I used to worry about what women would think when they saw my home, but it turned out that none of them ever see it at all so I might as well be true to myself and collect all the My Little Ponies.

It sounds like the point they’re trying to make is that Americans don’t want to have children because things in the USA are getting bad, but if that was the correct explanation then we would expect to see (1) people in countries where it’s worse having even fewer children, which we don’t see, and (2) people in countries where it’s better having more children, which we also don’t see.

It’s annoying to repeatedly read the same completely unsupported explanations for fertility rate declines.

Except for the part where the fertility rate in El Salvador is higher than it is in the USA. If we’re becoming more like them, our fertility rate should be increasing.

This is Bond-villain level megalomania, and therefore actually kind of cool.

Built to fail? The Constitution worked, more or less, for over 237 years and 44 different presidents. It hasn’t even failed yet now, although it is in a lot of danger.

It’s the job of Congress to stop the President from doing this, via impeachment. However, in a democracy the people get to choose their leaders and if the people elect not just a man like Trump to be President but also a majority in Congress to support him almost unconditionally, then the people get what they voted for.

Even now, Republicans in Congress fear that they will not be re-elected if they oppose Trump. Thus they’re still carrying out the will of the people.

That’s a good point, and I suppose that someone sympathetic to Trump might think that he was being unfairly prosecuted after other presidents hadn’t been.

I disagree with your implication that a former president should always be punished for having broken the law. The rules do need to be different for presidents than for ordinary people.

A prince, when by some urgent circumstance or some impetuous and unforeseen accident that very much concerns his state, compelled to forfeit his word and break his faith, or otherwise forced from his ordinary duty, ought to attribute this necessity to a lash of the divine rod: vice it is not, for he has given up his own reason to a more universal and more powerful reason; but certainly ’tis a misfortune: so that if any one should ask me what remedy? “None,” say I, “if he were really racked between these two extremes: ‘Let him see to it that it be not a loophole for perjury that he seeks.’ He must do it: but if he did it without regret, if it did not weigh on him to do it, ’tis a sign his conscience is in a sorry condition."

Montaigne’ Essays, book 3 chapter 1

It’s one thing to break a law with the belief (perhaps unjustified) that doing so is necessary for the good of the nation and quite another to do to because power protects you from deserved punishment, but how can the law itself make this distinction?

Even the Trump appointees seem like the sort of people who would want to defend the rule of law at least to preserve their own (and therefore the court’s) power, so I wonder how each of the six “conservative” judges was convinced to rule the way that he or she did. I don’t imagine all of them doing it for the same reason. Maybe some were rewarded for their votes and others wanted to see Trump wreck things (Alito and his flag come to mind) but did some actually think that it was a good idea or the correct legal decision?

Do pampered modern dogs even know that meat comes from animals? My guess is that my dog didn’t. He wanted to chase animals very much, I never let him catch one, but I suspect that he wouldn’t know what to if he did. On the other hand, when I let him chase me he would try to trip me by grabbing my pants at my ankles, which might be a wolf behavior.

(My ferrets didn’t even know that meat was food, because they refused to eat anything expect their pellets. They wouldn’t touch something like wet cat food even if they were hungry. I read somewhere that ferrets don’t eat anything that their mother didn’t teach them to eat when they were young.)

My dog had nightmares sometimes, or at least I think he did. He would twitch and do his sad/pain squealing noise. I woke him up whenever I noticed him doing that, and he always woke up calm and happy. I don’t think he remembered his dreams at all.

since 2015-2016

Hah, I would be ecstatic if we had a Romney now instead of what we do have. Or even a McCain. Or hell, even a GWB as long as he wasn’t allowed to invade anywhere.

Convicted?

My apologies. Here’s CNN’s exit poll. The results are substantially similar. I added a note to my original post.

Note that CNN also has a chart of this data with the “less than $30k” and “$30k to $50k” categories merged, which conceals this phenomenon. I think that can give people the wrong idea.

