Carl

It really is the epitome of the “used the wrong formula but somehow got the right answer” meme.

No, she probably isn’t. ICE has intentionally operated in a way that makes filing lawsuits against agents nearly impossible. In order to bring a lawsuit against an agent, step 1 is finding out which agent harmed you. And ICE has intentionally made that as difficult as possible, with unmarked vehicles that don’t even have plates, masked agents without any kind of identifying marks, constantly shuffling agents around so the agent who hurt you yesterday probably isn’t even in town today, burying any kind of discovery behind mountains of red tape and then systematically refusing to fill valid requests for info, etc…

Basically, unless your agent is unmasked via independent detective work, the chances of being able to file a lawsuit are near 0.

Republicans blocked Obama’s appointees because it was “too close to elections, (a year away), and we should let the voters decide.” The idiot Dems went along with it, because they thought that Hillary would steamroll the next election. Trump won. Then a few years later when RBG died (only a few months before Biden was elected) they shamelessly rammed Trump’s appointee through.

If voters flip congress, I’d argue it is Schumer’s moral imperative to block anything and everything Trump tries to do, because the voters will have spoken. That’s the same reasoning for not appointing anyone during Obama’s second term, after all.

I mean… The red tape part could actually be true. But only because black people have historically had to deal with a lot more red tape than white people. Because red tape is a tool that often gets weaponized in the name of racism. For a white person, red tape is an occasional inconvenience. For many black people, red tape is a fact of life, as inevitable as death and taxes.

Black people have been developing (and passing down) strategies to work within and around systematic discrimination for generations, because for them it is a necessary survival mechanism. If cutting some red tape is the difference between your family eating or going hungry, you can bet your ass that people will be singularly motivated to figure out ways to cut that red tape.

A large part of the conservative mentality is having an “other” group to focus their ire on. Conservatives all want to feel like they’re part of the in-crowd. But the existence of an in-crowd requires the existence of an out-crowd. And when one isn’t readily available, conservatism will invent one to be able to maintain their identity. The entirety of conservative history has been moving from one out-crowd to another, to keep their members satisfied.

When people say conservatives are selfish, this is largely what they’re referring to. The “fuck you, I got mine” mentality is largely because they feel like allowing too many people into the in-crowd will remove the existence of an out-crowd. And the lack of an out-crowd is an existential threat to conservatism. So they’ll continually work to create a new out-crowd whenever the current one begins to dwindle. It’s the old “first they came for the communists” poem.

I guess it depends on how you interpret the “official acts” SCOTUS ruling. Was him barring journalists an official act? If so, he can’t be prosecuted for defying the courts. The SCOTUS truly created a dictator with that ruling.

Anyhow the world is changing very quickly and nowadays not doing business with the united states or not using the dollar, is less and less of a problem.

While I agree on the surface, these sanctions also include any American companies. You can’t use most email providers, because most are based in the US. You can’t use any debit or credit cards, because MasterCard and Visa are both American companies that will block your access. You can’t use any cloud storage providers, because they’re all American. You can’t have a Google account for your phone. You can’t even use a Microsoft account to log into your Windows PC.

And sure, lemmings will say that all of those are good things. We’re happy in our little “self-host everything, delete all the cloud accounts, avoid being tracked by any means possible, etc” bubble. But the average person barely even knows how to open a web browser, and panics when their password needs to be reset.

It basically forces you to live as a Luddite, because the vast majority of the internet, modern banking, etc will (at least tangentially) touch American commerce in some way. And the average person isn’t even close to being well-enough prepared for that kind of upheaval.

While I agree on the surface, that would be giving them free reign to do whatever they want. They should still cover the press releases, but do things like mute the person at the lectern and add their own “the White House banned reporters from the news room, so we’re only releasing a summary of press briefings until that is changed” type of voiceover to it instead. Literally remove their voice and dub your own instead.

Have every reporter in every briefing only ask when the banned reporters will be allowed back. You just released a briefing on the situation in Iran? When will the banned reporters have their credentials reinstated and be allowed back inside the press room? You just released a briefing on gas prices? When will the banned reporters have their credentials reinstated and be allowed back inside the press room? You just released a briefing on Israel? When will the banned reporters have their credentials reinstated and be allowed back inside the press room? The question doesn’t change until they address it, and if the answer isn’t “we’re allowing them back in” then the exact same question gets repeated by the next reporter. It would require a massive act of solidarity on the reporters’ side, but it would be extremely effective at forcing them to address it.

Have every reporter make their reports outside the White House next to the banned reporters. If the White House wants coverage, they either move everything outside or allow everyone inside.

There are definitely more effective ways to protest than simply “don’t cover them.”

And here’s a reminder that ERs in some states are required by law to ask about your immigration/citizenship status. The cruelty is always the point.

Also, they’re not even requesting it be shared directly with the government. That apparently isn’t enough. They’re requiring that the personally identifiable information (names, addresses, diagnoses, etc) also be shared with an independent contractor. An independent contractor that these hospitals have no confidentiality agreements with, no privacy guarantees from, and no security audits to review. They’re being required to send all of their patents’ PII to this shadowy contractor, so that contractor can do throws hands up in the air and gestures around wildly with it.

Isolating vocals on a messy track would actually be closer to audio forensics, which is a pretty specific branch of the audio world. There are lots of specialized tricks that audio forensics experts can use, which would fly in the face of a lot of what traditional audio engineers would consider best practice. Because an audio forensics expert isn’t thinking about best practice for a mixed and mastered track, which is the mindset that most audio engineers would approach the problem from.

This isn’t even sarcasm or a conspiracy theory. This was literally why the Feds started the war on drugs. There are records of officials talking about it, and they outright state that it was started because they wanted to criminalize historically black behaviors. Because they could then use that to target black communities.