• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • According to the article, the names were in government documents which they were able to view. There’s no indication that the information was released or intended for release. It sounds more like someone with access leaked the information to them.

    It’s possible that this is a lie, but I don’t see how it helps DHS or the administration. I think it’s a lot more likely that there’s a complete lack of standards and accountability at CBP and ICE and that the problem has festered for decades. Being a 10 year veteran doesn’t mean anything if they aren’t enforcing standards and weeding out anyone who falls short.





  • From what little I have seen, right wing outlets were interpreting the video as proof the officer was hit by the car because of the way the phone gets jostled at the end. You also can’t see in this video exactly when he draws his gun, or how the shooter is positioned. It’s damning when combined with the other videos, but on its own it’s a lot less clear.

    And they also see it as proof that these were “agitators” obstructing “law enforcement” based on the confrontational tone with the woman outside the vehicle. They want to frame the issue as law enforcement vs criminals, rioters and radical domestic terrorists. They want to blame the victim and undercut the narrative that this was an innocent bystander.

    Obviously a sane person would recognize that it doesn’t matter if the victim was politically active or even obstructing police, it’s still murder. But these aren’t moral, rational people and they aren’t trying to persuade an audience with legal arguments, just feeding the US vs them mentality.


  • Trump isn’t personally running the entire federal government and showing up to court to file his own motions and answer questions from judges. Trump and his inner circle may act like they’re above the law, but the people who have to carry out their instructions aren’t immune to consequences.

    This is especially true in court. Lawyers aren’t eager to throw their careers away by lying to judges, filing false statements, or openly defying court orders. That’s why the administration has lost so many lawyers and says things in court that are wildly different than what they say everywhere else.

    Suing this administration has been a much more effective strategy than most people seem to realize. It’s often a long, drawn out process that wastes time and money, and they drag things out as much as possible. And yes the Supreme Court has been blatantly corrupt in the ways they’ve bailed out the Trump administration. But still, they only take on a small fraction of the total number of cases (and even then, they mostly help them stall cases with temporary orders rather than deciding actual cases).

    When the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene, the Trump administration loses or backs down the vast majority of the time.


  • The 25th amendment is invoked by the cabinet and the vice president. Those are the people supporting this shit, they aren’t going to get rid of him. He’s doing what they want and giving them cover.

    I would say that the only thing that could convince them to remove him is if he became such a liability that they felt the need to get rid of him out of self-preservation. But honestly, I don’t think they have the necessary level of awareness. If anything, I suspect most of them would be more likely to double down on being cartoonishly evil and try to do whatever it takes to cling to power.




  • So the average college graduate does better than the average non-college graduate if they end up with similar work histories.

    OK, but those who start and don’t finish end up in debt without the benefits. So you need to factor in the chance of not completing college and the associated drawbacks and factor that into the cost benefit analysis for deciding to start college. Otherwise the argument is about as valid as saying that playing the lottery makes financial sense given the amount of money that goes to the average lottery winner.

    Second, the average outcome isn’t the only metric that matters. The average person who pays for most kinds of insurance will get less out of it than they pay in, that doesn’t mean that it’s always a better idea to be uninsured. Hell, the average player in a Russian roulette game turns out fine. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the kind of thinking that tends to dominate conversations around college and particularly student loans. If the majority are better off after college, great. But if have to drop out due to forces beyond your control, or the degree you pursue suddenly becomes less valuable because of an unforeseen shift in the economy, you can still end up buried to your eyeballs in debt with nothing to show for it.

    Third, even if you make enough additional income to mathematically offset the debts you accumulate in college, you can’t get back the lost time. Many people have to delay major milestones in life because they’re weighed down by debts on top of all the other brutal economic realities out there. Good luck buying a house. Hope you weren’t too eager to have kids.

    Fourth, college might be a better option than not going to college, but it can still seem bad when both options are shitty due to an economy that exists to enrich billionaires.

    I’m not saying it’s a mistake to go to college. I just think the article is glossing over the very real problems that come from our atrocious student loan policies, and that perhaps some of the pessimism around college is a symptom of the economy as a whole being rigged against us.


  • Real people don’t have scripts to read from.

    But seriously, listen to the way people talk. It’s chaotic, messy, often unclear and very inefficient. Conversations meander wildly, with dangling threads that are never concluded and often times with people talking past each other as much as to each other. If you wrote dialogue that way it would just be harder for audiences to follow and waste precious screentime.

    Realistic sounding dialogue is about writing what a real person would say if they stopped to think for a minute between each statement.









  • I really hate how many people resent the idea of any kind of student loan forgiveness.

    Billionaires set up vast financial systems for the sole purpose of dodging taxes. No bid contracts get handed out like candy to politically connected scumbags. An obscene amount of money gets dumped into insurance companies that only make your healthcare worse. Giant corporations violate laws and rob both workers and customers, and if anything is done at all it will be a tiny fine that’s smaller than the profit from their crimes.

    All those things that actually harm the rest of us? No big deal. But you suggest that maybe it’s a bad idea to keep generations ensnared in crippling debt? THAT’S A FUCKING OUTRAGE!

    I mean obviously it wouldn’t be fair to have a policy that directly benefits some people but not others. Why should student loan borrowers get special treatment? Sure, I’ll fucking riot if anyone touches my tax credits for having kids and a mortgage, but that’s different, that’s good for society… unlike education. Besides, it’s not my fault your generation don’t buy houses and start families. Oh don’t bitch to me about how you can’t afford it, maybe you shouldn’t have taken those loans out then…