domain:cafeamericainmag.com
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
@ZorbaTHut, I've made two pull requests in the repository.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Is the right to marriage written into the constitution?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
But what they ultimately wanted to achieve, more than anything else they ever wanted before, was preventing Trump from getting elected, twice, and they failed at that. In that light, mind control does not work at all. I
Do you disagree with the theory that Elon Musk buying Twitter was a pivotal moment for Trump's second run?
I don't think HBD or lab leak theory or grooming gangs or trans scepticism or any other dangerous idea has been successfully suppressed by information control
I'll refer you to one of my previous comments:
Sure, they can't control the entirety of society at will, 100% of the time, but engineering does not require 100% accuracy, just predictability.
There’s this contradiction at the heart of anti-establishment movements – according to their own central myth, they are doomed rebels against the all-powerful, entrenched evil forces of the establishment, the cathedral, the megaphone, the elites, and so on.
I don't believe that, but I also think that the art of sausage-making involves a lot more than most people (including me) have stomach for.
Trump is acting as though he expects the ceasefire to be respected. Notably, he's acting like he expects both sides to respect it, and is willing to criticize Israel for shooting back. It seems pretty clear that Trump is, in fact, imposing a ceasefire on people who have a strong preference to continue shooting; if this is the case, then both sides are going to want to goad the other side into accepting blame and consequences for breaking the ceasefire, so that they can continue shooting with their opponent in a worse position. If that's the situation, then getting the ceasefire to stick means convincing both sides that they will not succeed in this and that brinksmanship games are an unacceptable risk, which is what Trump and his administration appear to be doing.
I maintain that Trump at least appears to be doing the right thing: pursuing obvious American interests as efficiently as possible, while actively avoiding entanglement in the problem. Trump declaring a ceasefire and blasting both Iran and Israel for limited violations makes it significantly more likely that the fighting will stop, and indeed both Israel, Iran, and the media are acting as though the ceasefire is a real thing that there are consequences for violating. But also, it seems to me that Trump's general approach vastly reduces the chances of America getting dragged into the war, because our stance now is that there is no war to get dragged into, and contradiction of that narrative by Iran or Israel is being framed as wrongdoing.
This seems like a pretty significant change from the status quo, and I am happy to see it.
[EDIT] - ...And skepticism and resistance to the contrary, it does in fact appear to be working. Per CNN headlines:
Iran is ready to resolve issues with the United States, [Iranian] president says on call with Saudi crown prince
Israel lifts country’s restrictions, and airports will resume full operations
And of course:
Rep. Al Green introduces articles of impeachment against Trump over Iran strikes
...some things never change.
Tree
2d ago
But what they ultimately wanted to achieve, more than anything else they ever wanted before, was preventing Trump from getting elected, twice, and they failed at that. In that light, mind control does not work at all. I don't think HBD or lab leak theory or grooming gangs or trans scepticism or any other dangerous idea has been successfully suppressed by information control.
There’s this contradiction at the heart of anti-establishment movements – according to their own central myth, they are doomed rebels against the all-powerful, entrenched evil forces of the establishment, the cathedral, the megaphone, the elites, and so on. So when they win, as they often do because it’s a popular message/beloved fiction trope, they have a dog caught the car moment. In reality they were always more powerful than they thought they were.
Holocaust denial is not about maintaining the moral righteousness of nazism, but its essential myth of the all-powerful jew. 'it didn't happen, but it should have'. Or 'according to my ideology: it should have, and it couldn't have.'
SSCReader
2d ago
I think that the Thirty Years War is the appropriate comparison because it too was about which value system, Protestant or Catholic, was to be the sole value system, regardless of parental wishes.
Absolutely, which is why the time to do that would have been at the founding. Trying to do it now would be a huge mess to say the least.
The only thing I would disagree with is that power honey pots are inherently bad, they do attract wasps, but to do anything requires power, so wasps must be planned for and tolerated. The optimum amount of government power is more than you think, because otherwise the honey pot will still exist and will be exploited by wasps anyway. At least if the hive is in charge you might get something useful done while the wasps are grifting.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
How can you hate that guy?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Obergefell is correct. The right to marriage does not distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex couples just as it doesn’t distinguish between same- or mixed-race ones.
5434a
2d ago
Rulers rule by codifying their rules into written laws out of a pragmatism that allows them to rule more effectively.
This thread smells of "there's a law I disagree with, therefore all law is illegitimate".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
I think Putin's stated goals of destroying the idea (the meme as it were) of a distinct Ukrainian identity is, under the more expensive definitions, considered "genocide", but I will concede that it's a much less central example than "industrially kill them all" or just "evict them from their lands and ignore the obvious implications" that people would typically point to in WWII.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
It’s no hair off my chin.
Seriously. On the long list of questionable bits of jurisprudence, intervening in an interfaith beard dispute is incredibly niche. There’s plenty of things more threatening than the government overstepping its prosecution authority.
Magusoflight
2d ago
More likely they didn’t want a ceasefire to begin with, but Trump made it a pre condition of their using the B2s. So now they are taking any excuse to renew the conflict.
TIRM
2d ago
No_one
2d ago
Iran's victory condition is avoiding civil war, preserving their strategic forces and forcing Israel to accept that Iran also has nukes.
