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New updates in the Comey and James cases. Both indictments dismissed because Lindsey Halligan was not lawfully appointed as United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and so all her actions as such are void and without effect. Comey and James opinions. Though the two are substantially identical, having both been authored by the same judge. These dismissals are without prejudice meaning the government can try and secure further indictments. Although, in Comey's case this faces some additional hurdles since the statute of limitations for his offense expired several days after the first indictment against him was secured.
Note that a similar dispute is playing out in New Jersey with respect to the appointment of Alina Habba as United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey and in Nevada with respect to Sigal Chattah's appointment as United States Attorney for the District of Nevada. These cases are a little more complicated than Halligan's due to implications of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act but they arose due to circumstances like what Halligan is facing now.
At the heart of these disputes is 28 USC 546 which provides:
The dispute is principally about whether the Attorney General is permitted to make successive 120-day appointments or whether the Attorney General gets a single 120-day appointment and then when that expires the District Court makes the appointment as to who shall be United States Attorney. In Halligan's case Erik Siebert had already been appointed for 120 days earlier this year and was appointed by the district court upon expiration of that appointment. He then resigned under pressure to prosecute James and Comey, whereupon Bondi purported to appoint Halligan under 28 USC 546. Naturally, the court finds that Attorney General Bondi has had her 120 day appointment and so authority to appoint a new USA for EDVA lies with the district court.
Conservatives really need to learn that the corrupt swamp cannot be taken out with the corrupt swamp's own tools. Buy guns people. You aren't fixing things by voting and things will only get worse.
edit: since I forgot how feminized this place is and don't want to get accused of fed posting. Rawls was a moron, institutions are downstream of culture. Our culture is shot, institutions will continue to degrade. The people that will inherit what is left will be people that have high trust and cohesive cultures + birth rates + guns (security). If you really want to be double safe find one that already has parallel institutions, like education (religious communities) money (crypto?) etc.
You're not going to get far with a consistent habit of booing the outgroup and clear consensus building. I note multiple previous warnings, so I'm going to extend a 3 day ban to make this one stick.
I have to ask, will it ever be considered "rational" to talk about living up to the ideals of the American Founding and watering the tree of liberty? I currently live in a state with my Attorney General elect thinks I and my children should die because we're breeding "little fascist". His top priority is emptying the prisons into my community to see this done. At what point does it become permissible to openly discuss your natural rights to self defense against the state?
I think whatever response you give here, you should give in sufficiently general terms that I can also give it to my lefty college buddies that think we're at the point of having to pick up guns against the Ice-Nazis.
At the very least, it's "we're not even close".
Within 24 hours of this post, two National Guard members were shot
and killedin Washington DC, by a shooter that alleged targeted and ambushed them.I'm willing to give another 24 hours from now before speculating on the motives of that shooter. The shooter has been capture and is expected to survive. I'll note, however, that nationally syndicated television did not wait to see whether the man was a gangbanger or schizophrenic before giving justifications for the shooters actions.
It's possible that Dilanian is fired in a week. Would you like to make a wager?
Because I'd wager that your lefty college buds can get all the justifications and friendly tongue-washing from broadly published news media that everyone treats with far more respect than it deserves; the wig-wong waggling here doesn't really matter.
Edit: I shouldn’t trust politicians. “conflicting reports”
No argument here about the media.
Nevertheless, on an individual level, you should endorse a logic on the threshold for armed conflict that cannot transparently justify both you and your opponents.
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As entertaining as watching fedposters like you fedpost is, it seems bad for the sites continued existence and vaunted neutrality to enable and encourage it.
"Viewpoint neutrality" does, in theory, include permitting the viewpoint "we should massacre my enemies" (from either side). Forbidding that viewpoint is a concession to legal reality and arguably utility, not upholding neutrality.
"fedposting is bad, actually" shouldn't be a hot take
Motte:
Bailey:
The bailey is something I feel morally obligated to oppose wherever I see it, i.e. the redefinition of terms to legitimate a preferred policy without acknowledging real tradeoffs. This is catastrophically dangerous because it leads to important principles getting hollowed out and losing their actual meaning - see "free speech doesn't include hate speech".
So, defend your claim. Or retract it. Don't try to pull a fast one by retreating to a motte.
(The reason I said "arguably utility" is because it can be useful for people like me to talk people out of starting a Boogaloo, and that can't happen if the other side is deterred from speaking.)
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Depends if the government is conspiring to murder you or not.
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Please don't share more info than is wise, but out of curiosity, why not vacate that state? There are states with moderately sane AGs (and overall saner justice systems that try to lock up criminals), minimal gun laws, and lower taxes. And I don't mean places that many people dread like North Dakota or Wyoming, although the latter is a very pretty state in places and no one is going to put their nose in your business.
