Yes and no. It’s a loyalty test and a demonstration of power. The more obviously stupid the bullshit that you can get your followers to believe, the more powerful you must be, and the followers need a powerful daddy leader, so they buy it. It’s also a way to signal that you’re part of the in-group to others in the group.
So they believe it, without concept of objective truth even being involved.
It shows what kind of world we live in now that a conservative acting with integrity is newsworthy.
Worst case, he does it. Best case, he gets resoundingly thumped by the legal system. But neither of those is going to happen. If he’s even still alive in four years, I don’t think the people really in charge will be able to hide the dementia like they are now.
That doesn’t sound like anything like a problem. We had a similar discussion on a local winter biking group, and there were some people who had issues from washing their face three or more times a day, exfoliating regularly, and such. Yikes!
Hope the hyaluronic acid helps!
Bigger picture, what’s your current facial skin care routine? If it includes a lot of cleansing, exfoliating, hot water, strong soap, multiple daily washings, et cetera, dial that all wa-a-a-ay back. All of those things strip away the natural oils quite effectively, which leads to that red, inflamed look in the cold. The best way to keep your skin moisturized is to keep the moisture it naturally has from escaping, and that’s 10 times more important in cold, dry climates.
Be sure to drink enough water, too. It’s deceptive, you lose a lot of water through breath in cold, dry air, so you can be dehydrated even without sweating.
Who’s going to hold him accountable? These things are true:
If an individual or small group tries, they’ll be arrested or killed by authorities.
A large enough group of people acting together could do it, but it has to be large enough, or see #1.
To build a large enough group requires getting the word out, and getting the word out means that the authorities will hear about it. See #1.
If the word goes out by anonymous, untraceable communication channels, then each person has to trust people they haven’t met and don’t know to act in concert with the plan. If the others fail to act, see #1.
I just realized that I’ve re-created the need for resistance networks (a web of trust in which each person only knows and trusts a small number of others each) from first principles. But even those require people willing to risk getting arrested or killed, because sometimes the authorities bust resistance cells. Basically, this is how all dictators hold on to power against overwhelming discontent in the populace: Nobody can get together in large enough numbers to do anything about it, and individually, going along with the regime is slightly (or a lot) better than not.
Dictators fall when enough of the population decides that the status quo is worse than defying the dictator. The United States is nowhere near that stage yet.
Exploitation is a loaded term, with many negative connotations. It’s more neutral to state the same thing as, “Nobody gets to be a billionaire without accruing the surplus value of other people’s labor.”
And that’s true of Notch, too. Minecraft wouldn’t exist without countless people who built the computers, the OS, the Java language, built out the Internet, operate the electrical grid, operate the payment networks, litigated and legislated copyright law, et cetera.
Now, you might say that all of those people got compensated for their labor, and it’s true. (That’s why the negative connotations of exploitation don’t apply.) However, the result of their labor unlocks immense value, which they do not share in because of the way the Internet developed. We could easily imagine a different scenario in which the online services won, an alternate reality in which Notch worked as a programmer for PepsiCo-Prodigy-AOL, and got paid a very good salary to create Minecraft for it. Then, it would be fair for the company to reap all of the subscription fees generated by putting the game on their network service.
We can say that in both scenarios, as long as we’re imagining, Notch would have put in the same amount of work. In one, though, he’d live a decent, middle-class life, with a corporation reaping the surplus value of his labor. In our world, he’s a billionaire, benefiting from the surplus value of others’ labor.
That’s an expansive definition that also describes what a journalist does, which is what upset defenders of civil liberties about the prosecution of Assange. The usual connotation of the word espionage, however, is that it is done by an organization, against adversaries, for its own benefit. Assange was explicitly seeking information from whistleblowers to release to the world. Like a journalist.
But to my point, the CIA explicitly engages in espionage as its mission. So would President Xi be justified in sending his police to the environs of Langley to drag CIA employees out of their beds and before a court to stand trial in Beijing? I say no, because they’re American citizens in the United States. Chinese law should not apply here in America.
Traditionally, courts need to have jurisdiction to hear a dispute, and it comes in multiple types: There’s subject-matter jurisdiction; a municipal traffic court has subject matter jurisdiction over traffic infractions. It can’t hear a murder case. Then, there’s personal jurisdiction, meaning it has power to compel an appearance by a defendant, and impose penalties or assess damages. Personal jurisdiction usually comes from citizenship, or physical presence. State and federal courts have wide-ranging personal jurisdiction, but even then they have to “reach out and touch someone” with service of a summons to effect it. (Trial in-absentia is not allowed in the U.S. unless the defendant waives the right to appear.) Tangentially, the admiralty law system developed because of a lack of a country’s courts’ personal jurisdiction over foreign nationals, and suing property (the basis of civil forfeiture) came about due to sailors simply returning to their home countries, out of legal reach.
