It's important to note that Weird Al seeks the approval of the artists he is parodying. Technically it's not likely in many cases he has to, since US copyright law generally protects parody, but he's a good faith actor who understands not everyone is going to want to be parodied. Still, the fact that he does seek permission gives him an extra layer of protection.

Yes, training AI on Nazis at Truth Social will be much more effective.

This small government philosophy sure does call for an awfully big government. Maybe they can get some Evangelicals to do the censorship for free.

I imagine it's the way in which you express your opinions that was viewed as problematic. But you seemed to make a concerted effort, as part of what you deemed a protest, to erase the actual posts.

I'm getting a clear sense of why you were given the boot.

I'm telling once you abandon the principle of retributivism, then anything can become a capital crime. It just simply becomes a system of revenge, and worse, where revenge is defined as whatever outrages the mob the most.

Apart from anything else, what happens if it turns out they're innocent? At least if someone is in prison, there's release and reparations from wrongful prosecution, conviction and imprisonment. If you kill someone and then find out later you got the wrong guy, not much you can do.

Beyond that there's a rather ancient legal principle that the punishment should fit the crime. While I want every child rapist severely punished, the fact is the child is still alive, and thus the principle is broken. If we can execute child rapists, are there are other non-lethal crimes that we should consider executing people for? How about rape of adults? How about defrauding old age pensioners? How about theft over a million dollars? How about theft of any kind?

You may say that's reductionist, but once you breach the principle, even for a notorious type of crime, you open the door for redefinition all the way down the line. And we've had legal systems where non-lethal acts, heck even non-violent acts were punishable by death. The Mosaic Code requires men who practice homosexual intercourse are to be killed, adulterers are to be killed, blasphemers, witches, rude children, death death death.

So while I can't say why you got permabanned on Reddit (or was it just a sub), which usually takes one helluva over the top post, your basic idea is incredibly problematic, and shifts punishment back across a legal principle that Cicero had established over a century before the birth of Christ. It means that a new principle (or an old one) involves the notoriety of a crime as the metric for punishment, and not the consequence. Consequence is at least to some degree objectively measurable; dump toxic goo into a stream, we can take a stab at what the damage over the short, medium and long term will be. Rape a child, and we can make some pretty good educated guesses as to what the short, medium and long term consequences for the child and their family will be. Execute people because you clutched your pearls exra-hard, and there is no line other than how upset you get by it.

Maybe a few million. The Great Leap Forward, a decade earlier, killed tens of millions. The conclusion we can draw from this is that Mao really didn't give a damn about human life. The Great Leap Forward had been about showing the Chinese populace and the world how incredibly great Mao's version of Marxism was, and ending up in mass famine. So discredited was Mao by this that people Deng Xiaoping managed to sideline him and bring some sanity back to the government. Mao didn't like being sidelined by his underlings, so sparked the Cultural Revolution to destabilize Chinese society and wrest power from Deng and Co., which he did, and Deng and the other reformers were sent off to be "re-educated". In the end Deng won; after Mao's death and the attempted coup by the Gang of Four, Deng was "rehabilitated" and handed power, and it is Deng Xiaoping who actually turned China around.

Sadly the lessons of that period seem to have been forgotten.

I found the book fairly dull and stylistically confused. Some of that perhaps comes from translation, but the awkward plot and stylistic issues almost certainly are built into the story itself. I finished it only be sheer effort alone, because of its reputation, but honestly I found its reputation to be ill-deserved. It just isn't a very good book. I can't imagine subjecting myself to watching a miniseries version of it.

Driving down the wrong side of the street may get you to work faster, but also leads to fatal head on collisions. But other than that, it can work!

That's a punch straight to my McRibs.

If there's no explicit or implicit threat, then not really. I mean, I suppose a President or their representative could say "Industry X, clean up your act, or I'll use my executive powers and/or petition Congress to pass new laws to force you to clean up your act." The latter is more strident, certainly is a threat, but not one that implies any unconstitutional threat (unless, of course, specific remedies are not available via Executive Powers or Congress refuses to play ball). In the case of the bully pulpit, it's the equivalent of a parent of an adult child telling them stop eating so much junk food, in the latter it's the adult parent saying "You won't be allowed to eat from our fridge and I'll ask the Johnsons not to let you scarf back their food either."

Well, that's kind of where concepts like conspiracy come into play. Clearly wagging your finger at Facebook and X and telling them to stop spreading naughty stuff doesn't even represent much of an implicit threat. Strongly implying to your supporters that they can prevent Congress from certifying the electoral votes seems a fundamentally different activity.

Presidents lecture and cajole all the time. The notion of the "bully pulpit" pretty much goes back to the beginning of the United States. That's not to say that all statements made by a President or member of the Administration is merely finger wagging. But telling people to eat less sugar or telling social media to stop assisting in the spread of misinformation are both more examples of a President using their moral authority (such as the office of the Presidency or individual Presidents may have moral authority). If Mark Zuckerburg or Elon Musk feel coerced by a US Administration lecturing them, perhaps it isn't SCOTUS they should be consulting, but the mirrors one presumes they have in their houses.

I'd argue overhyping is inherent in any kind of marketing and sales. I mean you never see a Ford commercial that says "Yeah, our F150 has four wheels, pretty much performs within the same parameters as our Dodge and Toyota counterparts, mileage isn't really any better, and our heated seats have about the same likelihood of malfunctioning and burning you alive as your neighbor's brand new Ram."

Everything in capitalism is one degree of fairy tale or another. It's how you beat out competition that are selling essentially the same product as you are. Am I the only person that watched the "It's Toasted" sequence from Mad Men? I don't actually think I'm going to have an orgasm if I chew minty gum, but the implication is kind of there.

Has a President or members of the Administration using the bully pulpit ever been seen as anti-constitutional? Surely an Administration has the right to lecture, cajole and whine. If Federal agents are showing up and forcing Mark Zuckerberg to type "I will not repost Nazi slogans" two hundred times, well sure, at that point lines have been crossed. But finger wagging, even vigorous finger wagging?