Israel isn't Russia or US, it has limited resources. Iranian victory is possible.
No_one
2d ago
My interpretation is that Israel is short on interceptors, Iranians are short on missiles bc Israelis almost certainly bombed exits of tunnel storages and possibly generally short. Rumor is Iranian air defenses rallied and made striking Tehran harder.
Both sides have refrained from truly damaging strikes so far. E.g. Israel didn't hit oil terminals at Kharg island, Iranians didn't hit turbine halls of the five Israeli power plants.
American bombing effort, if it wasn't fake (smaller yield bombs dropped) almost certainly failed to destroy Fordow enrichment facility which was engineered to absorb such damage.
Iranians want to withdraw from the NPT and are reportedly more avid than ever for a nuclear program. So, if Israelis are truly dead set on dismantling that, they're going to have to continue bombing until Iran turns into a failed state.
Can they? Do they have the munitions, spare parts etc?
No_one
2d ago
Good, interesting write up.
However:
It was an explicit break from the premise of the DNC as a neutral leadership institution for democrats anywhere.
Were the claims by Sanders supporters that DNC essentially sabotaged his chances to win primaries in '16 plain lies?
I have a hard time believing in 'neutral' institutions in the first place.
No_one
2d ago
It's sometimes used but I have doubts about the 'a lot's. SpaceX disables access for the ones in Russia. They're easily capable of preventing Russians from using them.
No_one
2d ago
How is the ease with which a modern military could impose a police state 'assuming the conclusion ' ?
You're going to need to explain that because it seems erroneous.
will take a substantial period of time
You sure? Simply grabbing the cell phone operator's admins by the throat, sending in your own experts and the network disconnecting devices whose IMEIs aren't registered as using the app would get most everyone who uses the phones to do so.
Alternative is not having any comms.
No_one
2d ago
Expecting Iranians not to be able to build compact, boosted fission warheads 70 years after such were first built is unreasonable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boosted_fission_weapon
Note that they do have an interest in lithium 6 separation.
More importantly, to play MAD, you have to have launch-ready nuclear weapons.
Chinese spent decades with hydrogen bombs and a definitely not launch ready posture.
Neither India nor Pakistan have MAD capability, yet their weapons are still deemed useful.
For the purposes of scaring away carrier groups, fission warheads are entirely sufficient. While you may think glassing cities after the enemy blew up a carrier or military base of yours is a proportional response, most of the world wouldn't think so.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
I'm not sure if I see the relevance here, considering that there are, for well-known reasons, not a lot of Jews inside the Muslim states at the moment. At this moment, when we're talking about the conflict between Muslims and Jews referred to in the posts above, it mostly refers to Israel-Palestine and secondarily between various other countries that generally operate by supporting Palestinian factions and, in case of Iran (and previously Iraq), sometimes shooting missiles.
Part of the answer is that some people wait-and-seed, and eventually the hate crime convictions were overturned for boring technical reasons, and their sentences reduced. There's a fair argument that the results still weren't fair -- the sentencing judge overtly said that he was still trying to give sentence enhancements for the religious focus of the crime, which is kinda sketchy even if specifically authorized by statute -- but it's enough that people who weren't that interested in philosophy of law could claim that everyone had a fair day in court and a neutral law was applied, whether or not it actually was.
Part of the answer is that the Amish are considered weird, and breakaway Amish weirder, and most people don't care about weirdos even where the court is unfair or the law illegitimate. As the list of awful things the government does to weirdos go, it's not going to take a top ten slot, and the people who do care about those top ten slots don't exactly get invited to a lot of parties.
Hell, even as sketchy trials before biased judges go, I can point to worse in pretty recent times.
Reality all adds up to normal. The fiction where one action by a government is so corrupt, awful, self-dealing, evil, and malicious as to result in major political upheaval or revolution is... not impossible, but it's the exception, rather than the rule, and usually downstream of a large mass of other motivating factors. If you look at the motivations for times these sorta things do go hot, there are patterns, and they're often not about anything so prosaic or useful.
It's an unpleasant revelation. Sorry.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Critically, this is a federalism issue with no important underlying policy disagreement.
No, critically this is an issue of whether words in legal texts mean anything at all, whether George Bush was right about the constitution, and of whether, as erwgv3g34 points out, "rule of law" is even a coherent concept. Whether or not I agree with a given policy, or the manners in which powers are delegated between administrative units is completely irrelevant to whether or not judges are making shit up out of thin air.
Since America became a country and the individual States ceased to be countries (which a lot of people date to the Civil War, but I think happened somewhere between the Monroe and Jackson administrations) federalism ceased to be a principle people actually believed in and became a peace treaty
Then they should have changed the constitution to reflect that. By not doing so, they are either admitting to be in it's blatant violation, or to it not having any meaning to start with.
Some rulers do that. Other rulers claim they're doing that and then rely on manipulation of procedural outcomes instead. And likewise, some critics are pointing to actual abuses, and some are simply mad because they got caught breaking black-letter law.
I believe I and others here are pointing to actual abuses. Between formal complexity, subjective interpretation, selective enforcement and corruption, Rule of Law is not a sustainable assumption in the United States. We cannot passively trust the legal system to fulfill its promises to us; pressure must be constantly applied, and some of that pressure must be illegible and outside the formal bounds of the law.
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