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Cake day: July 18th, 2024

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  • This is where my real concern lies, the suspension AND partial application of habeas corpus is essentially – in my view – a casus belli due the public. Habeas corpus must be universal in its application by the state, or the federal-state must be seen as a direct threat to the civilian public. They’ve tested the waters on this already in prior protests. At what point do we admit that it’s no longer being honored by the federal-state and realize that we’ve been stripped of our right to accuse those who have wronged us – also part of due process – and take matters into our own hands to restore our rights?

    Yeah. The entire concept of American governance was that the people in the country fight to maintain control of their own government, and then take responsibility for it running properly. We’ve wandered pretty far from that at this point. To a large degree because the tools that we might use to coordinate and organize the fight have been co-opted by people who want to run the government on their own behalf.

    Apologies for the long winded response, apparently I had more to say on this than I realized. TL;DR we agree, apparently – as I’ve just come to realize – the only difference is that I believe that we’re already at war, just not entirely de facto.

    Agreed. Yeah, I was talking just about what the desired end state should be once democracy is reestablished, not saying we shouldn’t be vigorously defending ourselves right now.










  • I’m addressing what you said, in a succinct way. If it’s a little too unclear, then:

    The real underlying question is ‘are those that violate social contacts due the protections of said social contracts’?

    No, they’re not. But, you have no idea who has violated the social contract unless you have due process.

    Those that you’re not sure yet have violated the social contract, because it hasn’t been proven, are due the protections of said social contracts. Yes. That’s the trial phase. Then, after that, we decide they might not be due the protection of the same social contract. That’s the punishment phase. They’re different. It is extremely popular in times of crisis to start to skip ahead to punishment without trial, as part of the official process, because things are so dire, and that’s explicitly what this person was advocating for. That is wrong. Because you’ll wind up punishing people who haven’t violated any social contract at all.

    Are we still bound by the rules of a contract that another party actively violated, in regards to that party?

    No. But once it gets to a broad scale, and due process breaks down on all sides as people start a big melee for their own safety against their enemies, things can get very very bad.

    Sometimes there’s no way around that, of course. That’s what we call a war. Maybe that’s where we are headed. But deciding ahead of time that you’re going to abandon due process within a civil society, because of how dangerous it is that your opponents want to abandon due process, is just hastening the phase of “might makes right.” It’s pretty hard to come back from that once it happens. A lot of people have had to grapple with this, notably the allies after World War 2 trying to figure out how to punish the guilty. If they’d gone with this “they’re SO bad that they don’t deserve due process” type of thing, Oskar Schindler would probably be dead.

    If you answer yes, this leads to the ‘paradox of tolerance.’

    No. Not having the trial and doing nothing, or having the trial and then not doing the punishment, is tolerance. Having the trial and then punishing is justice. Not having the trial and doing the punishment anyway is terror. I’m not aware of a time when that was the solution that didn’t go horribly sideways almost instantly.

    There are times when there was some massive crime against humanity and the paradox of tolerance prevented effective resolution, and it was very bad. Reconstruction is a good example. But just doing arbitrary punishment for anyone some random person decides is guilty is ten times worse. Even if you get it right 100% of the time, which you won’t, it sets a precedent that is horrifyingly hard to stop once people have gotten in the habit.

    Seems a little more clear spelled out that way?


  • Yeah. People said 100% the same thing about Hitler. He was a clown, he was the weird guy that came to fundraisers and scarfed all the food because he didn’t have any money, and scared away donors and political allies because he would get in their face yelling about Jews. Until, all of a sudden, his big opponents got sent to the camps or just killed, and it wasn’t funny.

    They’re doing a great job at following the playbook so far. People are upset but no one’s really done that much to stop them, which means it will continue and get worse.



  • Yeah. Even if they were just anti-West, it would be fine. I talked with someone around the first time Trump got elected who was super in favor of him, and he explained to me “The US keeps fucking up my country, and so if they put a moron in charge and he fucks up your country instead then (a) good (b) you deserve it © maybe then you’ll leave us alone.” I had absolutely no room to disagree with him. It made perfect sense.

    But on Lemmy, it’s never that. It’s always “There is no genocide in Xinjiang you’re just deluded by Western propaganda anyway it’s all NATO’s fault that half of Ukraine is a big rubble field and graveyard and Russia never lies, here watch Tucker Carlson and Dmitri Peskov, there’s a couple of guys who’ve got their heads on straight.” I guess it is cognitive dissonance, nobody wants to just say “Yes I am on team murderer because I don’t like your government, and regardless of what I say or do my guys are going to keep killing Ukrainian kids, so what’s the point of my trying to say they shouldn’t.”







  • I will for-real never understand the connection between “I like communism and power for working people” and “I support China and Russia.” The two statements simply have nothing at all to do with each other, they’re not compatible. I’ve asked some of them to explain it to me, and the closest I’ve gotten to an answer has been more or less that they don’t like the US, so they will support an enemy of the US, no matter how horrifying the enemy is or what crimes they are committing or whether they are communist or not.

    Congratulations, guys, you invented CIA logic. It was one of the dominant forces making the 20th century worse, which is saying quite a lot, and now you’re deep-throating it like you’re training for an event.