Of course the shitty local news station can’t just have a link to a continuous video clip, not without first cutting it up and filling it with their own talking heads.

This is a hit-and-run whine comment that contributes nothing to the discussion and makes no claims of its own whatsoever.

Sure, there is that difference. But the series doesn’t even address the fact that he’s already killed hundreds of people. Intentionally or not, it’s still absurd to hand wring about killing when you’ve already killed hundreds of people, accidentally or not, and the one person you’re worrying about taking down is literal genocidal maniac. To me that just sounds like not being willing to take responsibility for your own actions. Intentionally or not, Aang killed hundreds of people. And it’s not like he never went into the Avatar state again after taking out the Northern fleet. Hell, he fought Ozai while in the Avatar state. Maybe he should have just “accidentally” killed Ozai while in the Avatar state and just washed his hands of moral culpability, just like he did all the other people he killed before then.

Regardless, Aang found a way to make peace with the fact that he had taken hundreds of lives. But when the person in question is someone of power and renown? Then it becomes something to fret over.

It need not even be over permanently. Many nations have come together, broken apart, just to come back together again in the future. Look at how many times China has gone through that cycle. Look at German dissolution and reunification. I imagine some time apart would do the nation and its various political factions a lot of good. And probably in a generation or two, a movement would likely develop to try to bring things back together again. The idea of united America isn’t going anywhere. But our present form of government just isn’t what is needed to produce that unity. The Constitution is a collection of compromises meant to satisfy the needs of the 1780s. Perhaps in the 2080s, a new attempt can be made, a new set of compromises forged, and the nation rebuilt. If nothing else, an EU-style customs and open boarder union between the states would likely be implemented even from the time of first dissolution.

There’s no belief. It’s just basic facts. If you believe that being Jewish is inseparable from being a Zionist or being an Israeli, you are a flaming anti-Semite. This is the fundamental logic of the Holocaust. The Nazis believed that Jews were born foreigners. A Jew’s family could have been living in Germany for centuries, they could have proudly served Germany during WW1, and they could personally consider themselves nothing but German. But for the Nazis, it didn’t matter. Jews were foreigners in any land they resided in, they could never really truly be full German citizens. This was the logic of the Nazis, and it is the logic of Republicans and anti-Semitic Democrats like Jeffries. This is why they believe that any criticism of Israel is an attack on Jews generally - Jews can never be truly fully American. They will always be suspect. They will always have dual loyalty. This was also the same logic used to justify the Japanese internment camps during WW2.

I mean just think about it. This is a two way street. If criticizing the actions of the Israeli government is an attack on American Jews, then Jewish Americans must somehow be responsible for the actions of the Netanyahu government. Currently we’re allied with Israel, but what if that changed? What if geopolitical winds shifted, and suddenly we became allies of Iran? Seems crazy, but that kind of shift has happened before. Look at how we allied with the Soviet Union in WW2. If were to ally with Iran, and Israel became our enemy, well then I suppose Republicans and the anti-Semitic Democrats would be calling for the mass expulsion or internment of Jewish Americans. They clearly believe that American Jews are inseparable from the Israeli government. If relations with Israel were to sour, then they would logically support holding Jewish Americans responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.

In truth, this kind of thinking is a disgusting abomination. Individuals are responsible for their own deeds. The only people responsible for the actions of the Israeli government are Israeli leaders and perhaps the Israeli electorate. A random American Jew has no more moral culpability for the crimes of the Israeli government than they do the crimes of the North Korean regime. People are not their race or religion. You have a right to be free and to be judged by your own actions and the content of your own character, not by the actions of a foreign nation that happens to share a dominant ethnicity to your own.

If I had to flee the US as refugee, I would hope that those in whatever land I fled to could separate my own actions and character from the actions of the US government. I am an individual and a human being. I do not control the actions of the US government. But yet, if someone is Jewish, Republicans and anti-Semitic Democrats do not abide by this principle. To them, Judaism is inseparable from the Israeli state. And ultimately no Jewish person can truly be a full American. This is what they truly believe in their heart of hearts. And that is why they are a despicable collection of flaming anti-Semites.

Thanks! Fixed.

The Democratic Party is infested with anti-Semites, just like the Republican party is. These anti-Semites believe that Jews cannot truly be real Americans. Anti-Semites like Jeffries believe in the old Nazi concept that Jews are innately foreigners in whatever land they reside in. A Jewish American must have loyalty to the state of Israel, regardless of their personal conscience or beliefs, simply due to the race and religion they were born into. To be Jewish is to be Israeli; you as a Jewish person have no choice in the matter. The Democratic establishment believes in this Hitlerian definition of anti-Semitism. Any criticism of Israel is an attack on all Jewish people, because Jews cannot truly be full citizens of any nation except Israel.

