What worries me is that if is the case that the liberal justices are just whinging, then we're in even deeper shit, because that would suggest that the liberal justices are making decisions directly in the context of restraining the threat of a future Trump presidency, and that means every single member of the SCOTUS has abandoned being an impartial constitutional judge...

Nah, running your mouth about shit you don't understand isn't considered legal advice under most circumstances. He'll be grifting effectively immediately.

yup I'm totally saying let's do nothing about this. You people are brilliant.

What should we do then? The default assumption is nothing, give us something to actually work with or the assumption is true.

Imagine expanding the court by 4 seats, 4 months before the election and thinking that Republicans in Congress are going to let a single one squeak by before January 6, 2025.

Those seats would be filled by Trump.

And it is the President's responsibility to nominate justices, so if the majority party just nullifies every single nominee until they can secure the presidency, we shouldn't pretend that they aren't obstructing the operation of government to try to seize power.

All of this "but the government actually works this one specific way" argument isn't much of a real argument when the issue is that bad faith actors are exploiting and weaponizing the way our government works in order to destroy it and to turn it into a dictatorship.

This was already the arrangement. That's why Trump was even at the Supreme Court. He was asking for them to decide that everything he did as president was an "official act". They gave the right to decide that back to the lower courts, where it could theoretically come back to them with a more specific set of actions that they need to decide upon.

Of course, the idea that the SCOTUS is corrupted to the point that they would protect Republicans and sabotage Democrats is a worth discussing, but that seems like a wholly different issue that we allowed the highest court in the country to be corrupted by overt partisanship.

It doesn't seem so much that the claim is that the SCOTUS gave Trump immunity, but that nobody trusts the court system to draw that line to begin with.

This, to my understanding, is how things already worked. We've just never had to draw the line before because we haven't ever had to charge a former president with a crime. My understanding is that the SCOTUS refused to draw the line, not that they granted the office of president absolute immunity.

I guess I just don't understand Sotomayor's response. She says that Trump got the immunity he asked for, but that's not true. He was asking for everything he did as president to be considered an "official act", and they deferred to the lower courts.

It doesn't appear that anything actually changed. I am assuming I am wrong on that, but none of the articles I have read so far have answered that question. There are just a lot of assertions that he was granted absolute immunity, which doesn't match the language of the court's opinion.

I would have preferred that they draw a line on specific acts not being considered "official acts", especially as we draw the line between Trump's presidency and his 2020 reelection campaign. I'm just not seeing a lot of honest discourse as to what this decision actually means from a legal perspective.

I'm a little confused. Isn't their ruling just a deferral back to lower courts?

They didn't grant him absolute immunity, they just reaffirmed the incredibly broad language in Article II Section 3 of the Constitution.

They're not giving him immunity for everything he did as president, they just aren't interested in being the authority that decides what is or isn't an "official act". They are letting lower courts decide that.

If there's something I'm missing here, I would love to know, but it feels like people are misunderstanding this decision en masse.

You mean buying the only actually functional ARM-based laptop built with a level of quality and support that I can expect to continue working with a bloat-free UNIX-based OS for the next decade before I switch it to Linux for probably a decade more? And it starts at $1,100?

What are those people thinking? It's not even Copilot+ ready! /s

I don't see any evidence that this product line is intended only for rich people. Things are generally more expensive in the early adopter stage, and Apple doesn't make anything that they don't want to see widely adopted.

The original iPod held 5GB and cost $400 ($700 in 2024 dollars).

The original iPhone came in a 4GB and an 8GB model that cost $500-600 ($700-800 in 2024).

The iPod is gone, replaced by the ubiquity of the iPhone that it evolved into. The cheapest iPhone today is the SE at $430 and it wildly outperforms the original hardware.

If you want an MP3 player with as close to the specs to the original iPod as you can find, you can get one for about $20, and it still outperforms the original iPod.

If the Apple Vision line is successful, I expect to see $20 generic VR headsets that blow everything we currently have out of the water by 2040.

My brother in Christ, Batman is a billionaire CEO.

Copyright is a mental illness

Well, I happen to have a great deal of respect for and routinely offer my support to those who suffer from mental illnesses, so maybe find a better way to say this that doesn't denigrate disabled people.

Look, if Americans could get this outraged over an 70 extra cents on a medical bill, we'd be a lot better off.

But in America, they'd bill us an extra $2,000 for the same, and we'd just add it to our debts and carry on without even burning down an insurance company like we should be doing.

So I can pirate as many movies as I want as long as I'm only watching them?

Let these rich guys keep talking for a sec. I can get behind this somewhat.

25th Amendment. If the President is incapacitated, the VP takes over.

It's not a great situation, but I'll take it over the guy promising a dictatorship.

I'm pretty sure he could step down and hand it to Kamala. Maybe he could even run as VP. That might rock the boat the least, and while I don't like Kamala, I have more faith in her to actually do the job.

Hear me out...

I think there might be a connection between poast-dot-org and poa-dot-st. The latter is a Neo-Nazi Pleroma instance. I haven't seen any proof that the domains are connected. Might not be.