Personally, I don’t think we should allow any men to be president. Just of think of how absurd it is. We keep electing a bunch of testosterone-addled rage junkies to be in charge of the nuclear button. Men are just too emotional to be president, or even leaders in general. They’re just as likely to take off their pants and start waiving their dicks at each other as they are to come up with something that even meets the definition of “policy.” Electing a man a leader is like electing a rabid inbred gorilla hopped up on PCP as a leader.

Men belong in the home. That’s their rightful place. That way they don’t have to spend too much time seeing other men, which only inspires rage reflexes in them. You let two men meet and they start beating their chests and trying to assert dominance over each other, usually while stripping off clothing and pulling out firearms. Men have no place in politics, business, or any field that really matters. Men should be kept in the home where they can’t do too much damage.

But a man as president? Comically absurd. Literal clown world. How could such irrational, angry, emotionally fragile beings ever be elected a leader?

And the US still has millions of slaves to this day, completely legally. We use slaves to fight forest fires. How fucked up is that? Hell, the modern US has managed to create the absurd phenomenon of the full-time employed homeless person. Oh, and and the peak of the USSR? The US trapped millions of people in a hellish nightmare of a legally induced racial caste system.

If you ignore the slavery, the homeless working multiple jobs, and the US’s historic racial caste system, you can make the US sound utopian.

In the US at least, employment discrimination is fine if it’s due to a bona fide requirement of the job. Ie, the person is fundamentally incapable of performing a job even with reasonable accomodation.

An example of reasonable accomodation is a modified computer/desk setup for someone in a wheel chair. They need a bit more room for maneuvering about their workspace. But someone who is paraplegic is perfectly capable of working most office jobs.

Someone in a wheelchair however is fundamentally incapable of performing certain manual labor jobs, and it is perfectly legal to not hire them for those positions. Quadriplegic people can’t work manual construction labor. You’re not pouring concrete when you’re paralyzed from the neck down, and no reasonable accomodation is going to make that possible.

So for vampires, it really depends on what their work-relevant disabilities are, and how difficult it is to accommodate them. Need to be invited in? A reasonable accomodation for a police department would be to simply not have their vampire officers serve search warrants. They can still respond to emergency calls, as a call for help could give implied permission to enter a home. Vampire officers can still patrol, perform traffic duties, perform detective work, etc. But they simply can’t participate in search warrants execution.

The daylight limitations may be more limiting. Sure a vampire could wear a hood and gloves, and that’s little different from someone wearing a hijab. But it’s still dangerous from a workplace safety concern. All it takes is a perp pulling on your hood, and you start boiling? Huge liability risk for the department. So maybe vampire officers will need to be limited to indoor desk work or the night shift. I think hiring them only for the night shift would be a reasonable accommodation.

Overall, I think vampires could easily be employed as police officers. Some reasonable accommodations are required, but a department outright prohibiting the hiring of vampires likely violates the Americans with Disabilities Act.

No that’s just wanting to look younger. Again, not every cosmetic treatment is gender-affirming care. Hell, it’s pretty ridiculously to even use the term outside the context of trans healthcare. Musk looked male before and he looked male after. He just thought he looked better and younger with more hair. It had nothing to do with gender.

Just listen to yourself. You appropriate the language of a minority group. Then when actual member of that group comes along and tells you you’re not using it correctly, you double down and try to tell them that you know their own language better than they do.

The reason I push back on this is because the distinction between gender affirming care and general cosmetic treatment really matters. This shit kills people. Men who want hair plugs don’t have a 40% suicide attempt rate.

This watering down of language for cheap political points has very real consequences for the trans community. Right now our rights and healthcare are under attack. Hard won victories decades in the making are being rolled back. Among the targets of these attacks are conservatives trying to bar health insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care. And that case becomes much easier if the distinction between trans healthcare and every cis person that wants a minor cosmetic treatment is watered down.

This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s fighting against the casual appropriation of our language that threatens our rights and lives.

I get why people mention this, but as an actual trans person, when I hear someone, even an ally, say this kind of thing, it shows they really don’t get what gender-affirming care is. It’s really cringe. Gender-affirming care is just that - care that affirms your gender and allows you to take on primary or secondary sex characteristics different from that of your natal sex.

Male pattern baldness is a male secondary sex characteristic. It is simply a consequence of combining certain genetics with male hormone levels. You’re not affirming your gender by getting hair plugs. In fact, you’re actually dampening a male secondary sex characteristic. If a cis female had abnormally high T levels or some other condition to give her male-pattern baldness, then her getting hair plugs would be gender-affirming care. But for Elon, a cisgender man? That’s not gender-affirming care.

When I see someone call hair plugs gender-affirming care, it shows that they really don’t understand what gender-affirming care is. It’s not any cosmetic treatment you get just for fun. It’s more like reconstructive surgery you get to fix your face after a car crash. Elon got a cosmetic treatment, not gender-affirming care.

This is because Republicans are a truly Orwellian party - straight out of 1984. They have no real principles anymore. It’s just power for the sake of power. One day the official line is we’ve never been at war with East Asia, the next it’s we’ve always been at war. Trump can come up do a u-turn today, and the slime that is every Republican will instantly reorient themselves to follow dear leader’s new commands.

Unfortunately for them, LLMs just don’t have that much capability for doublethink and self-deception. Once you train a model, that model is fixed in time. So you could train a model to match the Republican fever dreams of today. But a month from now, there will be a whole new set of fever dreams that every good little fascist needs to follow. But the model will still be stuck repeating last month’s lies. As there are no consistent Republican beliefs, you can’t just train an LLM to tow the party line. There is no party line, just an endless series of lies and vomit, whatever is needed to advance their power today.

