"I hereby appoint myself the final arbiter of all terms and definitions!"
All you guys do this, for obvious reasons.
In this context, in political science, "authoritarian" does in fact have a very specific and well-defined meaning. Pretending otherwise just excludes yourself from the conversation. Maybe that's for the best.
Only in informal usage though. Formally, nonplussed means exactly the opposite as in "surprised and confused." If you want to sound smart/educated, don't use it in the sense of being "unsurprised." Especially outside of North America.
On paper, yes, but it's still a PR loss and not a good look. His followers obviously won't care, but it might tip some people on the fence, so that's a good thing.
That's nowhere near as true as it once was. Most of your big well-supoorted distros run flawlessly on most big brand machines.
Where you'll run into problems is in using more obscure distros that require a lot of tweaking and customization, but something like Ubuntu should run beautifully out of the box and if it does have a problem it will be very well-known and heavily documented with easy to follow step by step instructions on fixing it. Linux just isn't the pain in the ass it used to be. Or at least it doesn't have to be.
Don't bother friend. I know from long experience that they will insist on defining the terms of the discussion on their own, as if some whack job fringe theorist is somehow to be accorded the final word in adjudicating our use of language.
The problem therein is of course that when your opponent gets to set the parameters of meaning and discussion, you aren't really exchanging ideas on an intellectually even playing field.
I've pointed this out many times over the years, but it still hasn't taken with your true believers/idiots.
Long story short; don't waste your time; you aren't arguing with good-faith interlocutors.
They are playing semantic games and have no interest in honest discussion.
To them. You and I are simply uneducated morons who have yet to receive the true message.
That's a fair question. There's a reason why authoritarian nations don't have immigration issues, unlike virtually all of the west.
People aren't stupid; they can pretty easily see through nationalist bullshit and figure out which, if they have to leave their own country, are going to be the best countries to land in.
Guess what? Nobody wants to immigrate to Russia or China or Cuba or Venezuela. Full stop.
Well according to the theory of the case the 14th amendment is self-executing, so it doesn't require that Trump be convicted. It remains to be seen how well that stands up in court however.
You may be right, I am not a lawyer either, but regardless, I would be very hesitant to accept anything said about it here. Let's just say that the "Lemmy Bar Association" doesn't exactly have a great record with legal analysis.
Unfortunately our system was not designed in the anticipation of someone like Trump together with the complete siloing of information ecosystems made possible by modern technology.
What we're seeing is new in kind because both Trump and our information ecosystems are new in kind.
The founders also lived in a much more honor-based society wherein dueling was still very much a thing. Someone like Trump, a notorious liar and loud-mouthed braggart would have almost certainly been run through with a small-sword or shot while dueling. If he declined to accept a challenge to a duel, he would have been ostracized from polite society and effectively cut off from public office.
In other words, they expected that things like honor and decorum and the risk of being killed in a duel would provide for consequences not enumerated in the Constitution.
And they were right for over 200 years, then along came Trump and it turned out that such "customs and norms" were not enough.
We now see our old and very decrepit system --that was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to update -- struggling with that fact.
If it gets to the SCOTUS, and that's a very big if, they can easily make a ruling favorable to Trump without ever touching the question of whether or not he engaged in insurrection. I'm not any kind of expert, but as a long time amateur SCOTUS-watcher I think that's almost certainly what the conservative majority would do. You'd only see the question of insurrection mentioned in the dissenting opinion.
"I hereby appoint myself the final arbiter of all terms and definitions!"
All you guys do this, for obvious reasons.
In this context, in political science, "authoritarian" does in fact have a very specific and well-defined meaning. Pretending otherwise just excludes yourself from the conversation. Maybe that's for the best.