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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The BSG reboot really suffered from being a product of its era.

    It’s when shows were first really dipping their toes into telling an overarching narrative, but writer’s rooms were still very much geared toward producing stories of the week. The result was that a lot of shows at the time would start incredibly strongly, set up a lot of really interesting premises, and then just meander along because the writers were literally making things up along the way and because there was no coherent plan.

    Know how Game Of Thrones fell apart in the last couple of seasons when they outran the preplanned narrative of the books? That’s how a lot of TV ended up in the early 2000s. BSG and Lost are probably the two most prominent examples from around that time, but it was a pretty common problem as the format of TV shows was starting to change.




  • It also helps that their attempts to redirect back mostly serve to highlight their weird preoccupations.

    Things are happening like a former Trump speechwriter posting “Emmett Till was weird” on Twitter because they can’t comprehend just how unhinged and generally weird saying something like that is to a normal person.

    Or they think they’re being clever flipping the script and ranting about “boys saying they’re girls is weird.” “Why do you spend so much time obsessing over what children have in their pants? That’s really weird.”

    It all puts them in a bind. If they try to defend what they’re saying as normal, it’s very clear that it isn’t. If they try to deflect with what they think is weird, it just shows how detached they are from normal reality. It’s a surprisingly effective line of attack that largely neutralizes their normal gish galloping.




  • Article III only lays out there there will be a supreme court and a Chief justice and makes Congress responsible for establishing them. It does not lay out the makeup or structure of that court. The current body of 9 justices is set by federal statute and could be changed by a simple act of Congress.

    Article III also explicitly states that whatever Justices are appointed hold their office as long as they maintain good behavior (I e., as long as they haven’t been impeached) and that Congress cannot reduce their pay.

    Term limits are explicitly unconstitutional.

    Setting the number of judges is explicitly within Congress’ constitutional powers.

    Randomized panels would probably be challenged just because it’s never been tested, but the language in the Constitution re: Congress establishing the Supreme Court is vague. That said, Congress has already established inferior Federal courts that operate in this manner, so there’s precedent.


  • I think you’re missing the point.

    As things stand now, you get cases that are tailor made to the whims of specific people because there’s a 100% chance it ends up in front of those specific people. That’s an absolutely massive problem.

    The point is that you’re less likely to have cases that are specifically aimed at stroking any given individual’s brand of crazy when there’s only a ~1 in 3 chance they’ll even hear it. A panel of 9 from a pool of 26 means that you go from a 100% chance that, say, Alito and Thomas, hear a case together to around 12%. That’s a huge gamble when it takes years and a massive amount of money to get a case in front of SCOTUS.

    No, it doesn’t solve all conceivable problems with the court. But it’d help address the fact that SCOTUS justices are entirely too powerful as individuals and it can be done via simple act of Congress.

    Appointees should just be subject to term limits and yearly affirmation votes by members of the BAR association to renew or revoke their qualifications

    Not going to happen. SCOTUS terms are life appointments constitutionally. That means you’ve gotten into amendment territory which just plain is not realistic right now.


  • This matches the broad strokes of the approach I favor as well.

    There are 13 Federal circuits. Expand to one justice per circuit, then double that.

    But the core of the approach, regardless of the exact number, is to shift to having cases heard by randomized panels of judges. The amount of power wielded by individual justices right now is just insane. Dilute it down so that the power rests with the body rather than individuals.

    Further, randomizing who hears any given case would help curtail the current environment where test cases get tailored to the idiosyncracies and pet theories of individual judges.

    SCOTUS should be deciding cases based on rational reading of the law, not entertaining wing nut theories that Thomas or Alito hinted at in previous decisions. That sort of nonsense becomes a lot less feasible if there’s no guarantee a case will actually end up in front of Thomas or Alito.



  • our last “just war” that was even a little cut and dry was world war two.

    The Balkans were pretty cut and dry in justified intent.

    It was an intervention into the worst genocide in Europe since WW2. We’re talking not only wholesale slaughter of civilians, but even the establishment of literal rape camps as part of an organized, systemic campaign of ethnic cleansing. What was happening in the former Yugoslavia was absolutely horrific and the US and NATO stepping in to put an end to it was an unequivocally good thing.

    That said, there were still questionable incidents like the “accidental” bombing of the Chinese embassy or the numerous cases of civilians killed by NATO bombs. But that mostly emphasizes the fact that there’s no such thing as a clean war. War is always going to leave blood on your hands, even if it’s being fought for the right reasons.


  • As somebody that’s a paying Kagi user and generally happy with the service, it is interesting seeing exactly where the tradeoffs are.

    While I’d say Kagi pretty much universally returns better results for technical information or things like recipes where it deprioritizes search spam, it’s also pretty clear that there are other areas where the absence of targeting hurts results. Any type of localized results, e.g., searching for nearby restaurants or other businesses tends to be really hit or miss and I tend to fall back to Google there.

    Of course, that’s because Kagi is avoiding targeting to the point where they don’t even use your general location to prioritize results. It’s an interesting balancing act and I’m not quite sure they’ve hit the sweet spot yet, at least for me personally, but I like the overall mission and the results for most searches so I’m happy with the overall experience currently.