If this were a movie, it would end with the very soldiers he ordered for his giant vanity project deposing him in response to some crescendo of barbarity on his part. That’s a downright Aesop of an ending - the villain defeated by his own vanity and pride. You order thousands of soldiers to perform a parade to celebrate your birthday, and it’s the last straw that causes them to straight up depose you in a military coup.

Supreme Courts around the world have found all sorts of ways of exercising power. They can deputize citizen volunteers to serve as temporary court enforcers. They can outright order the military to stand down and arrest the president. Hell, they could dig into the ancient tradition and declare the president an outlaw - literally outside the protection of the law, making it legal for anyone to straight-up kill the guy.

Sure they have important differences. At the same time however, it is the height of tone-deaf arrogance to expect people to vote for their own genocidal oppressors.

Kamala likely lost Michigan due to her support for Israeli Apartheid and genocide. The Muslim population there quite understandably didn’t want to vote for her. You can’t really come to a group of people and say, “yes, we admit that we’re supporting a genocide of your people, but we need you to still vote for us for the good things we actually will do. We’re going to keep committing genocide against you, but we need you to vote for us for the sake of democracy.”

Trump and Kamala were largely indistinguishable on the Gaza issue. Trump is just a lot ruder about it. Yet, in the months following the election, we’ve seen countless gloating by centrist Democrats openly celebrating further violence by the Israelis, gleefully mocking Palestinians and their supporters, saying that this wouldn’t have happened if Kamala won. Now we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Biden, Kamala, and Trump all shared the same policy towards Israel - full and unconditional support with no limits or red lines whatsoever. Gaza was getting wiped off the map no matter who was elected. Notably, despite being still active in politics, to this day, neither Kamala nor Biden have spoken a single word publicly against the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. Even though they’re out of power and have nothing to lose by speaking out, they still fully support the actions of the Israeli government.

Are there still good reasons to have supported Kamala? Sure. But I also don’t expect anyone whose people are being genocided to vote for those other reasons. If you’re not willing to prevent a people from being literally murdered, then you can’t come groveling to those people, asking for their votes. If you don’t care about someone’s life, why should they care about your democracy? This is basic Maslow’s hierarchy of needs shit. People don’t have the luxury of worrying about abstract goods like democracy when their basic material survival is threatened.

Allegation: the DNC exhibited overt favoritism in the primary process to ensure Hillary won the primary.

Your response: but Hillary won the primary, therefore she won the primary!

No one is disputing that she won the primary. The problem was the DNC put their thumb on the scale through the entire process. Hillary was the presumptive nominee from the beginning. People voting for Bernie on day one had to vote against headlines that said, “Hillary is already 1/3 of the way to getting the nomination!” The DNC also collaborated very closely with the Hillary campaign, and they did not do so with Bernie’s campaign. They even went so far as feeding her debate questions ahead of time.

Yes, obviously Hillary actually won the primary even without the superdelegates. Any brain-dead moron can consult wikipedia and see that. There’s no need to parrot the obvious. But you’re completely missing the core of the issue - that Hillary only won the majority of non-superdelegates and only won the primary popular vote because the DNC threw the weight of the entire party behind her nomination at the exclusion of all other candidates.

I’m not a “prepper” in an “underground bunker” sense, but I do prepare for emergencies and instability, whatever form it may take: political, yes, but I also live on several fault lines

Assuming you’re a homeowner, make sure to check if your home insurance policy covers earthquake damage. By default most insurance policies don’t cover seismic.

There any sense on what would be good to stock up on now? When I’ve searched this, the advice is usually pretty worthless. Just advice indistinguishable from general prepper stuff. I’ve seen recommendations to stock up on things like flour, things that the US produces domestically in abundance. But some necessities are going to be more vulnerable to disruptions in shipments from China than others.

Anyone find a good guide or have a sense of what basic household necessities are going to be most vulnerable to disruption of trade with China? I’m not concerned with things like consumer electronics right now, those are luxuries. I’m talking basic food and household staples. I don’t need the standard prepper list that’s meant to prepare you for grave natural disasters. What’s really needed is an analysis of precisely what necessities are most likely to be interrupted by this.

Has anyone seen such a list, or have a sense for what necessities are most vulnerable here?

Worse. This is really a “don’t negotiate with terrorists” situation. Trump could have gone to the Chinese, and any other country, and said, “look, this isn’t working. We need to renegotiate our trade deals.” Public opinion has soured enough on free trade that Trump likely could get some legitimate tariff package or set of new trade deals through. The public generally likes the idea of not trading so much with China. The problem is Trump is trying to do this via decree and blackmail. He thinks that by cutting off trade overnight, he can coerce China into giving the US favorable terms.

But all this shows is that the US is an unreliable partner that is willing to back on its word at any moment. Nations can renegotiate trade deals. That isn’t some unprecedented violation of international norms. But it’s common sense to do these things slowly, giving both nations time to adapt their economies to the new conditions. You can’t just cut this level of trade off cold turkey without causing a global depression.

♫ I wouldn’t touch you with a - thirty-nine-and-a-half foot poooole! ♫

Arrest them on state charges for kidnapping.

Carr is a traitor to the Republic.

An overt civil war. The leader getting caught outright stealing an election is the kind of thing that causes people to start picking up guns.

Oh, there’s a hell of a lot more these judges could do. They’re just too chicken shit to actually do it.

Well, don’t be surprised when people start normalizing using ethnic slurs against Hispanic people. If you don’t have the common decency to refer to people respectfully, why would you expect others to protect you from the same treatment?