Deport them to the Antarctic Pole of Inaccessibility.

Set tax withholding to zero. Ie, set up your withholding so nothing is withheld. Have zero taken out of your paycheck by claiming a large number of deductions, or claim to be otherwise exempt from withholding. You can absolutely and legally do this. You can make it so that nothing is withheld from your paycheck. You’ll just have quite a hefty tax bill due come tax time. In this case, Newsom would be telling California residents that the state will prevent the feds from ever coming to collect that bill.

Set their withholding to zero, not set their deductions to zero.

I get it, but realize each of those things is equally as direct as ordering federal law enforcement out of the state. Taxing exports from the state? A flagrant violation of the Constitution. That would be a direct challenge to a main federal power. California decides to start charging an export tax at its borders. They set up tariff stations and start taxing ag exports. That is a violation of federal law, so the feds will have to step in to stop the California customs agents. Now you’re right back to having state and federal agents pointing guns at each other. Alternatively, the courts will order California to stop, and California will refuse to comply. At that point, the federal marshals are directed to arrest California officials for contempt of court. Now state and federal law enforcement are pointing guns at each other.

How about tariffs at the ports? It’s the feds that collect those tariffs, not state agencies. If you want the state of California to take over those duties, you’re going to have to send in state troops and force the federal customs agents at gunpoint.

Seizing federal buildings and military bases? Again, that’s just doing a Battle of Fort Sumter.

Seizing mineral rights? The feds license oil companies to drill for oil on federal land. If you want the state to interrupt that, then they’ll need to occupy those lands themselves. Or, they would have to provide armed protection to oil companies that decided to not pay the federal license fees.

These are all the same problem. The federal government doesn’t need California’s cooperation to collect any of its revenues. The only way for California to interrupt the feds is to send angry men with big guns to directly stop federal officials from performing their duties. There is in practice no way to directly usurp federal taxation or power in California without just starting a civil war. The feds do not need Newsom’s cooperation. If Newsom wants to stop the feds, he’ll have to send in armed men to start shooting federal agents.

I’m not saying this would be a good or bad thing. Frankly, the situation at the federal government is so bad, that we would probably be better off just dissolving the whole country at this point. Independence for all, let states form whatever new nations they want.

But what I’m really trying to do here is provide a reality check. Unless Newsom is actually prepared to order the killing federal officials, any talk of stopping tax flows, seizing federal assets, etc. is just self-indulgent bravado. And I just do not think Newsom is the type of man to go down that road.

Newsom doesn’t have the balls. This is all just posturing.

There is no mechanism for California to simply “cut off” funds from California citizens to the federal government. The IRS collects tax money directly. How exactly are you going to “cut off” these flows?

Really, the only way to do it would be:

1. Newsom announces that Californians don’t need to pay federal income taxes, and that the state of California will directly protect its citizens from the federal government.

2. Encourage and teach California citizens how to set their federal tax withholding to zero and encourage California businesses to do the same.

3. Order California troops and law enforcement to throw all federal law enforcement out of the state at gunpoint.

That’s what this would actually take. The feds have way more guns than any citizen can resist. The only actual way for California to stop the feds from taxing their citizen would be to directly protect the citizens of California from tax prosecution by the IRS. And that would require physically expelling federal law enforcement agents from the state. And that would likely require shooting a fair number of them.

There’s no way to do this without starting a civil war. And something tells me a moderate like Newsom can’t even process the idea of having the state actually secede from the union. Is a Republican-lite like Newsom going to order California law enforcement to kill IRS and ICE agents? In what universe do you see that happening?

This is all just rhetorical masturbation.

Pedantry is the last refuge of the ignorant.

Israel is an existential threat to its neighbors. The hate isn’t irrational. It’s perfectly reasonable.

On the other hand, Israel is an existential threat to every nation around it. If there was an aggressive theocratic ethnostate expansionist threatening your border, wouldn’t you hate them?

Israel doesn’t just want Palestine. They want the West Bank, Gaza, and all or large chunks of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Expelling the Gazans from Gaza won’t solve this. The Israelis want to do the following:

1. Expel the Gazans just over the border into shanty towns in neighboring countries.

2. Some displaced people in those areas will inevitably sneak back over the border to carry out revenge attacks against the people that stole their homes.

3. When (2) happens, use that as a justification to invade neighboring countries and seize additional land.

Israel has been slowly expanding its borders this way for decades. They seize an area of land, declare it a military buffer zone, but then let their civilians move into the buffer zone. They use their own population as human shields, putting them in danger of attacks by displaced Arabs. Then when this happens, they use this as an excuse to expand their borders further.

If you had a psychopathic country for a neighbor, that intended to slowly gobble up your own nation bit by bit, wouldn’t you want them all dead?

It ignores all the previous wars, all the tensions during the British mandate, the tensions during the Ottoman Empire, how the modern states came to be, how they developed their identities, the involvement of other countries in the region, the involvement of distant foreign powers, the insane amount of ethnic cleansing carried out not just in both of these states but also in the wider region as a consequence of that events that took place in this region.

And yet, for all your snowjob bullshit, there is one people in chains and another people putting them in chains. I don’t give a shit what the history is. No one has the right to do that to someone else. The Nazis had a long list of historical grievances against their Jewish population. You would have been right there on the side of the Nazis, saying that while you don’t support them necessarily, you fully understand what Hitler is trying to accomplish.

a trans state would be dope.

Can we just kick everyone out of Wyoming and make Wyoming the trans state?

Nah this is like if you are the parent of an adult child. They have a rough time. They get burned by a series of landlords who screw them over, take advantage of them, and seriously harm their well being. For whatever reason, they decide that instead of renting, their best option is to go squat in their childhood home. It was sold years ago and currently occupied, but they decided they’re just going to force their way in at gunpoint, take over part of the house, and slowly take over more and more of it. You think this is a great idea, and you gladly provide them with weapons and ammo so they can occupy their childhood home.

Nah, fed through a woodchipper feet first.

Not discrediting the work she does but it’s not like any of us even have the chance to do what she’s doing

Horse shit. That’s exactly what you’re doing.

RFK is killing far more people than Mengele ever did.

In the sense that he’s a fascist madman subjecting innocent human beings to tests of his crackpot medical theories.

RFK is just a MAGA Dr. Mengele.

To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren’t focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.

Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can’t produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can’t bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won’t have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.

You’re under-thinking this. Cops don’t help people during medical emergencies. They’re trained to stand there and let people bleed out and die in front of them rather than lifting a finger to help. Also, I’m pretty sure if the mystery gang does get any reward money, Shaggy just smokes it all away.

Well, I insist it’s “moral” to throw Mike Johnson off a bridge.

I personally won’t be doing it, but there’s nothing immoral about it in my book.

If sports were as fair as possible, every sport would have handicaps built into it. Ensuring sports are as fair as possible is only ever brought up when new minority groups want to participate in sports they were previously excluded from.

That’s the “big car small engine” problem. If anything, this puts trans women at a disadvantage in many sports. You’re stuck with the large skeleton formed in a male puberty, but now you have female-level musculature moving it. There are many sports where trans women are actually at a disadvantage compared to cis women. To see the absolute absurdity of trans sports bans, consider that they apply to all sports. In what possible universe does a trans woman have an advantage in women’s gymnastics?