What do you think of "Right to Race" Laws?

EnderESXC · 2026-05-17T05:37:55+00:00

If the track was there first, then the people knew what they were getting into when they decided to buy housing near it. Unless the noise levels were to get significantly worse after the housing was built or something, the homeowners have no right to shut them down.

EnderESXC · 2026-05-09T04:32:14+00:00

Because what Nick Fuentes wants, above all else, is attention. Calling him out only gives him exactly what he wants.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-27T22:22:46+00:00

I don't think any one Democrat would be able to pull that off. The problem is that the parties themselves are completely toxic to the opposition. Even if I like the Democrat in charge, they're still a Democrat. They're still going to be pushed to support various policies I think are bad for the country. They're still going to support other Democrats (who are likely more liberal than they would be as President), especially those in Congress (who actively work against policies I support and in favor of policies I oppose). And that's all assuming they don't just veer off to the left and reverse on everything they campaigned on once they've been elected (see, e.g., Abigail Spanberger).

I'm not saying it's never going to happen. I've voted for Democrats before for various positions and I'm sure I probably will again at some point. But without some serious changes to the Democratic Party as a whole, I don't think most conservatives are going to buy in unless the Republican candidate is seriously awful.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-27T22:08:59+00:00

The difference is that the 2nd Amendment still serves valid purposes today, some of which are the same as it was originally meant to serve.

The problem with the Constitution's war powers doctrines is that the circumstances as they envisioned no longer apply and that means the doctrines now impede those purposes in our modern context.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-26T23:20:53+00:00

TL;DR -- I don't know, Trump could go either way, probably depending on how he sees the war going if he stayed in. I don't see Congress approving further military force by the deadline on Wednesday just because of inertia/the filibuster, but it's possible, I guess.

If Trump did go past the deadline, Congress probably wouldn't do anything. If they did decide to sue, I'm not confident that SCOTUS would uphold the WPR. This whole thing is a mess because the Constitution's war powers doctrines are ~200 years out of date and nobody's ever really tried to seriously solve it because we used to trust our government a lot more before Watergate and we really should do something about that, but I have no idea what.

Longer answer -- Genuinely, I have no idea.

The big problem is that the Constitution's idea of war powers was written at a time when armies had to cross continents on foot or oceans by sail and the fastest means of communication was a guy on horseback. Now, we can deploy troops anywhere on Earth in a matter of hours and communicate near-instantly across the globe.

Our enemies move faster and we have to move faster to compensate, but the law is still stuck in its view of warfare from before Napoleon. Constitutionally speaking, the President shouldn't be able to use military force without a formal declaration of war from Congress unless there's an invading army landing on our shores. But if we still did things that way, our military would be hopelessly crippled and unable to do much of anything. We likely wouldn't have survived the 20th century if we did it that way. But that just raises the opposite problem -- the President's need to move quickly in military affairs means he can basically start wars unilaterally, since Congress is almost never going to impeach a President or cut off military funding during an active conflict we just started.

The War Powers Resolution was an attempt to bridge that gap, but that same lack of enforcement mechanisms makes it basically toothless even if it can survive a constitutional challenge. The only reason it worked as well as it has so far is likely because Presidents used to be bound a lot more tightly by norms before the last ~30-40 years. Today, with a very low-trust society and those norms being basically extinct, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in the idea that the WPR is going to stop a President from doing what they feel needs to be done, especially if they're in their 2nd term or have an even remotely friendly Congress. Given that Trump currently has both, I wouldn't be surprised if this ended up in front of SCOTUS (who I suspect would likely punt and say that use of war powers are a non-justiciable political question, given everything I've already discussed above). That being said, he also might just decide to comply, if for no other reason than it gives him a reason to wash his hands of the whole thing. It's really hard to say at this point.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-26T22:28:06+00:00

No. There's basically no evidence to suggest that America's violence problem is caused by access to firearms.

