Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
1yr ago
That is not a bad-end of the court opinion. That's what can already, and could already, occur.
Arguing against a Supreme Court opinion on the grounds that a tyrannical person will ignore it with sufficient congressional support is an infinitely generalizable argument- it's no longer a failure state of the actual opinion in question, but a failure of the broader system in who two branches of Government are colluding against the third.
Note that if you remove the presumption of capitulation, Congressional investigation by the opposition can still choose to dig in and find illegalities in the basis of action, which re-reverts item one to 'nope, outside of official scope,' or find evidence of resistance to oversight (such as, say, actual resistance to oversight), which is itself outside of the bounds of item one, or the other ways for additional information to be raised for public awareness. Will it un-assassinate a political rival? No. But would item one provide immunity? Also no, not unless there is sufficient coordination/agreement between the Branches of government such that the offense wouldn't have been prosecuted/pursued regardless.
This rests under the assumption that the power of Congress, "to make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces," trumps (heh) the president’s role as “commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States.” The opinion spends ample time dispelling the notion that congress can regulate the president’s article 2 powers. Why do you assume that regulations on what kind of orders the president can issue acting in his constitutionally mandated role as commander in chief are constitutional?
Because making Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces, which is what establishes the authorizations and limits to the military, is not preclusive to the Commander of Chief.
The Trump v. United States opinion makes no claim that all of the President's official acts fall within the conclusive and preclusive authorities. From the opinion-:
(2) Not all of the President’s official acts fall within his “conclusive and preclusive” authority. The reasons that justify the President’s absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within the scope of his exclusive constitutional authority do not extend to conduct in areas where his authority is shared with Congress. To determine the President’s immunity in this context, the Court looks primarily to the Framers’ design of the Presidency within the separation of powers, precedent on Presidential immunity in the civil context, and criminal cases where a President resisted prosecutorial demands for documents. P. 9.
Given this is literally page 2 of the opinion, which explicitly expands the area in which Congress can regulate Article 2 powers to all scopes on conduct in where his authority is shared with Congress, I propose that the notion that the Court dispelled the notion that Congress can regulate the President's Article 2 powers to be itself dispelled instead as a misrepresentation of the Court's position. An erroneous motte for a much more banal bailey: Congress can regulate what it has the power to regulate, which is not everything the President is empowered by the Constitution to do.
Article 1, Section 8 is still a thing, as are all the military-related aspects of it, which would not be preclusive to the President.
You say this has been litigated, but where? Who would have article 3 standing?
Defense appeals to following orders in the course of unlawful conduct has been as old as corruption within the military and/or war crime defenses, so take your pick. Congress's right to dictate what is / is not law regarding the military regardless of what the Executive prefers is demonstrated through all the military-governing legislations ranging from UCMJ to the late Cold War intelligence community reorganization to basing and expenditures. The standing comes via all normal standing principles.
Dean
Flairless
1yr ago
If you never hold politicians accountable you encourage corruption and tyranny. Holding politicians accountable means prosecuting them when they commit crimes.
If you only hold opposition politicians accountable, you are also encouraging corruption and tyranny. Hence why prosecutions of politicians needs to be even-handed, and why counter-corruption campaigns are an archetypical narrative justification for politically-motivated prosecutions by tyrannical governments.
We already prosecute politicians. The constant special pleading for Trump makes no sense.
Because you're dismissing objections as special pleading, rather than acknowledging like-to-like contemporary actions (and lack of actions).
Naturally if you ignore context, context-based objections likewise can be ignored as senseless.
Why the question mark? Is the order lawful, or isn't it?
The core of presidential authority over the military is not giving any sort of orders to the military. This is a conflation of the authority to command with the authority for a commander to act. The authority to command (to give orders) is distinct from the authority of a command to actually do X/Y/Z. The privileges of one do not imply the privileges of the other.
The Article II authority of the President to command the military is in the context of what Congress establishes the scope of via Article I. If it's not within the scope of what Congress establishes, it's not within the scope of Article II authorities either, because the scope of what the rules for the Government and the regulations of the military are get decided by Congress, not the President.
If the President's order is unlawful by the rules and regulations governing the military, it's outside his Article II authority to command the military and thus there is no immunity.
If the President's order is lawful, then it's immune from prosecution as a coup... but it's also not a coup by definition as a coup is an unlawful seizure of power, and for it to be a lawful order it has to be in compliance with the law.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
I'd add 'regulate the constitutional exercises of the presidential office that aren't shared with Congress.' There are Presidential authorities that are shared / overlap with Congress, and there are those that do not, and only the later are protected from Congressional regulation.
