As for Trump’s supposed “immunity,” I think we’ll eventually discover that it isn’t as wide-reaching as many think, and especially as he thinks. SCOTUS said he has immunity for his official presidential duties, but that’s a serious limitation.

It’s not a big limitation for Republicans. They can simply make the argument to a sympathetic Supreme Court that the charged violation was part of his official presidential duties.

That’s the thing in general as well. “The law is the law” is a meaningless platitude. Humans interpret (and reinterpret) the law as they see fit. We also pick and choose which portions to enforce.

That all set aside:

On July 1, 2024, the Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview, at least presumptive immunity for official acts within the outer perimeter of their official responsibility, and no immunity for unofficial acts.

(Emphasis mine)

“At least presumptive immunity” is another bit of legal worminess that makes whomever is president with a sympathetic make-up on the Supreme Court effectively a king with one exception reiterated throughout the opinion: impeachment, conviction, and removal.

Sure, there’s “unofficial acts”, but that is another bit of subjective non-sense that can be argued away before the trial even starts.

The idea that “the law applies to everyone” is not shared by our current Supreme Court. Despite Democrats being fairly useless and spineless, this part of the deconstruction of our country (along with the disastrous decision in Citizen’s United) belongs solely upon the shoulders of the gowned guys and gals of the Supreme Court. He acts with impunity because he can. He acts without fear of prosecution because his supplicants in Congress and the Supreme Court allow him to do so.

I agree that saying “non-voters voted for” anything is basically absurd, but people sitting on the couch rather than voting did affect the outcome of the 2024 election. A bit over three million fewer people voted in 2024 than 2020.

We are still a nation of laws, and they extend to all of us, including Trump.

This is not true according to the Supreme Court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States.

He’s just choosing to break them openly, because he knows the Dems are too cowardly to stop him, and he is 100% right.

Once you accept that the highest court in the land is the one who decides which people are subject to the law, the path for accountability for Trump within the status quo of the system only has a single outlet: impeachment, conviction, and removal from office (followed by subsequent prosecution in the criminal system outside of Congress).

While impeachment has occurred (or been threatened) multiple times, nobody has ever convicted a president nor removed one from office in the country’s history. The “Dems” – who you are somewhat unjustly demonizing here given the current make-up of Congress – got the closest anyone has ever gotten to removing one in Trump’s second impeachment.

The status quo responded by saying “he’s close to out of office anyway, it doesn’t matter” and then allowed Trump’s propaganda machine to re-write history and turn the participants in the January 6th insurrection into pardoned, misunderstood heroes.

Inside the system (which you still think will save us), the “Dems” also attempted (though halfheartedly) to prosecute Trump after he was out of office, and this Supreme Court carve out for a sitting President was the reward for them trying to enforce the law under Biden.

The Democrats have plenty of blame to take here for the rise of Trump both generally speaking and in particular him being allowed to run for and win re-election. But they did much more than any single Republican has ever done to stop Trump.

I’d argue that Biden’s true mistake was not acting as Lula did and arresting Trump immediately upon entry to office.

Alright relax pluribus

We’ve seen with Ukraine that drone warfare is highly effective and if the US wants to clear a supposed guerilla location they’ll just carpet bomb it all.

That’s what you get from Ukraine? Cuz what I got is that a dime a dozen drone can take down millions of dollars of military equipment. Our shit is bloated, expensive, and built by organizations that rival the largest governments on the planet in terms of bureaucracy. Do you remember any of that recent shit with Boeing?

In this scenario, we’re Russia.

It’s easy to move in and destabilize a government. It’s another entirely to control a whole region that doesn’t want you there.

We can compare this to Vietnam or whatever, but a lot has changed in 50 years and with Venezuela it’s clear that South America is not ready for this type of aggression.

Why Vietnam? Try Iraq or Afghanistan except the destabilized nations we’re “building” are in our backyard. Great. 👍

Yep because they’re doing such a great job running the states that we need a massive imperial empire run under the same governmental structure. /s 🖕

Great idea to start riling up lots of countries that don’t have to cross an ocean to fuck with you.

/s

It’s so ridiculous when they can’t even effectively govern the fucking country they already have.

If they’re are covered, why or how are they out of pocket?

Saw him live delivering his “fuck Tiger Woods” and “fuck Lance Armstrong” set a long time ago. It should be noted how prescient this was because neither of those celebrities had their fall from grace yet. He was ranting against the very idea of celebrity worship and being told who to admire.

Some people in the audience left after that and he responded by saying it was going to get a lot fucking worse so it’s good that you’re leaving.