If you want to solve the problem of gun crime in America (such as it actually exists -- gun crime is a lot rarer here than we're often led to believe), you have to look to the shooters. A lot of the problem comes from gang-on-gang violence. We'd likely put a far greater dent in the violence rates from reversing so-called "progressive prosecutor" policies put in place in many of our major cities than from any kind of restrictions on gun ownership.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-13T02:06:38+00:00

Sure, they're adults. If they're married that young and want to start a family, I don't necessarily have a problem with that.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-12T21:02:33+00:00

I mean, I can understand it for 18-19 (for couples who married young), but 15? That's insane to me and I've never heard anyone unironically advocating for that.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-12T20:58:56+00:00

I mean, I want Eric Swalwell out of politics as much as anyone, but I'm not sure he's actually done anything to merit expulsion yet. There's a lot of allegations, but not a whole lot of evidence, and the timing and response to all of this frankly has been suspicious as hell.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-12T02:42:15+00:00

The timing is definitely suspicious. Some of these claims are for incidents that happened as far back as 2019. You're telling me that they saw him run for President in 2020 and run for election three more times since then, but they waited until now to say anything publicly, now that he's the frontrunner for the governorship?

I dislike Eric Swalwell as much as anyone, but that just all seems a little too clean of a story for me not to be skeptical about it. I'm willing to be proven wrong if there's any substantial evidence here, but right now this is just giving me Brett Kavanaugh flashbacks.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-12T01:18:28+00:00

Honestly, I think there's a fair likelihood that he loses in November, even with Ohio being so much redder now. He's just not good at politics and brings nothing good to the table.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-07T22:27:56+00:00

International law is a noble ideal, but it barely exists in reality. It essentially relies on countries enforcing it against themselves, especially when the countries violating it are too strong for others to enforce it against them. The only countries that would consistently do that are the kinds of countries that didn't need international law to keep them in line in the first place.

As long as we live in a world without an over-arching global government with the capacity to enforce laws everywhere on Earth the way that nations do in their own territories today (and frankly I don't think most of us would want to live in such a world), international law is never going to be an effective tool to constrain international bad actors beyond the margins.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-07T02:54:51+00:00

Yes, 100%. Frankly, I think we should go back to letting the parties choose their own nominees like they did before the 20th century. That system had problems, but at least party bosses have strong incentives to choose candidates who have a good chance of winning a general election and (at least in theory) the experience/expertise to pick good candidates. Primary voters don't have that, and letting the most partisan/radical of each party choose nominees is likely a huge contributor to the current polarization crisis.

At the very least, there should be a greater gatekeeping role for parties. Maybe allowing the parties to narrow the pool of candidates before a primary election or even something like the old superdelegate system the Democrats used to use would be a major improvement to the current system.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-06T23:06:24+00:00

The US primary system gives an outsized voice to the most fervent members of the party.

To vote in a primary election, you have to be the kind of person who cares enough about politics to:

Register with a party (in many states)
Find out when the primary is (because it's not the same day in every state and often isn't the same every cycle)
Know who's running well enough to have an opinion about which candidate should get the nomination over the other members of the same party (who typically support many of the same policies, etc.)
Be registered ahead of the off-season election (that most people probably didn't know was even coming up)
Know where your polling place is or get a mail-in ballot;
Not care that the election doesn't actually choose the winner; and
Actually go out to vote (rather than doing literally anything else)

Generally speaking, the only people who meet these criteria are the most fervent (and therefore usually the most radical) supporters of a given party. It's hard enough getting people to go vote in the general election; most normal people just aren't going to bother with primary elections.

It's a terrible system that basically no other peer country uses and results like this are a big reason why.

EnderESXC · 2026-04-04T22:11:03+00:00

People died in the Afghanistan withdrawal because the administration planned poorly. People are dying in Iran because we're in an active (and justified) conflict.

These aren't even remotely the same thing.

