benmmurphy
4mo ago
Israel has been in a stalemate situation with Palestine for a long time. One has to wonder why Israel has not been able to impose their will on Palestine even though they are the superior State and they have the backing of the global hegemon. However, maybe this stalemate is a feature of the incentives. Imagine you are a US congress critter and there are companies in your state that are supplying weapons to Israel as part of the US->Israel defence aid. If the Palestinian question was resolved then a bunch of people in your district may no longer be employed making weapons. Is this is a possibility? Are congress critters actually intelligent or machiavellian enough to carry out this policy. People assume the current situation is a result of 'commies' in the state department but maybe its because of 'capitalists' in the state department.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
the problem is if they do kill trump then you can't vote for him. you will probably just end up accidentally voting for an establishment candidate in the end even if you try your best not to.
benmmurphy
9mo ago
That article claimed Russia was openly waiting for Ukraine fatigue to set in but never provided any evidence to back this statement. Funnily enough the author of the article seems to be the disinformation Mary Poppins.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
There is a nice culture war troll angle with some parts of the Rust programming language community being associated with leftist political drama. Rust is a popular safe language that solves most memory safety issues and some thread safety issues. I can see someone authoring a bait piece about taking my 'freedumb' to use C++ from my cold dead hands and forcing me to use communist Rust.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
It will also be interesting to see what happens to Couy Griffin (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/17/new-mexico-insurrectionist-fourteenth-amendment). I think these courts making 14th amendment decisions are screwed up. If there is either federal or state law that makes certain things a crime and punishment for that crime is that you lose the ability to hold office then I think that's fine. But courts making these decisions without a proper criminal trial with the opportunity for a jury and proper standards of evidence is broken. If you have a friendly judge you can basically remove someone from office for attending a protest where they have committed trespassing crimes.
that's the cheekiness of the opinion. how or why would trump appeal a decision that went in his favour even if the opinion derided him? the original petitions have filed an appeal but i'm not sure if the higher court will just address whether the 14th amendment applies to Trump or whether he engaged in insurrection or not. presumably, if the higher court did find the 14th amendment applied it would eventually have to also make a finding on the free speech issue if Trump pushed it but i'm not sure if this would be done at the same time or not.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
there is a big difference between messing about on a different continent and messing about next door.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
it was just a protest that got out of hand. a similar thing happened in Australia except it was the left protesting against a right wing government, i'm sure the right tried to make it out like it was the end of the world but i don't think anyone ended up serving 20 year prison sentences because of what happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Parliament_House_riot
benmmurphy
1mo ago
I guess he will get a gold coffin, nationwide protests and calls to defund the ATF.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
Isn’t this just mainstream consensus thought or something even broader like people. There is always going to be a popular consensus I’m not sure if it’s possible to defeat.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
it is a problem because you can always find someone who is associated with cause X but also has unsavory opinion Y. of course it seems like its fine to use these tactics to smear other causes.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
that's a very cheeky opinion by the court. they find that the 14th amendment doesn't apply to Trump so there is no finding against Trump but then include a bunch of disparaging stuff about him that will never been challenged on an appeal. but this courts opinion on Brandenburg would not be held up by higher courts. they even include a case where the plain language used by the accused was much worse than Trump and the the accused was not convicted but then magically read further than the plain language of Trump to find that he did commit insurrection.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
As far as I'm aware Trump is not being prosecuted for threats of violence because he never threatened violence. The federal indictment seems to be around what is being referred to as the 'fake electors' plot and trying to get Pence to reject certification. But if you look at historical challenges to election results the parties who have challenged the results have used similar 'fake electors'.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
I enjoyed the bit where Hollywood cashed in twice
i don't think the calculus is so straight forward. imagine that there is a fixed amount of raping that men want to commit. then basically any kind of defence is a defection because the defence is a cost and the same number of rapes is going to happen no matter what. i'm not saying that this is the actual reality but it is a possibility and if you advise defending against rape then you should also be prepared to defend against this. the reality is probably defence is part defection and part reduction but then it is much more complicated question. of course also there is the question of whether the cost of defence justifies the risk reduction. you could not walk across the badly lit field for a x% reduction in rape but is that actually worth the cost of pursuing the alternative route. i fear there is trap where people will sacrifice anything to avoid some kind of negative -EV event but i don't think this is rational.
