Fortunately we’re not fully there yet. Still several steps away.

Been hearing that line for a long time. No point in it.

Bout time.

Well, a lot of them were purged over the past few years. Fascists doing their thing you know. Things change though, that is one certainty. Not very predictably either.

Also note, I didn’t exactly say it would be easy. Simply possible. Where, say, an amendment that made voting mandatory would be actually fully impossible.

It’ll definitely take some time, effort and big time coalition building. I doubt this specific one would be as impossible as it might seem though, due to the specifics.

Small govt types could be convinced to support something limiting executive power. That’s all the libertarians and some conservatives. In a bloc with liberals and progressives, it could reach 2/3rds support with the populace. Barely. Then 2/3rds the states would have to ratify.

The fact that it would be for limiting the power of govt, is critical though. Fascists don’t want small govt and just lie about it, but many people actually do. That becomes a middle position liberals can work with in a case like this, since we support separation of powers.

It’s a battle that’s been going for centuries, bigger than any one of us. Taking it personally only has drawbacks, it’s not required for motivation. Breathing exercises can help.

Ah. Well, if all official duties of the Executive are immune to all laws lower than the Constitution itself, which itself bars him from very little and gives the Executive responsibility for enforcement of all laws, I guess a Constitutional Amendment is ultimately required then.

Authoritarians are irritating.

That actually sounds like a very interesting question. Regular tennis has far greater cardio load and a slower mental pace. Chess is purely cerebral and memory-heavy while being sedentary, while D&D is an exercise in creativity that is also sedentary.

makes community about video game arguments.

then makes community about not arguing with me.

Might consider it, if it’d actually help. We know what a “race to the bottom” is though, and that you can become the thing you hate if you aren’t careful. It sucks being loyal to responsible methods and long-term health sometimes.

They can’t. It would immediately run afoul of 1st amendment court challenges on top of appearing partisan, making them look bad on top of probably getting struck down.

We can’t escape the 1st amendment protecting the right to lie, outside of a handful of exceptions. The current SC is unlikely to side with us to acknowledge another exception in the current climate, with conservatives outnumbering us 6-3.

This one cannot be tackled by the government, we have to beat it grassroots and private sector. There are no other realistic options that I’ve heard floated anywhere.

It’s a little sad how far they have to go just to distract from the basic fact that a person can choose to deliver something however they want. A quiet person can yell or a loud person can whisper, it’s really not that hard.

They’re really desperate not to lose their Sleepy Joe attack point though. I suppose the real sad part is how some people will fall for it.

I guess it just depends if you have all your teeth or not.

No worries. You did help illuminate that even rural culture is not homogenous by any stretch. Even in deep red middle America there is bound to be some variety.

I certainly wasn’t trying to state that I was describing every single rural person in America. Just the broader culture of it. Sorry if I bothered you.

Rural folks don’t want policies except for one. They want to be left the fuck alone. At all times. They feel like being racist? They want everyone to let them. They want to not give a shit about climate? They want everyone to let them. Tax man cometh? They’d love to be able to point a shotgun at him, but they’re mostly more civil than that. They hate nothing more than the idea of a system beyond what they themselves come up with and understand.

The problem is modern times have made that stance less practical. That’s the heart of the urban/rural divide.

This type of person doesn’t particularly like any sort of de-integrated thinking in my experience. If you think of something in one way, then everything else ends up being thought of in a similar fashion. That’s partly how you end up with so much entertainment media influence in their day-to-day considerations of more real, serious matters.

Once you add in avoidance of things you’d rather not think about, it ends up as a very low cognitive dissonance load, which I think is a major part of the appeal.

That is not the mass increasing. It is the size. Size and mass are not the same thing.

Imagine a marshmallow, and a stone of the same size. Would they weigh the same?

edit: Nevermind, I understand you’re just adding the mass of the inner planets to it. That’s legit. It’s small though. It is also counteracted by the sun steadily losing mass as it shines. It kicks out all this energy and solar wind, right? Conservation of mass and energy says that has to cost something.

This makes no sense.

The mass, and thus the gravity of the sun would not increase. So, the outer planets would not experience any increase in pull unless they got closer to the sun. The shape that the sun is in, big and fluffy or small and compact, at any given time does not influence this.

I was using it in the meme-ey sense, to stand in more generally as an example for adrenaline-fueled feats of strength. I don’t know if that specific idea has a sound, well-documented reality or is just a meme though. Would not be difficult to look up where the meme came from, I’m sure.