NO, the Supreme Court should not decide who becomes president, but YES, the Supreme Court needs to decide unambiguously what the Constitution says about eligibility for the presidency. 

If the Constitution prohibits insurrectionists from holding the highest political office in the land, then this is NOT up to the voters to decide! 

The ONLY valid questions here are:

1. Are insurrectionists barred from running for president, and:

2. Did Donald Trump commit an act of insurrection? 

If the answers to both those questions are YES, then the people's vote is a moot issue - we're not voting to decide the meaning of the Constitution! 

In deciding this issue, the Supreme Court would not be ruling against Trump becoming president, but deciding who is eligible to run for office, as per the Constitution – and that question would hold true regardless of who's in the running. If Biden committed an act of insurrectionism, he should ALSO be considered ineligible!

The Supreme Court REALLY needs to consider the consequences of this ruling. If they rule to allow Trump's candidacy, Trump becomes president, and it later is ruled that he DID commit an act of insurrection, then the Supreme Court has dealt a MASSIVE blow to its own legitimacy. 

It will forever be known as the court that overruled the Constitution.

Donald Trump has once again debased himself and his party by flaunting expressions that are deeply offensive and fascist in nature, claiming that immigrants are ”poisoning the blood of America” – words once used by Adolf Hitler to de-humanize an entire people.

Trump defended himself feebly by claiming he has never read Hitler’s writings, but if you're arguing for fascist policies using fascist rhetoric, does it really matter if you've read Mein Kampf or not? I'm pretty sure you can be an awful politician and human being entirely without taking inspiration from the mustachioed guy with the stiff arm and knee-high leather boots.

In a denouncement – legitimately arguing that Trump' s statements are vile, and that he is completely unsuited for office – John Bolton nevertheless claimed on-air that it is tantamount to ”normalizing Hitler” to draw comparisons with Trump. This seems like a misplaced attempt at nuance. Noone is hyperbolically saying Trump committed atrocities analogous to murdering millions of people from a religious minority. 

Trump DID (intentionally or unintentionally) echo the words of that despicable little Austrian dictator however. That is a binary – it's either true or false – and if we can't call that out, the utter unsuitability for office of Orange Mussolini gets lost. Furthermore, if we can't use Hitler as a cautionary example, then how do we ever learn from that particularly sordid part of history...?

No, if those same vile words are ever uttered, it NEEDS to be called out, or we slide imperceptibly down that same slippery slope towards genocide.

Editing our objections so that we are NOT drawing fully accurate analogies (literal ones, in fact) means we are shifting the boundaries of what is acceptable.

Boundaries definitely need to be drawn, and ought to have been drawn MUCH more clearly in regards to Donald Trump a long time ago. So so much about this insufferable oaf of a man is unacceptable, and the people who incredulously think his transgressions are tolerable need to be told in no uncertain terms that they are wrong.

They are wrong about immigrants. They are wrong about January 6th. They are wrong about the election of 2020. But most of all, they are wrong about the walking, talking disaster that is Donald J. Trump.

Traditions, and the origin of traditions, are never as clear-cut as some would like to pretend, with simple before-and-afters. 

This is just as true of Christmas traditions, regardless of how dogmatically and simplistically conservatives cling to their perception of the holiday.

Take the example of the Christmas tree. This is as with so many other Christian traditions: something that was co-opted, applied to Christian practices, and integrated. Fir trees and fir branches had been used during the Winter Solstice long before Christendom, but not in the overtly decorated form we see today. So, the decoration is what makes it "Christian", not the use of the tree itself. There were afaik other Christian rites with symbolic decorations involved, and early German Christians simply brought the fir trees and branches into that - perhaps to bridge the new with the old.

I find it interesting that Christianity is seen as so monolithic and clear-cut today – especially here in the U.S., where every politician and pundit seems to think that it is some sort of beacon for clearly and uniformly understood values. It becomes especially puzzling when Christianity has co-opted so much, morphed into other traditions and worships so seamlessly, and even been so carefully edited by the church through the centuries. 