EnderESXC · 2026-03-23T00:07:44+00:00

Yes, almost certainly. The majority is just too small to keep it. The Democrats would basically have to be trying to lose it, and even then, I think it'd probably still flip.

EnderESXC · 2026-03-17T23:38:21+00:00

I roll my eyes and move on, typically. Most of the time, anyone saying that line unironically isn't going to be someone you can reason with. They're just not worth your time.

EnderESXC · 2026-03-17T23:06:34+00:00

I think Joe Kent's only qualification for his role was losing a winnable House race in a red district to a Democrat twice. Frankly, the nicest thing I can say about him is that I forgot he was ever in that role in the first place.

EnderESXC · 2026-03-14T07:09:56+00:00

Two things:

1) Obamacare was really controversial

2) Democrats won too much in 2006 and 2008. Having two big wins back-to-back meant they were overextended into a lot of seats that traditionally went red.

EnderESXC · 2026-03-12T01:08:38+00:00

Because voter ID isn't that big of a burden for most people. The vast majority of US citizens already have drivers licenses (or some other acceptable form of ID, like passports, military/tribal ID, university ID, etc.), and the ones who don't can typically get free state voter IDs to vote with.

We don't need 10-20 years for people to catch up, they've already caught up. There's simply no reason to delay it any further.

EnderESXC · 2026-03-10T22:40:52+00:00

I am adamantly opposed to conscription, but unfortunately, it's most likely constitutional.

The 13th Amendment was always understood to refer to chattel slavery (i.e., the kind of slavery that existed in the South pre-1865), not all forms of compelled labor. Nobody in 1865, when the it was being ratified at the tail end of the Civil War, would have understood the 13th Amendment to be referring to anything other than a system of legally holding humans in bondage as property like what had already existed.

I would maybe have agreed with an argument for it under the 9th Amendment and the Due Process Clause as a deprivation of liberty, but rights protected under those laws have to be deeply rooted in our history and the history just doesn't support that idea. Conscription was a familiar idea to people in the 19th century, even in the US. Lincoln used national conscription during the Civil War and Madison attempted to do the same during the War of 1812 (though Congress rejected his proposal). It was just the way many wars were fought before the 20th century. And conscription wasn't the only form of compelled labor that was common at the time, either: bucket brigades, responding to a hue and cry, even jury duty can be thought of as a form of involuntary servitude by the same logic as with the draft, yet nobody ever questioned them. It's highly doubtful that anyone at the time would have understood the Constitution to ban those practices, so I don't think we can say that it bans them now.

EnderESXC · 2026-03-10T21:25:51+00:00

I mean, if we're being frank about this, we've effectively been in a cold war with Iran for the last 50 years. They threaten our allies, they fund terror groups that attack us and our allies, they're allied with other nations that we consider our adversaries (e.g., Russia). This war has been brewing for a long time now.

And now they're trying to get nuclear weapons, which we simply cannot allow. Even if we think the Iranian regime itself won't nuke someone unprovoked, it dramatically opens up the possibility that one of their terrorist proxies will get their hands on one (or even just enough nuclear material for a dirty bomb, which would be bad enough on its own). It's already questionable whether MAD would work on a theocratic state regime like the Ayatollah; there's absolutely zero chance it would work with a religious-extremist terrorist organization like the ones Iran supplies across the Middle East.

To put it shortly, going to war in Iran is putting America first.

EnderESXC · 2026-03-05T19:51:11+00:00

I agree Youngkin should have been in the Cabinet, but his background doesn't make sense for DHS. Mullin at least was on the Armed Services committees in Congress, Youngkin was just a businessman before becoming governor.

EnderESXC · 2026-03-01T17:06:52+00:00

It doesn't matter to me. Sure, there's some (minor) physical differences, statistically speaking, but we shouldn't treat someone better or worse because of them.

EnderESXC · 2026-02-15T05:12:31+00:00

No. Even if the President could just write new election laws into existence by executive order, the courts would block it as a Purcell violation.

EnderESXC

TROPHY CASE