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  1. #251
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    It's not if, but when.

  2. #252
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    Quote Originally Posted by old goat View Post
    The position the GOP is taking in the NC case is that the right of the state legislature to do whatever it wants re elections is absolute--not subject to restriction or oversight by the state constitution--even by clauses initiated by the legislature, state law (in other words the state legislature can't even impose restrictions on itself) or state courts. So although we have a federal govt restrained by checks and balances, there would be no checks and balances re federal elections.
    And to be clear.. SCOTUS previously rejected reviewing that challenge by the state legislature.. thus leaving in place the state supreme court ruling that the gerrymandered distracts drawn by the state legislature had to be redrawn... As we have seen, pretty much all precedent pre far right religious court coup seem to be irrelevant now..
    Go that way really REALLY fast. If something gets in your way, TURN!

  3. #253
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    Regarding Arizona there was a SC ruling that the term "legislature" could be interpreted broadly, so in AZ the election districting is governed by a commission other than the legislature.

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinion...-1314_3ea4.pdf
    Merde De Glace On the Freak When Ski
    >>>200 cm Black Bamboo Sidewalled DPS Lotus 120 : Best Skis Ever <<<

  4. #254
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    Quote Originally Posted by Buster Highmen View Post
    Regarding Arizona there was a SC ruling that the term "legislature" could be interpreted broadly, so in AZ the election districting is governed by a commission other than the legislature.

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinion...-1314_3ea4.pdf
    That was before the EPA ruling, though. Now the SCOTUS claims the right to decide how a legislature may perform or delegate a major constitutional responsibility. If CO2 is too major for the federal legislature, voting will certainly be too important for state legislatures to be allowed to establish lasting rules to govern or restrict themselves. Or the state constitution isn't an act of the legislature at all. To throw out Marbury v Madison or just toss the notion of lasting rules or precedent of any kind? Decisions, decisions.

  5. #255
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    Quote Originally Posted by jono View Post
    That was before the EPA ruling, though. Now the SCOTUS claims the right to decide how a legislature may perform or delegate a major constitutional responsibility. If CO2 is too major for the federal legislature, voting will certainly be too important for state legislatures to be allowed to establish lasting rules to govern or restrict themselves. Or the state constitution isn't an act of the legislature at all. To throw out Marbury v Madison or just toss the notion of lasting rules or precedent of any kind? Decisions, decisions.
    states rights!
    Merde De Glace On the Freak When Ski
    >>>200 cm Black Bamboo Sidewalled DPS Lotus 120 : Best Skis Ever <<<

  6. #256
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    Quote Originally Posted by jono View Post
    That was before the EPA ruling, though. Now the SCOTUS claims the right to decide how a legislature may perform or delegate a major constitutional responsibility. If CO2 is too major for the federal legislature, voting will certainly be too important for state legislatures to be allowed to establish lasting rules to govern or restrict themselves. Or the state constitution isn't an act of the legislature at all. To throw out Marbury v Madison or just toss the notion of lasting rules or precedent of any kind? Decisions, decisions.
    C02 too major! Guns too major!! Pregnancy. and women's health?? Trivial, let the states decide!!
    Go that way really REALLY fast. If something gets in your way, TURN!

  7. #257
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    So fucking painful to watch....




    ... SNL "isn't funny anymore" b/c how can they possibly compete?

  8. #258
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    ^ Holy shit. If Cheney loses, Wyoming is fuct…and so are we if one those other fools gets seated in Congress.

    But hey, maybe WY will go blue.

  9. #259
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    How did the despair thread get moved and this one still lives in the pr?

  10. #260
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    Quote Originally Posted by Core Shot View Post
    How did the despair thread get moved and this one still lives in the pr?
    You want someone to say the quiet part out loud? Come on, man. Just PM pureantigravity. He'll explain.

  11. #261
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    Quote Originally Posted by Meadow Skipper View Post
    ^ Holy shit. If Cheney loses, Wyoming is fuct…and so are we if one those other fools gets seated in Congress.

