PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

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You all are precisely the type of people who hold the constitution to be a sacred document instead of actually understanding the legal framework within or it’s intent.

Ctrl-F "code-word" in these comments.

You really think you are going to be protected by a document

Ctrl-F "old-world".

By criticizing the constitution you are not threatening your rights or liberty, a constitutional convention that doesn’t include the right wing is required for anything to change in America or it will dissolve.

Pretty much agreed, Ctrl-F "crooks and tyrants".

It is because of the design of government as described in the constitution is why the US federal state is unable to operate and it is because of the constitution you’ve seen a minority of view points, neo-liberal conservatives, take it over to destroy it.

This one I haven't really addressed in these comments specifically, but I'm happy to talk more on it. I think the problem is in the nature of people. Any massive power center will attract evil people to try to hijack it and take control for their own malicious purposes. That's happened in every empire in history, in the USSR and China as it did in the US, in European governments, in little fiefdoms in the Global South wherever they have sprung up. It takes constant pressure from the people to stop it from happening, and there are design elements that make it more difficult. That's why the US has some semblance of democracy when most empires of its size lost it instantly once they achieved real geopolitical power.

I have no idea why you think the constitution is somehow responsible for any of that. What's the link between the corruption of the current day (citizens united, ICE, MAGA) and the constitution? What would you want to replace it in order to solve any of those problems?

In no material way has the gaza situation become worse.

I have a horrible feeling that we may, this month, be watching the final death of Gaza. And everyone's too distracted or too powerless to do anything about it.

They've just run out of food. There's none left. I think this might be the end. I think by this time next year, what was "Gaza" may simply be Israel.

There's a lot to criticize about Biden's response to Gaza (Basically all of it). But, it's outright absurd to pretend that all of that instantly applied to Kamala Harris, for more or less literally no reason at all, or that it represented a sensible reason to let someone come to power who turned "I'm going to hem and haw and at the end of the day support Israel in 90% of what they're doing while making noise about humanitarian aid" into "Fuck it, kill 'em all, I'll send their supporters to El Salvador to help support you."

All harris had to do was say ‘i will ensure american laws are enforced with respect to weapons sales to isreal’ and her major campaign problem would have disappeared.

Incorrect. I think it would have lost her a lot of support. A lot more American people support Israel than Palestine, because they're as unaware of the nature of the genocide as you are about the shockingly-good-for-American-politics steps Biden took to support the working class and a lot of the key issues the people on Lemmy are constantly clamoring about (police brutality, unions, climate change).

Seriously. What this country actually needs is a massive people movement to get the crooks and tyrants out of government. Trump didn't invent any of that or even close to, but if him trying to have the government kill everybody who looks at him funny or gets in his way is what it takes to get that going, let's fucking take advantage and accomplish some things, lord knows we need it.

I mean they did great given the circumstances. Their first try was a total failure but the revised version worked. They were doing their best. We don't need to cling forever to the stuff they got wrong, but for the time they did a really incredible number of things right, far better than some governments that tried big ambitious reforms in the 20th century that I could name. (Although, they had a huge advantage by starting small and scattered with limited technology and then working out the problems of government in a sort of unnoticed backwater of the world as they went, without a lot of the pressures of a modern state in the modern environment. And even with that they still had to struggle a lot, a lot.)

I'm fairly sure it is in one of the earlier of the amendments, actually.

As far as I understand it, the framers' viewpoint was not "here are the limits on government, everything aside from this, we allow it to do, here are the rules for addressing problems" but more along the lines of "here's how a government can earn for itself the consent of the governed, and if it's not earning that then it's up to the governed to adjust its parameters, and if they can't manage that, they deserve what they get." If that makes sense. They took a much more old-world approach to the realities of power than modern first-world societies do.

Do you think the constitution is a deeply flawed document written by the oligarchs of their time, which included among the institutions it codified slavery, misogyny, and war as a normal part of the human condition? Excellent, you're in good company and I (among many others) agree with you. That's why amendments and judges exist, also, so that we're not limited to its fairly flawed implementations and goals in governing what we're doing today.

Do you like having human rights, including the freedom to criticize the government, the right to due process, and the right to defend yourself against a tyrannical government? Great! So do I. As it happens there's a common phrasing that you can use as a quick code-word for saying that, which will engage the support of a massive range of people including among them conservatives, liberals, leftists, military people, police, lawyers, judges, and so on. And you know? It won't even made them want slavery back, if you do choose to say it that way. You could, of course, decide that it's more important to alienate 99% of those people immediately, and then provide fodder for extensive arguments with the remaining 1%. You could do that, that would be fun too.

