Honestly, I remember similar vamp lore dragging down the first one. There some interesting stuff with Frost being lower class because he was turned Vamp instead of born Vamp, but the third-act vampire-god thing was kinda meh, ending with some horribly dated CGI.

Also, while the world building was cool, it’s not as though Blade is a super interesting character. He’s a super cool bad-ass, but I find myself checking out when they get into his emotional backstory. Whistler id mich more of the emotional core of fhat movie, which is probably why they had to bring him back in the second (which ie something in fhe second movie that I thought was a cheap cop-out).

Yeah, I thought that was the general consensus too, but I couldn’t be sure that wasn’t just an echo chamber I’d created with my friend group.

I would argue that Blade II is the better movie. Guillermo del Toro is a much more interesting director, and the Reapers are basically a dry run for his take on Vampires in The Strain.

I don’t know what Stalin thought, but I do know that he was able to rule for so long because he was broadly popular throughout the Soviet Union. Also, Victor Orbàn clearly cared about public opinion, as did Ferdinand Marcos, Hosni Mubarak, and Alexander Lukashenko, to name a few.

You can’t control a country where the vast majority of people hate you. Even if the military remains loyal to you (and they won’t), if the majority of people are out in the streets protesting you instead of going to work, your economy will implode, and gunning everyone down won’t help. You need your opposition to be small enough that they seem like a trouble-making minority, while you remain popular enough that most people either support your violent suppression of dissent or at least don’t hate you enough to stick their own necks out.

Generally speaking, authoritarians want the support of at least a plurality of the citizenship. Even in well established authoritarian regimes, widespread public discontent will lead to regime collapse, even if it’s a military coup that just leads to another authoritarian regime.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, but the problem is that the President can only pardon federal crimes, so if a mob drags Steven Miller from his house in California and kills him, the President can’t do anything to intervene. However, I’m pretty sure that the President could pardon crimes committed in D.C., and the Supreme Court has basically said the President can’t be held accountable for crimes committed in office, so in theory, a future President could order agents to take Miller into custody, bring him to D.C., and execute him. He could then pardon everyone involved and no one could be held accountable.

The response to this needs to be a resounding, “LOL, no,” from whatever administration comes next. The constitution gives the President the power of the pardon? Well, if gives Congress power of the purse, but we let him ignore that. The Supreme Court will intercede? One of them is married to a J6er, another one is openly taking bribes, and ar least three of them committed perjury when they told Congress said they wouldn’t overturn precedent. Our country can’t continue without accountability.

Oh, I guess that’s just Massachusetts. Here you’re required to pay time-and-a-half for federal holidays and, for some industries, Sundays. I knew that Sunday-pay was state law, but I assumed federal holiday pay was required by federal law.

If it’s a federal holiday, employers are forced to give you time-and-a-half, which makes smaller businesses much more likely to close for the day (and large corporations much more likely to understaff and fuck over the people who do work that day).

If the Democrats were a functioning opposition party, they would have forced Fetterman out when his staffers started reporting his erratic behavior. But Chuck Schumer needs Senators to, “go against him,” and thwart any legitimate opposition the party can muster, so we let this brain damaged, mentally ill man occupy one of fhe highest positions of power in the nation.

Good. He’s an authoritarian who had his paramilitary goons invade an American city. All you achieve by going to the State of the Union and listening politely is the normalization of fascism. Only deeply unserious people who are incapable of meeting this moment would consider attending without disrupting him.

Wonder how they snuck this by Bari Weiss.

“Please be aware that I have instructed ICE and/or Border Patrol to be very forceful in this protection of Federal Government Property.”

Well, they just gassed a bunch of peaceful protesters in Portland, including children, so I guess that part is true.

Trick will be that pressing the murder charge would be federal since a federal agent dies in the line of official work (though illegal), which would give the president grounds to push for death.

Federal prosecutors are having a real tough time getting juries to convict, and sometimes even indict, citizens accused of assaulting ICE and CBP agents. They have 30 cases against Chicago residents, and so far they’re 0 for 15. They couldn’t get a felony indictment for the sandwich-throwing guy in DC, so they went for a misdemeanor; he was aquitted despite clearly having done it. It is not at all clear to me that the feds could get a conviction for killing someone during what is, legally, a home invasion.

(This is not an incitement of violence towards any federal agents, nor am I advocating for anyone to break any state or federal laws. To any FBI agents reading this, I think you’re very smart and handsome.)

“You Europeans need to learn how to stand up to Trump and the far-right fascists! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my podcast, where I platform people like Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk, rest his soul.”

Sure, ICE should be scared that someone might kill them, but a more interesting question is if a prosecutor could find 12 people in an ICE-occupied city that would convict someone of that killing.

I’m sure they’re just planning to quietly delete their comments once they’re sure everyone’s stopped paying attention.

She was NOT GOING TO LOSE CALIFORNIA. For fuck’s sake, who could possibly be this fucking stupid.

OK, but yes, she absolutely was..

You know the election happened right? SHE WON CALIFORNIA, YOU IMPOSSIBLE DUMBASS.

Again, no. She dropped out before the California ballot deadline, most likely to spare herself the embarrassment of losing her home state.

The neither did Sanders.

Sanders won several states. Kamala was polling so badly she dropped out before Iowa.

I’m sorry that accurately remembering the 2020 primary is so upsetting to you, but Kamala did not win a single state, even as a VP choice. She dropped out in December of 2019. Voting started in February of 2020. Biden eventually secured the nomination, and on August 11th, the day that the final state voted, he named Kamala as his running mate.. Anyway, maybe before you jump into a thread and start calling people dumbasses, you should make sure that literally everything you’re saying isn’t wrong.

If Newsome gets the nod, which is the assumption we were all OBVIOUSLY operating one for the purpose of this conversation

That’s a weird assumption to make considering I started this conversation by saying, “The minute [Newsom] enters the primary…he’s going to flame out fast.”

They didn’t say anything about Trump, they said she had no shot of winning the primary, which is true. She was on track to lose every single state, including California, where she was a sitting senator. If you think describing polling data from a 5 year old primary is somehow saying Kamala is, “worse than Trump,” you should log off for a while, maybe take a walk or something.