    But hey, maybe WY will go blue.
    How is this happening, over and over, more and more? Too many stupid people of voting age. If we can't prevent them from voting we need to revamp our education system.. But instead of that we're getting more religion instead of more education in schools.. Because they know it's working for them... the long game... Dems suck at the long game..
    Go that way really REALLY fast. If something gets in your way, TURN!

  12. #262
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    I remain convinced that positive change is very possible. There's a forest fire's worth of tinder on the ground. Maybe R v. W will be the spark, we'll see. But the tinder's there and a spark will come and what we need is someone to tend the flames and that's the question of the day: Who will lead us forward? It's not Biden, he's an amiable placeholder at best. Maybe it's Fetterman? Katie Porter? Whoever it is, we need to identify them and get behind them, like today.

    This essay from today's Times is worth reading, he gets the zeitgeist of the moment imo. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/o...llennials.html

  13. #263
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    Quote Originally Posted by ötzi View Post
    …This essay from today's Times is worth reading, he gets the zeitgeist of the moment imo. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/o...llennials.html
    Good article.
    By Tim Kreider

    Ten years ago, I wrote an essay called “The Busy Trap,” about the curse of “busyness” that seemed endemic at the time. The treadmill had been imperceptibly increasing its speed for a while, and people were nervously starting to notice. As happens with a lot of unavoidable evils, they tried to rebrand their frantic busyness as a virtue. “Busy — so busy, crazy busy,” was the answer you got whenever you asked how they were. I came out, in my essay, as anti-busy; I advocated idling, daydreaming, hanging out and goofing off. My conclusion: “Life is too short to be busy.”

    I guess a lot of other people had been thinking the same thing. For a few days, that essay was the thing everyone linked to, reposted and emailed. Other writers got paid to write responses to it. Someone even “debunked” it, as though it were a fake Bigfoot film. Entrepreneurial self-help gurus cited it and invited me to conferences. “The Colbert Report” even called, but I was unreachable in the Idaho panhandle at my friend Carolyn’s anniversary party, for which my agent has never really forgiven me. (Meg, I am sorry; Carolyn, I blame you; Mr. Colbert, I am still available.)

    A decade later, people aren’t trying to sell busyness as a virtue anymore, not even to themselves. A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system. My generation, X, was the first postwar cohort to be downwardly mobile, but millennials were the first to know it going in. Our country’s oligarchs forgot to maintain the crucial Horatio Alger fiction that anyone can get ahead with hard work — or maybe they just dropped it, figuring we no longer had any choice. Through the internet, we could peer enviously at our neighbors in civilized countries, who get monthlong vacations, don’t have to devote decades to paying for their college degrees, and aren’t terrified of going broke if they get sick. To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams, and “hard work” less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan, inane as “Just say no.”

    The pandemic was the bomb cyclone of our discontents; it not only gave all us nonessential workers an experience of mandatory sloth — which, for many, turned out to be not altogether unpleasant — but also dredged up a lakeful of long-submerged truths. It turns out that millions of people never actually needed to waste days of their lives sitting in traffic or pantomime “work” under managerial scrutiny eight hours a day. We learned that nurses, cashiers, truckers and delivery people (who’ve always been too busy to brag about it) actually ran the world and the rest of us were mostly useless supernumeraries. The brutal hierarchies of work shifted, for the first time in recent memory, in favor of labor, and the outraged whines of former social Darwinists were a pleasure to savor.
    Of course, everyone is still busy — worse than busy, exhausted, too wiped at the end of the day to do more than stress-eat, binge-watch and doomscroll — but no one’s calling it anything other than what it is anymore: an endless, frantic hamster wheel for survival.