Which is kind of inherent in Congresses's own limitations of power- if it doesn't have the authority over something, it doesn't have the authority over. There's a reason the interstate commerce clause is so load-bearing to Congressional legislative authority, and even that has limits.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
I can't speak to the specific history of attempts to take court cases against wars to the Supreme Court, but the distinction between authority to command authority to act is pretty old. It's a relatively common affair for when dealing with the American military internationally for humanitarian assistance / disaster relief efforts, because your American counterpart may have the presence and the means, but not the authority to actually help, except when they can do so for just a few days, before they have to cease and wait for broader authorities, and so on.
(This is actually pretty stereotypical in UN peacekeeper deployments in humanitarian contexts, actually- the authorities for doing anything more than self-defense are often so restricted that Commanders have no legal option but to not retaliate. This is how you get things like peacekeepers best known for just standing around and not stopping belligerents fighting around tehm.)
From what I remember, most of the drama over Iraq-era AUMF for the Americans to deploy to the United States hinged over the legal appeals, i.e. whether Congress needed to call it a war (Formalists), or if a UNSC resolution was required (Internationalists), or if this it was a derivative from the Gulf War 1 authorization and cease fire (since Saddam had by this point repeatedly violated the cease fire, if the previous authorizations were still valid). The AUMF directly references the later, as well as other basis for action, but the AUMF itself was what Bush relied on for the authorization to act.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
Except what the lawful orders can be issued is not preclusive to the President, but the rules for the government and regulations for the armed forces established by Congress per Article 1, and thus not immune to prosecution by the standard of the court.
The President has no authority for issuing unlawful orders, and thus the immunity argument can only apply if ordering Seal Team Six to execute his political opponents is a lawful order in the framework already passed by Congress.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
Yes, on multiple axis.
The main originalist theme is that the Founders established some powers for the President, and not the Legislature, and so the Legislature or Courts don't have a Constitutional basis of restraining authorities that the President is constitutionally granted. I.E. the Constitution gives the President the power of pardon, originalist writing supports this sort of consideration, the Constitution doesn't give Congress or the Courts a role in executing or limiting it, and thus the current conclusion is that the Congress or Judiciary can't make it a crime to execute the Constitutional power of the President as the original intention for it was. This is generally consistent with the originalist intents behind separation of powers, the empowered Presidency vis-a-vis the previous Articles of Confederation, and so on.
The current forum discussions are more dominated by discussion over the military, but that's because of general conflation of two distinct authorities between the authority to Command (the President's Article II authority), and the authority to establish the rules and regulations of what may be commanded (Congress's Article I authority). And then trying to superimpose the absolute immunity argument on that overlapping sphere when the Court says absolute immunity doesn't apply to the overlapping spheres.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
Is it okay for Congress to say "It is a felony to appoint an ambassador in exchange for a bribe"?
At this point, after the Americans spent the better part of the last century and more doing just that for campaign donors? It'd be rather weird and imply a good deal of criminalizing bipartisan normal behavior, which itself would imply an intent for arbitrary and selective enforcement.
I’m also curious whether the claims will be retracted if Trump wins this year, since presumably that would be the deep state choosing to allow him to become president again, right?
Why would a sincerely curious person have reason to believe a 2024 Trump victory would negate or disprove beliefs of deep state opposition to Trump?
The core argument on the idea of a deep state is that it exists and is organized and has power that it utilizes for a cause, not that it is all-powerful and all-determining. There is no requirement for some Nybbler-level nihilism that the deep state determines all and resistance is futile because the deep state determines all. The premise of a deep state is that it is still a state, and while people frequently have unclear ideas of the limits of states they are also very aware that there are limitations of a state and their ability to fail if key actors are opposed (the basis of politically organizing against a vague group of interests) or fall out (divisions within the private coordination mechanisms causing visible turmoil). Even the most famous examples of deep states of contemporary history, including some of the ones that popularized the term like the Pakistani deep state, can have both clear power and clear limits and failures to their attempts to influence. For a somewhat more public version, the current fallout over Biden that is breaking the Democratic coalition apart is a failure of system, not evidence of that Biden's new critics are secretly pro-Trump. The non-public Democratic coordination mechanisms are still anti-Trump, they just are in disagreement as to how.