i think a lot of these decisions are very complicated but unfortunately they are reduced to soundbites like 'i shouldn't have to change my behaviour because some dickheads will fuck with me' or 'you need to take preventive actions so dickheads won't fuck with you'.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
I'm not so sure that the progressive agenda is to remove gender. There is a lot of progressive effort to promote female role models and that doesn't seem consistent with removing gender unless the goal was to promote female role models that would influence women to act more like men.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
i like to pretend its not real and just modern art
benmmurphy
1mo ago
The argument seems to be meritocracy is not possible because some people are going to be 'losers' in the system. Even if there wasn't race to coordinate around the 'losers' in the system could coordinate around a measure like IQ. Maybe the general argument is correct but I don't see a strong reason why race should be treated in a special way.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
I don't think that is a fair characterization of what people wanted the Pence to do. The problem was after certification occurred even if the fraud was found it would be unlikely that the courts would allow the final result as certified to be overturned. The idea was to send the contested results back to the states so the irregularities could be properly investigated before certification.
The most similar election was in 1876. It didn't involve the VP rejecting certification himself and infact there was controversy over who had the power to count the votes during certification but there are very strong parallels and no-one was prosecuted for what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election
There is also a longshot theory that the FBI 'reformed' and suppressed the Hunter laptop story because they were worried it was going to be another Steele Dossier situation. Assuming the FBI was acting politically neutral they may have been worried that Giuliani was manipulating them like the DNC had manipulated them with the Steele Dossier. However, this doesn't seem to be consistent with the FBI positively claiming the laptop was Russian disinformation. I think there is a big difference between looking at a situation skeptically and taking positive action to spread falsehoods. When they were asked about authenticity of the laptop it seems they could have just gone for some cop-out where they don't affirm or deny the authenticity.
I think there is also a chance that this might end up being used as a 'defence' for the FBI's institutional behaviour if there is an investigation into what went on. "We learnt a lot from the IG report into Crossfire Hurricane about dealing with politically sensitive individuals where information is brought to us from people who have clear conflicts of interest but we just went overboard in the wrong direction and this caused us to make mistakes when dealing with the Hunter Biden situation."
benmmurphy
26d ago
the federal government is not sending their best: https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/delhi-township/james-burk-atf-agent-charged-with-stealing-wine-from-kroger?_amp=true
Police say ATF agent James Burk took expensive wine to the self-checkout lane and charged himself a small percent of the cost.
If they used the term 'reverse racism' then I think that is weird to begin with. There is a category 'racism' and then there are subcategories 'racism against X from Y' and 'racism against Y from X' which I assume is what they want to discuss. I would answer false because the statement doesn't make any sense and nonsense statements are false. If you try and argue the statement is true then you arguing with one arm tied behind your back because you are already accepting the main premise behind the 'false' argument. I don't see why 'racism against X from Y' should be privileged linguistically so that there is a normal 'racism' and a 'reverse racism'. I think it is just lazy on their part to use the term 'racism' when they really mean 'racism by the majority group in a country' or something similar. surprisingly, it can be difficult to know what they mean if they don't explicitly say it.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
Maybe they used something like this: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/natural-family-planning/
benmmurphy
4mo ago
There is another problem which is they are effectively claiming Trump is disqualified from office if he was elected. But they cannot know this because it would be possible for the house and senate to remove this disqualification before he began serving. Whether Trump is disqualified or not at the point in time that he would assume office is currently unknown. This would be similar to Colorado not allowing someone on the Primary who was aged 34 years and 11 months because they are not currently qualified even though they would be qualified at the point that they serve. Maybe there is Colorado case law where they already do this which would be strange but I assume cases would be decided allowing a person of such age onto the Primary ballot. The age issue is a stronger argument because we know someone will age whereas Trump’s situation is unknown but I think it is a compelling argument.
The federal case against Trump seems to boil down to if you challenge an election then you have to be correct or you are going to jail. That doesn't seem to be a good precedent to set. He is being prosecuted for things that are entirely legal and people have done before in the past and have not been prosecuted for.
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