine. A lot more than the last 25 years of advancement would be needed to actually take over I figure.

Get every flagship CPU and GPU from 2000 to today that I can get my hands on. Also as much open source code as I can get hold of. And especially AI stuff - there’s several fully open source models, so bring those, and as much technical writings on them as possible.

Speaking of which, download every science paper published since 2000 that I can get hold of, in every possible field.

Get as much info on the 2000 election as possible, to hand to Al Gore, see if he can win that election with a solid unassailable margin.

Research stocks, lottery, and everything else I can to get fast money within the shortest possible period of time after I get there, so I can get super rich before the butterfly effect makes predictions impossible, I need billions in seed money and I need it fast.

Then use that money to start a private research group, and hand them all the scientific papers I brought. Get those experts to work studying all this knowledge and figure out what can be turned into practical technology. Turn some of this into profit-making devices to fund continued development, but release as much as possible for free.

Essentially, deluge the world in as much new technology as possible, mostly free and open source, holding back only as much as necessary in order to fund continued research.

And oh jeez the pharmaceutical industry. Release for free every drug made since 2000, so the pharmaceutical industry can’t get their patents in them.

Big list of stuff there, but if I pulled off even half of it, the world would probably be a much better place in 25 years than in my original timeline.

Well the waste of land part doesn’t really matter much cause if we ever did need that land for other things, it’s still there. It’s not as though building a golf course makes that patch of land into an irradiated wasteland that can never be used for anything else again.

Most likely, in my opinion:

Hold you for 24 hours to see if anyone reports a crime and describes you as the perpetrator.

When no one does, find a crime which seems plausible for you, and where they’ve gotten a description that could possibly fit you.

Interrogate you about it, giving you your lawyer of course. Assuming you do not have a solid alibi for that particular crime, there’s a real chance you’ll be charged and eventually convicted.

If you do have a solid alibi, they might keep looking for other crimes to charge you with, or they might give up.

If they give up, they’re likely to charge you with something related to wasting their time, for which you will at minimum have to pay a fine.

Well they did put the quotes in writing, so I could read them.

While that union done fucked up, this ‘decertify the union and then I suppose join some other union maybe’ plan seems incredibly dumb too.

Even a completely shit union is probably better than none at all, which is what you’re likely to get doing it this way. Seems like there should already be a union selected, with the recommendation being to decertify from this one and simultaneously join the new one.

I love a quote I read once in a thing about alignment. “If you fix twenty neighbor’s roofs, you’re Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat the neighbor’s daughter, you’re Jimmy the Cannibal, and no amount of additional carpentry assistance will change that.”