Hitler declared formal war upon the US.

Exactly. The US has a history of making inconvenient Latin American leaders disappear. The means vary, but the impact is the same.

When was the last time we violently deposed a Western European head of state?

TBF, attacking Venezuela like we did has a lot of historical precedent. The US has a long history of deposing inconvenient Latin American leaders.

But engaging in an unprovoked war of conquest against one of our oldest allies? Collapsing our most important defensive alliance? This is an entirely different animal. There’s no precedent for an invasion of Greenland.

We need more than that. We need potential 2028 candidates to announce that a future Democratic president should just refuse to fund ICE. If Trump can shut down entire departments by fiat, so can a future Democratic president. If SCOTUS commits the most transparent act of judicial partiality in history and wish to somehow rule that a Democratic president can’t do the exact same thing they okayed for Trump? Well tell them to pound sand.

Well, you’ll certainly get plenty of exercise and won’t have to stop yourself from binge eating in the gulag!

Real in the sense that it was made at the height of the napster crisis. It wasn’t put out by the RIAA though.

We’ll let you be the negative one.

Seriously. This person is using the right wing strawman version of open borders. We had open borders in the 19th century, but there was still a customs office. You still had to show up, register, and declare yourself. And they filtered out what criminals they could back then. Open borders simply means that anyone is able to come if they’re a law-abiding person.

You leave the borders open. If a terrorist comes across the border, you send the police to arrest them. You arrest criminals and prosecute them. Why is this so hard? You only need a completely separate organization if you want to control the numbers of people coming into the country. If you don’t care who comes, and just want to make sure there aren’t violent criminals coming in, the police are more than capable of handling that.

As high as is practicable. Have you forgotten that you live on stolen land? Did you think that was just a slogan without any meaning?

What I take from this fact is that we, the current citizens of the US, don’t have any actual moral right to the land of the US. (Except citizens of native descent.) If practicality weren’t a concern, the moral thing to do would be to give all the land back to the native peoples. But practically, that isn’t possible. The 300+ million citizens of the US have nowhere else to go. Trying to give all the land back would create humanitarian crisis of similar or greater magnitude, by raw numbers, to the genocide that wiped out most of the Native Americans.

Instead, I recognize I have a practical, but not moral, right to live and own property in the US. I have a right to stay here simply because trying to kick everyone out would be impossible. Any attempt would likely trigger a civil war and even further violence against native peoples.

This matters because I ultimately don’t have a right to tell people they don’t have a right to come to the US. If we’re going to justify not returning the land based entirely on practical grounds, then it becomes our duty to ensure that the land we’re not giving back is used for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. A random citizen of Somalia has as much moral right to a patch of ground in the US as I do, and I had an ancestor on the Mayflower. That’s how far back my roots here go.

We should accept as many immigrants as is practical. Obviously we can’t let in a billion people tomorrow. We need to be able to accommodate everyone who arrives. But ethnic or cultural identity is completely irrelevant. Hell, if you’re worried about housing, we should offer an unlimited quantity of visas for anyone around the world skilled in the trades and home building. If you know how to do construction, you get a visa. You’ll build your own housing and then some.

In short, figure out the maximum rate of immigration that our systems can handle, and set that as the level.

Or, hear me out, show some maturity and end the meeting at it’s end time.

Individual action vs group action. You don’t have control over other people. You can’t force others in your organization to end their meetings on the hour. You can however set your meetings to begin five minutes after the hour.

We adopted a bonded pair of brother cats a few years ago. We wanted to go with a pair of names. We considered Romulus and Remus, maybe Cain and Abel. Ended up with Sam and Frodo. But one we did consider was Ignorance and Want!

“Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demand."

This is gaslighting by cowardly state officials. If you can get official records great. But they are not necessary. You have countless eye witnesses and multiple angles of video recording the murder. You don’t refuse to prosecute gang hits because you don’t have access to official cartel records. No different with ICE.

This is bullshit stonewalling by cowards in state office who are afraid to hold the powerful accountable.

I mean, for the sake of the hypothetical, perhaps we assume that Wolverine has undergone a deep religious awakening and has decided to convert to Judaism entirely out of his own free will as an adult of sound mind and body!

Holy strawman, Batman!

Yeah, if anything, 1945-2025 may end being a historical anomaly. The US was an aggressively expensive colonial settler state though most of its history. We’re still settler colonial, but we’ve at least not been aggressively expansionist for nearly a century.

Over 300 years of aggressive expansion (if you include the colonial period.) A return to orthodoxy after an 80 year hiatus doesn’t seem so unusual in that regard. Really, everyone who remembered why we stopped acting that way has now died of old age, so we now have only our shared national mythos to guide us. And our culture has continued to celebrate its expansionist past, even if we’ve walked away from it as policy over the last few generations.

I mean, every American voter certainly has more moral culpability than say, any of the millions of Japanese civilians we incinerated in WW2.

The second amendment is still useful. You use the little guns to obtain the big guns.

And some people use full sized buses as their personal vehicles. Weird edge cases aren’t how we define words. Your exception proves the rule. This isn’t “umm actually,” this is you being deliberately obtuse.

We’re talking about how 99% of people actually interact with these machines, not a handful of oddballs living in rural Alaskan homesteads. Those few rare edge cases are not how words are defined.

Planes, for 99% of the population, are more like buses than cars. When people say, “flying car,” they specifically mean a flying vehicle that:

1. Can provide point-to-point transport.
2. Can be operated on your schedule.
3. Doesn’t require expensive licensing and training (at least no more than a regular drivers license.)
4. Can be owned or operated by the typical American family living in a typical American neighborhood.

This is what a flying car is, and it’s why planes are not flying cars.

Have you literally never seen any media depicting flying cars? Are you really that incapable of seeming the difference between this:

And this?:

For 99% of the population, the idea of using the latter for a personal vehicle is comical. You need to have a pilot’s license, and you need to own a god-damn runway in order to use it as a personal vehicle! The vision of a flying car has always been something that you could park in an ordinary suburban garage, pull it out into the driveway, and vertically takeoff without requiring you to own a giant piece of land. This is why you only see two types of people use planes for personal transport - the incredibly wealthy, or folks who live in extremely rural areas where large amounts of land are comically cheap. And it has to be something you can keep on your own land. If you have to drive to an airport to use it, you’re no longer fulfilling the point-to-point on-demand dream that the vision of flying cars represents.

Again, you need to focus on the social definition, not the technical one.