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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • At a glance this looks like a subject matter jurisdiction objection (as distinct from personal jurisdiction), which is not waivable and can be raised at any time or sua sponte–so you can keep it in your pocket forever and raise it whenever you’re desperate, which seems to be the case here.

    Edit: Looked at the motion, and that’s what this is. It doesn’t necessarily mean the motion is meritorious, but it’s timely.


  • I can think of few things that would restore and bolster my faith in government more than watching the arms of the state rapidly, effectively, and effortlessly put down an active, armed rebellion against the democratically elected institutions of the nation.

    Anyone who marches on the Capitol to unseat the legitimate government of the United States should be met with lethal force, preferably while on camera being broadcast live.

    And that includes anyone who marches on the Capitol to unseat a legitimate Republican government.

    Flowing from the rule of law is the peaceful transfer of power, and flowing from that is the presence of loyal opposition.

    A government that defends the people’s ability to select it with the means entrusted to it is doing exactly what it should. The bitch my state sends to the Senate is an utter slimeball whom I despise with the very core of my being. But the people of my state in their wisdom sent her to DC, so anybody who charges that building with designs on her life should immediately eat a red, white, and blue bullet. If the government fails to defend that bitch, then it has failed me, and my faith in it will have been tarnished.

    That’s my perception of the government in such an event. I certainly don’t speak for everyone.




  • The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can’t be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.

    Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. “Being unkillable” or “controlling this space” can’t be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you’re now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that’s a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.

    Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you’d interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can’t punish a playstyle because playstyles aren’t that well defined, and you can’t create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There’s also no energy denial in GW2, and you can’t give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1’s mesmer–like a lot of things that were better in GW1.

    If you ask me, we don’t need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs–stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have–and we need the elites to be “de-elited” so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they’ve taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.


  • The way faith is treated in the First Century doesn’t translate well to modern audiences. Having faith of a child isn’t an analogy to a child being gullible. It’s an analogy to the way a child trusts in and depends on his parents. Trust, arguably, would be a better translation than faith in many instances.

    Faith for ancient religious peoples wasn’t about believing without proof. That would be as ridiculous for a Firsr Century jew as it is for us. Faith is being persuaded to a conclusion by the evidence.










  • But that wasn’t the question, was it? United international action works and also doesn’t really exist. You think billionaires are going to just throw up their hands and give governments their tax dollars if enough nations agree they should. Doesn’t work that way.

    Read the article you linked. Who’s going to jail in Panama? A few bankers–maybe. Panama changed its rules, and the billionaires just moved all their money elsewhere–exactly as predicted.

    The solution to tax evasion isn’t more tax law. That’s like saying that if only everyone agreed rapists should go to jail, people would stop committing rape.

    I’m in favor of a wealth tax just because any action beats no action, but it is absolutely a half measure. The real solution to this problem is not financial. It’s personal.




  • Would you respect a judge that quotes Harry Potter in official documents on a regular basis?

    YES! If the judge used the Harry Potter quotes to advance sound legal reasoning, I’d consider it a potentially clever and humorous way to inject some levity into something that’s otherwise likely mundane and dry. Also I guarantee you a judge has quoted those books in opinions, along with every other popular piece of literature.

    I’m sorry to remind everybody incensed here, but the professionals in the profession get to decide what is and is not professional, and the legal profession has a long history of quoting material that’s non-germane. You can be upset about it if you want, but we’re fortunate that judges explain their reasoning at all.

    Quoting a book you don’t like doesn’t make a decision bad. A decision is bad if it’s wrong on the law, and as I think everybody in this thread knows, the Bible isn’t the law of the land! Quoting non-law in order to bolster a line of reasoning isn’t good, bad, harmful, or harmless by itself, because the reasoning is the important thing. The Bible has been used to stand for many bad positions–but if it hadn’t been, those positions would still have been bad!

    While you lot are pulling out your pitchforks because a judge quoted the Bible for the billionth time in the last 200 years, did any of you even bother to find out what the decisions actually were?