Fun fact about that: I think it was Mike Mullane who was on one of the first missions with a female astronaut. He found her, obviously, to be beyond qualified, and was just as furious as all the other astronauts of any gender at the dumb type of "how will you do your makeup in space" type of questions she would get from the press.

Anyway, partway through the mission her hair got caught by some kind of machinery, sucked in and tangled up in it, and it was a little bit of a pain in the ass to get things sorted out. She hunted down every single member of the crew and made them swear an oath under threat of terrible violence not to say a goddamned word about it, because it was intolerable that there be some actual negative issue with some reality that was connected with her gender in any way, that anyone could point to as a reason why male astronauts were better.

Then he put it in his book. Of course. Hopefully enough time had gone by at that point that we understood that astronauts can be qualified even if they have hoo-has. Or, well, we did until Jeff Bezos got involved.

She was widely ridiculed for the quote with Alien as a notable example.

I think the rest of the quote was pretty accurate. She was speaking to gender bias in Hollywood and saying she was happy to be an exception, which I think was fine. But because she said something boneheadedly wrong to tee up the point, that's all anyone really remembers about it.

The boll weevil was not added until thirty years later, when Luther Baker thought the Boll Weevil Monument should have a boll weevil on it.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas had dissented, and that Alito was planning to write a response.

I really hope when this is all over we can put these guys on trial. Impeachment is not enough.

God damn. So, the Budapest Memorandum is short enough to read in a couple of minutes: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/Part/volume-3007-I-52241.pdf

It's incredibly badly written. The most relevant part:

4. The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.

What is "assistance"? Selling weapons? Giving weapons? Sending troops? Using nuclear weapons in retaliation? I definitely don't read that as a security guarantee. But, it seems cunningly vaguely crafted in a way that could make it sound like one.

Also, do they even have to actually give "assistance"? Or just seek assistance from the Security Council and then they're allowed to give up if they don't find it?

Does it even get triggered by "victim of any act of aggression," or does that clause about "in which nuclear weapons are used" also apply to that first contingency?

It's basically so poorly worded that it could mean anything. Presumably, this was either a deliberate goal, or else the result of the various parties being so unwilling to come to an agreement that they just wanted to get something signed and all move on regardless of whether it meant anything, or both.

Of course, if we're assigning any blame to Western powers for not stopping the Russian Federation, we should also be noting that the Russian Federation agreed to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine, including the existing borders, and not to attack Ukraine under any circumstances. But we always knew modern Russia is so full of shit their eyes are brown, so no surprise there.

Rashida Tlaib is better on Israel than Shapiro, yes. Go figure. She was not an option for vice president.

The article notes that Tim Walz was the main alternative option being pushed by the anti-Shapiro crowd, and he was objectively worse on Israel in terms of messaging at least.

I do get what you mean. I read the Wikipedia article and watched an interview where he talked about Israel, and I definitely didn't like him. All his answers are politician answers, very successfully crafted so that it'll sound to everyone on any side of the issue that he agrees with them. He did say clearly that he prefers a two-state solution but that was about the only non-weaselly thing he said. But yeah, he has a bunch of extremely anti-Palestinian actions and I can definitely see why a committed pro-Palestine person could have a serious problem with him.

“We didn’t mean to send you that stupid letter, it was so so stupid, you should have known it was stupid when we sent it to you.”

• “That sounds like a you problem”
• “So if we’d agreed you would have said never mind don’t worry about it forget all that?”
• “Apology accepted. Contact us if you need anything else”

I feel like this is the kind of question that needs a whole lot of details before it is answerable.

Tax fraud? Absolutely fuck not.

Drunk driving? Probably I would give them a single "Hey next time I find out you're doing that I am calling the cops on you" warning shot.

Stealing from their company? Depends, what does the company do and who owns it? Again almost certainly not.

And so on.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, nominated by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, wrote that he and his two colleagues “cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.”

Until I read this whole verdict, I hadn't realized why people were making a big deal about it. It's breathtaking.

The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate.

This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dint of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions.

The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.

It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.

This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.

The person who wrote that should get a medal made of gold.

Full text is in this post.

I feel like you actually probably can drive air into the empty spaces (that's exactly how your lungs work), if you can somehow make a tight enough seal on the person's nipple, but it would be incredibly dangerous because of embolism. Don't do it.

