Rov_Scam
25d ago
It was in the news briefly when it happened, and there wasn't a lot of ongoing action to keep it in the news for an extended period. But a year or two after it happened it turned into a cause celebre among libertarians and progressives about the excesses in the war on terror that the Obama administration wasn't backing down from, and it was discussed more frequently on magazine shows, in op-eds, and on so-called alternative media. And it wasn't so much an onslaught as it was that it would come up every couple weeks (Oh, Amy Goodman is having Glenn Greenwald on again, etc.). If this guy had died I suspect we'd see something similar here, but since there's ongoing action in the story, it's going to be in the news more.
Rov_Scam
25d ago
We can quibble about the timeline, but, Rand Paul (whose speech was in 2013) aside, Progressives were, by and large, the only people arguing for Awlaki's civil liberties. Again, it would help if I knew how old you were at the time, what media you were consuming, and what kind of company you kept, but as someone in his late 20s who listened to either NPR or Democracy Now! on his way to work but would occasionally switch over to right wing talk for a change of pace and whose friends were (mostly) Democrats, NPR and Democracy Now! were regularly running segments talking about how much of a travesty Alwaki's death was. Right wing talk radio, in a rare move, defended Obama's actions, while at the same time criticizing him for not being aggressive enough. They thought the standards the administration used to determine the guys was sufficiently dangerous to merit extrajudicial execution were too high.
Sorry, I did a bad job of explaining what I meant there. I wasn't using fatigue as a justification for lack of interest. What I meant was that this execution, combined with a bunch of other shit Obama did on the foreign policy front, let to a fatigue with the administration among more progressive voters, particularly younger ones. Obama was elected largely on the promise that he'd back away from the aggressive war on terror policies of the Bush administration. In the '08 GOP primaries you had people like McCain and Fred Thompson who were doubling down on this position. Then Obama comes in and while he was eventually able to get out of Iraq, he doubled down on Afghanistan without making any progress, invaded Libya, wasn't able to close Gitmo, drew lines in the sand in Syria, oversaw an NSA domestic spyiung program, and was now droning US citizens. He was able to make up some of this ground by moving to the left on social issues later in his second term; this ended up being good for him personally, but it wasn't enough to save Hillary Clinton, whom millennials didn't like to begin with and was largely seen as the architect of some of these adventures. The fatigue that I'm referring to is the fatigue with the entire Democratic establishment that led to Bernie Sanders almost giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money in 2016, a fatigue that was largely the result of the Obama administration's more conservative views on civil liberties.
Rov_Scam
25d ago
I wonder why that is?
Two reasons:
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You may think that killing someone is the worst thing someone can do to them, but as a litigator, I can assure you that is not the case. Any case with a live victim who can testify and enjoy the proceeds of the suit directly will collect more than a wrongful death action where the injury is determined by extrinsic evidence and the proceeds go to the family. Garcia is currently in jail and the administration (presumably) has the power to get him out, and there is action in the court system almost daily. It has implications for the administration's policies going forward. Alaki wasn't in the news until several years after his death, and while the surrounding circumstances certainly had implications for policy, they weren't as salient.
-
Criticism of the Obama administration came mostly from Democrats, and internecine wars aren't going to make the news as much as wars that have cross-party intrigue. The media outlet furthest to the right condemning the attack was the New York Times editorial board. Fox News, on the other hand, was going so far in the other direction that even the administration was telling them to stop. If the country is roughly split half and half R/D, and only half the Ds are making a controversy about something, it's not going to catch on, especially if see No. 1.
I don't know how old you are or the social circles you run in, but among left-of-center people at the time there was definitely a fatigue about Obama setting in. The whole Clinton–Kerry foreign policy machine seemed like a continuation of the failed Bush policies, or for that matter the 20th Century foreign spook shit writ large. And then on the other side, you had Republicans who said he wasn't being aggressive enough. I'm beginning to suspect that the whole turn toward what would become wokeness in late 2014 was largely an attempt to reconnect with a leftist base who had largely become frustrated with his schtick.
Rov_Scam
26d ago
The issue under debate isn't due process. The government made no argument in its motion about the amount of due process, if any, should have been afforded to the deportee. It was simply about whether the courts can compel the executive to take a particular diplomatic action.
Rov_Scam
26d ago
Arguments surrounding the guy's immigration status are irrelevant here. At no point has the administration argued that its obligations would be any different were he an American citizen; it's taken a firm stance that the court has no authority to compel the executive to return someone held by a foreign government. Period. If the court sides with the administration, there's nothing preventing Trump from deciding that it's easier to send a high-profile citizen criminal to El Salvador than to provide the due process the law affords him. And who is going to argue? After all, there was certainly no due process provided to the victims of his crimes. At that point, 200 years of constitutional law will go down the toilet. Every citizen is entitled to due process, unless the government decides he isn't is not the hallmark of a free society.