I would argue that, even when it comes to traditions, but especially when it comes to religious practices, there are probably every bit as many differences between, say, Catholicism and most flavors of Evangelicalism, as there are between Christianity as a whole, and Islam or Judaism. 

Furthermore, the tie between religious belief systems and traditions appear to be getting looser and looser. A person from the days of strictly religious celebration of All Hallow's Eve would probably find very little to recognize in today's Halloween traditions. 

Still, religious people keep clinging to the notion that they have a monopoly on the definition of traditions – see: "war on Christmas", or even such fundamentals as the institution of marriage.

Christianity exists, and has always existed, within this ever expanding, ever changing array of fluid traditions.

Not as an overarching definition of them.

People and nations aren't the same, and should not be conflated. 

Nation states don't have to be colonial powers (or even particularly oppressive) to pursue imperialist goals, or create problematic structures of minorities and majorities, bundled together and constricted by artificial geographic boundaries. The artificiality of those boundaries consistently cause a lot of geopolitical problems worldwide, and the problems are amplified by the fact that the rights of people are not recognized, where the rights of nations are asserted – sometimes violently and abusively so. 

Russia is fighting an illegitimate war in the Ukraine based on such geopolitical nonsense, claiming they have a "right" to Ukrainian territory, when there have been independent Ukrainian people living there for many centuries (Kievan Rus, in fact). Israel is imposing its geopolitical dominance over the Palestinian people, whose rights to self-governance has been repeatedly denied.

Even so, when you have modern nation states and governments committing questionable acts in pursuit of their current geopolitical interests, it is not fair to blame the people for it – it's the state and its government that is the entity esponsible for the acts. So, when we talk about acts committed by nations and governments (or even religious factions), let's talk about those things, and not conflate them with the people living there. 

In this particular case: jewish people and the state of Israel are not synonymous. We can (and should) hold Israel and Hamas accountable for their actions, without having to treat jewish or palestinian people as a monolithic whole.

It seems to me, this is an issue of conflating human rights with political rights. Surely these two people both have the human right to exist, and to occupy this area that they have historically occupied for centuries? 

It's when the debate slides into political rights – the rights of nation states – that the source of the conflict becomes apparent. A state was created inside colonially occupied territory specifically for one people, where another people had already been promised statehood, but where that promise was ultimately reneged. 

And the conflict that arose from that broken promise is still fuelling all this violence – violence from both sides, it bears repeating. Debating whose violence is worse is so not productive or meaningful, as long as the political rights issue is never addressed. 

The discourse somehow continuously devolves into shaming and accusing either people, not the state or the would-be state – both of whom are violating human rights left and right, on behalf of political rights that are still in dispute.

Personal liberty is not all that it's being cracked up to be. 

Personal responsibility and accountability also matter. Unlimited personal freedom for everyone does NOT create a better world; it creates anarchy, where ultimately only the loudest voices are heard, and the strongest have their way. For that reason, individual liberties and right, and collective liberties and rights, must always be weighed against each other. As citizens in a civilized society, we agree to give up some of our individual liberties for the good of society as a whole.

You have the right to your own opinions, but you don't have the right to your own facts. Your right to free speech does not insulate you from the consequences of bad speech that may be harmful to others. The social contract of a civilized society, and the rule of law, demand that harm and abuse be curtailed. This is not oppression, it is the very antithesis of oppression. It is protection, respect, consideration, and balance. We should always question the motives of someone who labels respect for others ”oppression”, and demands the right to be offensive. Usually, that is the argument of a bully, who wants to assert their dominance over others by abusive means.

Measured regulation - of literally everything - in the interests of the public is necessary to stave off anarchy, and ensure the progress of the species, and the survival of the planet. We are the only beings in the universe (that we know of) who are capable of considering the consequences of our actions, and adjust our behavior based on moral principles. That's what makes us humans, but it is sadly a human capability we are not leveraging very well right now. 

