A tankie is a hardcore authoritarian communist. They’re people who support governments and politics like Russia, China, and North Korea. Nearly everyone who learns of them can’t stand them, and they don’t have any support outside their own echo chambers or as “useful idiots” to authoritarian governments.
Anyone who says tankies are a bigger threat to the US than the Trump administration is either stupid or using it as a strawman to tactily support Trump.
If you do, better hope it’s not loaded.
In a Musk-approved world:
Is there no law enforcements with weapons in your courts?
American cops don’t protect American people. First and foremost, they protect their own. Beyond that, they protect the establishment that gives them their authority.
Same. We got not-the-onioned
Bro, if people hate you and you company enough to employ and pay others to protest, then you and your company must be an all new level of shitty.
His people—conservatives—don’t follow logic. They have a victim complex and see anything that negatively affects them as someone else’s fault and not the consequences of their own actions. If there isn’t an obvious perpetrator, they scapegoat one into existence.
I’ve debated some of these people and it’s hopeless trying to get them to connect the dots. You can keep presenting them with logic and evidence, and they keep shifting the goalposts and changing the topic to justify their beliefs. A summary of one of my attempts to convince someone that Trump isn’t universally beloved by average Americans went roughly like this:
I don’t doubt that some tiny handful of people would be paid to protest for some reason or another, but I highly doubt it’s anywhere close to what MAGA conservatives think. IMO, it’s more likely that protesters would be paid by the other side to make the protest violent so they could crack down on them.
Emulation is legal
Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward anymore. Emulation of modern consoles exists in a legal gray area that may or may not be illegal under the DMCA.
With something like the Switch, the ROMs are encrypted in a way that they can only be unencrypted with keys that are derived from data baked into the console itself. Yuzu for example is still protected as an emulator for some hardware/software platform, but it wouldn’t be able to run retail games without being able to decrypt the ROMs.
And that’s kind of the problem. Creating tools for preservation and interoperability is permitted by the DMCA, but tools that are made in part or whole to bypass DRM measures is explicitly not. That conflict hasn’t been tested in court either, so the first ruling is going to be the one that sets the precedent.
This is my problem with your argument, you’re saying that because of piracy they’re entitled to crack down on emulation.
My argument isnt that they’re entitled to crack down on emulation because of piracy. My argument is that people blatantly and publicly using emulators to play pirated, unreleased games emboldens Nintendo.
I believe Nintendo isn’t willing to test that gray area in court without having something to support their anti-emulation position. What they want to do is bully devs into settling because it’s a low-risk way to kill development on the emulator without opening up that can of worms that could make Switch emulators unambiguously legal. But, the more evidence Nintendo gets to support their argument, the more confident they become in thinking they would end up winning if they don’t get that settlement.
Keep in mind that when they did finally go after Yuzu’s devs, they went after them for creating software to circumvent the Switch’s DRM (that gray area I mentioned) and not for creating an emulator. If they were actually confident in thinking the legal answer to “is an emulator that decrypts ROMs illegal” was “yes,” they would’ve just went after Yuzu a long time ago instead of waiting 7 years into the console lifestyle.
Don’t get me wrong: Nintendo deserves no sympathy here. They could do many things to make their games more accessible, but they chose not to.
That’s not to say asshats like this deserves any either, though. The homebrew community and emulator developers step in to make Switch software interoperable, and they end up being the ones getting screwed over by both Nintendo and the people who provoked Nintendo.
I don’t normally victim-blame, but streaming an unreleased game is really asking for it.
It’s one thing to pirate a game for yourself. That’s just called being poor or being someone who doesn’t believe in copyright. The only party who can argue they’re being harmed is the developer, who may or may not have received a sale otherwise.
It’s another thing to pirate an unreleased game and stream it for others. If you do that and receive ad revenue or donations, you’re profiting off of someone else’s work. Not only that, but you’re also harming the console modding community by incentivizing the publisher to go after homebrew developers and emulator developers. It wasn’t a coincidence that shortly after some asshat streamed an unreleased Zelda game being played on Yuzu, Nintendo decided to finally come down on the emulator with an iron fist.
In conclusion, between pirating a game to enjoy yourself and pirating a game to play on a for-profit streaming platform, one of those two things is morally gray and the other is someone being a selfish fuck.
If we can’t have lead paint, we can always have lead food dye /s
It’s pretty disheartening to help someone find old media and they show a giant box of USB sticks and hard drives.
Equally disheartening is knowing that both of those have a shelf-life. Old USB flash drives are more durable than the TLC/QLC cells we use today, but 15 years sitting unpowered in a box doesn’t have very good prospects.
That’s kind of the problem I’m getting at.
If the Supreme Court isn’t stepping in and threatening real, immediate consequences laid out by themselves, Trump and friends are pretty much free to ignore it. They don’t respect lower courts, and they’re insulated from consequences handed out by lower courts anyway.
If Boasberg wants to hold them in contempt, what can actually be done? Consequences applied to them as a collective mean nothing (they’ll just ignore them again), so the only thing that can actually scare them is seeing personal consequences like asset seizure or jail time.
