I’m glad they reported on this, but the author needs to look into federal regulations for people who work on or hold federal contracts. There’s a ton of qualified language in there that makes it clear they didn’t do a ton of research. It’s actually much more black and white than they make it seem.

I’ve worked as a federal contractor, and before I could even start onboarding, they do an intensive background check and interview where they ask probing questions about substance use (among many other things) and then they check up on your answers with a number of third parties (acquaintances, colleagues etc). Nearly without exception, if you want a job in the civil service, any prior drug use is almost always automatically disqualifying. Telling the truth about it doesn’t win you any favors with investigators either, so the general recommendation is that if you’ve smoked weed in the past, you must consistently lie about it, or you won’t get a federal job (or contracting job).

And that’s just weed. This guy does and talks about doing hard drugs in public.

The fact that it doesn’t seem to be a problem for someone who has pocketed such absurd amounts of taxpayer money from federal contracts, to openly use schedule 1 drugs in public, is one of the best examples of the legal double standards the rich have come to expect. Anyone who isn’t a billionaire would be prosecuted and jailed for the behavior Musk brags about. And they’d obviously never be awarded a federal contract.

Drugs should be legal. But until they are, these double standards have got to go.

There was nothing racist about this comment. The West has provided billions of dollars of unconditional support to the racist, Islamophobic, child-killing, amoral, death-obsessed state of Israel. And I’m a Jew, in case you were considering tossing the antisemitism card.

If you need cold hard numbers, 82% of the Israeli public supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

The West’s behavior can of course be accurately described as colonial, neocolonial, or imperialist. Choose whatever murderous exploitative term you want, but please wake up and see the world for what it is. The West has directly supported the murder of countless people.

This may be splitting hairs, but this is being pushed on EPA scientists by the political appointees. This is why the politicization of these agencies is so critically dangerous. EPA scientists are incredibly talented and their recommendations are largely driven by good science. They know their shit. This is not that, this is political appointees forcing “interpretations” that the scientists themselves would undoubtedly take issue with.

I’m not making excuses, this is bad no matter how you slice it, but blame should be directed at the political appointees.

So now we can legally buy fully automatic machine guns, but not a lifesaving miracle of medical science, that we all paid for.

Republicans are a death cult, through and through.

I find Kenyatta’s comments to be pretty disingenuous, to be honest. He talks about how important it is that everything have the same source of truth, but then says shit like this:

“We’re not for the incumbents; we’re also not for the challengers,” he said. “We are for listening to our voters who make the decisions about who they want our nominees to be.”

That’s just laughably untrue. The DNC has almost always favored incumbents and establishment candidates, that’s why it’s so incredibly unpopular and why most Democrats don’t believe it represents their actual values.

“You look at every story that’s written about this, and it’s, ‘Oh, my gosh, the party is doing this to David.’”

No, I haven’t seen that narrative anywhere. What I have seen is a lot of disillusioned leftists pissed off on Hoggs’s behalf because of the intra-party double standard he has helped expose. Kenyatta harps about how unhelpful all the infighting is while he contributes to the infighting.

It’s not just that it was written by an LLM, it’s that you didn’t write it.

This platform is for reading stuff written by people. Whether that’s news, comments, whatever. You’ll find plenty of AI communities here, but each community has a culture and norms, and you’re now feeling what it’s like to push against those norms.

There’s an obvious difference in language and tone between LLMs and a genuine comment written by a living breathing human being. Most of your comments read like they were written by a PR firm, and that’s just not fun for anyone.

Don’t rely on a machine to filter and improve your thoughts. Use your own thinking and writing to do that, otherwise you’ll quickly be blocked by all the humans here who actually participate.

Lemmy users are pretty skeptical of anything that reads like it came out of an LLM. I downvote and block all the low-effort slop I see.

This might fly on other platforms, but lots of Lemmy users came here to get away from this kind of stuff.

If you want to engage with people in good faith, then take the time to think through your thoughts, and write them out using your own words. If you’re not willing to take the time to write a post yourself, I’m not going to take the time to read it.

So because a small group of voters made a decision that you (and I) disagree with, their rights shouldn’t be protected by the law? That’s not how this is supposed to work.

Staying silent on the unlawful detention and suppression of the first amendment rights of a legal permanent resident would be unforgivable. If this specific case doesn’t cause outrage and epitomize the lawlessness and cruelty of this administration, then nothing will.

There is no political upside to staying silent on this issue. This is not the time to spread unsourced rumors about a facially law-abiding permanent resident, it’s the time to insist our government follow the laws that the rest of us are subject to. Follow due process, and if there are genuine issues with his case, deal with them within the bounds of the law. But keeping quiet and just assuming this administration will follow the law is foolish. We all need to loudly stand up for this man and his rights, otherwise no one will stand up for us when the time comes.