Churro
13d ago
Okay, inartfully phrased on my part, I didn't mean to imply Tarrio was there. But the seditious conspiracy charge doesn't depend on physical presence so much as on his participation in the conspiracy. The jury found that Tarrio helped create the Ministry of Self-Defense, establish its command structure, recruit participants, and coordinate the operation whose objective was to prevent the certification by force. That's why his absence from the Capitol isn't exculpatory.
The people who did were unarmed.
And that's just not true as a categorical statement. Dominic Pezzola smashed a Capitol window with a stolen police shield and used it to gain entry. Christopher Worrell was wearing a tactical vest and carrying pepper gel. Michael Sauer was wearing a ballistic vest, Kevlar gloves and a balaclava and deployed chemical spray against police.
Leftists interrupt similar events on a routine basis - it doesn't make the news because it's totally expected. They get escorted out, maybe some arrested for a few hours (just for bragging rights), and then the next group is brought in to start screaming and disrupting the proceedings.
Okay, they shouldn't do that shit and they should be arrested if and when they try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, or any similar government proceeding. I'm not going to defend that shit.
Churro
13d ago
I'll concede that the most recent one I can find in my brief search is Eric McDavid's group from 20 years ago.
Churro
13d ago
How is Trump analogous to the DSA? He's not radical either in social or economic policy.
You wouldn't consider this radical? Or restricting asylum to only white South Africans? The scale of his usage of tariffs? Taking 9.9 equity in Intel? Trying to overturn a century of legal precedent on birthright citizenship? You might agree with all of these things, but I don't think it's crazy to say they're outside what had been the established mainstream for decades. I mean, isn't that exactly why Trump has been so wildly popular? He gave voice to all of these nascent issues the more right-leaning base felt the establishment had been ignoring or feckless or kowtowing to Democrats on.
How are they more reasonable and moderate than Trump?
I mean, lazy answer is they didn't do all those things I just said Trump and his admin did. But to at least have something more to add, none of them seemed inherently hostile to NATO, nor as fawning of various dictators as Trump. Pretty much anything that diverges from the Blob is definitionally radical given the totality of the Blob.
Ok, this is getting absurd... "Let's balance the budget" is now seen as the same kind of radicalism as "let's implement socialism"?
No, obviously it's not. All I said is that MAGA developed out of the Tea Party, which I don't think is particularly controversial to say given there's an ideological and stylistic connective tissue between the movements. I didn't compare the the DSA to the Tea Party apart from saying they served in the role of insurgents. I mean that structurally, instead of implying they are somehow precisely equivalent. There was a neocon establishment, it was challenged by the Tea Party, and it was eventually displaced by MAGA.
Churro
13d ago
I mean there is some truth to it. The left has done very little to confront the insurgent DSA despite the far left having some pretty odious people and policies. Generally the center left is afraid to rile up the extremely online people who make the most noise and as a result are pretty feckless at addressing bad stuff happening on their side.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but could I get specifics?
The right wing establishment, on the other hand, works hard to make sure insurgents stays out of real power.
I mean, I'd argue both Trump presidencies are a pretty strong argument this isn't the case. The right wing establishment 10 years ago was the Mitch McConnell, Liz Cheney, Jeb Bush crowd. The adults in the room, as they were so fond of reminding everybody. They pretty spectacularly failed to defeat the right flank insurgency that first emerged in the form of the Tea Party but eventually fully cohered around Trump as MAGA. The GOP is an insurgency become establishment. It's just that there's always another insurgency, like the Groypers, or your militantly anti-government militias, or whatever Tucker and MTG and Massie may or may not be scheming.
Churro
13d ago
Okay, let's say I, an anarcho-socialist, organize some militant antifa group and breach the capitol, tactical gear and blunt weapons and chemical spray and all, during the counting and certification of the Electoral College votes to disrupt that. Is your contention that I would face significantly lesser prosecution?
We've moved past leftists being targetted and have been stuck on militias and "right wing extremists" for decades now.
What about Operation Backfire, or slapping domestic terror charges on Stop Cop City protestors? Or if those don't count, why not?
Churro
14d ago
Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to decades in prison as punishment for being the anti-antifa.
Is this what we're calling seditious conspiracy these days?
The police state works and is aimed in one direction.
This is funny given the verb you used to describe the maybe-entrapment the Wolverine Watchmen faced was a program that almost solely targeted leftists.
Churro
24d ago
See, I'm not convinced that was going to be a problem until this war. Nor am I convinced the only way to avoid it is by committing ourselves to yet another forever war in the Middle East over WMDs that are nebulously always an imminent threat, justifying the wars of choice that the people who start them wanted all along.
