Doc Avid Mornington @ docAvid @midwest.social

Not actually a doctor.

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2 yr. ago

Are you claiming that wanting to make antidemocratic rules more democratic is authoritarian? Who wanted to ignore the popular vote? And how, exactly, does the comment you replied to suggest that Bernie was entitled to the nomination? The voters are entitled to get the candidate they want.

How do you conclude that I'm not considering that? Escalation doesn't reduce that risk.

Bernie might have the right idea in a ideal world, but in reality it's not a great take and it makes other Democrats look bad that are having to make the difficult decisions which again spreads apathy.

It's hard for me to read this as "not advocating for one way or another", given that what Bernie is doing is saying to step back from the unquestioning full-throttle support of the Netanyahu government. If you think that's a bad take, the only conclusion I can draw is that you are advocating for that full support of what they're doing.

To be fair, a lot of the other things you've said indicate otherwise, so I guess I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Because the Democrats are conservatives.

AOC has made mistakes, but tearing down the left-most Members of Congress for not being left-enough will only push Congress right.

I highly recommend this episode of Unfucking the Republic: https://www.unftr.com/episodes/topical13

The Bush government response after 9/11 increased radicalization, strengthened Al Qaeda, and decreased support for the US. It put us in more danger, in order to destabilize the Middle East, advance US imperialism, and line the pockets of international arms profiteers.

The Netanyahu government response after 10/7 increased radicalization, strengthened Hamas, and decreased support for Israel. It put them in more danger, in order to destabilize the Middle East, advance US imperialism, and line the pockets of international arms profiteers.

Maybe you're correct that some action, other than strict defense, would be best, but that's not on the table, here. In this context, the choice is between further funding the worst choice, or not doing that. What makes Democrats look bad is how many of them support further funding the worst case.

And that right there is why thugs with badges always get acquitted. A cop isn't a judge, jury, or executioner. I don't care what she thought she knew already, there is no excuse for this kind of violent assault against someone who still holds the legal presumption of innocence. She is a criminal and belongs behind bars.

Their decisions are logical based on their map, which is grossly inconsistent with the territory. Better?

If murder was legal, and somebody who was known to have committed murder was running, and you were confident that person would make murder illegal, and you were convinced that their opponent (who may have never committed murder themselves) would actively encourage more murder, maybe even pay poor people to commit murder, which candidate would you vote for?

Technically, I'd say "increasingly inevitable" is a meaningless phrase. "Inevitable" is an absolute - an outcome either is, or is not, inevitable. Like they say, "you can't be a little bit pregnant", outcomes cannot be a little bit inevitable, or somewhat inevitable, or mostly inevitable, so the degree of inevitability cannot be increasing.

However, I think most native English speakers would not think twice about it, and would read it as something like: "a Trump dictatorship is approaching inevitability." That's how I read it, at least.

If one party ignores the rules, while the other party follows them, the party with no regard for the rules will take all the power, and we definitely won't have a democracy anymore.

Marriage predates any modern religion, and likely predates organized religion entirely. Marriage is a civil institution. Marriage belongs to all of us, not just churches, not just the religious. Don't let them take it.

This ignores the fact that the country is to the left of Democratic leadership, by far, on issues polling. Sure, if our choice was between right-wing neoliberal Democrats and fascist Republicans, it wouldn't be a contest. And in the general elections, that's usually about what we get. But these arguments are used, disingenuously, to convince primary voters to support right-wing Democrats, who actually do worse against fascist Republicans, by far. It's a losing strategy, and it's designed to be a losing strategy, because right-wing capitalist Democrats are more interested in suppressing their own party's left wing, than in fighting the country's radical right. They're more motivated by maintaining power than by preventing the collapse of American democracy. We have to vote for the best viable candidate in the general election, even if that candidate is a capitalist extremist Democrat, but we should be doing everything we can to remove them in the primaries, not just in spite of the general election stakes, but because of the general election stakes.

EDITED: Changed "issues voting" to "issues polling"

The Writ of Habeas Corpus doesn't come from the Constitution, it is from common law. However, the Constitution does say "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." This both protects Habeas Corpus, and also allows for suspending it. It was controversial when Lincoln did it because he did so unilaterally as president, rather than Congress doing it, but the Constitution doesn't actually say who can suspend it, or specify a procedure, so Lincoln's act was within the Constitution.

Tldr: Suspending Habeas Corpus is controversial, but not the same as suspending the Constitution.

The thing is that, largely, government works because people all just kind of agree that it should. If a president says "I'm suspending the Constitution to deal with an emergency", what happens next? We have a bunch of masked fascists, at high levels in government and in Washington think tanks, who would talk a lot about the unitary executive theory. It would be presented as a done deal, as if there was no question that it was legal. Who would step in to stop it? In the best case scenario, we would have a major constitutional crisis, that would eventually get worked out between the courts, the press, the public, and hopefully some courageous civil servants. In the worst case, it would straight up end our democracy. Somewhere in between lies civil war, and whatever that leads to. If suspension is explicitly forbidden, it gets a lot harder to defend, and makes the best case scenario a lot more likely.

I'm less sure about the value of background checks for presidents. I'm not sure some routine background check would unearth anything that the other side's oppo-research wouldn't. But hey, can't hurt. I'm guessing the intelligence agencies are already digging up everything they can find; making that an official requirement and publicly reported before the election might be really beneficial, not only directly, but also to prevent rogue officials from keeping the dirt to themselves and using it against a sitting president.

I can't. Happy?

Biden is less terrible than Trump, yes. In the general election, he still has my vote. Do we need to carefully declaim this every single time we criticize him?

He's also holding onto power when he shouldn't, and likely to hand the Whitehouse back to Trump as a result, just like Clinton handed it over last time. Democrats should be demanding he step down, en masse, and let somebody with more integrity run, before it's too late. He is not helping.

Bold of you to assume they were using source control under that manager...

But an irreplaceable liability.

The Columbine shooters did not use hunting guns. We have better access to mental health care than in the past. We also have greater access to more deadly guns. Countries with strong gun control do not have our problem with mass shootings. Implementing strong gun control has been proven to stop mass shootings. A lot of money has been spent by arms dealers to convince you the the problem is your fellow humans, and not the largely unregulated flow of machines of death supplied for capitalist profit.

Should we have better access to mental healthcare, and intervention programs? Sure. Funny, though, how the people insisting it's all about mental illness and not about the gun profiteers also usually oppose any public spending on mental healthcare as well.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Liberalism isn't the opposite of conservatism. When monarchy was the norm, liberalism was an extremely progressive, revolutionary philosophy. Today, with liberal democracies being the norm, liberalism is essentially conservative. That's not, in itself, a bad thing - I want to conserve the core ideals of liberalism myself, and we can have an anticapitalist, progressive form of liberalism, that keeps what's most important, the real heart of liberalism - individual liberty, equality under law, consent of the governed - while also moving ahead to end warfare and establish pro-social economics. However, we can also have a liberalism that protects generational wealth and funds the war machine. It's far past time for people to decide whether liberalism, alone, is enough.

Minor correction to the description: The character identified as "other officer" is actually Roland Hedley, a journalist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Hedley