No president has tried it before. Whether he can get away with pardoning himself has yet to be seen. For him not to get away with it would require someone to bring some sort of court case challenging it. And to bring a case, they have to have “standing.” (That is to say, they have to have some credible justification why the self-pardoning action the president took wronged the petitioner in some way.) Which would probably require some legal argument that has never been made before.

I’m guessing Trump probably could get away with it, but given that no president has tried this, we’ll just have to see for sure.

I doubt the term “time tangled in knots” is sufficiently well-defined for any reasonable answer. At least in terms of real-world physics.

If you’re talking about scifi technobabble time tied in knots, my answer is “Looper.”

Yeah, good answers. Thank you.

Are you expecting someone to provide you with all the answers?

Only to explain the answers that they’re already bringing up.

And, honestly, your answer and OP’s answer are exactly the sort of answers I needed. Thank you.

I guess the short restatement is something like “work with others to create an alternative to depending on the capitalist/fascist system for crumbs and then protect that alternative system on a self-defense basis with firearms. (And be ready to before you actually have to.)”

Seems like you’re advocating:

• “Get organized/involved” - What’s that mean in more practical terms? Start attending social gatherings put on/hosted by radical leftist organizations? And maybe start ones if they don’t exist in your area?
• “Get armed” - So, acquire firearms. To use in some particular way? (You mentioned you’re not advocating for “acts of violence or an insurrection like January 6th”, so not that, apparently.) Or just to have for when “something” happens? If so, what specifically?
• “Don’t wait until troops are rolling down the street to stage a resistance” - 'K. Not really helpful until I understand more specifically what you’re advocating for people to do.
• “Start organizing” - Same as that first bullet?
• “Get involved in mutual aid” - Yeah, ok. I’ve read Eisenstein. I know his book Sacred Economics has some tips for how to get involved with existing mutual aid organizations. I definitely need to re-read that bit and read other sources about that. But at least I have an idea where to start with some of that, I guess. I’d still like more specifics on what in particular you mean by this, though.
• “Get involved with resistance” - So, let’s say you’re a respected voice in a mutual aid radical anarchist collective with guns and enthusiasm. What do you suggest they do?
• “Stand, fight, and maybe even die” - How? Not January 6th, but… how then?
• “Don’t do nothing”/“Don’t lay down and accept our fate” - Not really helpful on its own if we don’t know what you’re suggesting we do instead of “doing nothing” or “laying down and accepting our fate.”

I don’t really know if this is a “I can’t really say what I’m advocating for because I’ll be banned, so I’m dancing around the issue and hoping you’ll stochastically pick up on what I’m not saying” thing either.

Without knowing more concretely what you suggest we do, I don’t really have a take on whether I agree or not.

He dropped out? Waaaaaat?!

(Kidding. Kidding.)

I don’t think it would phase me that much.

In 2016 it was so out of left field. So completely unexpected.

If he wins tonight (surely he won’t, but if he does…) I’ll be kinda pissed and scared. I don’t think I’ll be moving to another country or anything. It would feel a little “been there, done that.”

Don’t get me wrong. I voted. I voted for Kamala. And I hope the final figures show her winning in a landslide. And I would love to see a blue majority in congress along with her victory. But I’m not expecting good things. And I’m not investing too much in the result emotionally.

If Trump won, I’d probably plan to be a little more shut-in and keep to myself more.

Right?!

I’ve dabbled in learning Japanese enough to know that learning a second language as an adult has a way of driving home to you how little I really understand about my own native language. And learning what little I have of a second language definitely has taught me more about English.

There’s a linguistics professor at MIT who I once heard say in a class (an Open Courseware class… I didn’t attend MIT or anything):

“We’ll speak no more of prescriptive linguistics except to mock it.”

However you want to say it, say it. Your particular style of speech is unique and beautiful and you should keep speaking that way.

