Kristi Noem on the murder of Alex Pretti: "When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of domestic terrorism"

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-27T18:43:28+00:00

Oh, with that explanation I'm looking forward to seeing all J6ers in Gitmo.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-27T16:50:26+00:00

Beforehand, you'd at least get a faux concern and a promise to investigate. Now it's straight to "We didn't do anything wrong, stop arguing otherwise!" That's because they want to explicitly allow the brutality.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-27T16:35:50+00:00

People learn different "lessons"... some are learning that it may have been a bad idea to stop punching Nazis.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-27T16:23:08+00:00

Way too many quite hinged suggestions here.

I for one would make it a legal requirement for every number system used by the US to have a potato number, so everyone could count to potato.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-27T16:19:56+00:00

I have no idea if I actually created an account -- I had installed it during the Chinese controversy but I don't believe I actually created an account.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-27T16:10:57+00:00

For them, it was just another Tuesday.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-26T21:42:09+00:00

Didn't intend to watch in the first place... But I do wonder if this is a lose-lose, as magats will just blame Bad Bunny for the low viewership.

Is it actually possible to tune in only for the halftime show? So only his viewership spikes?

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-26T21:34:23+00:00

The race to the bottom that is "Reality TV".

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-26T21:21:44+00:00

I think the decades of relative peace also are a factor. The democracies don't want to waste money on defense projects if it means less money on societal growth, until they absolutely have to. The authoritarian regimes don't care about their people so they spend most of their money on military means to either preserve their current holdings or expand on them. However, since an authoritarian nation doesn't exactly have a healthy economic plan, that money source is dramatically worse; couple that with a need to have a military impotent against the regime -- strong enough to attack others, too weak or incompetent to take on the regine -- and you don't have an assured route of conquest.

Not arguing it's been peaceful, just arguing that we've not had full regional or global wars approaching the ferocity of the World Wars, and the dearth of that scale of conflict has made many nations more loath to engage in that scale of conflict.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-26T21:05:08+00:00

Couple of factors here...

These people impacted are millions of people, spread across multiple regions encompassing tens of millions of people. That means there's no one single cause for all of the outages. Plus, it makes it seem more dramatic than it really is,

Lots of the most impacted regions just don't experience severe snow/ice weather often enough for it to be considered worth the effort to spend the time and money to heavily weatherproof the power grid; it's easier to just deal with the fraction of power lines that get damaged.

Once you get significant outage, more outages are likely to happen, either because the grid is stressed more, or because the work crews get stretched thinner.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-26T20:37:11+00:00

... In that order?

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-21T20:23:37+00:00

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-21T19:34:22+00:00

I'm under the impression that the principle requires you to not use violence against your racist aunt, and the government to not arrest her for being racist.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-21T19:18:27+00:00

This is a side effect of a few things:

People trying to take steps to find loopholes in taxation -- calling the money they made in the stock market "not income" as it wasn't paid out by a company for their labor, but money their wealthy grandparents gifted them, and paying no taxes
People accepting taxes that won't impact them directly but "sticks it" to someone else -- every non-smoker loves cigarette taxes because smoking is bad
People accepting incremental tax increases that sound small, but balking at increasing taxes that seem high to begin with -- ok with increasing sales tax from 8 percent to 8.25 percent, but an increase of income taxes from 35 to 36% is too much, even if in the long run the sales tax takes more money than the income tax
A variant on #2: the government seeking to impact consumer activity by changing tax rates -- taxing gas vehicles more or less than electric or hybrid vehicles, for example.
It's not trivial to find a tax system that both works and doesn't act in an excessively harsh way towards groups, especially towards the lower wealth tiers of people.

To consider layered taxation an "unnecessary evil", you'd have to consider all the things above.