We are giving WAY too much power to a select few, who are mostly only acting in their own self-interests. If they have greater power and influence than others, does that really mean that their personal liberties and rights are more important than others...?

Does the Supreme Court not realize how damaging it is for its legitimacy, and indeed for the entire rule of law, if one iteration of the court goes back on the rulings of a previous one? Is the law not supposed to be consistent, impartial and apolitical...?

And while we're at it: why should appointments to the Supreme Court be political, AND for life, basically guaranteeing a completely random composition of the court? How else do you explain a full THIRD of the current court being appointed by a single term president (who didn't even win the popular vote), simply because of when random illnesses, deaths and individual retirement decisions happened to be made, and who happened to be president at that time? Doesn't that basically ensure a constant political bias on the court, which is not in the least reflective of the electorate? And where judges are apparently allowed to make decisions based on whims and biases, not based on established precedent?

And, while I would not be equally upset if three justices were appointed by Obama or Biden, I STILL think it is unreasonable that these appointments should be FOR LIFE, and occur at random timing. By this mechanism, some presidents may get to appoint ZERO justices, whereas some get to appoint as many as THREE - entirely without it being balanced by the desires of the electorate. Where is the fairness and balanced application of the law in that...?

The Supreme Court has overturned the precedent guaranteeing a woman the right to control her own body – despite this being a strongly unpopular decision with the people, and despite elections in states all across the nation being currently lost over this very issue. So... shouldn't the Supreme Court first of all uphold the law as established by precedent, or at the very least stay consistent with the wishes of the electorate...? 

In essence, this current Supreme Court has granted Donald Trump (of all fucking people) the right to determine what American women are permitted to do with their own uterus. 

IT. IS. SICKENING.

Lindsey Graham claims "the people of Gaza have been radicalized for a very long time", as if Hamas is synonymous with the people of Gaza as a whole. That is no more true than to say that the state of Israel is synonymous with jewish people. The very least one could expect of a state as powerful and dominant as Israel is to not make radicalization such an easy, black-and-white choice. A people who isn't being marginalized and oppressed isn't going to be so easily radicalized.  Terrorism is global; the entire world suffers the consequences of when Israel does not shoulder its responsibility. Hamas unequivocally needs to be held accountable for its horrific acts, but Israel equally needs to acknowledge that it represents the lid in a very powerful pressure cooker. People don't suddenly wake up one day and decide to commit terrorist acts – it is very often the last resort of desperation of a people who have no other access to power or ability to affect their situation. No act of terrorism  should be excused, but we need to realize once and for all that it arises as a reaction to something – just like the build-up of steam in water that is being heated. That something clearly needs to be changed.

It doesn't matter who you voted for
They bought the man that you elected
Selling liberty and martial law
Installed the one that you rejected
And all the presidents and kings and queens
The revolution had ejected
Stole the money through the backroom door
To Deutsche Bank undetected

(Go)

And so the Kremlin and the KGB
Under golden bed disinfected
Got the gossip on the GOP
And the candidate they selected

(Go)

Saudi money over Central Park
Khashoggi's body got dissected
With dirty slogans on the red bus door
The narcissist stole the exit

(Go)

It doesn't matter who you voted for
They bought the man that you elected (Go)
Selling liberty and martial law
Installed the one that you rejected (Go)
And all the presidents and kings and queens
The revolution had ejected (Go)
Stole the money through the backroom door
To Deutsche Bank undetected (Go)

---

ORCHESTRAL MANEUVRES IN THE DARK
(From the album "Bauhaus Staircase", 2023)

If one uses the Bible as a literal source of moral guidance, one will be committing a lot of very questionable acts. Anyone who has ever read the Bible with an open mind knows full well that those who quote from it are inevitably cherrypicking from a lot of parables of highly varying degrees of usefulness or appropriateness. Just like you might find something salient in it, you don't have to look very far to also find something completely inadvisable and objectively wrong. But Biblethumpers like to pretend that stuff isn't even in there. 

