#man...2016 was something

[snackugaki]

surprise my other hobbies are window shopping and fashion

[sdrose93]

Tom 🥰😍😍

[latenightsundayblues]

i love how you draw adam. he really is a sopping wet rat

*twirls hair* you think sooooooo

[thebreakfastgenie]

Some man on twitter took the opportunity of someone literally celebrating Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 90th birthday to push the "Ginsburg should have retired and this is her/Democrats' fault" line and unfortunately I have some time on my hands so you're getting this rant from me again.

First and foremost, putting the blame on a dead woman when there is a living man who is more directly responsible for losing control of the Supreme Court is profoundly stupid and while I doubt it's consciously misogynistic it does reflect a society that holds women responsible for everything.

I don't know how many times I can say this, but we didn't lose the court in 2020, we lost it in 2018 when Anthony Kennedy retired and Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed. A 6-3 conservative majority is certainly worse, but the Dobbs decision, for example, would have been the same.

You don't get to blame Democrats or Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the fact that you dismissed the importance of the Supreme Court in 2016. Whatever you think should have been done in 2014, you knew what the reality was in 2016. There was already an open seat on the Supreme Court during that election.

If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, Antonin Scalia would have been replaced by a liberal justice, likely Merrick Garland, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have been replaced by another liberal justice. Anthony Kennedy would either have remained in his seat or been replaced by a moderate or liberal justice. The tentative 5-4 liberal majority we had prior to 2016 would have become a tentative 6-3 majority with a solid 5 liberal votes. This Supreme Court would not have overturned Roe and would not be threatening policies like student loan forgiveness and affirmative action. That is the court we would have if 50,000 people in three states had voted for Hillary Clinton.

Instead, Donald Trump appointed three Supreme Court Justices and there is a solid 6-3 conservative majority that will continue handing down horrible decisions that are nakedly political and barely even bother with constitutional justification. At the moment we're basically waiting for a couple of them to die and hoping there is a Democratic president and senate when it happens.

I think the position that Ginsburg should have retired in 2014 is heavily influenced by hindsight, but even accepting that it was a good idea, it's not as simple as people who began believing it in 2020 make it sound. First of all, I cite 2014 because Democrats lost control of the senate that year. This argument relies on Democrats seeing that loss coming. Even if they could do that, Democrats did not have filibuster-proof majority in the senate in 2014. At the time, senate rules required such a majority for supreme court confirmations. Harry Reid had only recently changed the rules to allow all other federal judicial nominations to be confirmed with a simple majority.

It's easy to forget now, but the level of Republican obstructionism during the Obama administration was unexpected. The rule change came about because there were so many judicial vacancies. Unfortunately, not all of them were filled even after the rule change, which allowed a number of Republican appointments during the Trump administration. I didn't have a position on senate rules in 2012-14 because I was in high school, but my position now is that I support ending the filibuster.

I think it's very clear that Republicans will simply change the rules to benefit themselves anyway the second they have power, so Democrats are not gaining anything by preserving the filibuster. However, I reached this position with the benefit of having observed Mitch McConnell's actions as Majority Leader between 2015 and 2019. Democrats in 2012-14 did not have that benefit. I don't know how predictable this Republican behavior was, but it's certainly not the same as having observed something that already happened. If Mitch McConnell had not already changed the rule for Supreme Court confirmations in 2017 in order to confirm Neil Gorsuch, I would have urged Democrats to do it in order to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson. But I don't know if it's fair to expect Democrats to have done so in 2014.

It's also worth remembering that the open politicization of the Supreme Court is fairly recent. It's been obviously political at least since the 1980s, but for quite a long time both parties kept up a pretense that it wasn't. It's easy to see why Democrats might not have expected Republicans to keep a seat open for an entire year rather than even give a Democratic nominee a hearing.

I think "in hindsight, things would be better if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had retired in 2014 and Harry Reid had changed the senate rules so Democrats could confirm a replacement" is a reasonable take. But it's academic. There's no point in assigning blame. And Democrats clearly did learn from this, because Stephen Breyer retired and was replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson.

And, once again, whatever you think should have happened in 2014, we all went into 2016 knowing exactly what did and did not happen. Few people were saying Ginsburg should have retired at that time, and even those who were would not have been justified in not voting for Hillary Clinton, or discouraging others from supporting her, or downplaying the importance of the Supreme Court.

