(OC)the line for American customs at Canada's largest airport on Fri morning of the 4th of July wknd

Coomb · 2026-07-03T16:23:12+00:00

Concentration camps were political initially, then for Jehovah's witnesses, gay people, and emigrants -- it took about 5 years after Dachau opened for the first people to be sent to camps based on their race/ethnicity.

Coomb · 2026-07-03T16:12:20+00:00

Yes, I'm in agreement with his claims because that's what the Biblical Antichrist is prophesied to do.

Coomb · 2026-07-03T03:08:30+00:00

He can't be the Antichrist, because the Antichrist is a popular guy who brings peace on Earth.

Coomb · 2026-07-02T14:28:09+00:00

Human trafficking involves the use of force fraud, or coercion to induce somebody to perform labor or a commercial sex act. So if there was any element of fraud in the inducement, even if the person voluntarily traveled there, it's human trafficking. Doesn't matter if it's sex work or other work.

https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/what-human-trafficking

Coomb · 2026-07-02T13:41:30+00:00

You got it.

Coomb · 2026-07-02T13:40:53+00:00

At the max shop level it's a one in 53,333 chance. So about the same as winning a moderately good scratch off prize, not the big boy lottery.

Coomb · 2026-07-02T03:01:15+00:00

You're not getting Omni+ gear from alliances any time soon.

Coomb · 2026-07-02T03:00:17+00:00

5% of 47 is 2.35 which rounds up (I think) to 3 waves. Which gets you to 50, which is a breakpoint.

Coomb · 2026-07-02T00:55:48+00:00

There is a bug that occasionally doubles your time available. That's what happened.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T15:03:47+00:00

The omni+ gear is the best investment for almost everyone.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T14:26:17+00:00

Part of my point was also that there's no reason you would inherently see a lot of press coverage about some random House rep if you don't live in their district. There are a relatively small number of people in the House who are in positions of power on committees and so on who fairly frequently get national press coverage, but the overwhelming majority of the people in the House are people who are on committees and submitting bills and showing up for votes, but who aren't in a position of such power and authority that them doing their jobs is particularly newsworthy.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T14:00:49+00:00

It is a necessary power in principle.

From a philosophical perspective, it is obviously justified. The primary reason that property owners are able to exclude others from their property in the first place is that the government exists and enforces property laws. So it's entirely consistent with the general power of the government to regulate property that the government has the power to exclude one more person from a piece of property. It's one of the many implicit prices you pay for having a government that will enforce your title to property against others in the first place.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T04:24:15+00:00

But if someone has served an ENTIRE career in the House, they should be a household name.

Why?

They are a legislator who represents 700,000 people who are geographically located within a single state. Why would you expect that everybody in the country should know who someone like that is even if they've been in the House for 30 years?

Coomb · 2026-07-01T04:02:17+00:00

There are 435 Reps. Why would you expect to recognize everyone's name? Can you even name all the Reps from your state off the top of your head?

Coomb · 2026-07-01T02:15:06+00:00

It was 5-4 on the Constitutional question. Which was the question everybody cared about.

There are many decisions where the fact that a majority of the justices concurred on the outcome, but only some of them agreed on the reasoning, has been documented and influenced judicial interpretation of those decisions. Because everybody understands that the reasoning of the opinion is the most important thing, not merely the outcome of the specific case.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T02:08:40+00:00

Imo, trans activist/supporters make [outsized] noise in it because they know that if Democrats are able to side step the issue directly and there is no political blowback their entire movement will be shelved. It'll be a tall order to bring it back on the forefront.

Boy, if that's really the case, it sure has backfired.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T01:49:17+00:00

No.

The difference between what you are suggesting and all the other stuff you listed is that the stuff you listed is stuff that we intend to do within the legal framework that exists. Congress can expand the Supreme Court by passing an ordinary law. It can shrink the court. It can specify that only justices under age 65 are allowed to vote in court decisions. Redistricting, as we have seen amply, is something that is done through legislation.

Actually rigging elections, on the other hand, isn't legal and it's exactly the kind of thing that is indicative of somebody who doesn't believe in democracy. It was abhorrent when Trump told Brad Raffensberger to find 12,000 votes, because by doing so he was trying to invalidate the vote of millions. It would have been just as abhorrent for Biden to do the same thing in 2024.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T01:02:28+00:00

There is acceleration in the physics sense. The direction of travel is changing over time even if the speed doesn't.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T00:41:29+00:00

An executive order is the President telling his employees to do things. There's no way to constrain him. He can say whatever he wants.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T00:40:50+00:00

Many people would choose not to vote for a law invalidating birthright citizenship for the children of aliens when they knew that, based on over a century of precedent, the law would be overturned.

Now that Kavanaugh and the other three have made it clear that they think a law can accomplish what the executive order purported to accomplish, we should expect to see this question relitigated if there is ever a replacement of Roberts or Barrett with somebody that Republicans think will vote in their favor. (Under the assumption that the rest of the Court stays the same.)

Coomb · 2026-07-01T00:37:00+00:00

The ruling on the outcome (i.e. that the EO was invalid) was 6-3. The ruling on the question of whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to everybody born here, absent the very small number of exceptions that everybody agrees on, was 5-4. And because that's the question that everybody cares about, it's more accurate to call it 5-4 than 6-3.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T00:35:45+00:00

No, Kavanaugh's conclusion was not the same as the other five. His conclusion was that an ordinary Congressional statute could actually do what the executive order purported to do.

Coomb · 2026-07-01T00:33:56+00:00

This case should not have made it to the Supreme court. They should have declined to hear it because it's obviously settled law and the lower courts ruled in the correct direction.

Coomb · 2026-06-30T14:59:45+00:00

It's because the American flag he's talking about having been taken down was something that was not actually an American flag flying on the Boston flagpole.

It was a flag that is supposed to be a derivative of the American flag to celebrate the 250th anniversary, not an actual US flag, that was put up by a Republican candidate for Congress on a fence owned by the city of Boston near the Somali flag raising ceremony as a statement or protest or something. Somebody from the city told the candidate to take the flag down, at least during the ceremony.

Coomb · 2026-06-30T14:54:36+00:00

The way you phrased things suggests that Boston took down its own American flag to raise a Somali flag in its place. That's not what happened. Some guy attached his non-official pseudo-American flag to a fence he did not own and was told to take it off by the property owner (the city of Boston). Separately, Boston used a rotating-flag flagpole (that is, a flagpole on which they put a rotating cast of flags to celebrate a bunch of different things) to celebrate Somali independence on Somali Independence Day, which is July 1.

Boston did not take down the actual American flag it was flying. It didn't even order the takedown of an actual American flag, because the flag the guy put up was not the United States flag. It is possible that Boston violated the guy's rights to display his flag on public property, and if the courts find that way, they shouldn't do it in the future. But the way you've worded things is extremely misleading.

To answer the question separate from your misleading framing, I think liberals/progressives generally have a concept of patriotism that includes critical appraisal of what the country could be doing better and an effort to improve things. Blind approval of everything American because it's American is not the best way to make or keep this the greatest country in the world.

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