However... you CAN find evidence in the Bible that specifically says that lying is wrong: ”Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord”, for instance (Proverbs 12:22). I challenge anyone to find evidence in the Bible to suggest that lying is somehow a moral act. 

So if, as a person of religious faith, you are denying that the Bible promotes a lot of truly heinous acts, know that your lips are ”an abomination to the Lord".

Case in point: ”And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.” (Leviticus 26:27–29) 

So, people of Christian faith: either go out and eat the flesh of your offspring, or acknowledge that you are lying when you use the Bible for moral guidance – and also know that your ”lord” disapproves of this lie.

At some point, republican voters are going to have to account for the total erosion of decorum and meaningful debate in the nation's political fora. They are actively endorsing outright bullying (from you-know-who), defending it by saying he's "telling it like it is". Would they say the same about other politicians, if they returned the insults, tit-for-tat? It is very easy to insult Trump, and he clearly gets very irked by it. So... is that defensible? Is that "telling it like it is"? Or are insults against Trump not acceptable, and only his insults are A-OK? That is nothing less than a cult of personality, it has nothing to do with politics whatsoever. I submit to you that insults have no place in our body politic. 

Please... get back to voting based on policy, it is the only thing that makes sense. Forget this crude and shallow carnival barker – he has literally nothing to tell you. Nothing he says is in any way, shape or form "telling it like it is" - it's just insults and word salad. Policies? I don't know that he has ever had any. What the crowd cheers for, that is what he will give them. He's clearly just in it for the popularity chase; the ratings game. It is all he cares about, and it is NOT what we elect our politicians for.

Watching the profound, recent dysfunction in the GOP House, where a small group of 8 political arsonists held their own party hostage in order to foment chaos following the ouster of the speaker of the House, I'm left wondering: 

Why haven't the majority of at least somewhat rational, serious conservatives gotten together to cleanse their ranks of these self-serving troublemakers, who clearly have absolutely no desire (or ability) to govern? 

Surely, the party would be able to support and promote better, opposing candidates in the districts of these bomb-throwing undesirables? 

How difficult is it really to find and boost a better candidate locally in, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene's district...? Surely, if they can swiftboat the reputation of major Democratic candidates like Howard Dean or John Kerry, they can do the same to some of these saboteurs within their own ranks? Or has all sense of strategy fled the Republican party?

The electorate is clearly not, on average, capable of selecting reasonable representatives, but since we cannot (and obviously should not) force people to vote one way or the other, we would need to ensure better quality candidates.

One way of doing that would be to have certain basic and firm rules about who we allow to run for office. 

• More than 10 criminal indictments, or have a single conviction on your record? You're out. 

• Threaten other congresspeople? You're out. 

• Get censured, reprimanded, or flagged by the Ethics Committee more than 3 times? You're out. 

• Fail to show your tax returns? You're out. 

• Fail to vote in more than 20% of congressional votes? You're out. 

• Found to be taking bribes? You're out.

• Found to use your position to engage in insider trading? You're out. 

• Enable a government shutdown more than 3 times? You're out.

Of course, we have the candidates we deserve. But even if there are a lot of voters in MAGA land with a tenuous grasp on civics, democratic principles and the rule of law, I'm absolutely convinced the GOP could work successfully to present and support better candidates than MTG and her ilk. They are now paying the price for their laissez-faire approach to political strategy, with a splintered party and an over-abundance of poor quality candidates, who serve in Congress with highly questionable motives and capabilities.

Case in point: fraudster George Santos, a.k.a. Kitara Ravache. Is that really the best the GOP can do...? Like so many other GOP congresspeople right now, he appears interested only in self-promotion, and his obligations as a legislator seem to have completely eluded him.

See, conservatives have been wrong about one critical thing since day one: 

They remain fixated on the SIZE of government, when – as actual candidates for that very government – they ought to be more concerned about the QUALITY of government. 

And failing to evince any meaningful ambitions in regards to the quality of government, they are now showing themselves to be completely incapable of governing at all.

Fear and cowardice are now core elements of conservative politics. 