Thus, the idea of prosecuting a foreign national outside of the U.S., for actions undertaken outside of the U.S., in places where U.S. law shouldn’t apply—essentially extending a U.S. court’s personal jurisdiction to the whole planet—is deeply troubling. Even if it’s just one category of crime, like espionage. If there’s one exception, then there’s no practical protection, since a country can define espionage in any way it wants to trigger the exception. Or not. It could just accuse somebody of espionage, evidence be damned. After all, that person would be hauled off to a foreign land before being able to mount a defense in court.
That is a tool of tyrants.
Sacha Baron Cohen.
The appeal of Trump’s rhetoric and populist message is entirely subconscious, and doesn’t stand up to even a few moments of critical analysis. Baron Cohen has a genius-level understanding of how to get into people’s heads, and what’s more, he can do it fluently, on-the-fly. His U.S. presidential candidate character would totally dismantle MAGA.
And you keep saying espionage, invoking a word as if it’s some special kind of crime exempt from the rule of law, and also immutable. China gets to define what espionage is under their laws. The U.S. did mangle it far beyond the common definition to pursue Assange.
And they’ve been neglecting that. There are a couple of street names that they have wrong, and I’ve been using the edit feature fruitlessly for over 8 years. I’ve included links to local business web sites with the new name of one, links to municipal web sites with the new name, geo-tagged photos of the street signs, and even links to the municipal ordinance that changed the names in 2003. It all goes into the same black hole.
Also, it’s not even the same corporation or factories behind them. It’s just a brand name at this point, and the product has nothing in common with the old, good one. For example, Maytag bought Amana, and then Whirlpool bought Maytag. (It’s enlightening to read the list of Whirlpool-owned brands.)
Oof, yes, we need opponents for this guy who understand the fundamentals of how he and his rhetoric work. The better way to deal with him is to flip the frame. Specifically, in the opening statement, Biden needed to call out very explicitly that Trump was going to lie constantly, and furthermore, point out that you can recognize his lies when he says “best, strongest, biggest, greatest.” That little bit of verbal jiu jitsu would’ve ensured that it was no longer Biden calling out the lies, but the viewers’ own ears, and by bringing them to conscious attention, draining the power of those statements. (Trump spews lies and nonsense that don’t parse analytically, like that alphabet-soup closing statement, but he’s really aiming his words at the subconscious mind.)
Travel to those countries? The precedent here is that China has the right to extradite me for supporting democracy in Hong Kong from here in the U.S., never once even leaving my house. Assange was not a U.S. citizen, and located outside of U.S. territory.
Of course, the U.S. won’t cooperate with the extradition request, but that’s just a matter of power relationships, not principles. The principle is that everybody in the world is subject to every country’s laws. Or, every person in the world is subject to the laws of the U.S., which fundamentally breaks the rule of law.
It’s scary how many people out there are okay with that.
So your decision is to feign helplessness. I can only point this out, but it is your life and your decision to make.
Do you understand? Do you own that decision as your personal choice? I ask because posts like this one indicate otherwise.
Yikes! This reply validates my concern 100%.
Other sovereign nations get to make their own laws and legal systems without our control. They can make bullshit laws if they want to, like conflating journalism with spying. Then they can charge journalists in another country with a crime and extradite them to face charges. But, spying or journalism or criticizing their king, the details didn’t really matter, they could charge anybody anybody, anywhere in the world with any crime they want. And since it’s another country, we have no assurances of due process there.
That’s scary shit.
Another harsh truth that I learned from existentialist writers, especially Albert Camus, is that we are cursed with freedom. How we choose to deal with what the world gives us is entirely up to us, and refusing to choose is also a choice. If we choose not to try to be somebody worth having as a partner, well, that is a choice.
I also understand depression, and that making that effort may not be possible. Then, healthy alternative is to affirmatively make the choice not to try, and to own it. Sometimes, people call this, “owning your shit .” Paradoxically, it helps a lot by putting you back in control of your own life, instead of feeling like the universe’s chew toy.
So, listen to me or not. It’s your choice.
Harsh truth: No, it’s not enough. You have to convince somebody that their life will be better with you in it. Loyalty and respect are requisites for a good romantic relationship, not the reasons to get into one.
Yep. I chose the words of that comment carefully to say he acted with integrity, not has integrity.