I hate semantic and pedant arguments on the Internet but this is worth it:
We don't legalize things in America, we illegalize things.
The constitution doesn't give us rights, it actually takes them away so our government can operate.
We give freedom lip service in this country but if you truly believe in it this is what we must drill into people in civics class and in discourse.
This is in fact what happened with sports betting. They wrote a law making it illegal. That law got struck down, so we are back to the default which is it is legal.
We can make it illegal again to address the court ruling, but it's an uphill battle.
I don’t know what you think was gained by this argument.
Sports betting was effectively illegal, and a number of people lobbied aggressively and pursued lawsuits to overturn the status quo (de facto federal ban) then a huge number of efforts to permit it at the state level in a bunch of states.
All of these efforts are completely adequately described as “legalization” efforts.
Yes, we can change the new status quo again. And we should.
>>>>Fentanyl will kill you the first time you're exposed to it.
This is why DARE failed. You can't blatantly lie about everything just because you want what's best for people. At some point people find out you're a liar and don't believe a thing you say.
Just seemed like a high schooler who read Howard Zin and is reciting all the ways America is horrible. Very emo or goth or nihilistic or just bleak. Not a fun or thought provoking read.
This *1000. It's a supreme failure on our educational system and society at large that most Americans don't think about our government and our rights in these terms.
The Constitution actually takes away our rights. It has to, it lays out the powers the government has over us. Even the bill of rights doesn't technically give us rights---it explicitly details the ways our government cannot operate.
Thats a ridiculous comment. The thing about the space race is we were getting are ass kicked, then said 'Oh the finish line is actually this. Oh look we kicked your ass "
It was like we lost the first 9 events of a decathalon and then won the 1500 and declared ourselves the winner.
Actually, in Russia do they have a pitch for where they’d rather draw the finish line? I admit it is probably influenced by having a US upbringing, but “landing on the Moon” does seem like a natural finish line for a space race.
The move of picking an advantageous finish line is easily countered by… picking an obvious successor finish line. If they’d stuck a base on the moon that’d have been a pretty compelling “actually, here’s the next finish line.”
But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing, planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.
I think both sides broadly agreed on all of those as their "next big goal" (with slight question mark over the space plane, as you could reasonably say the Soviet programme was purely reactive).
The race ended after the fall of the Soviet Union (with the Challenger disaster being an additional factor), not because it had been definitively won.
> But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing,
I agree here, but it’s not really a game with declared rules or something. I think the US won in a game of oneupsmanship. Rather than try to make up rules, we can observe that the US always lost by little enough to plausibly claim that there was another more interesting goal right there. Then, won on the goal where, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a natural follow-up.
Of course, getting people to believe that the next thing you go for is a natural follow-up is itself an exercise in PR or propaganda. That’s why I’m mostly curious about how Russians saw
> planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.
There are definitely candidates for what could have been the “next target.” In my perception these just weren’t something people were excited about. But I wasn’t born at the time and I’m American so I know I got a biased telling.
That was part of the mission profile, no? If it hadn’t been you’d have a point, but as I understand it that was a reasonable milestone to hit and to determine if an animal can even survive for a time in orbit before they risked a human life.
Animals often die in experimentation and that’s usually the whole point of the experiment.
Sure. So you could maybe add the first animals to safely return from space into the list too - the first win on the American side if you're counting sub-orbital flights, otherwise it'd've been Sputnik 5.
Russia has the first finish line -- Sputnik. You can pick a successor finish line to diminish the American accomplishment, but Russia will always have that first one.
That isn't the way it works, there's no "three strikes" law for Presidents. If all of his extant corruption, clear senility and incompetence, throwing the global economy into chaos tumbling ass over end into an unnecessary war he can't even win and the Epstein stuff didn't get him removed from office, then this won't.
What we need is a form of legal redress more effective than a stern talking to, which is all impeachment amounts to.
There is a form of legal redress - following through in the senate with impeachment. Trump had sufficient allies in the senate when he was impeached so they dismissed it but if instead they had a 2/3 vote he could've be removed from office.
They gave Trump presidential immunity partly because the remedy for addressing any perceived lawlessness, they figured, is provided by the impeachment process. If impeachment is forclosed as even a possibility, the president is truly immune from any consequences.
We don't legalize things in America, we illegalize things.
The constitution doesn't give us rights, it actually takes them away so our government can operate.
We give freedom lip service in this country but if you truly believe in it this is what we must drill into people in civics class and in discourse.
This is in fact what happened with sports betting. They wrote a law making it illegal. That law got struck down, so we are back to the default which is it is legal.
We can make it illegal again to address the court ruling, but it's an uphill battle.
reply