benmmurphy
25d ago
I guess he will get a gold coffin, nationwide protests and calls to defund the ATF.
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
23d ago
I guess there are few mainstream politicians that believe in free speech as a principal. Most of them believe in free speech when restrictions on speech are used against them but happy to put forward restrictions on speech when they think it benefits themselves. Conservatives might look like they support free speech at the moment but its because they are the ones that mostly being screwed.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
ubiquitous TLS + ESNI/ECH does make it harder to perform some forms of censorship. for example if someone controlling the network wants to ban you from a particular site hosted on cloudflare or another CDN then they will need to ban ESNI/ECH connections to the whole of the CDN. more people using TLS/etc increases the collateral damage from certain blocking technologies.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
Even if the petitioners win is it going to meaningfully impact what the government can do or are they just going to find work arounds like in the affirmative action decision. Presumably, the government is allowed to write to a newspaper and say I disagree with this OpEd/article here is our opinion on the matter as long as they make no demands or threats. Now if the courts say to the government you are not allowed to make requests for censorship then the government has the option to just ping the social media companies saying, "BillyBob made this post stating X our opinion is Y". Certainly, this is an improvement but maybe the end result ends up being the same with social media companies assuming there is some kind of implicit threat or demand. Though, I think some of the requests were already using a dodge around explicit censorship. For example they were saying, "BillyBob made this post stating X and this appears to violate your terms of service". So not explicitly asking them to censor BillyBob but bringing to the attention of the company that BillyBob may have been violating the terms of service for the social media site. If the court comes up with something to prevent this then maybe it will also be a solution to other work arounds the government might come up with.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
i like to pretend its not real and just modern art
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.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
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.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
68% of elite ivy league graduates support banning private air conditioning and non-essential travel to fight climate change? I just do not believe that, there's clearly something wrong with the poll.
i think this is a reasonable possibility. i've heard it claimed there is a strong social desirability bias when answering surveys and the 'correct' thing to do is to fight climate change. just because they answered positively in a survey doesn't mean they would actually support the policies if it came to a vote. the cheating question is very weird and I suspect somehow they worded the question without explicitly saying cheating and claimed they question meant cheating in their summary.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
benmmurphy
3mo ago
its interesting that part 2 mentions the pipe bombs. the fake pipe bombs were very weird. apparently, they were placed the night before and there is video of someone suspected of placing of the bombs but one of them (or both?) used a 60 minute kitchen timer as the pretend detonation source. now, its gets weirder because apparently someone 'found' one of the bombs at a point in time where the timing made it look like it would explode around the time of certification. this was partly covered by an interview in congress: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/republicans-release-new-information-january-6-pipe-bomb-investigation and FBI Director Wray's testimony: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DaL5RM-ZYt0 the cell phone data from the area was also mysteriously corrupted which impeded any investigation.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
i thought 42 might have been a deliberate reference but it looks like they invited 43 and there was a no show. i'm sure these numbers are just coincidences and not deliberate numerology.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
the situation is weird because the allegations are part of the text of the indictment but Trump is not actually being charged for incitement or anything else in regards to the Jan 6th riot. his lawyers tried to get that part of the indictment removed because they believed it was irrelevant and potentially prejudicial to a jury but the judge did not agree and let the text stand as-is. here is the text of his motion: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24078250-motion-to-strike-inflammatory-allegations
The indictment includes repeated references to the actions of independent actors at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. See: ... The indictment does not charge President Trump with responsibility for any of these actions.
And here is the judges opinion for reference: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.158.0_1.pdf
An uncharitable reading as to why this text was included in the indictment could be so that third parties reporting on the indictment could muddle things for their audience and give the impression that Trump was being charged for the Jan 6th riots. I believe a similar thing may have happened with the statement by former intelligence officials about the Hunter Biden laptop. If you read the statement on the hunter biden laptop it doesn't actually say anything useful but other people could then portray the statement as saying something meaningful. The way the media works is kind of similar to chinese whispers but if you are aware of this then its possible to manipulate it for your benefit.
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
1mo ago
in their opinion they also made a reference to the problem of congress being able to remove the disqualification which is something i brought up here on the motte: https://www.themotte.org/post/801/colorado-supreme-court-thread/172633?context=8#context
not exactly the same argument tho.
Its final sentence empowers Congress to “remove” any Section 3 “disability” by a two-thirds vote of each house. The text imposes no limits on that power, and Congress may exercise it any time, as the respondents concede. See Brief for Respondents 50. In fact, historically, Congress sometimes exercised this amnesty power postelection to ensure that some of the people’s chosen candidates could take office. But if States were free to enforce Section 3 by barring candidates from running in the first place, Congress would be forced to exercise its disability removal power before voting begins if it wished for its decision to have any effect on the current election cycle. Perhaps a State may burden congressional authority in such a way when it exercises its “exclusive” sovereign power over its own state offices. But it is implausible to suppose that the Constitution affirmatively delegated to the States the authority to impose such a burden on congressional power with respect to candidates for federal office. Cf. McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 436 (1819) (“States have no power . . . to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress”).
benmmurphy
3mo ago
Maybe they used something like this: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/natural-family-planning/
benmmurphy
4mo ago
It’s probably based off some narrow technical claim from an agency that is true. For example I’m guessing the number of electronic voting machines with no paper trail has decreased. So if you have a bunch of things you have been trying to improve and they have all improved since the last election and are the best they have ever been then you can claim it is the most secure ever. There might be other things that you don’t measure that have been going in a negative direction but because they aren’t part of the improvement plan they don’t exist.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
riots are just a schelling point for dickheads
This is kind of how policing was meant to be historically in the UK as I understand it. Police were meant to be just citizens that were being paid to do a job but having no special powers. Even now I think citizens can bring private criminal prosecutions to court. The Peelian principles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles) article on Wikipedia has some of the background on this. Also, due to historical fears UK police are generally unarmed except for special units. However, I guess as time has gone on the UK has drifted from policing from consent to a more policing by the state model.
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
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