Organizations- public or secretive- can simply try and fail. Their failure does not imply they were secretly for the other side the entire time. This is particularly true when the reasons for their failures are the over-use of increasingly ineffective/discredited tools that have become less effective with time and over-use.
Because they were the ones who wanted the debates. You're after-the-fact rationalizing that participating in the debates was an obviously wrong decision that everyone could see in advance, when two weeks ago before the debate everyone could 'clearly' see that Biden could expect to do reasonably.
Biden didn't just refuse to participate in the debates because he was the one who needed them to shake up a contest he was gradually losing. Trump approached from the position of having a consistent and enduring lead he could stand to lose; Biden was the one approaching from a position of having a consistent and enduring trail that would lead to loss if not changed.
To bring a card game metaphor: Biden had to make a bigger gamble because he was behind and couldn't count on average scoring to pull him ahead. The fact that the gamble failed, doesn't mean the game wasn't appropriate.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
Alternatively, this is the failure state of too much party discipline.
Biden is the leader of the Democratic Party, not the other way around. The American system is not a European parliamentary system, and there is no 'They' to tell Biden he was done: there is no list-control element that could keep him from running again, and he's the one whose allies and loyalists are in the positions of control of the national party infrastructure. That's why the primary season was reorganized to the benefit of state (state politicians that backed Biden in 2020), and why the national convention was being converted to a dial-in convention even before the debate- Biden is the leader of the party. Party discipline is discipline to him.
What's occurring now is the breakdown in discipline because discipline was used to drive into a crisis against misgivings. It was precisely the discipline that previously suppressed doubt and kept alignment, but discipline then breaks when respect and trust break.
Quoting for posterity in case you decide to delete this as you have various other things that even you later realized countered your self-sought reputation.
There are, of course, many ironies that could be noted here, but again- posterity.
From the very bottom of my heart, go screw yourself.
Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must; I believe this will mark my first violation of this sort. But I stand by it, and sometimes, things like this need to be said.
To you, to everyone like you who thinks that about me here: go screw yourself.
I have always been perfectly upfront about who I am, what I do, and why. I have aimed to remain earnest, consistent, open, and push constantly against falsehood and towards painting clear pictures of the truth, including in controversial and sensitive situations. I stake my reputation and my name on my work. The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.
Have I made missteps? I don't know anyone in the arena who has not. But I am immensely proud of my work as a whole, and every time I return here and find miserable scolds like you grousing about bitterness you've never let go, it disgusts me.
Screw you, screw everyone like you here, and if I didn't know perfectly well that plenty of people here do not think like you, I would delete my posts here and never spend another moment on this site, because you and yours have dragged it into the gutter and I don't need to spend my time around people determined to see nothing but the worst in me. Imagine writing something like this after I spend a month exhaustively documenting the malicious history of one who has been spreading propaganda against communities like this before either you or I had anything to do with it. Imagine having nothing better to do than dig this rubbish up, than look to start a stupid fight over nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself, but of course you won't.
You can insult me when you've put your money where your mouth is a fraction of the amount I have. Until then, go screw yourself. You and Gerard deserve each other.
I deleted my LoTT stuff because, in one of the worst moments of my time online, it was too much for me to engage with the community I had come up within as they reacted less charitably and more harshly to me than everywhere else on the internet. As for this one, don't worry. I meant every word of it and have no intention of deleting it. I reiterate the same to you. Go screw yourself.
Yawn. Get off your victim complex and grow thicker skin if you want to be a public writer in a community based around rhetorical argument. You just spent self-admitted weeks doing internet archeology for the sake of a slam piece, and you're flaming out of a modicum of pushback a much more recent time that you were duplicative, dishonest, manipulative, and deliberately so for another boo-post.
You've meant every word of your previous flame-outs as well, and had no intention of deleting them too until your temper cooled and your ego was pricked enough by the reputation damage to try damage control. This is merely cutting off your previous lines of retreat and preserving the record.
You have no high ground here, and your reputation is not beyond reproach. Defending your thesis on such will not protect it.
People build the communities they deserve.
How is the Schism going, anyway?
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
And I am sure David Gerard is quite likely proud to have helped lay the foundation for improving the health of the public record.
That's fine. Participating someplace where a significant minority of the community care about nothing but digging through old grievances every time I post gets old very, very fast, and there's not really a point to beating around the bush on that.
You just spent weeks digging through old grievances dating back a decade, and then made it a top-level post about it. On multiple websites, even.