Trivially, there are pretty significant costs to flight.
More seriously, there's very little guarantee it would work. I'll point, again, to KendricTonn getting a Kirk Smirk in Ohio meatspace, or to my own experiences over half-a-decade ago. Crusading AGs from Blue States have brought the long arm of the law against people who did try to escape, or (as people trying to publish CAD files from Texas have found out) even if they were never in New Jersey to begin with. WhiningCoil cares a lot more about trans stuff than I do, but Wyoming specifically isn't exactly matching with his goals there despite a legislative and regulatory environment that specifically ordered or legislated it.
And then you get the federal government decides that they're going to have a new interpretation of a law and want a nice high-profile grab, you get your skull ventilated at 6AM, the cops doing that put more effort into documenting your soon-to-be-widow's morning piss than the pre-dawn raid, and no one in office in Arkansas cares. The supposed libertarians otherwise traumatized by the presence of masks for law enforcement they don't like will suddenly find crickets, the people who would burn down buildings over government overreach will suddenly decide to roleplay owls with a 'who, who'.
And I'm not downplaying them. His job, his wife's job if she has one, schooling for the kid(s), church, overall support structure if family is nearby... those are all significant considerations and make moving complex. However, if the alternative is seriously weighing armed rebellion, then perhaps relocation is a more realistic first step.
As to your other points, I don't disagree. There is no perfect escape at this point. To add to your examples, in Arizona, Daniel Shaver got killed by a cop while crawling along the ground, and there certainly wasn't any rioting when the cop was acquitted of murder. And that's Arizona, so what does that say about supposedly pro-freedom states? Even so, there are an awful lot of states I'd pick before VA or NJ.
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People, by revealed preference, seem to like living in the northern Rockies. But even neighboring North Carolina is a very pleasant GOP run state.
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Because it's a non-argument: or rather, you're forgoing your opportunity to make an argument with an appeal to violence. Honestly, advocating others to fedpost on your behalf on social media is a cowardly and self-defeating act. A real chad just goes out and does things, you know?
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I would imagine on The Motte you could make an effort post about what people would consider a morally acceptable line for either starting revolution or committing political assassinations in a completely abstract sense. Though that does invite people to come up with "hypothetical" scenarios that are thinly-veiled parallels to actual American events.
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I don't see where "rationality" even comes into the picture here. If we were modding people for being "irrational", we would have far fewer participants left.
As it stands, your comment is a non-sequitur. To assess the rationality of armed resistance to what you perceive as a hostile state is not in my remit as a moderator. Questions of rationality don't even come into the warning/tempban here. He was building consensus, being a culture warrior, and so on and so forth. Fedposting isn't in the sidebar rules last time I checked, but we frown on it because:
It goes against the culture and ethos of this forum. Doesn't get much more heated than that.
Zorba prefers the FBI don't kick his door down. We're all here at his behest, and on his sufferance.
You want to discuss your to natural rights to defend yourself against a state? Buddy, that's half of all we talk about over here. But if things have gotten so bad across the pond that you feel the need to form a militia and shoot the AG, then take it to Facebook. And if everyone else feels that way, I think moderation guidelines will be a less than pressing concern during a civil war.
10/10.
Can we put this on the sidebar?
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Aren't we a rationalist forum? I've always thought so, at least; a part of the rationalist diaspora, if a few steps removed from LessWrong/Overcoming Bias.
Not really, and IMO the old-guard movement is a shell of itself. I certainly wouldn't count any of Scott's other commentariat-zones as 'rationalist,' either.
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I wish, I really do. Unfortunately, this place is best described as rationalist-adjacent, which is the next best thing.
LW? The ur-rats.
Scott himself? Of course.
SSC/ACX and the subreddit? Mostly the case.
Us? The blood is a bit diluted.
Of course, this is my personal opinion, but IMO, a real "rationalist" forum includes more explicit discussions of the tenets of rationality itself, which we really don't do very often. We have high standards for discourse, we have people using Bayesian arithmetic when they feel like it, but we are a more general interest kinda place. And that's fine!
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Irrespective of whether it's "rational", is it really a conversation we need or want here? I'm with @FiveHourMarathon below regarding how these discussions always wind up going. I don't even think that there aren't interesting discussions to be had about how a popular uprising in the US would proceed, but the burden at this point should really be with those who want to talk about it to lead with something novel rather than another instance of "my chad tribesmen will beat the shit out of your effeminate wimps, if only the sheeple finally wake up and develop
classtribal counsciousness".Maybe I’m unusual, but I’m pretty doomer-pilled about the right’s prospects in a civil war.
Enh, 50/50.
I think they hold clear dominance in fieldcraft, and modern infrastructure is in fact so perilously fragile that a small group of dedicated individuals can have truly outsized effects. On the other hand, team red sucks at organizing in groups.