You have a majority of republican candidates and lawmakers who are afraid to stand up to Donald Trump, or push back against what they clearly think is wrong deep down. 

How do I know this?

All the private calls from politicians for the rioters to stand down, and for Trump to put a stop to the insurrection on Jan 6th (while later taking a totally different stance in public), makes this abundantly clear. They are hypocrites.

The same goes for the issue of gun control. Conservative lawmakers KNOW it is a death sentence for their political careers if they take a public stance for gun control, but many of them also know it's an absolute necessity to limit access to assault weapons. 

How do I know this?

The fact that they regularly ban guns at the RNC illustrates this clearly, yet they are never held to account for this hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, on the "left" (I'm using that term within air quotes, since there are really very few truly left-wing politicians in the U.S.), you have someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who gets accused of being a communist on a daily basis, and gets threatened with harm by conservative voters consistently. But does that make her stand down, and moderate her political positions? No. She stands up for what she believes in.

Seems clear to me, the Republican party is a party full of spineless, pandering cowards. They refuse to do the right thing, even when it is staring them in the face. Even when they themselves show through their actions what they really believe.

Meanwhile, they try to eat their cake and have it, too. They claim to be the "party of law and order", but a majority still support a man who is indicted on 91 (that's NINETY-ONE) criminal charges, and very few have taken an active stand against the clearly unlawful and unconstitutional acts of Jan 6th. 

I can assure you that very few of them truly believe in the ”deep state conspiracy”, which outrageously suggests that fully valid and justified investigations are fake, and evidence of a ”witch hunt”. It's a lie that they feed to their feeble-minded supporters, in order to stoke fear, and stay in power.

How do I know this? 

Because when right-wing politicians (like Rudy Giuliani) are forced to take the stand in a court of law, and swear to tell the truth or perjure themselves, they say something entirely different than what they tell their supporters. There was no decisive election fraud. They know it, they testify to it, and they continuously fail to produce any evidence of it. 

But once they're outside the courtroom, they go back to making their outrageous, unlawful, untruthful claims – fully aware that they are false.

So, it appears the law (and the imperative to tell the truth) only applies to non-conservatives. Conservatives will lie, and choose to dismantle democracy and the rule of law, before they give up power.

Concerned about gun violence? I think most people are. So, ask yourself:

1. Do we have a problem with gun violence? I think the vast majority of Americans would answer that question in the affirmative. It is clearly not a partisan stance.

2. Have we done enough to curb the problem of gun violence? The pure mathematical answer to that question is no, which is also not a partisan stance. The problem persists, ergo: we have not done enough.

So, the question isn't if we HAVE a problem, or if we should DO something. The question is WHAT to do. 

And that question isn't one lacking in bi-partisan agreement. The issue on the conservative side isn't that their proposals are ineffective, or objectionable. The problem is that they don't propose ANYTHING. They try to mute the discussion, in craven support of their NRA donors.  

But the truth - the objective, non-partisan truth - is that we have to TRY to solve this problem. We have to make an effort - even gun owners. To solve it, we have to be willing to try ANYTHING and EVERYTHING, before we can determine what works, and what doesn't. Which conservatives stubbornly refuse to do - in fact, they refuse to even debate it.

It's almost as if they already know that gun control WOULD work, and they just don't think the ongoing deaths of thousands and thousands of innocents are enough to accept that. 

Putting ideology ahead of human lives.

How does it make sense to anyone that we allow partisan political appointments to the highest judicial instance in the nation – basically ensuring that the law is not impartial? 

What's worse, we end up with an imbalance that is caused more or less by chance – i.e., according to the political bent of whichever president happens to be in power when a court seat is vacated. 

It's turned the legal system into a lottery – when it's not shaped by outright theft that is. 

We therefore now have a Supreme Court whose composition does not reflect the electorate, and does not reflect the will of the people, based on election outcomes. 

A court, the majority of which has been appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote, and a full third of which has been appointed by a single term president who is now under indictment for federal crimes. 