[give-grian-rights]

can someone tell me why im being abnormal about a character i've barely touched the content of. like yay yippie i watched like 20 hours of you. there's fucking 80 years of content get me OUT OF HERE?

[bunnyboy-juice]

spent the first hour and change at work deleting some old files and am having a grand ol time laughing at myself for not realizing i was a lesbian sooner

[electricpurrs]

actually no yeah the early 2000s isnt much of an excuse i think the guys at rooster teeth just have a really lame sense of humor

[pa-pa-plasma]

i don't think i'll ever get over how people treat kids that aren't good in school as worthless no matter what. "oh it can't be that bad" my guy idk how to tell you this but the last time i went to a normal high school the principal called me into his office to brag about how he failed me in all of my classes before the semester was even finished & i should quit while i'm ahead cuz i'm too stupid ("officially" diagnosed as such by a school counselor & a psychiatrist!!) to succeed. & this is considered normal

[dragon-giggles]

Underrated movie

[yellowloid]

thinking about that "there's nowhere for me to hide" quote that's been going around and the fact that it's actually the opposite. i know he's mostly talking about writing and yes when it comes to am he's the one doing (most of) the lyrical work on records as opposed to tlsp where him and miles are 50-50 and they have a whole different creative process than he does with am. but when it comes to being on stage, performing with am is actually the time he hides most. perhaps exactly because he's up there alone as a frontman, hence the need to "protect" himself by putting on a persona, a mask that can be conveniently taken off once he's hopped off stage (a theme that has been widely explored in the last albums, but really it's been there his whole discography - including obviously tlsp with the bourne identity and also his solo work with songs such as hiding tonight). but when he's up there on stage with miles, and miles is "up there singing with [him]", he says it gives him somewhere to hide because that 50-50 ratio that comes with writing translates to their stage presence as well. however one could argue that it's that same equal ratio that makes it so that he doesn't, in fact, hide at all when it comes to tlsp performances, and especially eycte era ones. because the knowledge that not all attention is on him, but rather distributed equally on the both of them, added to the reassurance that having miles there gives him, results in what is maybe his most genuinely maskless behaviour, of which we've seen countless examples during the 2016 tour. and although one could also say that that one, too, could partly be a persona in and of itself, the point still stands - he might be hiding in different ways depending on whether he's up there as the am or tlsp frontman, but being two halves of a whole with miles certainly didn't give him more of a hiding place. on the contrary.

[egg-emperor]

of all 21 characters in the volleyball event in Rio 2016, Eggman is literally the best at receiving

yeah I bet you are 🥴 he always loves to receive instead of giving to others in all areas of life ;)

[project-catgirlpillar]

I was actually raised in a hyperrealistic VR world where every Person around me was actually Just an npc and every one of my moves got Broadcast to the entire world a Bit Like the Truman Show. Used to be everyone got These incredibly detailed bespoke Models so i never noticed but recently the bigwigs have been experimenting with ai to Cut costs so i've been Meeting more people with fucked Up Fingers or No clear line where their Body ends and their clothes begin.

[sdrose93]

This man is so freaking fine 😍😍

[abessive-art]

going through WTNV weather playlists and finally realizing like 80% of my music taste originated from those songs.... truly the podcast ever...

[dreamteamemojis]

.

[starry-studies]

I made this blog many years ago now, when I was struggling to graduate first highschool, and then college. Both were an insanely uphill battle for me- I struggled with the social aspect and the academic aspect, later finding that I qualified for a diagnosis for not only ADHD but also autism, and after three years of waiting, I finally got prescribed medication in the last semester of college.

Medication is like not having to search everywhere for your keys before being able to leave the house and start the car. I would have gotten where I did without it too, but without it I would have had to expend so much energy that it would have burnt me out- I would have suffered more. I am very lucky that my symptoms present themselves in a way where this much is possible, and I am so incredibly lucky to have access to something that helps even that.

This is all to say that after struggling to graduate highschool, failing and dropping out of college after 3 years, working and saving up for a year, repeating my third year and finally finishing my fourth, I'm graduating with a 3.5 GPA in engineering. And fuck it, a Masters sounds like a pretty good next step.