Zompist Bboard Again

Virginia Supreme Court throws out redistricting referendum results. It's hard to imagine the Democrats winning the midterms at this point.

Looks like we might be getting a new pandemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Hondiu ... s_outbreak

Horrible news yesterday. Local elections have swept the far right into power across the country.

xxx wrote: ↑Thu May 07, 2026 12:22 pmanimal of size of a human and with tongue sticking to insects...

Sorry for rules-lawyering but technically that references two animals...

it is, yeah. I've heard this idea but if you dig a bit more, you'll find that it's a universally agreed upon principle, i think, that it is unfair if we both steal a car and you get three days in jail whereas i get three years, so yeah, everyone does this afaik, though to different degrees. the law...

i live under a civil law system, and tbh i wouldn't be opposed to juries. precedent is something all legal systems have, though it's slightly less important in civil law regimes than in common law ones, Is that so? Wikipedia made it sound like precedent is the biggest difference between common law ...

Just to underscore one impact of the war, gas prices around here have surged from less than three dollars before the war to nearly four and half dollars today. Admittedly gas is undoubtedly cheaper here than in many other parts of the country and expensive gas is hardly the worst impact of this war....

Fuck you both California Democrats and California Republicans. Quite. While we're focused on global catastrophes like the climate and war, we can't forget about local bullshit like this. Although it does sound like proposals to kick children off of social media and require IDs for such are rapidly ...

Admittedly the common law system of the US has always sounded rather janky to me, at least as Wikipedia and such describe it. The whole concept of precedent, where law derives from continuity with past judicial rulings, sounds remarkably pre-modern like tribal custom or something. The civil law appr...

often there exist some definitions of victory at least, such that it is the case that they are in fact not achievable. feudalism lasted for a long while until it didn't, and eventually the same should happen to liberalism or any other social system. I'm not thrilled about what might come next, if w...

I understand. Computer systems are very complex, and therefore their behaviour is often unpredictable, and I understand why people mystify them like this. People tend to mystify what they don't understand. In the Middle Ages, most people were illiterate, and many thought that letters had magical po...

You have completely missed the irony in alice's post - a trait they are famous for in these quarters. (Hint: irony has nothing to do with metals, nor with laundry care.) No, I understood the irony. I meant that there are people trying to make her statement literal rather an ironic by creating AGI c...

Au contraire, the Computer is a Being of unfathomable Cunning, large and complicated far beyond our Ken, whose Function we can only ascertain in very small Parts at a Time, by offering it divers Incantations and interpreting its Responses with very careful Understanding. Well, that is certainly the...

I don't mean to be rude, but does malloc even try to surround himself with non-Trumpists? How many No Kings rallies has he been to? If he just locks himself in his room all day, of course he's going to feel hopeless, isolated, and depressed. As the kids say nowdays, he needs to "touch grass&qu...

I'm pretty depressed too. ngl The anxiety of living in contemporary society is: Will your neighbors decide to kill you this week or next week? Yeah, things have only gotten worse for me over the past few years with no reason to expect that they will ever improve. It seems incredible in hindsight th...

(3) My grandmother disliked Trump before the assassination attempt. I asked her what she thinks of him now, after the (latest) assassination attempt, and she said she still dislikes him. Contrary to how you think people do/should act, she's not putting on a MAGA hat and bending her knee to him just...

So you're saying he has a rigged d20 with which he makes all his saving throws? His own portable Deus Ex Machina, which never breaks down? Well not literally, but metaphorically perhaps. He has consistently snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, shrugging off scandals and crises that would have ...

Does anyone really care that someone tried to assassinate Trump? No one really cared the last two times, why would they care now? This time there were literally thousands of journalists watching the assassination attempt. Imagine the kind of coverage that will generate over the next few weeks. It w...

What in your opinion would count as an unlucky break? Is there *anything* which could happen to Trump which would not result in him becoming ever more popular and omnipotent? Good question. It really did seem like Trump was finally facing a losing streak over the past few months. Between the Epstei...

Next week is looking quite horrible. I have fifty hours of grueling work with an enormous backlog, Trump just got his Reichstag moment, and my esophagus has been acting up again.