Rov_Scam
26d ago
As @quiet_NaN notes, it's highly unlikely that Wikipedia would be able to sue you over a clone site, or that they'd even want to, given how frequently I see the articles pop up on subject specific wikis that aren't affiliated with the main site. That being said, there are a few problems with this approach. The first one I see popping up is that once you clone the site and make the necessary updates, it will quickly become outdated if you're only focusing on the small percentage of the site with political relevance. Automating the process runs the risk of automating out all the changes you've made.
But there's probably some workaround for that. The real problem is that such an exercise would be utterly pointless. At root level, what is the concern about an overrepresentation of liberal viewpoints on Wikipedia and an underrepresentation of conservative ones? Correct me if I'm wrong, but all I can think of is that it presents a distorted view of reality to the average reader—it may be useful that someone who doesn't know who Taylor Lorenz is but looks her up for whatever reason is aware that she's made controversial statements. At least, it's useful provided the site has a general policy of describing notable controversies. And maybe at some bigger level it can give the impression that conservatives are overall worse people than liberals due to the asymmetry in controversy.
A Wikipedia clone created to rectify perceived liberal bias in the original isn't likely to achieve this end. The kind of person likely to adopt such an alternative isn't the normie you assume is being influenced by this stuff, but the conservative looking to have his opinions validated. Why would anyone without your particular axe to grind prefer an imitation over the original?
Rov_Scam
29d ago
They did solve it. The order prohibiting removal to El Salvador wasn't an equitable remedy the judge made up on the spot; it was pursuant to US law. If the legislative branch wants to change the law, then fine, but until they do that, Trump should be making every reasonable effort to get the guy back.
Rov_Scam
29d ago
What's more likely is that her office email (and probably mailing address) was listed as the agent for the applicant. I represent large companies that get sued a dozen times per day, and aside from the initial complaint, every notice in the suit goes to us, not to the company. Once we enter our appearance in a case, all the related correspondence goes through us. That's part of the reason people hire attorneys in the first place. If the client's corporate counsel wants an update they're going to call us and ask for one; they're not going to look through reams of filing notices, get copies of the relevant documents from the courthouse, and attempt to piece it together themselves. And they don't want to get spammed with mail, either.
And this is for sophisticated clients who have their own legal departments and are used to this. For an unsophisticated person who may not speak English very well trying to navigate a complex bureaucratic process, it's best to just have everything sent to the lawyer. At the very least, it prevents them from having to waste time on a phone call about some standard notice that doesn't require them to take any action but they just want to call and make sure. It could prevent someone from doing something stupid because they got a form in the mail that they assumed they'd just fill out and mail back, only to find out later that they totally fucked something up.
Rov_Scam
30d ago
Yeah, but he couldn't, and didn't. There's no reason to believe that a von Neumann level supercomputer can marshal the resources necessary to create a clone, let alone an infinite number of clones.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Things are different, though, when everyone who knows anything about the thing you're trying to do knows it's a bad idea and explains to you why it's a bad idea. It's not like Trump had a bevy of economists in his ear and out in the media saying that the tariff policy was necessary and that the short-term pain would be worth it. The only people saying that were him and politicians whose constituents require supplication to him. The criticism he was receiving probably wasn't simply that this was a bad move politically, but a stupid move economically that wouldn't bring about the desired result even if we'd stuck to it for a hundred years. It may be an act of courage to do something necessary but politically unpopular, but it's pure stupidity to do something disastrous and politically unpopular.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Even if it were banned, I'd still prefer the deletion to editing it to the point of indecipherability.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Um, because it didn't exist? The Dow futures index wasn't launched until 2015. The only big crash since then was the March 2020 crash, and people were definitely talking about the Dow Futures Index then, but with other things taking the spotlight, you probably weren't reading the business section. Now that the tariffs are THE story of the week, you're paying closer attention to what's being written about the markets.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Even if the GOP ultimately gets destroyed in the midterms, I think there will be a GOP pullback well before then, probably beginning at the end of this year, assuming, of course, that the tariffs stay in place. As the effects are more fully felt, I think Trump's intransigence on the issue may cause some of his supporters in congress to see the writing on the wall. You can guarantee that some otherwise safe seats will have primary challengers basing their entire campaigns on tariff policy, particularly in districts where losing the seat to a Democrat is a real possibility. The Republicans who are currently standing with Trump will have a hard enough time getting reelected already, and will have to pull back in order to have any chance of salvaging their careers. This is doubly true if Trump's approval ratings tank among Republicans, at which point supporting the cult no longer scores you any points.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