    You’ve seen all the headlines about the Great Resignation — “Gen Z and Millennials Would Rather Be Unemployed Than Unhappy in a Job,” Business Insider reported, nervously. Even the youth of China are embracing the virtues of sloth, with the lying-flat and sang movements. On YouTube, the faux guru Self-Help Singh exhorts, “Do nothing.” Millions are now pursuing what a punk guitarist I know called “the C-minus lifestyle.” And it’s no longer just a subcultural rumble: Companies in Britain are now experimenting with a four-day workweek.

    I think people are enervated not just by the Sisyphean pointlessness of their individual labors but also by the fact that they’re working in and for a society in which, increasingly, they have zero faith or investment. The future their elders are preparing to bequeath to them is one that reflects the fondest hopes of the same ignorant bigots a lot of them fled their hometowns to escape. American conservatism, which is demographically terminal and knows it, is acting like a moribund billionaire adding sadistic codicils to his will.

    More young people are opting not to have kids not only because they can’t afford them but also because they assume they’ll have only a scorched or sodden wasteland to grow up in. An increasingly popular retirement plan is figuring civilization will collapse before you have to worry about it. I’m not sure anyone’s composed a more eloquent epitaph for the planet than the stand-up comedian Kath Barbadoro, who tweeted: “It’s pretty funny that the world is ending and we all just have to keep going to our little jobs lol.”

    Midcentury science fiction writers assumed that the increased productivity brought on by mechanization would give workers an oppressive amount of leisure time, that our greatest threats would be boredom and ennui. But these authors’ prodigious imaginations were hobbled by their humanity and rationality; they’d forgotten that the world is ordered not by reason or decency but by rapacious avarice.
    In the actual dystopian future we now inhabit, the oligarchs have realized they could work everyone harder, pay them less, eliminate benefits, turn every human institution from medicine to corrections into a racket, charge far more for basic rights and services than people in any other nation would stand for without revolting, and get rich beyond the penny ante dreams of a Carnegie or Astor.

    In the past few decades, capitalism has exponentially increased the creation of wealth for the already incredibly wealthy at the negligible expense of the well-being, dignity and happiness of most of humanity, plus the nominal cost of a mass extinction and the destruction of the biosphere — like cutting out the inefficient business of digestion and metabolism by pouring a fine bottle of wine directly into the toilet, thereby eliminating the middleman of you.

    Everyone knows how productive you can be when you’re avoiding something. We are currently experiencing the civilizational equivalent of that anxiety you feel when you have something due the next day that you haven’t even started thinking about and yet still you sit there, helplessly watching whole seasons of mediocre TV or compulsively clicking through quintillions of memes even as your brain screams at you — the same way we scream at our politicians about guns and abortion and climate change — to do something.

    I once watched in awe as my girlfriend, who’d been lying inert on the couch, hypnotized with dread of whatever she had to do next, roused herself by intoning, “One, two, three,” — and on “three,” immediately got up and swung into action.

    I have a shameful confession to make: Secretly, I am not lazy. I’ve learned that if I do literally nothing for more than a year, two at most, I start to get depressed. I’m not recanting my old manifesto. I still hope to make it to my grave without ever getting a job job — showing up for eight or more hours a day to a place with fluorescent lighting where I’m expected to feign bushido devotion to a company that could fire me tomorrow and someone’s allowed to yell at you but you’re not allowed to yell back.

    But once I become genuinely engaged in a project, I can become fanatically absorbed, spending hundreds of hours on it, no matter how useless and unremunerative. As a teacher, I edit my students’ writing with a nit-picking precision and big-picture ambition they may likely never experience again. And I don’t believe most people are lazy. They would love to be fully, deeply engaged in something worthwhile, something that actually mattered, instead of forfeiting their limited hours on Earth to make a little more money for men they’d rather throw fruit at as they pass by in tumbrels.

    It’s no coincidence that so many social movement arose during the enforced idleness of quarantine. One important function of jobs is to keep you too preoccupied and tired to do anything else. Grade school teachers called it “busywork” — pointless, time-wasting tasks to keep you from acting up and bothering them.
    Enough with the busywork already. We’ve been “productive” enough — produced way too much, in fact. And there is too much that urgently needs to be done: a republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impoverished, imprisoned, illiterate, sick or starving. All while we waste our time at work.