By what twisted logic is this court vested with any judicial authority whatsoever?

”Happy” birthday, America.

Social media is an extension of capitalist principles, where what ultimately matters is how things are monetized. That causes the whole clickbait situation, which incentivizes clicks over meaningful experiences. 

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is just an extension of that – a way to scale up clickbaiting, and then aggregating and homogenizing experiences based on lowest common denominators. 

In such a scenario, artists are actually more important than ever – humanity just hasn't realized it yet. 

A.I. might help produce volume in ways that drive commercial value, but can it produce meaning...? Getting what we want is not a way to make things more meaningful – most meaningful discoveries and insights come from realizing we are wrong, and modifying our views to be more truthful. Even if we can enter prompts where A.I. yields exactly that which we are looking for, social media has already shown us the risks associated with confirmation biases, echo chambers and opinion bubbles. 

It's not a slippery slope as much as it is a precipice with no grip whatsoever.

Conservative Christians sure love their cheesy, pastiche vintage artifacts. 

Fake stone tablets, fake scrolls, fake arks, fake white Jesus-figures, fake burial shrouds, fake relics, fake grails etc etc – all made to look like they're period authentic, despite the fact that these people don't even appear to know the source material very well, and don't seem to be bothered by the fact that it has been processed through thousands of years of mistranslation and misinterpretation, to the point where it no longer even remotely resembles the original. 

I guess what I'm really saying is, Christianity seems to require a heavy tolerance of fraud and misrepresentation. 

Authenticity might be a better starting point.

Over the past decade, we have seen the rise of Fake News, and the dangers of social media allowing us to remain coddled by our confirmation biases in our closed opinion spheres, finding erroneous support for almost any misguided opinion there is.

Artificial Intelligence will unequivocally aggravate that problem.

A.I. supplies the deceptive psychological confirmation mechanisms that convince the ignorant that they are right. They can continuously iterate, feeding the A.I. bullshit, and demand changes until they are satisfied. And without knowing what its sources are, they take the A.I.'s output at face value.

In my experience, the only thing that (misguidedly) satisfies an ignorant person is to get exactly that which they want to see, through unlimited iterations. What ”proves” to them that the result is ”good” (which they themselves by definition lack the objective capability to determine) is that they persuade themselves through continuously requesting changes, and that those changes in and of themselves supposedly mean that they have somehow ”refined”  the results. When, in reality, all they have really done is go through a long series of bizarre, totally subjective mutations which at no point were guided by deliberate, knowledge-based and empirical judgments. The A.I. doesn't know what is true, it merely aggregates what it is fed.

That is, in my mind, the real problem with A.I.: it enables limitless, arbitrary, unverified and automated mutations, without any of us ever really understanding the purposefulness or the adequacy of the decisions made along the way. We simply outsource important decisions to the A.I., without comprehending or even being aware of those decisions, relying entirely on the machine to make the right decisions. 

This is certifiably insane. 

We have no way of ascertaining the factual accuracy of the decisions made by the A.I. or, more importantly, the MORAL consequences of the decisions it makes. The A.I. aggregates data and determines ”truth” to be whatever it can find that corroborates its findings, even if the corroboration itself is false. If it finds 100 blog posts that contain the same falsariums, it will judge them to be of equal weight to 100 blog posts that are objectively true.

The current problem with A.I. is this: the advocates for Artificial Intelligence are experts on the technology, not subject matter experts in the fields where A.I. is being disruptively accelerated and implemented. The ACTUAL subject matter experts have no access and no means through which to validate the veracity of A.I. output, and the technical experts don't appear to care about the morality of it.

The long-term problem with A.I. is an ascerbation of that very problem: the more advanced A.I.s get, the harder it will be for its human counterparts to validate its results, or even understand how it arrived at those results. When the input reaches a certain volume, it becomes impossible to fact check – and the very selling point of A.I. is its processing power, which widely exceeds that of human brains at this point.

