tanadrin:

The US constitution as a Nomic

gonna start a party whose entire raison d’etre is recreating the holy roman empire without amending the US constitution in any way

then we’re gonna make it Turing-complete

#at least until that fateful day when the Supreme Court has to rule on the halting problem #OVERTURN TURING V THE UNITED STATES the radicals cry #it’s adam and eve not church and goedel! #meanwhile someone has already installed Doom on the state of california 


Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I don’t understand most of this but I laughed at the last tag anyway) #home of the brave #politics cw?

michaelblume:

So I said a while back that whitehouse.gov petitions are basically a way to assign the white house essays and now I’m imagining if The West Wing was set like ten years later and there’s some petition that’s getting lots of votes and Toby’s really hoping it doesn’t clear the threshold because then he’ll have to write the response to it so of course Josh covertly leads a drive to get it more signatures just to fuck with Toby I am writing crackfic what the fuck.


Tags:

#West Wing #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

justice-turtle:

So @brin-bellway mentioned that being born into liberal feminism is apparently “vanishingly rare, to the point that I’ve seen people who will actually base an argument they’re making on the assumption that everyone comes from somewhere else. (“Nobody’s born spouting feminist doctrine! Give people a chance to learn!” Dude, I *was* born spouting feminist doctrine *that is now two decades out of date*.)”

Thing is, being a convert (so to speak) from hyperconservatism is also vanishingly rare – I know of one other person besides me who switched, and the most common argument I see against tone policing is “Nobody ever changed a hyperconservative’s mind by talking to them.” Which, I mean, tone policing is in fact wrong, but that argument is invalid, because I’m sitting right here not being hyperconservative anymore. ^_^

So what we were wondering is: where the fuck did all the rest of y’all come from? O_O Is there some large pool of mildly apolitical families out there that we just don’t hear about? (And in today’s polarized political climate, how’d you manage that? ;P)

I’m not, though. I mean, I am now, but just as I am a liberal feminist through an accident of birth*, so too am I American through an accident of birth. In fact, I’m Canadian for political reasons: you know how people always say that if a Republican gets the presidency, they’re moving to Canada? Dad saw the “you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” speech, went “fuck this, I’m moving to Canada”, and actually went through with it. (I occasionally refer to our move as “part of a long tradition stretching back to the Loyalists”.)

*Please don’t ask what my sincerely-held political opinions are. (The answer is “I’m not sure I even understand the concept of a sincerely-held political opinion, let alone whether I have any, let alone what they are”.)


Tags:

#I have some *vague* suspicions that I might actually have some genuine opinions around here somewhere #I occasionally notice a moral claim that hurts to hear even though #I happen to qualify by the standard in question #(I notice it most with people shaming kinks I don’t have) #even when there is no consensus in my tribe on the morality of it #it isn’t–I think–the pain of ”that was a dangerous thing to say and I’m scared I’ll get caught in the ensuing flamewar’s crossfire” #but more like the pain of encountering someone being factually incorrect #from this I tentatively infer that I genuinely disagree with these claims #but there are few claims that have either little enough or balanced enough baggage that I can sense the feeling of whether it’s Incorrect ov #over the feeling of whether it’s Dangerous #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #(a tag which does double-duty as both a general Canada tag and an immigration tag) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost


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Alison for Space Empress 2k16

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sinesalvatorem:

responsible-reanimation:

@sinesalvatorem‘s campaign-ad speech here deserves to be dramatically read, so I did it in my best comforting, authoritative newscaster voice which isn’t especially comforting or authoritative.

This message has been approved by Humans For A Transhuman Tomorrow; Alison Morais’ Super PAC.


Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

plain-dealing-villain asked: Even if you aren’t going to deliver it, please compose the arguments for at least one of the crazy Constitutional things and share it with us.

comparativelysuperlative:

  • If you’ll permit me to head the Committee on Detail, I bet I could sneak some coded messages into the text. You know you want to.

Our predecessors kept things a bit ambiguous as to how much weight we ought to give to their opinions on the floor. Filing a lot of the records of the debates away in the warehouse where they keep the Ark of the Covenant, Madison keeping his notes secret and then published them after everyone involved was dead, that sort of thing. Since you’ve already shot down my suggestion about requiring courts to interpret everything by the literal text which is written entirely in Lojban, I have an alternate proposal.

I know most of you take a dimmer view of sticking to original intent than I do. And I was expecting you to change that opinion now it’s your intent that’s in question, but congrats on your consistency I guess. Now. This is going to be an ongoing debate in the coming centuries. People looking back at the opinions of anyone who was in this room where it happened and using our opinions as proof of what we Really Meant. (Yes, that’s going to include me. The guy who just gave a six-hour speech about electing an aristocracy.)

But.

What if we made it completely impossible for anyone to say “the Founding Parents intended to put [X] in the document; therefore it must be the meaning of the law”? No one, and I mean no one, taking that seriously ever again. I can give you that.

Imagine: some future scholar, poring over the text because she’s in eighth-grade social studies and might get called on soon. And she notices that if you take the first word of the Preamble, the second word of the first clause, and so forth, it spells out a 419 scam. Or it says that da Vinci shot Kennedy, or gives ambiguous directions to a nonexistent buried treasure, whatever you like. I’m open to suggestions. In any case, your least favorite mode of interpretation will be dead

Plus, hidden messages are cool.

You know you want to.


Tags:

#home of the brave #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

sinesalvatorem:

argumate:

sinesalvatorem:

ilzolende:

The prediction market: 81% confident that we’re going to have a president that’s on its list.

I did not realize everyone was so confident in Deez Nuts or the overthrow of the US government.

original post

Why is Deez Nuts not on the list, though? Does argumate not love us? They’re not our real mom!

Why can’t I shake the nagging feeling that ilzolende and sinesalvatorem are working together on some nefarious plot to take over the market, possibly by winning the presidency themselves?

It’s the kind of thing a dystopian cyberpunk teen protagonist would do, after all.

Never let it be said that I’m not a dystopian cyberpunk teen protagonist. Get me a flight to the US and I won’t even need citizenship. I’ll be Benevolent Space Empress before you can say “border control”.

In other news, you just retitled my blog :p


Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog