I’m old enough to remember a time when you could receive your messages instantaneously via instant messages!

I’ve always found it absurd that presidents possess the authority to grant pardons. It trivializes our judicial system and undermines its integrity. This power should not be vested in the presidency.

These polls are just his approval ratings, right (sorry, can't access the article), not a measure who is willing to vote for him in 2024? Yeah, people don't approve of you backing Israel when it's indiscriminately killing civilians and committing war crimes. Surprise, surprise. Doesn't mean they're going to vote for Trump over you, Joe, don't worry.

"He could invoke powers we've never heard a President of the United States invoke—potentially to shut down companies or turn off the internet or deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil," he added. "We don't know because the things that are in there, the emergency powers of the president, aren't widely known to the American people.

Wow, it’s almost like we’ve consolidated too much power in the Executive Branch and should do something about it before a despotic asswipe gets elected by an unhinged, manipulated populace.

Pretty sure it’s already considered one if you’re in the Russian army in Ukraine.

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if Lemmy is rife with these trolls. And I'm not just talking about the tankies.

I will never understand people who advocate for communism as opposed to democratic socialism. Every major country that has ever gone down the communist road has ended up a dictatorship. That's not a bug of communism, it's a feature. I get the criticism of capitalism, I really do, but we can enact socialist laws that rein in the excesses and extremes of capitalism without sacrificing our democracies for one-party governments.

The new law, which reforms the state’s conservatorship system, expands the definition of “gravely disabled” to include people who are unable to provide themselves basic needs such as food and shelter due to an untreated mental illness or unhealthy drugs and alcohol use. Local governments say current state laws leave their hands tied if a person refuses to receive help.

The law is designed to make it easier for authorities to provide care to people with untreated mental illness or addictions to alcohol and drugs, many of whom are homeless.

I work in mental health in another state, and I’ve been wishing for a law like this since I started my career. I don’t believe people who have any sort of mental illness should be forced into treatment, but laws enacted at the behest of rights groups for the mentally ill have gone too far (although it’s certainly better that we have those laws than don’t). Some people are so sick they’re their own insurmountable obstacle to care, and that would be fine if their condition only affected them, but it often doesn’t. For their sakes and that of those around them, I agree some people should be forced to get their issues treated.

We have actual victims speaking up to let us know that the Catholic Church and other Christian communities are abusing children. If LGBT groups are allegedly doing the same, where are the victims' testimonies? Where are the hundreds, if not thousands of victims coming forward with their own stories that can be investigated so we can bring these alleged gay pedophiles to justice?

Relevant:

According to previously unreported details that police released about the incident Wednesday, Donofrio repeatedly knocked, banged and kicked on the front door "while manipulating the door handle" while trying to enter the home.

A female resident of the home called 911 as Donofrio kicked the door, while a male resident went to retrieve a firearm elsewhere in the home, the news release states. The homeowner owned the gun legally, “for the purpose of personal and home protection,” according to police.

While the woman was on the phone with police, Donofrio broke a glass window on the front door "and reached inside to manipulate the doorknob," at which point the male resident fired the shot through the broken window that struck Donofrio in his upper body, according to police.

Under those circumstances, I don't blame the homeowner for using a gun to defend himself and the other female resident. This guy was literally breaking into their home. If it had been me, I would have been terrified and very thankful to have a gun on hand for defense. I'm sure a lot of people here will protest to the shooting, but I would urge them to really think about what they would have done in such a situation. I don't know what Donofrio's reasons were for trying to break into the home, but they hardly matter; the fact is, he did try, and the residents of the home had every reason to think they were in danger. If we had multi-shot stun guns that could reliably incapacitate an intruder, I'd say he should have used that rather than a lethal weapon, but current stun guns aren't that reliable and only fire once before needing to be reloaded. That a life was lost is sad, but I agree that no criminal charges should be filed in this instance. However, I'm not saying that I entirely agree with the Castle doctrine on which this is based, as I'm not intimately familiar with it, but the general notion of being able to use lethal force to defend oneself against a home intruder I do agree with on principle.

As a person born many years after the first moon landing, I always thought it was fucking ridiculous that we managed to put a machine on a celestial body thousands of miles away from our fucking planet. That puts our species' relative IQ compared to other species at 100,000. Back in the Stone Age, our peak achievements were running a long time and throwing objects accurately and at high speed, which allowed us to pwn just about everybody else. Now we're using chemistry and engineering to produce rockets that can move complex objects off the fucking planet to a spheroid object we can see in the sky. Like, what the actual fuck?

Due to sociopolitical issues, I have a fairly negative view of our species these days. But when you look at our technological achievements, you have to sit back and just stare in awe at what we've been able to accomplish. We're homo sapiens, fuck you. Our closest relatives (chimps) are four times as strong as us, fuck them, we experiment on you to learn about ourselves. Elephants, dolphins, crows, and orangutans trail us in intelligence, LMAOROLF, keep playing with them mirrors we gave you. We are so fucking OP we domesticated cows so hard their anal gas is a threat to the fucking planet. We've genetically engineered dogs into the most prolific and diverse species on Earth, and other animals actively seek us out sometimes, because they're like "holy shit, humans do magic, maybe they can get this weird plastic shit off my ass," and we invented that plastic and put it there in the first place. We are the fucking bomb, for better or worse. Nothing compares to us. We are functionally gods, fuck you.

For many reasons, humans suck, fuck us. But god damn, you better fucking respect.

I have to admit that I have a bit of a failure of empathy when it comes to people who get sucked into cults. I understand many of them suffer from various psychological vulnerabilities, and if you're talking about someone with extremely low self-esteem or certainly an intellectual impairment, then fine, I get how they might be duped by a cult leader. But if you're basically mentally healthy, the signs of cultdom seem so obvious to me that I have a hard time understanding why they don't see them. I accept that they don't, but it's difficult for me to understand.

As such, this whole Trump thing has put me in a kind of political existential dilemma: I don't know that I will ever be able to see Trump supporters (~90% of conservatives) as mentally reliable people from now on. I don't mean to be dramatic; I go back and forth on this (hence it being a dilemma). At times, I tell myself, "it's not that bad, it can't be that bad," but then another poll comes out reporting that 3/4 of these folks really are forehead-deep in the Kool Aid.

The sad thing is this is my field! I work in mental health; I'm supposed to understand how this shit happens, and when it's a small group (like most cults) I...guess I just sort of write it off as an anomaly. But this is over 1/3 of the U.S. population. I've done a little research and the prevailing explanation seems to be groupthink and echo chambers—Trump supporters are just surrounded by each other and so when everyone you know seems to think these things are true, you reason that they can't all be wrong and agree based on that heuristic. But...really? No critical thinking?

I accept that this is a failing on my part though, because there are other examples of this in history. I guess seeing it play out in front of my eyes is just too surreal for me to handle. I don't know. I guess the scariest part is the idea that in theory this can happen to any group of people. Leftists are not immune, we just haven't had it happen to us yet. It's a truly depressing thought that our brains have this kind of innate software bug, but then again I guess it does explain a lot about human history.

They left out the part where Carolyn Bryant Donham admitted her initial accusations that Till assaulted her—which catalyzed Till's murder—were lies. Still think they should have sent her cancer-ridden, geriatric ass to prison before she died.