The way I see it, the key issue here is that A.I. is a "black box": it produces results without us knowing how it arrived at those results, and we therefore lack the ability to validate them. And this is an escalating problem, which worsens the more complex A.I. gets: the black box gets blacker and blacker. We will eventually require "Voight-Kampff-detectors" in the hands of A.I.-psychologists, who will try to analyze the A.I., and query it constantly, in order to understand its decisions.

Talk about chasing your own tail.

We dismiss the dangers of A.I. at our peril. We may pooh-pooh the dangers, thinking that the current outputs produced by A.I.s are unsatisfactory, and that A.I. poses no threat for that reason. But those are mere details that A.I. will get progressively better at resolving. That is, after all, precisely what A.I. does: it learns and progressively improves its output, and that is happening at an ever accelerating pace. If we believe that we can judge A.I. by what is produced TODAY, then we are missing the core of the problem.

Specific results may be difficult for A.I. to procure TODAY (such as images of people with anatomically correct hands, for instance), simply because those aspects are still new to the A.I., and the machine lacks sufficient data upon which to base its results. This is a challenge that will disappear on its own through the very way that A.I. is constructed: to gather more data, and refine its output indefinitely.

If we outsource decisionmaking – in any form – to the A.I. machine, we are in deep trouble. Because A.I.s CAN and DO make mistakes: its decisions are only as good as the data fed to it. Just like social media, which enables the uncritical spreading of lies, and itself appears to verify these lies merely on account of the frequency with which a lie is told. 

Ultimately, decisions are validated not on the grounds of veracity, but on the grounds of morality – morality that A.I.s don't have. There may be thousands of data points that support a certain decision, but the decision may still be an immoral one.

Decisions without morality? 

That is Skynet right there. Or, if you wish to be more sophisticated: Asimov's law of robotics – a law that is yet to be enacted.

The notion of originalism is, at its core, offensive. 

It implies that the world has been frozen in stasis since the 1700s, and will never change. That modern human beings must be forever shackled by antiquated ideas, because their very age supposedly make them more true somehow. 

This is one of the many many things about conservatism that is based on a thoroughly warped, fossilized perception of the world. The world is forever changing, and if our laws don't evolve with it, to account for the changing conditions of life, they will run counter to our existential truths. 

Humanity evolved not because we enshrined certain rigid ideas and encased them in amber, but because we were continuously able to adapt to an ever changing reality. 

The judicial ideas of the bronze age seem ludicrous to us today, and we can safely assume the same will eventually be true for 1700s legislation as well. 

And when it comes down to how we view the US Constitution in this context, the Founding Fathers quite obviously realized the fact that laws need to change: they enabled it through the future-forward affordance of Amendments, which in and of themselves are entirely incompatible with the very concept of originalism. If the founders did not want the laws to change with the times, surely they would have not permitted ANY amendments? 

If we try the logical gymnastics required to judge the applicability of future constitutional Amendments through the lens of originalism, it pulls the rug out from under originalism itself.

Over and over, we hear the scare-mongering narrative about "woke-ism" and how it's somehow this giant threat, as if we're supposedly now all obliged to adopt positions on gay or transgender issues that we apparently don't support, or as if we have succumbed to a political machinery that forces us to enact pro-minority policies against our will. 

Someone PLEASE show me this nebulous, enormously influential transgender or minority power structure that wields this unchecked power, or channels these nefarious, unseen, moneyed interests into actual policymaking. Show me transgender lobbyism at the level of the NRA, Big Oil or the pharmaceutical industry. 

It. Does. Not. Exist. 

It is a mirage, a phantom – another conservative boogeyman.

No, "woke-ism" – to the degree it even exists as a ”thing” – is a stream of thought. Attitudes and opinions that have taken hold with certain parts of the population. There is no point in demonizing that, even if you disagree. 

Public opinion always waxes and wanes in different directions. Deal with it! It's called freedom of speech, and it is CLEARLY not a symbol of warped political influence, because that influence is not manifested anywhere, except in the paranoid, culture war-obsessed minds of conservatives.