Holy shit, you’re not kidding. I generally like The Atlantic for obvious recent reasons but I just looked up their Gaza coverage and about 50% of it is more or less “Why is everyone mad at Israel what have they ever done to anyone” 😳

Rss.ponder.cat is for only the bot-fed communities of RSS feeds, segregated off so that it's easier for people to block if they feel like it's spammy and want no part of it. Ponder.cat is for the humans.

https://rss.ponder.cat/post/1454

Yeah. Every securely built society gets rotten as time goes on, because no one feels anymore the urgency to maintain it. People used to have a fire of how important it was to make things okay, build and maintain all that structure, and that's what built the mid-20th-century good place that was America (for some people, not that it was "finished" in any sense, but it was pretty freakin' good all things considered and comparatively.)

But yeah then everyone got lazy and let things fall apart. And now, look what happened. Weak people make hard times.

So my orientation isn’t generally to just assume bad faith from everyone, you can take that to be willful ignorance, but it’s also just an understanding that people can do impulsive things or make mistakes without it being a complete indictment of everyone they even associate with.

I never said bad faith. I literally just described what happened: I came in, disagreed with them, and then I described the reaction I got.

I do think you could draw a conclusion of a certain type of mentality from that reaction, although looking back I can see a lot of hostility on my side, so I kind of get it. But all we've been talking about now in these 7 different messages I have sent you about it is the simple reality facts of what happened. That has to be the starting point before anyone makes any kind of judgement built on it. I sent you proof, links, all kinds of stuff, and you're still up to right now coming with "looks like a misunderstanding" "if there was some censorship goal" and so on.

I'm not assuming bad faith. I'm describing what happened. I'm not saying it's an indictment of everyone. We're just talking about what happened.

To me, it looks like what you're doing is the converse of what you say: You're bending over backwards like Professor Farnsworth to try to assume good faith, even refusing to accept or examine clear convincing evidence, or say "well both sides" or try to come up with reasons why it must probably be some other way.

I also notice that you're extremely eager to assume bad faith from lemmy.world. You said they said to shut up about Palestine. I can absolutely guarantee that they said no such thing (or at least 99% of them said no such thing, I won't swear for every single user). You keep saying you're "paraphrasing" or that "You guys have already demonstrated what you believe" when someone's trying to explain that they believe no such thing. You will not accept any kind of thing that illustrates good faith. After all, they already demonstrated what they believe.

The reason I'm making a big deal about this is that, for as long as you simply want to cling to your preferred version of events, so that you can "assume good faith" when in other contexts you go hard hard hard in the other direction, I don't see much point in talking to you about any more complex topics.

Some people get endless good faith. You must have misunderstood. Out of context. Well look at what these other people did. I'm not sure I believe that source.

Some other people get absolutely no good faith, in fact you already know the truth about them, they've already revealed what they believe, so your viewpoint's not going to change.

Like I say: Waste of time. Trying to build a more complex discussion in the face of that type of approach is going to take way more than 7 messages, and you probably still will cling to your preferred preexisting interpretation, so oh well.

Edit: Also, what are you talking about with rss.ponder.cat versus ponder.cat? They're just two different instances with totally different communities, I have no idea about links to one being going to the other or anything like that. I don't think that is happening. Can you show me which page you're looking at, and which link someone might click that leads to the wrong one of them or etc? It might be a bug or something but I have never seen that behavior and it shouldn't be that way.

Lemmy’s core development team are communists, of a very bizarre and inconsistent type that is openly or semi-openly in favor of massive command-economy-capitalist countries like China and Russia even when they are engaged in imperialist conduct. They’re weird. Idk what’s up with it. A lot of the core historical instances still have that mindset and are sometimes so obnoxious about demanding that everyone else needs to also that they are banned from the more recent more mainstream-thinking instances.

Generalizations are tough but I think it’s safe to say that 90% of everyone else on Lemmy is some variety of vague-leftist roughly in the mold of Bernie Sanders, which depending on your personal Overton window you may define anywhere from “disgusting liberal who betrayed the movement by voting for Kamala Harris” to “Communist.”

Hope this helps

The people that do this horseshit never want to move to places where it’s already in place, because they are always dangerous gangland nightmares and those people tend to be soft and sort of stupid. If they went there they wouldn’t survive. They need to be in our safe ordered society, and fuck it up into the nightmare, in safety.

Thank you. Not that it did a damn bit of good. Dude seems like he’s stuck on all output no input. Like I said, I really tried.

As often happens, the young people haven’t yet gone through the world’s natural selection which leaves alive only the ones who have accepted and internalized the bullshit. They’re still, often, alive on the inside a little bit.