No, but Congress holds the power of the purse. If the Dems hold both houses, or even get enough Republicans to flip on the votes in question, they could defund the war. Literally attach riders to budget legislation saying no funds can be used in X region after Y date. There's a bunch of other things they could do like actually invoking the War Powers Act, repealing the AUMF, up to impeachment and removal, if they can find the supermajority for that. But defunding is probably the hard, structural counter to presidental authority here, and probably the easiest to do, funnily enough.
Churro
24d ago
My reading of history explicitly tells me not to rely on the really, really dumb thing not happening. Most of the bits we think are exciting started because of exactly that happening.
Churro
24d ago
I'd agree! I think if there is any lesson we should be learning from the new ubiquity of drones in warfare, and our own history of what actually won us the one real war we were tested in (WW2), it's that our weapons must be ruthlessly economically efficient. I don't really have an answer yet as to how you economically defend a target as big and vulnerable as a base or a ship from a remotely pilotable bomb that costs $20,000-$50,000, and is buildable in a garage.
The vast majority, by an order of magnitude, of what Iran is shooting at us is drones. Mostly Shahed variants. What we use to shoot it down depends on whether it's a boat or a land target, but at sea we're mostly using the SM-2 (approx. $2.1 million) and ESSM ($1.8 million). The workhorse for land is Patriot PAC-3 (approx. $3.7 million). That is a bad trade.
Churro
24d ago
Cute.
Let me ask this a different way: if it were possible to have built a deliverable nuclear weapon within 6 months, why don't they already have one? They were off the JCPOA since Trump's first term. Or, hell, if we're to accept the Republican narrative, they were building a nuclear program the entire time they were on it. It's been 134 months since the JCPOA was signed, and 100 months since Trump backed out. You can pick either as the start date from when the Iranians began earnestly trying to build a nuke. You'll notice both are much longer than 6 months. Where are the nukes?
Or, would you argue that actually this is a process that takes years? That maybe it's a long research and development cycle, but Iran was finally getting near the end of it, and only timely action now (February) was enough to stop them from nuking Tel-Aviv or whatever by March. I believe the Netanyahu standard is about two weeks away. I mean, that's plausible. Except last summer, your dude told all of us that he had "completely and totally obliterated" iran's nuclear enrichment facilities. As he said: “We’re not at war with Iran … We destroyed the Iranian nuclear program … and we did it without endangering the lives of American pilots. That’s an incredible thing.”
So like... was he lying? Did he realize that actually he totally oversold it, and Iran's way better at building a nuclear program despite being bombed than he thought, and now we have to start a whole regional war that does get our people and lots of others killed to actually do the job he told us he did? And if that's the case, and it turns out you can spool up an entire, imminently-deliverable-bomb-producing nuclear weapons program in less than a year from "complete obliteration", I ask you again, where are all their nukes? They've had years and years of being unconstrained by our bombs or our diplomacy, and seemingly nothing to show for all their very, very active work trying to build a bomb all these many long years. North Korea managed it with an economy ten times smaller, a famine, and literally nothing that resembles Iran's scientific corpus. Where's the bombs that they should have been producing all this time, if they were actually trying to do so, like your ilk keep telling me?
Churro
24d ago
Iran will never produce a nuclear weapon. Here is a very simple proof: since Iran would win by producing a nuclear weapon, and Iran has not produced a nuclear weapon, they can’t do it. They’ve had six months and failed.
How long do you think it takes to make a nuclear weapon?
Churro
24d ago
Why are you in such a hurry?
Because every day we burn multi-million dollar missiles and interceptors to shoot down or blow up the launchers of weapons that cost tens of thousands or, at most, hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't want to pay to throw weapons we'd need to defend Taiwan into the trash for the possibility of some distant payoff. Every single day this dynamic continues is a day Iran gets the best of us attritionally.
Fair point, I don't think this is actual policy beyond Stephen Miller's fever dreams. I would still argue it's pretty radical to message support for deporting a number so massive it would by necessity include millions of citizens, if significantly less radical than actually doing so.
I appreciate the even-handedness.
I mean, I'd have voted for Norman Thomas myself, but even I can acknowledge that 100%, FDR was a radical shift from what had been mainstream up until then. But that's the thing, isn't it? When radicalism succeeds, it becomes the new mainstream, usually because what was radical was actually where the majority (or at least the plurality) was for a while before it finally filtered up to elites.
I mean, no argument here on Roe vs. Wade. I support the policy goal, but I'm convinced by arguments that it was bad jurisprudence. While I like the law to support the outcomes I want for society, I like it to be internally consistent and not politically motivated more. That's what Congress is for.
I think the 2nd Amendment is written in such a way that lends itself to being misinterpreted, but I also think we exist in an uncomfortable tension where the literal interpretation of "shall not be infringed" probably precludes stuff like universal background checks or restricting access to people with severe mental health issues, which are almost universally popular.
Tell me about it. I think this is just what a two party system does once you get far away enough from the last realignment.
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