Yeah, I think this is more valuable to her as conservative bonafides than anything. “I stood up to libral, woke, Disney and won!” will probably play great fox news and the other rocks these folk thrive beneath. It’s a further step in a career in the rightwing culture-war bullshit sphere, not back twords Disney.

This has been a republican strategy decades in the making. The comment above framed it as an arms race and that’s a good way to put it. They’ve had the overthrow of democracy in their heads as an objective and have undertaking a concerted strategy to achieve it.

The democrats were always going to be at a disadvantage simply responding to that, but that disadvantage is made a lot worse by the fact that they don’t seem to want to respond to it. They have an idea of what this country is and that comes with a bunch of lines their unwilling to cross. Meanwhile republicans had a clear idea of what they want this country to be and were willing to trample any line, break any law or norm, in order to make it a reality.

This? The news story we’re responding to? It may represent the first stumbling steps off the starting line. But it doesn’t change the fact that the starting pistol sounded decades ago and the republicans have been running the whole time.

Too little, to late. I don’t want that sentiment to be true, but I find it hard to look at this situation and view it in any other way.

Yeah, I know. Just leaving room for miracles I guess.

On paper there’s plenty that could. The Supreme Court could have stepped in to stop a lot of this. Executive orders only stand in places where a full fledged law from congress doesn’t cover the issue. The military is theoretically as obligated to disobey an unlawful order as they are to obey a lawful one and states are theoretically pretty insulated from federal interference except in a few explicit areas.

But, we don’t live on paper and none of those protections exist unless there are people out there who are ready, willing, and able, to act on them. What happens if the Supreme Court somehow manages to rule against the administration and they just flagrantly disregard the order? What happens if Trump orders the military to start attacking US citizens openly or starts an illegal war without congressional approval? What happens if Trump runs for president again in 2028? Or just says he’s president for life and we’re not doing elections anymore?

The answer is nothing, unless people stand up against him. And… so far… we haven’t seen much of that. Not from people in government at any rate. We’ve seen a bit from normal folks on the ground in places like LA, but our government’s been working to neuter the power of popular protest since the civil rights protests, perhaps even earlier. So reasonable people can disagree on the efficacy of that.

I really don’t want to echo the doomer line I’ve seen written here a lot, but yeah, we’re probably fucked. Like maybe if something was done like… a decade ago? Two? Maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation. But… as things stand? I don’t even know if the damage from the first Trump presidency can ever truly be repaired and more damage is being done on a weekly, almost a daily basis. Personally? I think it’s only a matter of time before this man breaks the global economy irreparably. In a way that simply can’t be swept under the rug again. Domestically? Who the fuck knows at this point? I have to resist the urge to laugh out loud whenever people ask where I see myself in five years because at this point I’ve got no idea what the next two weeks are gonna hold.

So… yeah. Fun times in the ol US of A.

I mean, we kinda already ended up there with the Ashley Madison hack in 2015. Problems with that site aside, I feel like it’s kinda the blueprint for everything wrong with companies that retain personally identifable info on folks. If a company collects details like your driver’s license, it’s not a question of if it gets out but when. There’s just no way to collect that sort of data and truly keep it safe.

But, it seems like we’ve kinda forgotten how to learn lessons in the modern day, so I’m sure this was an isolated issue and we’ll never see it’s like again.

(/s on that last part, just in case that wasn’t blindingly obvious.)

I feel like you could actually do some cool comedy game turned horror with that. You know it’s all fun and games until he gets it right.

Every day we get closer to teaching the robots how to feel pain.

I’m gonna be honest, I did not think this was staged when I first read it…

…Because why on earth would that be what you want to stage? Like sure, they say in the article it was to “prove Putin isn’t hiding behind others” or some such shit. The message it sends to me is “our air defense is so shit we can’t even lock it down when the guy in charge comes to visit”. What a bizarre choice of propaganda.

Not a burden. We’re social animals at the end of the day. Everyone relies on everyone else to keep this whole thing we got going. Participating in that doesn’t make you a burden, it makes you human. Hope you get what you need OP, we’re all here rooting for ya.

It’s… better in the sense that you don’t have right wing weirdos all over the place. But technically? Organizationally? Feels like we’re on track to replay the same exact shit over again. It feels like people just aren’t learning the lessons they should from the Twitter takeover.