The biggest deterrent against civil war is that a vast majority of people on both political aisles are Comfortable(tm), or at least, comfortable enough that a civil war would have deleterious effects to their present quality of life and material well-being. They may not be happy or even content, but there's a gulf between that and everything else.
Also, there's nothing sadder than the yes-chad who got shot first getting less than half-hour's engagement on social media before everyone else shrugs and moves on. Nobody wants to be the one who starts a revolution if it doesn't start a revolution.
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There is no winning for anyone if it comes to that. Just violence until both sides are exhausted, or one is annihilated. I can't even speak with confidence which side it would be. But funnily enough, I always remember a line out of a trashy fantasy novel I read once.
"We don't fight to win. We fight so that we don't lose."
The prevailing wisdom here cannot be "Listen, it's just 'rude' not to walk into the ovens. It would get us into trouble with the feds if we talked too openly about non-compliance with their pogroms". Are we really so committed to ensuring everyone cannot even imagine a world where they aren't forfeiting their lives for nothing?
Why does there need to be "prevailing wisdom" here on this topic at all? You treat it as a given that we can't just ignore the topic, as something that can't be discussed while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the forum, and perhaps even mean to suggest that enforcing non-discussion is tantamount to complicity with your enemies. The exact same approach has been tried on the other side, with popular glosses like "the personal is political", "silence is violence" and what-not; and look where the discussion norms built around those memes got them.
I'm not saying what the prevailing wisdom should be, I'm saying what it should not be.
This is wrong and bad faith and borders on intellectual malpractice. "Silence is violence" as deployed by the left is about compelled speech. I'm asking for free speech, non censorship. Nobody has to have an opinion about their own genocide. But I'm asking for the freedom to discuss it, as well as extra-Democratic ways to survive.
And this is exactly what people mean when they say this place, and it's rules, are too "feminized". The only possibility that can be imagined is consensus. If you disagree, you are trying to change the consensus to a different consensus. Because a consensus must exist. There must be a norm that everyone conforms to. There cannot simply be endless discussion.
So, full disclosure, I found @remzem's post obnoxious and performative, but I would not have modded him for it, even though it did get several reports. @self_made_human decided otherwise, and while I would have decided differently, I don't think he's necessarily wrong. (Yes, this does in fact mean how you do or do not get modded sometimes depends on which mod decides to take action.)
I will attempt to answer your questions directly.
Are you allowed to discuss resisting the state? Yes, you can discuss it. People discuss that all the time here! (And that's why I personally thought @remzem's post was borderline but within bounds.)
Talking specifically about people you think should be killed is not within bounds. Talking about plans to do violence is not within bounds (and would be pretty fucking stupid if you're serious).
No, we are not saying it would be "rude" to talk about not walking into ovens (really, though? Come on.) Or that you can't talk openly about "non-compliance."
But what is it, exactly, that you want to say that you think you are not allowed to say? That you hate Jay Jones and hope someone shoots him? Well, you can say you hate him, but no, you can't openly wish death on him. (Yes, his texts would have gotten him banned on the Motte.) If you want to be more indirect about it ("I really think some of our state leadership should water the tree of liberty"), we are not stupid and we're still going to tell you to knock off the fedposting. Both because, yes, it's easy for you to whine about what you're not allowed to say when you're not the one who would get visited by the FBI, and because as several others have pointed out, most people here are not really interested in reading dick-fondling threads about what people will do to their enemies when the Boogooloo happens. If that's what you're into, there are guys on Twitter whose entire niche is jerking themselves off over such fantasies, including our own Motte alum Kulak. If you want Kulak-posting, go give him a follow.
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"Silence is violence" is absolutely deployed in defense of "free speech" too - it's a mainstay in protests where students disrupt unrelated university functions to inject progressive talking points of the day, and in those cases is taken to mean that being forced to stay silent (on the talking points, at university) is tantamount to being forced to be complicit in violence. Essentially, you and they are conflating the "I have the right to be heard" notion of free speech and the "I have the right to speak wherever and whenever I want" notion; while neither can be implemented perfectly, we can get a lot closer to something like a stable equilibrium with the former.
Also, from where do you get the idea that there is a consensus here, and anyone is trying to force some other consensus? I am under the impression that, weighted by posting frequency or upvotes, this place leans mildly towards the at least boogaloo-sympathetic. I do not think that a right-wing uprising in the US would win, and I am generally pro-chaos so I would want to see it happen! Yet, I do not want it to be discussed here, just like I don't want my approximation algorithms lecture to be disrupted by people yelling about Palestine (even though I am inclined to agree with them).
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In the post you replied to, self_made_human modded remzem for consensus-building and boo-outgroup, not for advocating violence. Did you mean to reply to Amadan's post?
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