Do you like having big performative "I'm more left than you so I'm superior I'm actually very smart because everything YOU think is good is actually bad" contests which assail whatever people are trying to do and distract from the most urgent issues of the day? Well... you're in good company with that one, too. This has always been a part of the left from the beginning, and I guess not for nothing; it's connected up with the freedom to speak your mind, not having to agree with any particular herd, and with having passion about issues and wanting to analyze everything and be on the right side of history. I get it. But I think the fight this person is picking is a pretty silly fight to pick right now.

100% of people you will talk to will understand what's meant by "the constitution," and literally nothing about it is anything other than urgent self-defense against a genuinely very urgent threat.

I started work at a place that gave us single CRT monitors and expected us to do programming on them. I scoffed at the suggestion, ordered a Dell LCD monitor in the days when you had to mess around with screws and XF86Config to remount it vertically, and made for myself a 2-monitor setup with all the code on the vertical monitor on the side. I am not trying to brag when I say that I instantly became the alpha nerd of the office.

Woooomwmwmwmwmwmwmmmmm clear picture

Triniton

And if they were the "suspects," it would have been much, much worse. She might have never seen her children again. Not because she did anything wrong or there was anything wrong with her visa, but just because they'd written her name down and decided today was her day.

As long as they were not fired...

I owned a computer for a while for which the standard startup procedure involved smacking it hard on the top to make sure everything was seated right.

Back then everything was made of metal, and it was an ugly white color, and we hit our computers if they weren't doing what we wanted. We all knew what our ports and IRQs were. It was great days.

CRT, yes. I really hope that static electricity was the explanation honestly. I sort of always assumed that it was just tilting it forward jiggled something around back into place, something stupid like that, but they swore that was the only thing that worked. It would please me greatly to think that they were right and the dragging across carpet was actually a vital component that they had figured out.

In college, a friend of mine had a TV whose picture would mess up every so often, and the solution was to take it in the hallway and drag up and then back down the hall by the power cord. Then, when set up again, it would work again.

There was never an explanation, that I know of, for why. Presumably there was some simpler method that would have achieved the same result but no one was interested in that.

Are you saying I was being silly?

You might be onto something

This is screaming for someone to ham it up with some new signs. I would be pretty surprised if no one's done it inside a week.

They wouldn't have to be at the White House, although that would also be entertaining. It could just be the same format and posted literally anywhere.

Okay, so way back when, Google needed a way to install and administer 500 new instances of whatever web service they had going on without it being a nightmare. So they made a little tool to make it easier to spin up random new stuff easily and scriptably.

So then the whole rest of the world said "Hey Google's doing that and they're super smart, we should do that too." So they did. They made Docker, and for some reason that involved Y Combinator giving someone millions of dollars for reasons I don't really understand.

So anyway, once Docker existed, nobody except Google and maybe like 50 other tech companies actually needed to do anything that it was useful for (and 48 out of those 50 are too addled by layoffs and nepotism to actually use Borg / K8s/ Docker (don't worry they're all the the same thing) for its intended purpose.) They just use it so their tech leads can have conversations at conferences and lunches where they make it out like anyone who's not using Docker must be an idiot, which is the primary purpose for technology as far as they're concerned.

But anyway in the meantime a bunch of FOSS software authors said "Hey this is pretty convenient, if I put a setup script inside a Dockerfile I can literally put whatever crazy bullshit I want into it, like 20 times more than even the most certifiably insane person would ever put up with in a list of setup instructions, and also I can pull in 50 gigs of dependencies if I want to of which 2,421 have critical security vulnerabilities and no one will see because they'll just hit the button and make it go."

And so now everyone uses Docker and it's a pain in the ass to make any edits to the configuration or setup and it's all in this weird virtualized box, and the "from scratch" instructions are usually out of date.

The end

As is often the case, the behavior they are telling you you MUST not do, and they will NOT stand for and you definitely will suffer for it, is what they're afraid of.

At some point the public opinion will hit critical mass at the street and individual level. Maybe (and maybe not). There is a reason they always want to get out of the area as soon as possible, and have stopped wearing identifiable uniforms.

I have no idea whether a group of ICE agents getting mobbed by an angry crowd that outnumbers them 20-to-1 will be a good thing or a bad thing, if things do reach a point where that happens. I legitimately don't know. It's definitely better than no one doing anything until they've escalated to filling up all these detention centers they've been building with people who mentioned "protest" on Facebook. Also, certainly, them threatening retaliation against people who are showing signs in that direction is a real and dangerous threat.

I'm just saying there is a reason they are calling out judges and bystanders as the threat that they MUST shut down. It's because it is by far the most easy and reliable undoing to their power. It means a lot more than the Supreme Court, honestly, at the end of the day.

Yeah, my funding's been all in disarray since the Trump cutbacks started. I've had to start a whole proxy war in Nicaragua to self-fund the whole thing and it's been a huge pain in the ass, let me tell you.