Yes, I realize that you feel yours are important and valid and other peoples are beneath acknowledgement, but this is part of why you are getting pushback from people with longer memories of your past conduct.
Once, this forum meant a great deal to me, and many of the individuals on it still mean a lot to me, but the space as a whole lost the mandate of heaven long ago despite your own good work and the good work of the other mods.
In the past couple of months, I've met more than a dozen motte users I read avidly, respect, and have fond memories of in real life, at several events tied to this broader community. Almost none of them post here anymore. The Motte had a good run and contains a lot of good memories, but for all practical purposes, I think its run is over. Here’s to a glorious diaspora.
I encourage those of you who enjoy what I have to say to join me on Twitter or elsewhere. At this point, the conversations there are richer, the community there healthier, and participation there is more meaningful than it is here, and I have very little to gain from kicking around someplace where some 1/4 of the userbase want it to be crystal clear that they loathe me every time I post. There was a time this was the best discussion space online, but that time has passed and it's time for relics like me to move on.
How can it be a glorious diaspora if you keep coming back after denouncing it?
This isn't your first flounce. You came back after establishing the Schism, you came back after Liberals of TikTok, you came back after the site switch, and probably several more breaks I'm not recalling offhand. Between the recruitment attempts and the self-promotion efforts but also just to discuss emerging and contemporary news, you never stay away for terribly long. In much the same one that one is not stuck in traffic, but a part of the traffic, you are (still) a Mottizan.
You may leave for awhile, and all the longer for it being called out on it, but you'll return as you have multiple times before.
All the best.
Until you come back again, and not just for the last words tonight or tomorrow.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
Of course, there's no changing the past, so I'd say the only thing to do is Be Good going forward. You have my faith that you can and will, as with this article.
Strictly speaking, there is a way to escape this trap, which is to fully admit to the past errors and stop using the tainted persona, adopt a new Internet pseudonym, and with it a new identity set unassociated with past errors. If found and pressed, (re)acknowledge the past errors, and make the point that the new persona is on the diferent path. It's hard, it doesn't assauge the worst opponents, but it is a clear and credible break with the past practices.
It also means, however, dropping the reputation of being one of the luminaries of the whole SSC-sphere, and for people who have devoted large parts of their identity and emotional sense of self into that sort of persona, that's unacceptable.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
Alternatively, treat / approach it as one does someone who does a late-in-life baptism/conversion and adopts a new name. Spiritual rebirth is a common cultural context, and part of that is to do away with both the sins and the gains of the past as part of the break in identity. This isn't 'lie for the sake of a new false identity' this is 'recreate the identity,' which has common cross-cultural analogs and context for understanding if demonstrated as sincere and approached from a position of humility.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
The Schism averages around 100 comments a month on the monthly discussion threads. The Motte is somewhere around 1000 a week, give or take a few hundred depending on current events.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
It's bad faith and deceptive if done to avoid responsibility and guilt, as opposed to a process to acknowledge and overcome. Again, culturally-resonate examples abound: faking a conversion is contemptable, conversion as a new start is respectable. Or we could raise the more progressive-secular example of transition, or the chance to reset/reframe when marrying into another family, or so on.
Separately, there is a bit of amusement given that encouraging people to abandon old personas and pretend to be someone else, but in compliance with the rules, has been a Mission Accomplished success of The Motte's modding philosophy when dealing with sockpuppets who stay more within the rules. I realize Motte modding is non-generalizable, but it is applicable as a (sub)cultural example.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
Why do you believe Woodgrains pushback is based on things completely unrelated to the current post?
Tracingwoodgrains condemnations of Gerard include both explicit and implicit themes that Gerard is malicious, deceptive, dishonest, and taking exceptional effort in order to negatively shape others perceptions of his political opponents. The evidence of this goes back years, more than a decade ago. This is presented as to be contemptable, especially as he is unrepentant, a critic of this community, and doing this in obvious self-interest (in this case, ideological).
Tracingwoodgrain's LibsOfTikTok hoax was also malicious, deceptive, dishonest, and took exceptional effort in order to negatively shape others perceptions of his political opponent. The evidence of this goes back years, not even half a decade ago. Tracingwoodgrains is also unrepentent, a critic of this community, and doing this in obvious self-interest (in this case, self-publicity).