The bigger issue with point 2 is that the calculus for determining the tariff rates is unhinged from reality. Countries like Switzerland, Israel, and Singapore don't charge any tariffs to the US (and in the case of Switzerland and Singapore, to anyone else). Countries like Brazil do charge tariffs, but we have a trade surplus with them. Trump counts VAT as a trade barrier, which doesn't make sense to begin with and would require countries that have it to rejigger their entire systems of internal taxation, which isn't going to happen. He tariffed countries that already have free trade agreements with us. Services, for which we run a trade surplus and which employ the majority of workers, apparently don't count. If these were simply reciprocal tariffs with the goal being to get free trade agreements, Trump may have had a point, but these countries have nowhere to begin negotiations, and the manner in which the tariffs were implemented, combined with Trump's general schizophrenia, doesn't inspire much confidence that any deal will survive longer than a week. Given the overall environment, it's better for them to just hang in there and hope that domestic pressure puts an end to this nonsense sooner rather than later.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
I actually used to have to do this kind of genealogical work when I was in oil and gas. It's a pain in the ass, and a lot of time you simply can't find anything. That being said, this is a little easier since you're only trying to figure out who the living heirs are, and not who the living descendants and devisees are of a guy who died in 1906 and had 9 children.
If you want to prevent all this rigmarole from happening when you die alone and unloved, write a will! (Don't forget to check your jurisdiction's laws, too. Some jurisdictions require witnesses for a will to be valid, but others do not.)
Don't DIY your own legal work; hire a lawyer. It's not expensive and it's easy to fuck it up if you do it yourself.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Sorry I'm just getting to this now, but the upshot of this case isn't that tens of thousands of people will become felons. The regulation being allowed to stand simply means that companies that sell such kits will be subject to the same requirements involving licensing, background checks, serial numbers, etc. The reason the court didn't get too into the weeds over the raw block of aluminum argument was because, as it was a facial challenge, specific examples weren't at issue. If and when the ATF starts demanding compliance from distributors selling aluminum ingots, complete with CNC machine or no, then they can raise an as-applied challenge and maybe get a favorable result.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
Like it or not, the term "classical" has become the term used to describe all music that emanates from the European art tradition, from Gregorian Chant to John Cage and beyond. Several other terms to describe this overarching meta-genre have been proposed, but none have really stuck. Art Music and Legitimate Music come with the implication that other kinds of music are somehow of lesser value, and can be confusing to the general public. Professor Feinberg from the Great Courses Series uses the term European Concert Music, which is probably the best term from a purely semantic point of view (it comes from Europe, was intended to be performed publicly rather than privately [as with folk music], and doesn't contain any implied superiority), but it's a mouthful and hasn't been widely adopted. Furthermore, the term "classical" has also been widely used to describe music that comes out of similar traditions from other parts of the world, e.g. Indian Classical Music or Chinese Classical Music.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
And if he's an American citizen, then what? Is ICE just supposed to take his word for it?
And that would be his second chance to present evidence, when there's some hearing via either the U.S. or his home country to show proof of his status and/or disprove the basis for his detention so as to obtain release from custody.
Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? In the present case the government is arguing that he isn't entitled to any hearing, even though they admit that he shouldn't have been removed. The whole process is designed to be impossible to challenge.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
At which hearing he was granted protection from removal. Presumably, had he gotten a hearing this time, he could have presented that as evidence. As it was, he didn't get one, and neither would an American citizen. The whole point of OP's argument is that only citizens should be entitled to due process, yet there's an inherent contradiction in that one who isn't afforded due process has no ability to prove his citizenship.
Rov_Scam
1mo ago
If they didn't skip the steps when entering the country, it would be MUCH easier to determine their rights and status under the law! Government would have some record of their entry, they'd presumably be able to present some tangible evidence of their status, and they might actually have a case file open to process their claims to stay here.
And at what point is he supposed to actually present this evidence?
I never said that the court should require "any means necessary". I think that there is a certain bar above which you can say that the administration is making satisfactory efforts to facilitate his return, and that courts are qualified to determine where that line is. The problem here is that the administration has made clear that they have no intention of doing anything; indeed that their preferred outcome is that the deportee remain imprisoned in El Salvador. If the administration at least tried to give the appearance that they were making minimal efforts to secure the guy's return, I'd be more sympathetic to the government's argument. But they're making a public show of doing nothing.
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