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pjwestin

@ pjwestin @lemmy.world

Posts
2
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576
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • SHOCK POLL: Trump Approval Craters to 33% in New AP Poll, Whopping 67% Disapprove

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  • I don't know what Stalin thought, but I do know that he was able to rule for so long because he was broadly popular throughout the Soviet Union. Also, Victor Orbàn clearly cared about public opinion, as did Ferdinand Marcos, Hosni Mubarak, and Alexander Lukashenko, to name a few.

    You can't control a country where the vast majority of people hate you. Even if the military remains loyal to you (and they won't), if the majority of people are out in the streets protesting you instead of going to work, your economy will implode, and gunning everyone down won't help. You need your opposition to be small enough that they seem like a trouble-making minority, while you remain popular enough that most people either support your violent suppression of dissent or at least don't hate you enough to stick their own necks out.

  • SHOCK POLL: Trump Approval Craters to 33% in New AP Poll, Whopping 67% Disapprove

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  • Generally speaking, authoritarians want the support of at least a plurality of the citizenship. Even in well established authoritarian regimes, widespread public discontent will lead to regime collapse, even if it's a military coup that just leads to another authoritarian regime.

  • New: Bombshell report says Trump promised to pardon his entire staff

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  • I've been thinking about this a lot, but the problem is that the President can only pardon federal crimes, so if a mob drags Steven Miller from his house in California and kills him, the President can't do anything to intervene. However, I'm pretty sure that the President could pardon crimes committed in D.C., and the Supreme Court has basically said the President can't be held accountable for crimes committed in office, so in theory, a future President could order agents to take Miller into custody, bring him to D.C., and execute him. He could then pardon everyone involved and no one could be held accountable.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Damn, it's crazy that we let one guy decide these things. Seems like the kind of thing that should be determined by a large legislative body that holds the power over our nation's budget and the ability to write laws. Weird we don't have one of those.

  • New: Bombshell report says Trump promised to pardon his entire staff

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  • The response to this needs to be a resounding, "LOL, no," from whatever administration comes next. The constitution gives the President the power of the pardon? Well, if gives Congress power of the purse, but we let him ignore that. The Supreme Court will intercede? One of them is married to a J6er, another one is openly taking bribes, and ar least three of them committed perjury when they told Congress said they wouldn't overturn precedent. Our country can't continue without accountability.

  • I've spent three years since getting the puppy training them to cuddle up to each other.

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  • They seem alarmed that they were caught in the act.

  • Chinese chefs summoning the fires of 8 hells just to make some fried rice

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  • People are downvoting real hard for this, but there are 3 different interpretations of this comic in this thread, so you definitely have a point.

  • Woman who wrote children's book about grief found guilty of murdering husband

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  • She was also convicted of other felonies, including attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Valentine's Day with a fentanyl-laced sandwich that made him black out.

    Look, I don't want to blame the victim here, but I probably wouldn't let my wife make me a cocktail if she once gave me a sandwich so strong I blacked out.

  • Trump allies plan Senate floor takeover to pass SAVE America Act

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  • Oh, I guess that's just Massachusetts. Here you're required to pay time-and-a-half for federal holidays and, for some industries, Sundays. I knew that Sunday-pay was state law, but I assumed federal holiday pay was required by federal law.

  • Trump allies plan Senate floor takeover to pass SAVE America Act

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  • If it's a federal holiday, employers are forced to give you time-and-a-half, which makes smaller businesses much more likely to close for the day (and large corporations much more likely to understaff and fuck over the people who do work that day).

  • John Fetterman says Iran girls’ school strike is just a leftist craze

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  • If the Democrats were a functioning opposition party, they would have forced Fetterman out when his staffers started reporting his erratic behavior. But Chuck Schumer needs Senators to, "go against him," and thwart any legitimate opposition the party can muster, so we let this brain damaged, mentally ill man occupy one of fhe highest positions of power in the nation.

  • Cardassian bathrooms are the worst

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  • Man, if I ever become an employer, this is how I'm gonna do job interviews.

  • Joe Biden warns that Donald Trump will try to ‘steal’ midterm elections

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  • Democrats defy their leaders by relentlessly disrupting and heckling Trump SOTU speech

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  • Good. He's an authoritarian who had his paramilitary goons invade an American city. All you achieve by going to the State of the Union and listening politely is the normalization of fascism. Only deeply unserious people who are incapable of meeting this moment would consider attending without disrupting him.

  • Loops is a new short form platform created by Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault.

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  • I hate TikTok too, but it's not going away without comprehensive legislation regulating social media. Until then, a fediverse alternative that's not ruled by corporate algorithms would at least be a form of harm reduction. Think of it like a Safe Injection Site program; it's not great that they're still using, but at least they're getting clean needles.

  • Sam Altman would like remind you that humans use a lot of energy, too | TechCrunch

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  • Someone on Bluesky pointed out that, even if you ignore the morality of this argument, AI is trained on human content, so if we're going to start examining the human energy cost, we'll have to factor in the cost of every single human whose work was used by ChatGPT on top of the data center costs.

  • Removed

    the one where ross says a slur

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  • Oh, the Occupation apologist? He was still justifying the concentration camps into season 5.

  • Removed

    the one where ross says a slur

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  • Season 1 Bashir probably needed an HR meeting abput his continued sexual advances on Jadzia.

  • Sir Sean Connery was a selective actor

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  • Highlander rocks too. Time Bandits as well. He had some interesting, unorthodox choices throughout his career.

  • Sir Sean Connery was a selective actor

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  • In all seriousness though, thank you for the information, but I will still continue to believe that Sean Connery gave up acting because he could no longer figure out what good or bad movies were.