I think it’s a rhetorical distinction, but an important one to be aware of.

It would be terrible for us to waste time arguing over whether or not “Trump can succeed!” when we both agree that any such success is likely to be short lived, lead to immediate violence, and most probably result in a violent removal of his administration from power.

(Not to say that we necessarily agree on those things – just that it’d be a waste of time arguing if we do.)

We are far from being confident that Trump won’t succeed in another coup attempt.

This entirely depends on what you mean by “succeed”.

Would you consider the Confederate States of America (nominally founded during and extinguished by the 19th century US civil war) a “success”?

What isn’t mentioned are other ways Trump could attempt a coup or election interference that might ignore the constitution

There really aren’t any other ways which don’t fall into either “entirely protected speech” or “instigation of civil war”.

Trump is free to claim his party won the midterms, and even file nuisance suits in the courts. And we shouldn’t assume he wouldn’t try to just declare who won or try and interfere with the formation of the much-bluer 120th Congress. But all permutations are either things he’s as free as anyone to do, things that likely won’t work, or things that would start a civil war.

This isn’t a paradox. It’s the ordinary and expected outcome of you have a junior whose work you can never trust.

Regardless of what your profession is, if you have a source of “work input” that requires specific instruction for near every task and whose output must be carefully examined, then the part of your job which is reviewing drafted work would necessarily increase.

This is especially true in engineering fields, where the things that can be abstracted into repeatable tasks usually are. Computers saved structural engineers from having to do all their math separately and higher-abstraction languages saved programmers from having to futz around in assembly, but neither of those had to be manually checked.

Parliamentary systems are substantially more susceptible to facism and nationalism than multicameral legislatures with a separate executive.

And they’re hardly proof against the sort of gerrymandering that makes the US House less responsive to general election voters than it should be.

“We should abandon all those queer kids in small communities because there are so many grown up MAGA redcaps around them” is a hell of an opinion.

That sounds like an argument for abolishing the fundamental parts of the united states.

It would be very bad thing if every governor and attorney general suddenly became as subject to Republican malfeasance as local mayors in Texas.

Also, there are some federal rules for what counts as special “birth certificates” to efficiently prove that a US citizen asking for a passport was born in the USA. But states don’t have to follow them if they choose, and depending on their reason could presumably go to court to get the federal rule adjusted or discarded.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-22/chapter-I/subchapter-F/part-51/subpart-C

I’m very relieved to hear it was only water and apple cider vinegar. “Unknown liquid sprayed by an attacker” is just short of actually wounding someone when it comes to anxiety induced.

MN should throw the book at him. And at anyone who helped him do it.

By this standard the US civil war began no later than 1787, when the 3/5th and grand compromises.were necessary to get both factions to agree to the new constitution.

There’s a reason why we don’t call the “three score and thirteen” years between the conference in Philadelphia and the attack on fort Sumter a “war”.

Oh, I know the trick to this!

Refuse to learn anything at all about someone’s actual positions, and just judge them by labels. Castro and Hitler were both bad and called themselves socialists, so Bernie sanders and AOC have to also be bad.

(Or, y’know, we could just judge folk by what they say and do instead of labels…)

While malls are a staple of American culture, they’re not the mark of an ally. To the USA, that word means “we will go to war to defend you and expect you to do the same”.

That the USA ended its friendship with Venezuela over an idiotic cold war bias is embarrassing and indefensible, but it’s not a recent diplomatic change.

We do use sortition for the most direct part of our government in the United States. Juries grand and petite are both populated with a more or less randomly selected group of citizens, then filtered for bias.

This also makes juries the most unpredictable part of government.

If Venezuela was ever a US “ally”, that ended literally years before the recent rendition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Venezuela_relations

(Not trying to justify Trump’s bullshit, but facts are facts.)

Hey, let me try re-writing that headline:

“Republican senator interjects transphobia into a hearing about banning abortion ; OBGYN refuses to misgender her trans masculine patients.”

Men can absolutely get pregnant. Because trans men can get pregnant, and trans men are at least as much men as bigoted transphobia like Hawley.

Oddly, there are some foods than can be done amazingly well in a microwave. Including a cup-cake in your coffee mug, which is my favorite microwave trick.

But none of them are steak. If you’re alone with a steak and need to cook it alone, literally any cooking method including “just hold it over a candle for eight hours” or “give up and eat it raw” would be better than steak.

Congress does have a huge investigative role when it comes to anyone who holds a constitutional office, though. And that role’s actually gotten bigger since the “POTUS Immunity” and “14th needs a law” bullshit from 2024.

The rules that apply to Clinton equally apply to W, Obama, Biden, and ****face…

China is definitely stupid about something, but “let’s.join the current USA bubble” doesn’t seem to be it.

Stackexchange sites aren’t intended as forums, they’re supposed to be “places to find answers to questions”.

The more you get away from stack overflow itself the worse they get, though, because anything beyond “how can I fix this tech problem” doesn’t necessarily have an answer at all, much less a single best one

The original food pyramid was designed when starvation was a major concern, and so makes sense in that context.

The “my plate” was a fair adjustment that refocused on quality of food in a world of plenty.

I have no idea what a “upside down pyramid” is supposed to be.

“if we just made this opt-in” has become the bleakest nonsense in IT.

Be it LLMs or ads or “free” albums, tech companies just can’t accept that “make me say yes” should always be the default.