    OK: one, two, three…

  14. #264
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    Quote Originally Posted by Meadow Skipper View Post
    Good article.
    I have always been a strong proponent of "mandatory sloth."

    What a great phrase.


  15. #265
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    The last year I worked people were constantly asking me what I was going to do when I retired. "Not work".
    As it is, I spend a fair number of days--at least when it's not ski season--doing little or nothing. It's nice to have an excuse to do nothing. Maybe one day I'll stop looking for excuses and just do nothing guiltlessly.

  16. #266
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    My old man seems to have found a nice balance. He usually does something for half the day (bike ride, hike, house project, etc.), then nothing for the other half. Retired for 15 years now and happy as a clam, considers people who can't find joy in retirement without working to be certifiably insane.

  17. #267
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    Quote Originally Posted by old goat View Post
    Maybe one day I'll stop looking for excuses and just do nothing guiltlessly.
    You have 20,000 posts here.

  18. #268
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    Quote Originally Posted by skaredshtles View Post
    I have always been a strong proponent of "mandatory sloth."

    What a great phrase.

    My favorite was "C minus lifestyle"

  19. #269
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    I'm nowhere close to retirement but looking forward to it every day.

  20. #270
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dantheman View Post
    My old man seems to have found a nice balance. He usually does something for half the day (bike ride, hike, house project, etc.), then nothing for the other half. Retired for 15 years now and happy as a clam, considers people who can't find joy in retirement without working to be certifiably insane.
    He's in the minority.

  21. #271
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    Quote Originally Posted by old goat View Post
    The last year I worked people were constantly asking me what I was going to do when I retired. "Not work".
    The correct answer whenever a psychopath asks that question is, "Whatever I want, whenever I want it."

  22. #272
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    [quote]
    Quote Originally Posted by Dantheman View Post
    My old man seems to have found a nice balance. He usually does something for half the day (bike ride, hike, house project, etc.), then nothing for the other half. Retired for 15 years now and happy as a clam, considers people who can't find joy in retirement without working to be certifiably insane.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ted Striker View Post
    He's in the minority.
    That’s pretty sad.

    Quote Originally Posted by Mazderati View Post
    The correct answer whenever a psychopath asks that question is, "Whatever I want, whenever I want it."
    When people ask what I do, I use the short version - “whatever I want.”

  23. #273
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    Quote Originally Posted by muted reborn View Post
    You have 20,000 posts here.
    I'm pretty sure that qualifies as doing nothing.
    Same with ranting in the comments sections of the NYT and WAPO

  24. #274
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    Quote Originally Posted by Meadow Skipper View Post
    That’s pretty sad.
    It's true though. There's a reasonable body of work that correlates age of retirement in men to depression, declining mental acuity, and general health. Routine and purpose are what keep a lot of people going.

    Anecdotally, when we had forced retirement at 60 in my industry, a lot of the "old guys" were pretty unhappy. And unless they blew it on ex-wives, they had enough money to live like kings. But since their identities were inseparable from their careers, they were just lost.

  25. #275
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    Quote Originally Posted by ötzi View Post
    I remain convinced that positive change is very possible. There's a forest fire's worth of tinder on the ground. Maybe R v. W will be the spark, we'll see. But the tinder's there and a spark will come and what we need is someone to tend the flames and that's the question of the day: Who will lead us forward? It's not Biden, he's an amiable placeholder at best. Maybe it's Fetterman? Katie Porter? Whoever it is, we need to identify them and get behind them, like today.

    This essay from today's Times is worth reading, he gets the zeitgeist of the moment imo. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/o...llennials.html
    Possible, definitely... But it will likely take generations... just like ending Jim Crow is and has been taking generations. Three steps forward... two steps back...
    Go that way really REALLY fast. If something gets in your way, TURN!

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