Not only do I agree with you (the headlines are click-bait telling the audience what they want to hear) but I also love you for using the word “construed”.

I’m not at all convinced, because the poor aren’t the ones who elected Trump. Both the rich and the poor voted for Harris. Here’s the data:

Edit: This is not the most up-to date poll, although it is substantially correct. See my post below.

Ordinary people don’t keep track of billionaires. Almost no one even knows how many billionaires there are, or how many billions they have. I don’t know and I bet that even most people who blame billionaires for everything don’t know. If there are twice as many now as there were before and each one has twice as much money, the public won’t even notice.

IMO Trump support is due to envy and resentment, but it’s not the resentment of the rich by the poor. It’s the resentment of the middle class by the working class. Look at the results by college education:

(Note that while income and education are correlated, my first plot shows that the people without a college education who are voting for Trump aren’t voting for him simply because they’re poor.)

It used to be the case that mass media was controlled largely by people with middle class values. The people who opposed vaccination and supported renaming the Gulf of Mexico were called crackpots and they wouldn’t appear in most mainstream newspapers or TV news. Neither the Democrat nor the Republican candidate for President would agree with them.

Now, thanks to the internet, these people have been able to organize into a mass movement and they want to smash the institutions built by the middle class that looks down on them. They voted for Trump because he’s culturally one of them, despite the fact that he’s a college-educated billionaire.

Do experts say Trump is a fascist? Do experts say vaccination is essential for public health? Do experts say tariffs will wreck the economy? Now Trump will make those experts cry delicious liberal tears…

I don’t think that what K-to-12 schools are capable of teaching even in the best-case scenario can be sufficient to equip the average person with the knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary to, for example, evaluate complex economic policy on its merits. I have a STEM PhD but it isn’t in economics and I don’t think I can evaluate economic policy well - I go with the consensus of economists, but that’s easy for me because I think their best interests and mine are aligned. (I want to see the stock market go up.) I’m not sure what a person whose interests are not aligned with the economists’ is supposed to do… Listen to ignorant demagogues who promise everything, apparently.

Before the election, I saw a house flying a big flag with the words “Elect Trump King of the United States”. So, uh, maybe monarchy would turn out to be even worse…

With that said, I understand how you feel. I don’t know how democracy can work in a post-truth era.

I was also a very active user of traditional forums but, in my experience, small niche subreddits (when I was on Reddit) were a decent substitute in terms of content, since posts could stay on their front page for several days. Lemmy isn’t big enough to have those yet but I hope it will be. The thing I miss most about forums isn’t the format but rather the community. The forum I posted on the most had only a few dozen regulars and I knew them.

There was the guy with a kind, insightful take on controversial issues and a fetish for women with more than two arms. The active duty marine who reliably posted harsh truths. The feminist I didn’t get along with at all despite agreeing with her about most things. The dedicated father who bought real razor wire for his daughter when she wanted a UN-peacekeeper-base themed birthday party. The very determined conservative who defended his position no matter how outnumbered he was and once bragged that he had given his wife several dozen orgasms in a row…

I suppose I was the young man with strange views about what was or wasn’t fair and a great deal of anger over any perceived unfairness. (I don’t think I was particularly well-liked.) The internet is so much less personal now.

In my dream world, the courts respond to Trump’s claim that he cannot retrieve anyone from El Salvador by putting a stay on all deportations until the Trump administration demonstrates that it will not deport people to any place from which it cannot quickly retrieve them if they were deported in error.

(I don’t expect this to happen.)

My hope is that if they wait two years then it’ll be to minimize the damage until the midterm elections, at which point Democrats will win both the house and the senate. I think that’s the best-case scenario.

There isn’t much the court can do if Trump refuses to comply and Republicans in Congress continue to support him. I hate to say it, but avoiding a confrontation may be better than getting into that situation, both for the court and for the country.

This is purely for show. Not only is there no chance that the bill will pass, but (as the article points out) there’s also no available way of moving the shuttle from DC to Texas.