Suppose they are threatened with jail time, though. They have a complicit SCOTUS protecting them as individuals. The Supreme Court would step in and either take four years to decide whether that specific punishment is warranted/justified/allowed, say the lower court doesn’t have the authority to punish an individual member of the administration for the actions of the entire administration, or any other manner of bullshit excuse.
The punishment has to come from the Supreme Court, and it has to be something that the members of the administration are actually scared of. Anything other than that is all bark and no bite.
Edit: Bad explanation on my part.
I appreciate the optimism, but I really don’t think they’re going to listen to this one. SCOTUS rulings without clearly defined and severe consequences for both the administration and members of the administration are effectively toothless. Without those being up-front and the court prepared to act upon immediately, Trump’s administration is free to ignore the ruling and carry out their plans while the court spends time fighting amongst itself internally about how to respond. By the time they come up with something and act on it, it’s too late and likely too much of a slap on the wrist to be an effective deterrent.
I italicized the word “might” in my last comment for a reason, unfortunately. The Supreme Court can be a threat to the Trump administration, but they need to be organized, unified, ready to act, and unwilling to pull punches. If they’re going to be effective, they have to be prepared and willing to respond to and immediately shut down the “shock and awe” tactic being used. No waiting, no delaying, no debating. That’s what the administration is counting on to get away with their bullshit: the courts not being fast enough to stop them while also not being harsh enough to actually punish the individuals in its leadership with personal consequences.
On a darker note, if the SCOTUS ever does get their shit together and do that, it’s probably going to lead to another January 6 the first time it happens. I can’t see Trump accept being blocked by the court and punished without crying to his cult about “an attempted coup by the Supreme Court.”
Doing what you’re doing and protesting, calling Republican representatives, and voicing an opinion is the only civilized path forward if that’s still even possible. Republican Party members have to turn on Trump, Vance, and The Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 if there’s going to be any chance of a peaceful resolution to their path of destruction. As long as he’s protected by the party line and insulated from impeachment, he’s going nowhere.
I don’t think asking the courts to do anything is the answer, however. Trump’s government has proven that they don’t give a single shit about what the judiciary has to say. They’re happy to ignore orders and they receive zero consequences for doing so. The only court they might consider listening to, the Supreme Court, is filled with Republican judges and judges Trump personally put there. They’re as good as useless, and they helped create the problem with their ruling giving sitting presidents immunity from any consequences of vaguely-defined “official acts”.
Active checks and balances are in shambles and the constitution is being used as toilet paper.
Judges that try to hold the administration accountable for anything are being ignored and labeled “activist judges”
The House let the “No Rogue Rulings” act pass onto the senate. If they pass it, it legitimatizes administration’s decision to ignore lower court orders.
Republicans are scared of speaking out or acting against Trump.
The administration is trying to weaponize the IRS against educational institutions that don’t fall into line.
The administration is actively weaponizing withholding funding (which is congress’ domain) to make organizations fall into line.
Musk is dismantling social services while lining his own pockets and feeding government data and PII into his company’s LLM.
People are being kidnapped out of their cars and homes by ICE and sent to a concentration camp with zero oversight.
ICE is going to schools and trying to take people’s kids to lure out their parents.
Citizens are being “accidentally” kidnapped by ICE.
People who refuse to kiss the ring in various leadership positions are being ousted and replaced with loyalists.
Even if the Supreme Court, House, and Senate all grow spines and try to do something, Trump and co are going to ignore it. That’s what happens when a “dictator on day one” is voted into office.
The data can be filtered. I can’t figure out how to get a breakdown of it by incident type and year, but filtering to incident types that aren’t plausibly unrelated (murder-suicide, escalation of dispute, anger over discipline, and targeted domestic dispute), the data from my source shows 1185 incidents and 1366 casualties recorded since 1966. The total number of incidents of all types is 2981.
Assuming the ratios for incident types don’t fluctuate, only 40% would fall into the categories I filtered for. With the combined total for just 2023/2024 being 679, that’s still 269 incidents over two years. I’ll correct my previous comment.
As for the NPR article you linked, the source I’m using is aware of it and mentions it in their methodology page. They try to account for the lack of granularity by using multiple sources and cross-referencing them.
I cited where I found those statistics. Their methodology included events such as brandishing firearms, bullets hitting schools, and premeditated school shootings. It’s not mass school shootings with fatalities occurring nearly every day of the year, but my point still stands: there have been enough of them in general that the pigeonhole principle applies.
A horrifying fact:
In 2024, 2023, and 2022, there were 132, 139, and 123 gun violence incidents in schools [1]. Totaling 384, by the pigeonhole principle [2], it’s a guarantee that some (not necessarily mass-) shooting takes place on the anniversary of at least one other shooting.
Edit: Updated statistics to be more selective about the incident type.
They also hate neurodivergence. RFK’s little speech talking about it like an acquired disease and promising to “reverse” the autism that made children “regress” was very telling.
“America is the greatest nation on earth, why wouldn’t another country want to be part of it?”
That’s what happens when a population is spoon-fed “patriotism” from birth. All the nationalism and propaganda is doing its job promoting American exceptionalism while diminishing empathy and critical thinking.