I personally would pronounce it like “Travises”. As if pluralizing it. (“There are multiple Travises in the phone book.”) Makes it fairly clear. I guess that brings up the question what to do if there are multiple Travises who co-own something. “The Travises’ shared given name.” I think off the top of my head, I’d probably pronounce it like “Traviseses.” Cool!

I mentioned this to my mother just a minute ago. I said I’ve never seen anyone use “are” instead of “our” and she was like “oh god that drives me nuts; I see that all the time!”

Until it makes shit up that the original work never said.

I don’t know what TTT is, but that reminds me of this story that I just posted in response to another comment.

This reminds me of a game of Bang where I was the manipulative player. It’s a hidden role game, except that the sheriff role is not hidden. The deputy, renegades, outlaws, etc were all hidden roles. The sheriff and deputy win if the outlaws all lose (get shot enough times to be out of the game). The outlaws win if the deputy and sheriff both lose. (I don’t remember specifically the rules of the renegades.) Depending how may players you have, you’ll have different numbers of outlaws and renegades, but there’s always one sheriff and one deputy. But everybody knows how many of each there are even if they don’t know who is what role.

I was an outlaw this game. And I basically just kept telling the sheriff that I was the deputy. One by one, all the other players fell, each at my insistence they’d said something suspicious and had to be an outlaw. (Basically, convincing the sheriff to start shooting a particular player is a death sentence for that player.) When only three players (the sheriff, me (an outlaw), and the deputy) remained I just kept telling the sheriff I was the deputy and trading shots with the real deputy. Eventually, the sheriff sided with me and started shooting the deputy, thinking (at my insistence) he was an outlaw.

When someone dies, they’re allowed to show their role card, so the jig was up when he died. Then it was just a grueling game of the sheriff and I trading shots until one of us was unlucky enough times to take the hit that our health went to zero. I eventually won, but it took forever.

After the deputy died, he admitted that he had suspected something had gone wrong in the shuffling/dealing of role cards and somehow we’d ended up with two deputies. I was apparently that convincing.

That was the day I learned of my talent for manipulation.

LLMs in medicine. What could go wrong?

All the better to make with the aforementioned flour and sugar.

Just don’t buy the flour and sugar in a dark alley at night from someone with shifty eyes.

New anxiety unlocked.

Neat!

I like mine raw and muddy.

FizzyOrange got it right. “Screen grab” is nicely asking a graphical system (X11/xorg-server or a Wayland compositor or whatever) via an api to give you an image of either the whole desktop or some particular rectangular part of it. And you can do it 30 times every second (or more) to get a video. OBS uses such APIs to get video from the screen for saving to a file or streaming to Twitch or whatever. Various tools can be used to get screenshots and save them to files. Etc.

Heck. On my work machine, because they require us to meticulously log the time we spend on individual tasks, I’ve got a script running that uses ImageMagick’s import command to grab screenshots of my desktop and save them to files once every 5 minutes so I can refer back to them while logging my time.

And as FizzyOrange said, various Wayland compositors have workarounds for the fact that there isn’t (or rather wasn’t until recently) a way to do screen grab in a standard way that would work across all compositors which properly and comprehensively implement the Wayland protocol. I use Sway on my personal machines and it’s based on something called wlroots which has built-in a nonstandard extension to the Wayland protocol that allows screen grab. But once wlroots adopts the new standard way of doing screen grabbing, the nonstandard extension will be unneeded/obsolete.

Oh shit! I hadn’t heard they’d finally added that. That’s awesome.

Maybe that means FFMPEG and Zoom will start supporting it soon.

On my personal systems, I use Sway (a Wayland compositor). And I sometimes wish I could do screen grab with FFMPEG, but so far I haven’t wanted that enough to actually switch to X11 or use wl-screenrec.

On my work machine, I’m on Ubuntu and I have to use Zoom and screen sharing is kindof a non-negotiable thing. (Plus, FFMPEG screen grab is nice to have on my work machine as well.) So I use i3-gaps on xorg-server. Except for those two things, I’d rather use Sway.