What have the Romans ever done for us??

You know, besides the aqueducts, the roads, baths, public sanitation, law and order…

75 million people decided they wanted this, a bit less than that decided they didn’t, and the remainder decided they did not care enough about their country to give their opinion either way

Of all the Supreme Court precedents that are going on the chopping block, I certainly did not expect United States v. Wong Kim Ark on that list.

Taking wagers on how long it will last before Trump’s FTC revokes it

(Bets are only accepted in the form of biscuits 🍪)

In the context of the Government subscribing to a particular religion, I use the word “religion”, but I guess I really mean “religious belief”, i.e. a belief about religion, in the broadest sense. I would consider deism to be a religious belief under that definition.

So to reiterate my point, if you, the designer of a system of government, allow the state to hold and enforce a religious belief of any kind, eventually a government will take power which holds a different religious belief, and use the state"s ability to deal with religious matters to enforce their different belief upon the people. And this will inevitably happen. So the best protection you can design against this is to withhold this power from the state by explicitly declaring it to be secular.

The story is much more enlightening, and frankly, more educational than this meme projects. Yes, it’s correct, at least on a surface level, but there’s also the reason they decided to create a secular state. Namely, even though they were all, broadly speaking, Christians or Christian-inspired deists, they also recognised that Christianity came in hundreds of different flavours, not all of which are agreeable. They recognised that a religious state would have to pick a side in all of the hundreds of different spats that Christians have gone through over the most minute details of their dogma. Furthermore, they also realised that a state is most fragile when it is just founded, and thus, to survive, the state would have to have as much support as possible. Pretty much everyone was at least begrudgingly satisfied with a secular state.

You see, if they had created a religious country, they could not guarantee that it would stay loyal to whatever interpretation they had settled on. Future governments could, if they were able to, could easily “reinterpret” the state dogma to whatever they wanted. They understood that if the Government had the power to meddle in religious affairs, it was only a matter of time before someone whose religion was not agreeable to take over and start doing things that you don’t like, justifying it with their religion.

An xkcd becomes a classic when people use it a lot.

In most cases, destroying evidence will result in an adverse inference being drawn against the accused. It means that the court will assume that the evidence was incriminating which is why you destroyed it.

I don’t think anyone has been able to recreate his experiment. He’s accused of manipulating it to fit his narrative. He denies these accusations, of course.

I mean, Biden dropping out already caused a fuss with people who bought the “Don’t let the old man win” merch because it suddenly changed from an anti-Biden slogan to an anti-Trump slogan

Did he do anything besides the Stanford Prison Experiment that I just don’t know of? Because if that’s all, I’d be more inclined to say that he’s just stubbornly wrong rather than evil. But maybe you know something I don’t

I remember some popular YouTuber ran an experiment trying to re-create the conclusions that Zimbardo had come to. The results contradicted his conclusions and they confronted him. He continued to defend his experiment. He seemed like a rather stubborn man.

The police can engage in rubber-hose cryptanalysis. In many countries, it’s legal to keep a suspect in prison indefinitely until they comply with a warrant requiring them to divulge encryption keys. And that’s not to mention the countries where they’ll do more than keep you in a decently-clean cell with three meals a day to, ahem, encourage you to divulge the password.

Law enforcement shouldn’t be able to get into someone’s mobile phone without a warrant anyway. All this change does is frustrate attempts by police to evade going through the proper legal procedures and abridging the rights of the accused.

Get a passport card. It is legally the same as a passport book within the US (it can also be used for international land and sea travel within North America). It’s only $30 to apply and a $35 issuance fee. $65 in total for a piece of RealID-compliant identification valid worldwide for ten years.

The UK is a small country that doesn’t have nearly the geopolitical sway that the US does. If the UK withdraws to itself, that sucks for Britons but the rest of the world will carry on. If the US withdraws to itself, it will suck for the rest of the world but the Americans will carry on.

I want to be clear here that this is dangerous messaging. While any individual vote likely has little effect on the outcome of an election, it’s people’s collective vote that does ultimately decide the outcome. And when the electorate is disengaged, disinterested, and apathetic, that is the environment in which fascism and authoritarianism thrives. Voting is not and should not be the end of a citizen’s political participation, but it is still vitally important. Voting should only be the foundation of citizen political participation. It’s also important to campaign, to discuss important political issues with others, and to protest and take direct action against the injustice of the political class. But if you don’t vote and spread the idea that voting is meaningless, your efforts will change nothing.

This line in particular comes a lot of young people, and it is an absolutely understandable and reasonable conclusion for them to come from seeing as they are the most politically neglected group, and politicians almost never pay more than lip service to the concerns of the young. Youth turnout in elections is historically rubbish, so why would any rational politician pay heed to the demands of a voting bloc that won’t influence the outcome of an election? Politicians who pander to youth voters will lose to politicians who pander to old voters simply because youth voters will stay home while old voters will show up at the polls and vote their guy into office.

It costs almost nothing to vote and to encourage others to vote as well. So do it. It is irresponsible to spread the idea that voting is meaningless without also attaching the context that if you don’t vote, you have no power at all.

I’m pretty sure Cuba is a bad choice for… other reasons

The passport card is valid for sea travel as well.

This is a proceeding in federal court, but the president’s pardon power doesn’t extend to civil cases anyway. Or at least until the Supreme Court rules that it does.