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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It is for Congress to decide such matters. It says so right in our constitution, but our Legislative branch has been ceding their ability to check Executive overreach for decades. Now, with a complicit Congress as the majority, they will never challenge Trump on anything he does, no matter how unconstitutional or illegal it might be. Same goes for the Judiciary as well, chock full of partisan hacks who bend and twist their interpretation of the language of the constitution to cherry pick a favorable ruling for anything that Trump does.

    Basically, our system of checks and balances that are meant to keep one aspect of the government from becoming too powerful has been completely subsumed by ideologues who prefer monarchy to democracy. The executive now essentially has unchecked authority and is in full control of the government apparatus.








  • There’s a few comments like this, but what would rolling over look like and / or why would a country do that?

    Look no further than Colombia, who was likewise threatened with tariffs by Trump if they refused to accept our deportees. They caved and accepted them after initially refusing them.

    Now, in that case, I’m sure some people in the Colombian government likely did the math and determined that it would be cheaper to just accept the few hundred people Trump deported than to have the tariffs damage their economy by depressing the demand for exports like coffee.

    The entirely expected and appropriate response is to apply retaliatory tariffs. This doesn’t take bravery and isn’t “standing your ground” it’s just the obvious default response.

    It is if the tariffs were meant to stand on their own merit. Trump has only historically used tariffs as a threat to get what he wants. The one time he implemented targeted tariffs on China in his first term, it led to him having to bail out farmers with the money that was collected from the tariff revenue as a result of the retaliatory tariffs on agriculture exports. You would think he would have learned his lesson about using tariffs as a bluff and then following through anyway when it’s called, but then again, we are talking about Trump here. You don’t get to bankrupt a casino and still claim to have a shred of business acumen.


  • Good on Canada and Mexico for sticking to their guns and not rolling over for Trump. Show him that winning trade wars isn’t as easy as he likes to think it is, and then force him into favorable terms when he implodes his own economy.

    edit: lmao, well that was short. Tariffs don’t go into effect until tomorrow and Trump already caved to pressure from Trudeau and Sheinbaum. Trump got the massive conciliation prize of… Canada and Mexico agreeing to do stuff they had already agreed to do under the Biden administration. lol.






  • I had thought so too. Apparently there have been a bunch of false reports on them being involved in fighting. Which makes sense, because their involvement in this conflict was entirely political theater to begin with - they were sent over to try and scare the western allies into backing down or else risk a wider global conflict. USA and others called their bluff and the NK soldiers have been sitting in Russia ever since. They can’t fight and they almost certainly don’t speak any Russian or have enough translators to be an effective assault force in a combat scenario.


  • Good point on the ethics issue. Youngsters these days don’t know what hard games really are. Games used to be diabolically hard, design holdovers from when quarter-munching games moved to home consoles and every game you paid full price for was essentially a gamble on whether or not it was going to be good or even playable, but finishable was almost not a consideration back then because it was pretty rare to actually ckear a game from start to end.

    These days to think it’s important and walk a line between challenging and entertaining not just for the sake of capturing a larger market share of players, but also to avoid bad publicity from having a game be too difficult to o complete.



  • I like to ask anybody in a tirade against “wokeness” or “DEI” what their definitions of those words are and what they find objectionable about it.

    If they can define it correctly (most can’t), they usually can’t put into words what they don’t like about it other than that the idea of other people being treated equitably and respectfully makes them feel threatened , vulnerable, or marginalized. Which is absurd, but expecting these people to think beyond themselves is asking too much.