The Democrat party is infested with anti-Semites.

For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.

How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?

The point of this is not to condemn Aang’s actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he’s hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there’s zero chance that Armada didn’t have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.

So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about…Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler’s head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn’t a conscript. He had full autonomy; he’s the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn’t even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.

New law. LLMs will only be accessible in very particular forms. Engaging with an LLM will be more like visiting the Oracle of Delphi. You’ll have to travel to some remote location and ask the LLM in person. It will then respond in riddles or vague prophecies that leave a lot open to interpretation. This will be the only legal way to use an LLM.

No, none of this is possible because it violates supremacy law in every way imaginable (unfortunately).

So? The Constitution is dead. Stop fellating its corpse.

We need to just ignore the Supreme Court entirely. They’re a fundamentally illegitimate institution. Their opinions are worth less than soiled toilet paper. Ignore them.

Then the solution is for the blue states to establish their own banking systems that the fed has no control or influence over. When a court tells the California bank to transfer money, they’ll just send that email to the trash folder.

No. Canada is a small country and can’t actually absorb the millions of people that acquiring US states would entail. California alone has a population similar to that of all of Canada. The US West Coast, if it joined Canada, would suddenly represent the majority of the Canadian population. Canada could absorb a single low population state, like Alaska. But asking Canadians to absorb large chunks of the US is asking them to make existing Canadians a political minority in their own country. Is doesn’t make sense. The US West Coast can simply be its own independent country.

Honestly, we need to dissolve the union at this point. It’s just common sense.

Look, it’s time for a reality check. When a nation’s political culture becomes this dysfunctional, there’s no bringing it back, not without some massive bloody civil war that leaves millions dead. What they don’t teach you in school is that every written law or constitution is ultimately meaningless. The Constitution does not enforce itself and neither does any law. They all require a certain amount of good-faith interpretation. It is always possible to come up with a strained bad-faith interpretation of any law that will allow you to do whatever you want. But in a healthy political system, this doesn’t happen. Both sides practice restraint and realize that their overreach will be answered by overreach on the other side.

But if you lose that? The nation is effectively shattered. The United States, as a functioning democracy, is already dead. It’s zombie corpse is just limping along. The president is openly defying the laws passed by Congress. The Supreme Court is openly corrupt, openly partisan, and ignoring the plain language of the constitution. It’s all just might makes right now, and both parties view the other as fundamentally wicked and illegitimate.

Once your politics have decayed this much, there is no bringing it back. We need to peacefully dissolve the United States. Will it be easy? No. But we also shouldn’t let one of our core national character flaws - American exceptionalism, blind us to the possibilities that exist. Plenty of nations have peacefully dissolved before. And they find ways to negotiate the hard issues like dividing assets, debts, obligations, military forces, etc. This has been done before, and it can be done again.

When this comes up, the “umm aktually” crowd also comes out of the woodwork. They’ll point out that there’s no actual constitutional mechanism to do this. These people are blind or have been asleep the last six months. You would think they would learn by now that all it takes to do something is that there not be anyone there to stop you.

We should grant all 50 states full independence. Just disband the existing federal government entirely. Let the states then come back together in whatever new nation or nations they want to form. How can this be done legally? Simple. Someone just needs to run for president on the platform of national dissolution, saying, “I’ll grant all 50 states independence. I’ll fire every federal employee, and I will not use any military force to stop all the states from seceding.” And then they get elected and simply do that. Congress or SCOTUS can complain all they want; it won’t matter. That candidate if elected would have an overwhelming political mandate, and there would be no way to stop them. Some may whine that it’s unconstitutional, but who cares? It’s pretty obvious by now that the Constitution is broken, obsolete, and no longer worth respecting. We’re walking away from that broken obsolete piece of trash. We can do better.

Because you’re posting like someone without two brain cells to rub together.

The VOTERS of each party are different. The actual leaders of each party, the actual people running the party apparatus? There’s very little difference between the parties in terms of actual leadership.

Then why are you commenting?

We had a fight, and a fire extinguisher may have come off the wall at some point. A fire extinguisher makes a surprising amount of mess if you’re not aware. There’s not some huge story here. It was a fight that involved a fire extinguisher.

The final solution to lock picking!

Like that time I had that fire extinguisher fight with my brother…