There is the surface-level subject of a post, and the meta-level subject of what a poster likes to talk about or return to. Woodgrain's thesis lacks sting or sincerity when its themes are things he is likewise guilty of (of kind if not degree), and noting this when he attempts to assert a moral high ground is not merely a matter of grudges, but of topling the meta-positioning of the argument.
And that pushback in turn revealed relevant context via the response- Tracing went from pejoratively opening his characterization with 'longtime malicious critic of this community' to a blistering 'screw you' burnout rant and posts about how bad this community had been for a long time. This is relevant information for the current post. It reveals not only information about the viewpoint biases of the author (by reminding otherwise-ignorant readers of narrator similarities with the subject of condemnation), but it revealed previously hidden information (the private views the writer has of his audience).
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
People who convert generally don't pretend to be someone else and abandon their previous identity.
Yes they do. I will disagree with you here, particularly since I'm referring to the more variable forms of conversion and not simply religious.
People who do major lifetime conversions frequently cut ties and connections with their previous identities, including in some cases the formal identities themselves, in their efforts to distance themselves from these past personas and habbits. This can go from religious/cult conversion, gender transition, nationalization, marriage, even very banal things like going to college and dropping old nicknames to adopt new monikers. The very act of creating and internet pseudonum is an act of obscuring a previous identity, and we don't consider that a falsification, even though the research on how people's behavior and prowess over the internet change vis-a-vis in person is well established.
We could endlessly go into how in depth as to how relevant twitter-handles and Rationalist-sphere psuedonums are to these, but I suspect it would be missing the point regardless.
Even if Trace apologized for pranking LoTT (which, by the way, I agree was a low point, but seriously y'all need to get over it, it's not like LoTT has ever been doing any kind of quality or good faith "journalism") and disappeared, if he reappeared as Earnest McGee, brand new social media account talking about culture war topics, and then was discovered to be TracingWoodgrains, I think you and his other detractors would be the first to gleefully drag him. You would not grant him absolution and forgiveness.
I am as always impressed by your long-distance over-internet mindreading powers of my views and approaches to absolution and forgiveness. I can only hope that you are as capable in person.
In return, I am reminded of the opening paragraph of the classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup.
In Chesterton’s The Secret of Father Brown, a beloved nobleman who murdered his good-for-nothing brother in a duel thirty years ago returns to his hometown wracked by guilt. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion.
Tell me you are unfamiliar with American military law without telling me you are unfamiliar with American military law.
This is not new, and not the incredibility you think this is, because distinction between lawful and unlawful orders has already litigated and legislated at length, while your incredibility relies on conflating lawful and unlawful actions as both being under the scope of the President's immunity as described by the Supreme Court. The basic Supreme Court rejoinder to your incredibility could simply be 'the President does not have conclusive or preclusive authority to issue illegal orders, duh,' and then point at the Constitutional chain under which the President can give orders.
The American Constitution provides the power "To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces" is allocated to Congress, not the President. The President and Executive Branch works through these parameters, in part, through the Uniform Code of American Military Justice (UCMJ), which is Congressional legislation. The UCMJ in, in turn, sets the requirements of obeying lawful orders, and the contrasting limitation on illegal orders. Lawful orders in turn derive from, well, laws and regulations allowing their issuance/execution/funding, while unlawful orders violate the laws.
There is no authority to the military (or the President) to give illegal orders, because the President's constitutional role is to give orders within the Congressionally-defined rules and regulations for giving lawful orders. Orders contrary to those- the unlawful orders- are outside the scope of the President's constitutional role. If they are outside the scope of office or duties, there is no immunity.
This is the very old 'where does 'following orders' apply as a legal defense?', and the established answer is mundane. Soldiers are obligated to follow lawful orders, and thus legally protected even when those orders result in negative consequences, and are not obligated to follow, and thus not protected if they do follow, unlawful orders. Now take this distinction all the way to the top.
By eliminating the category of unlawful orders outside of the broader category of lawful and unlawful orders the President could give, what you have left (by definition) is the scope of lawful orders within the scope of authorities...
...which is the context of the only reference to the Armed Forces in the opinion, on page 14, in a paragraph listing constitutional authorities.
There are reasons the Opinion Dissents don't appeal to the Armed Forces angle, and among them is that the SEAL Team 6 assassination argument is one only protected under this ruling if SEAL Team 6 assassinations are already legal orders to give.
You might as re-express your incredibility at the shock that the none of the Democratic justices thought to argue that the President should be prosecutable for giving legal orders.
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