In small (population-wise) rural areas like that, where positions are running uncontested or only contested in the primary, it’s actually possible individuals could make a difference. But there’s some caveats.

If the area is extremely Republican and would never vote for a Democrat, don’t run as one. Unlike in races like President and Senate, independent and third party are actual choices at this level, they’re not simply false choices.

An individual could find some local issue that matters to a lot of people in the area but seems to be being ignored. Talk to neighbors, local people, etc, figure out what they’re upset about that actually falls under the purview of local or state government, then make that the core of your platform.

As long as you’re not officially listed as a Democrat, you’re not platforming on things that the locals would never vote for (and you probably couldn’t do anything about anyway in the lower office you’re running for) and you’ve actually done some local research and found an issue that a significant number of people in your area are upset about, you actually have a chance. You’d probably lose, but there’s a real chance.

It’s kind of a difficult issue. Jury nullification has been used for both good and bad, with the simplest and most obvious examples being from Civil War type stuff - people who unambiguously broke the law against helping slaves escape have had their verdicts nullified. Good thing. But also people who lynched black people in the south have had their verdicts nullified. Bad thing.

Making sure that verdicts are determined purely based on the law and whether the law was broken means that people need to work to change the law, they can’t just apply the law unevenly by nullifying against some defendants and not against others. So I can see the case for nullification being a bad thing. Ideally, you deal with that by removing or reworking the law so that it doesn’t come to the point of needing nullification.

But, well, reality isn’t ideal. Still, it’s unavoidable - as long as a jury can’t be forced to explain the reasoning behind their verdict beyond insisting ‘I was not convinced of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt’ and as long as a jury verdict of Not Guilty is final and cannot be retried, jury nullification will de facto exist. That said, it’s the entire system not just ‘this judge’ that is attempting to prevent jury nullification from happening. The judge’s question about following the law is boilerplate standard basically everywhere, and it’s a systematic and intentional attempt to weed out potential jury nullifiers.

That’s exactly the reason for those questions. So they can ask ‘would you consider using jury nullification’ without informing people that jury nullification exists.

And also so that if you at some point admit something that sounds like you’re voting not guilty because you disagree with the law, they can kick you off the jury and possibly charge you with perjury.

If you ever find yourself in a jury and intend to nullify, you must not admit it ever: you must maintain simply that you are not convinced by the evidence.

It feels to me like people did unite after those attacks…it was the crazy conspiracy theories about them that really seemed to get the ball rolling as far as division goes.

Thing is, Republicans have been using any crisis and our ‘unite behind leadership’ behavior to fuck us since before Reagan, so I’m not sure it’s really such a bad thing that we stopped ‘uniting’.

No shit! That’s our fucking election system. After the primaries, we wind up withtwo candidates that most people don’t like, and we vote against the one we think is worse. It’s been this way for a very long time. Case in point:

https://youtu.be/riDypP1KfOU?si=xwlInd1CS9p7rYcT

Acting like this is shocking news is disingenuous bullshit.

Nope, wouldn’t really be in less danger. That’s something that bothers and concerns me, people act like it’s Trump that’s the problem, but he’s really kind of irrelevant. This is the Republican party, this is all Republicans. Trump is not some bizarre outlier, at least not in the sense of the things he wants to do and will push for and enable as President. Every Republican wants those too.

That’s exactly what the agitators and such want - not to get people to vote for Trump which they know isn’t gonna happen, they just want to convince enough people not to vote against him so he wins.

Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.

So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…

Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.

You probably had the same damn book I did, with an illustration of him eating an orange and seeing the wings of a butterfly coming up over it and supposedly realizing they look just like the sails of a ship and so, gasp, the world must be round like this orange!

Some of them, sure, but there are a lot of stories of how many lies recruiters will tell you to get you to sign on, so a pretty significant number are genuinely bad people.

So one thing I don’t fully understand is this: the secret service is required by law to protect the former president, but…is there anything that actually requires the state of New York to accommodate the secret service in doing so?

In theory, couldn’t the state of New York just actually throw Trump in prison, no special privileges, and also no special accommodations for the secret service?

I don’t usually recommend movies in situations where the solution space isn’t already limited significantly by the context, but 2001 is the one I thought of first upon reading the title, so I suppose there’s at least two of us!

They could turn that into a running theme, like how every Elder Scrolls protagonist is a prisoner to start with…

But Divinity already has a long history and so does Baldur’s Gate so…ehh, doesn’t fit in quite as well. Maybe with a new IP they make it a tradition for.

This long explanation supporting capitalism and ‘the market’ fails to take something crucial into account that all these market promoters forget:

Labor cannot have an undistorted market so long as the option to not sell your labor isn’t a valid one.

For any market to be relatively undistorted, a seller must be free to choose not to sell at all if none of the offers are equal or greater than her assessment of the value of her product.

However, as long as labor is needed in order to procure food, shelter, and adequate living conditions, this cannot be the case - people are coerced into selling their labor at values lower than their assessment of its value because to not do so means being denied adequate living conditions.

If people were free to choose not to sell their labor without this coercion, then those seeking to purchase people’s labor would find they likely cannot find anywhere near as many people willing to sell at the price they are offering.

Basically, you are making excuses for the fact that due to this market distortion coercing people to sell their labor, the divide between productivity and wages has grown. It is not necessary to lock wages to productivity - if people have the option, and they see massive profits being pocketed off their work with increasingly minimal compensation, they would choose not to sell…except there comes the coercion to ensure they don’t do that.

I wonder if the same excuses would be made if we turned it around and told companies they must sell their products, no matter how little the customers are offering…

Yeah, agree…this woman’s colossal fucking hubris is in perfectly appropriate company with the likes of Elon Musk. If she hadn’t been so colossally egotistical, and retired sometimes around 2013 or so, the supreme court would be a lot less fucked today.

It’s only be a spine if he gets out there and basically campaigns for Biden. If he asks any remaining same conservatives to abandon the Republican party and join the Democrats, until the Republicans wither and die and the Democrats split into a sane pair of parties that can disagree but compromise like it used to be.

But he won’t do that. None of them have so far.

This is what I said to someone who asked a very similar question about the same thing a while back:

‘Females’ is, effectively, a ‘technical term’ you might say, that isn’t used in normal conversation. It’s used specifically in situations where distance from the subject being discussed is intentional. It is the sort of language used in police reports, medical reports and the like…when it’s even being applied to humans at all. Its use is perhaps more common referring to animals; it’s the sort of terminology you’d expect to hear in a nature documentary.

The people trying to push its use are intending to make the subjects - women - sound ‘other’ and separate and alien by referring to them as ‘females’. Not everyone who is picking up this terminology intends it that way, but the connotations are unavoidable because of how language works in common use, and therefore if you don’t intend it that way, you badly need to be made aware of it so you can stop.

There’s probably a decent number of people that buy a game and don’t install it immediately. I often do this when something is on sale. By the time they realize they didn’t get what they were after, it may be outside the refund window.

Mostly if you had ever posted something that was useful to people, it hurts other people now trying to find that information on the internet somewhere. It is unlikely Reddit actually deleted the data, they just made it inaccessible. Storage for posts is cheap. There’s no reason for them to not keep literally everything ever, especially since they’ve known for well over a decade that the data itself is useful.

Odd comparison, and internally inconsistent. They criticize KOTOR for having only one decision that affects the overall story, but fail to consider that SWG had zero decisions that affect the overall story.

It is true that as a multiplayer game there are theoretically more opportunities for roleplay in SWG, and if they’d focused on that it would make more sense and be more consistent.