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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • A cursory reading of the decision (PDF), and most reporting on it do suggest that it allows the president to sell pardons. Clarity that it does not can be found in a footnote, which reads in part:

    JUSTICE BARRETT disagrees, arguing that in a bribery prosecution, for instance, excluding “any mention” of the official act associated with the bribe “would hamstring the prosecution.” … But of course the prosecutor may point to the public record to show the fact that the President performed the official act. And the prosecutor may admit evidence of what the President allegedly demanded, received, accepted, or agreed to receive or accept in return for being influenced in the performance of the act… What the prosecutor may not do,however, is admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself.







  • Federated systems are one option for this. On one of my sites, the only way people can leave comments is with ActivityPub. They must have a (probably pseudonymous) account on a server to use that, and I hope that most servers have moderation I find acceptable. I can block those that do not.

    More sophisticated options for sharing reputation between servers would help here. If, for example five servers I trust block another server as a source of harassment, I’d like to block it as well, automatically.


  • Much as I’d like to blame Trump for everything bad that happened during his term, the pandemic and surrounding craziness caused a spike in crime, and Trump did not cause the pandemic.

    Biden did not end the pandemic or its social impacts. I’d argue the pandemic isn’t really over, but most of its social impacts are.




  • My (self-hosted) Mastodon server seems unable to view profiles on Threads. As far as I can tell, there’s nobody to talk to about that.

    I don’t have high hopes about Meta having good intentions here, but I am eager to see platforms that would have previously been walled gardens open up to the federated model. I do think we have some work to do on the open source side to manage the potential massive increase in exposure once Threads users can follow users of other software.

    Of course you can pick a server that blocks Threads if you just don’t want to deal with that.


  • The article has a weirdly alarmist tone to it.

    Yes, there are a bunch of people claiming to know loopholes in the law through which they don’t need a license to drive and the county sheriff (who will absolutely arrest them for driving without a license) is the supreme authority. A few of them will resist the police with violence. People unsuccessfully advancing crackpot legal theories and a few isolated incidents of fighting the police are not a threat to the rule of law.