Dude was a fucking legend, and I’m still happy that I saw him before he died. He ruled that room, and I’ve been to other comedy shows, but none in my experience captivated the crowd and spoke as much truth as he did.

It’s a big fucking club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the club.

is it bad i’m just kinda glad they finally went completely masks-off?

I understand this take, but honestly, there are things missing from it.

I think, like Vonnegut wrote, that we are what we pretend to be, and when we let them as a society get away with not even pretending to be good people…we worsen society overall.

There is another element to this as well, IMO, which is that people are mostly animals: monkey see, monkey do. When people see these psychopaths in high-powered positions getting away with whatever they want, they are more likely to model that behavior as well.

I’d rather have a society where everyone is pretending to be nice over one where people feel free to be the absolute worst version of themselves. I also think that being who you are pretending to be has a good side. People can “pretend” to be good and become better because of it.

People think that the more these people are obviously evil, the less the public will agree with them and the more precarious they’ll make the entire escapade. I think that the 2024 election and all of the events of 2025 have proven that notion is a dangerous fiction.

Dude has been saying for 20 years that we should’ve stolen Iraq’s oil. Yet somehow everyone acts surprised when he does pretty predictable things like this.

Thanks Trump

I feel like streaming has led to things being more fragmented, both because you need to be subscribed to the one service that carries the show and because there’s so many more shows being made.

I’m not who you were originally replying to, but I think two seemingly contradictory things can be true at once.

Yes, there is definitely more content nowadays, and less people watching the same things at the same time because of all of the variety of services and content and platforms, etc.

But that content tends to still be homogenous. The settings and costumes of the shows might be different, but most content cannot pass, for instance, the bechdel test.

For all of the emphasis on “eradicating woke” in the last few years, there really isn’t a whole lot of actual diversity in most media. I could probably only name a single show that expresses, for instance, communist ideas, and I think it was cancelled in recent years alongside scores of lgbtq characters in shows.

Plotlines are typical, production values are stepped up but there’s a large amount of, for instance, ideological consistency among all media produced nowadays.

If you’re looking for a variety of typical genre shows, yes, you’re spoiled for choice. But when you’re looking for something that breaks the mold even slightly there are really only a handful of things from which to choose.

And that’s leaving out how much derivative media exists. Vince Gilligan in recent interviews even lamented how he was one of only a few people that could get a new show with a new concept even started in the industry. Many shows are set in “universes” that are decades old. A lot of “new” movies are reboots or sequels of old movies.

There’s a thread of choiceless variety that used to apply mainly to things like groceries that has now infected much of media as well. Whole political movements now push to eradicate the little diversity (ideological and character identity based) that exists.

All of this leaves out what happened to music btw, which is becoming so algorithm-driven that it’s hard for those using streaming services to even tell if it was produced by a person.

I’ll just leave this here as well:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/

Edit: I realized after a while that the easiest way to summarize the homogeneity you see in modern media is that it is supply-side oriented. Shows, movies, and music are made (or not) primarily based upon how easily the corporate marketing apparatuses think they can shove it down the public’s throat.

However, I can’t tell you whether a suitable driver is already on board.

It likely isn’t. PC enthusiast Windows users all know that installing any device that isn’t very typical (monitors, keyboards, mice) usually involves hunting for drivers online if you didn’t keep the disk. When I buy different hardware (for example I bought a USB toslink adapter, and a USB to USB serial emulator) it most times comes with a tiny, useless little disk for Windows users.

This is generally not the case for Linux, but since you’re inexperienced with the OS you’d have no way of knowing that.

Shit works (or not, but often does) without the need to install additional drivers for every stupid little thing.

Ick

Bought a lifetime Plex pass a few years ago so this doesn’t affect me. It’s honestly worth the cost especially over time.

Dude containers are often easier than running the underlying programs.

If you can’t tell the difference and it fits how you listen to music, I guess who cares?

AI software writing up musak doesn’t matter to me because I don’t listen to music that way.

I’ll know the bands I’m listening to are real because I will have manually downloaded their music after reading reviews, magazine articles, or things like albumoftheyear.org just like I’ve been doing for the last half decade.

Music streaming services suck and not only because they will promote low cost bands to you. If you actually give a shit about music then stop being so lazy as to have an algorithm fill your trough with slop and then being surprised that it’s AI slop.

Or just continue eating the slop if it pleases you. 🤷

It’s a bit of a contrarian take, but I think people need to start adding more intentionality to how they live their lives. If music is unimportant to you, that’s fine. But nowadays everyone just watches the shows they’re recommended, listens to the music that is picked out by the algorithm, and reads what is fed to them in their feeds…figure out what’s important to you and curate it for yourself.