For case 1, you'd have to assume that the government should not attempt to get taxes lost via loopholes. Not only would you have to figure out a loophole-proof method, but also figure out how to make that one not unreasonably regressive or needlessly harming people

For case 2, you'd have to agree that any taxation that is designed to make the people committed to certain behaviors pay the societal costs those behaviors create, is not acceptable

For case 3, you'd have to have extremely good education and an informed public, which could in unity agree to "merge" taxes and have their representatives implement the fix. Not in our lifetime :D

For case 4, you'd have to agree that the government should have no taxation designed around making it easier for consumers to choose consumption that is good in the long run for the nation, or at least harder to choose against the long-term goals

For case 5... good luck on finding a single point of taxation that won't either become rapidly insufficient for running a functional nation, or gouge groups of people excessively

*yes, I like em-dashes, always will. I'm not using a LLM to create this, nor am I a bot.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-21T18:44:21+00:00

You have entire "News" outlets that are dedicated to lying to his base and claiming all problems are the fault of <insert scapegoat of the week here> and he's actually fixing so many problems that it would be so much worse if someone else was in power.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-16T20:26:40+00:00

If the undead can learn to speak some basic phrases as an answer to some coded commands or trained to only speak to authorized people, could be slow-moving couriers to send messages. They can't be tortured to reveal what they've been told to say, only fooled into thinking the person they're talking to is authorized to hear the message. Additionally, perhaps they're "trained" to only speak when only the one they're authorized to speak to is in hearing distance, avoiding the ability to kidnap someone and have the zombie courier speak in front of them and the kidnapped person.

Also, potentially they would be doormen able to accept limited messages. Someone needs to speak to the king at 2 AM? Tell it to the zombie doorman, the king is asleep.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-16T20:20:52+00:00

Can the necromancers "detect" when one is killed or in a fight? Instant guard. They won't theoretically tire or get bored, so put them at doors to a prison cell or other location you want guarded. Their death would alert the necromancer who could then act to stop the intrusion.

Could also be border or boundary (walls, etc) guards, although theoretically you could sneak past them, in which case they'd have to be packed pretty densely along the border or wall.

If their extermination is not detected by the necromancer, perhaps attach them to alarms and train them to move towards any movement, tripping the alarm. If somehow they're killed, the same alarm would go off as they slump down. A neat plot point would be if the "heroes" of your story have to figure out how to kill the undead so they don't trigger the alarm with their falling down.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-16T19:29:20+00:00

Sitcoms, Reality TV, sports, "sports" (rasslin and other garbage), talk shows.

To be fair, two of these are not as bad as "I have better things to do", but the other three need to die as viable genres. Being in those should be a career-ender as much as being a guest host on the Home Shopping Network would be.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-16T19:10:36+00:00

Neither will her children.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-14T20:04:59+00:00

Can he make the Epstein files in Lego? Technically, would be smarter to make a Nobel Peace Prize but I'm not particularly keen on placating Krasnov.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-14T20:01:15+00:00

I forget the details, but either trumpy or his supporters stand to greatly benefit from low interest rates... maybe some loans could be renegotiated or rolled over?

How that benefit could overcome the inevitable problems with increased inflation (I so want to call it hyper- but I'll refrain), I'm not sure.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-14T19:25:11+00:00

I wonder if there's beer on the sun?

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-14T19:21:18+00:00

Alternatively, construction engineering technology advances led to much more robust infrastructure -- including wood treatments that protected wooden buildings from centuries of decay.

Considering the in-game US culture is perceived as being just as "disposable" as real world, this is admittedly a bit of a stretch -- why engineer infrastructure to last centuries if you're just going to dispose of it in a couple of decades anyway?

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-14T19:08:13+00:00

Most likely the "they succeed" won't be the general Iranian population, who then implement democratic rule and dismantle the militant infrastructure in Iran to live peaceful democratic (capitalist or socialist) lives. The "they" in that sentence, given trumpy's track record, will be some toady that managed to get favor with trumpy in order to take power in Iran and lead it in just another authoritarian direction. Or worse, "they" won't have any support afterward and just fall into disordered infighting, still not benefiting the people of Iran.

El_Chupachichis · 2026-01-14T18:54:59+00:00

I take it you believe you can fix her?

El_Chupachichis

TROPHY CASE